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[Grieving Natashina]

Yeah that terrible story Varric told was completely necessary and couldn't be done in a cutscene, it wasn't annoying at all to do every new game in addition to the escape from Lothering starting level.

 

And I completely agree with you.  

[Momiji.mii]

I'm a big fan of tutorials, but I also understand those of you that loathe them. Here's some of my thoughts on the matter: 

 

First of all, tutorials should definitely be skippable, for those who don't want their immersion ruined or play the game for the nth time. But they're also an absolutely necessary tool for explaining to new and returning players alike about new as well as old game features and systems, in order to enhance our enjoyment of the game.

 

Lack of knowledge about important features can at worst ruin your enjoyment of the game, no matter how much time was used to put all the systems in place. The tutorial is, after the initial menus, the first thing that the player encounters. I've seen friends give up on games because of lengthy, unskippable tutorials. I've also seen friends skip games because they just didn't understand the gameplay when there was no tutorial available. 

 

Then there's the middle ground: A friend is currently playing DAO and DA2 for the first time. Listening to her thoughts on the games have been quite enlightening, making me realize that a lot of my knowledge about the games and how to play them comes from these forums as well as friends helping me out when I was new to them. So Origins is difficult for people like me, who are complete newbies to these kinds of RPG. My friend on the other hand had played Baldur's Gate etc, so she figured out DAO without any problems. But when she continued with DA2, she encountered many problems that a better tutorial might have solved. 

 

Most problematic for my friend was my two favourite new features in DA2: Voice and friendship/rivalry. I knew about these systems beforehand, since they were explained to me by friends who were playing the game already, so they seemed perfectly understandable to me, but to the uninitiated, they're hard to understand, especially when you previously played Origins. Some of these problems originate in the design of the UI. 

 

- Voice/choice-wheel: some of the symbols and colouring system was unintuitive (like the diamond). Better explanation in the tutorial would have helped players find "their" voice easier. The fact that there was 2 wheels (choice and voice) present during conversation was also hard to figure out. It's easy to get the different symbols mixed up during conversations (what's the difference between angelic wings or an olive branch? Between a fist or a smashing club? etc). Also, the voice-specific special choices, like the crossed fingers for lying, was quite a mystery even to me for the longest time. I don't think those were ever mentioned anywhere. 

 

- Friend/rivalry: As previously discussed on the forum, using red/blue gave the wrong connotations, especially to rivalry which gave it a negative feel. A more neutral choice of colour as well as a more detailed explanation in the tutorial would have helped much. Alternatively, an option in the UI to read a detailed explanation of the system. 

 

We've already found out through this forum that both voice and rivalry have been removed from the table in Inquisition, at least partly because of the difficulty for players to understand how they worked. I'm fairly certain that the new system will still be great, but sad to see two really interesting inventions to the genre fall on the chopping block because of lack of explanation in the tutorial. 

 

tl;dr Tutorials should be skippable, but they're necessary to explain features (new as well as established) to the player and should be fairly detailed. The UI is extremely important when explaining features and systems as well.