Will Starbound have tutorials or is "every man for himself"?

I believe the game will be user-friendly enough to not require much of a tutorial at all. Trial and error will suffice for 99% of the game, with a few basic functions being given a very short and generalized instruction.

 

I don't think a huge tutorial is necessary, from what we've seen, a lot of stuff in the game can be figured out by just clicking around. And if that's not enough, tooltips should fill in the gaps. Plus, there's that magnifying glass they showed in one livestream, that gives you a short description of whatever you click on.

 

An optional tutorial when you first start your new character isn't what alot of people are actually after, alot of what they want explained and detailed out to them as they said is the more "complex" stuff you get to later in the game, a tutorial at the beginning of the game won't help with that, why? Because in two days of play time when you get to the point of the basics of machinery, you may not remember it, and may be forced to look it up anyway if you're in a rush. A basic tutorial, I'm not entirely against, if it's skippable, something that tells you the controls, awesome done.

Terraria was straight forward if you talked to the Guide enough times, who happily told you that a house is considered something that has walls, a table and a lightsource (Or somtehing along those lines I forgot his exact wording.) when I first played the game I didn't know how many NPCs I could get, so what did I do? Made 20 or so rooms, figuring "Ehhh if they all fill up I can always make more! ) PS They never all filled up. Boss summoning? So the first time you came across a demon altar, hit it with ahammer and lost half your life, couldn't mine around it, explode it with dynamite, or bombs, DIDN'T make you go... "well damn this has to be important and mission-like to be this indestructible, let me go grab all those useless fucking items I've been saving." ? Right, because that's old-gamer mentality. Trial and error and all that.

There WERE "good ol days" where video games came with no instruction whatsoever. You know what those days were called? Rhino Videos, a place that sold just the cartridge games, both NES and SNES, and most didn't have a booklet to go with them, so you had to figure all that shit out yourself. Or when a friend lent you a game, but they lost the book. You figured it out yourself, why? Cause it was fun, cause it made you think.

As for people learning faster? That's a whole nother can of worms, so many places educate in so many different ways, and each of them have different variations that work for different people. I'd argue that it's not really learning when someone tells you how to do everything in the game and you find nothing on your own, that's someone reading you a story and you have to flip the page, or in this case push the button every once in awhile. I suppose that's perspective though.

 

I do believe that they said there will be a tutorial of sorts, more then likely optional, because I mean I wouldn't want to fumble around with everything because I didn't have one. So yeah, pretty sure there will be one.

Don't know if it's been confirmed or not but with sandbox games, they usually have an optional tutorial. I HOPE it's optional, because I bloody hate being forced to do a tutorial to get to the game every time you start a new character.

Edit:

Oh. I just realized due to the previous poster. That there might actually be a tool tip type of tutorial. When you reach a certain tech level, something pops up and tells ya about it. Easily shut off or ignored.

 

If you're like me, then you didn't know how to chop down trees when you first played Terraria. Hopefully there's a tutorial but they don't stalk us around the game, so I guess I want it to be free roam.

 

An optional, instanced tutorial session would do nothing but good for players. That's all I'm saying.

 

I like it when I have to figure things out myself, but I hate it when it's impossible or redundant to find out something unless you pretty much just look it up.
I hate tutorials that go like. You can press W to go forward. Now go forward. Great! Did you know you can press space to jump? Now jump!.
No Shit sherlock, I know, I'm playing an FPS game, those are the first buttons I try. There's a fucking key bind menu with all controls where I can see everything instantly , yet you force me this tutorial
Best of all is, those obvious tutorials NEVER get any deeper into the game, so they'll only try to teach you things you likely already know.

 

If they do add a tutorial I hope it's optional, even if you've never done it...

Edit: Pretty much how I feel, also has cussing. (so yeah...)

 

Funny thing here. This guy claims that you learn how to play this game "all by yourself" but in reality the level design teaches you, he admits it. There is very little trial and error in that first level because they only throw one thing at you at a time, intentionally to teach you. (kinda helps that you only have, what, 6 buttons to push?)

The difference between this and what I hear some people asking for in this forum is that they say that they don't want any kind of teaching. When in reality, they do. They just want it to be in this subtle way. This could easily be accommodated by the beginning of Starbound (escaping the planet maybe?) include places where you need to equip tech that the game gives you in order to get past an obstacle, or repair a generator on the ship to provide power. This kind of thing would teach you that tech works, and things need power. It is essentially a tutorial level, without words, but it is still a tutorial level.

 

There's a difference between a level being designed to assist your learning and having the knowledge spoon fed to you as though you're a bloody baby.

 

It's just that we don't want those hold your hand tutorials and figure some shit out ourselves. We also don't want to hear obvious things either.

 

Omochao: "Did you know you can jump by pressing the A Button? Use the control pad to move about!"

 

Yeah. I agree, handholding is silly and unnecessary, but there have been a couple of people who have stated that they want the game to be completely open with no guidance...Which is exactly what that video above criticized about the "Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde" game. So I am pretty sure that we agree on this.

 

I just hope that if there is some sort of tutorial in Starbound, it's more optional (for the people who do want to just dive in), or very very minimal.
Instead of pulling a Skyward Sword where every 10 minutes it's HEY. HEY GUESS WHAT. IF YOU PUSH BUTTONS THINGS HAPPEN.

 

I, as a not-developer, obviously don't know how difficult it would be to have an optional tutorial upon character creation, but that seems like the best option. If you choose to do it, you know what you're in for. If you don't, then you don't need to worry about it. This thread just seems to be a whole lot of random, baffling vitriol directed at any sort of tutorial that risks wasting even a second of your time with information you already know.

Forced tutorials are dumb and get in the way of people who already have an idea of what's going on. Optional tutorials are meant for people who need a helping hand learning how to play the game. Try to remember that plenty of under-twelves are going to be playing this game, too. The game is as much for them as anyone else.

 

http://www.screwattack.com/video/-Sequelitis-Mega-Man-Classic-vs-Mega-Man-X-3927911 **Warning, bad language, if you are easily offended, keep away** **Also, abuse of yelling, just so you know**
This.
This explain to the best my tought on tutorial and how it should work.

 

Personally, I'd just want some sort of explanation on how to use this, and use that and these.

For example, if you open the crafting menu, I want there to be some sort of text telling you what you can actually do with it and how to do that specific thing.
I don't want a tutorial session, unless it's included into some sort of a Starbound Prologue to the main story which will be optional.

It will be useful for Newbies to this kind of games and for some of us who are still "noobs" to actually understand by ourselves how stuff work.

Terraria as mentioned before in this post, was pretty much create a new world, a new character, choose a character, choose a world, load and then you have no idea on what to do. (My experience as a newbie to Terraria)
I wouldn't really like this kind of thing in Starbound as well.

 

The optional part is probably the best idea in all this. Any one of the older generation of gamer will probably prefer no tutorial at all while some of the younger one will love them.
I grew up with no tutorial in games or very minimal ones, hell, I've learned how to play games by myself while not understanding a single word of english, so my view might be a little biased. Still, I think that learning by yourself is better for your intelligence than being fed the information with a spoon. Not to say, much more satisfying in a game that is all about exploration and discovery.

 

Indeed.

 

Tutorials R 4 babies!!!!!