You're right, there is a balance to be struck. I spent a few minutes just now thinking about what needs to be balanced with what.abregado wrote: ↑Sun Dec 29, 2019 10:04 pmBoth very dangerous trains of thought. Elitism is something I try to avoid as I believe it will cause many problems. This game is great and wanting to share it with more people seems sensible...BattleFluffy wrote: ↑Sun Dec 29, 2019 9:09 amFactorio players are smart. They can work it out on their own without the need for spoon-feeding.
Thankyou for trusting in the player's intelligence - something almost no other developer does.
Some people just won't find it fun (fools!)
Using tutorials in an attempt to widen a game's appeal beyond its natural audience ends up providing a motivation to dumb things down.
I think mainly its important to balance between "opening the game to as many players as possible" and "compromising the game".
I understand your point of view in that regard - since the tutorial and the free play are mostly independent, ie changing something in the tutorial does not typically change anything in the freeplay.
As a long time veteran player who was shown the basics by a friend, I have never played any of the tutorials. So I really can't comment on their quality or suitability. Maybe that's why I feel it's better to spend all the development effort on things that impact the free play; the tutorials are not relevant or useful to me.
I often skip tutorials in other games. I would probably have skipped Factorio's tutorial too.
I do see the benefit of them, and I can definitely learn to play a game faster if I follow a tutorial, but I just hate them. They feel insulting. "Oooh, I need a tutorial because I'm too stupid to work it out on my own."
I'm not being elitist here, this is just my personal feelings when I grudgingly decide to do a game tutorial. In contrast, struggling to work out the UI and mechanics on my own feels much more rewarding. Factorio has one of the best and cleanest UI's in any game, and the game mechanics are world class, thanks to all your efforts. Figuring things out was a joy.
I guess as a veteran player I will always be biased, because I already know how to play, so why would I want the developers to expend their precious time on something I won't benefit from?
Someone needs to speak up for the new players I suppose. Perhaps some of them do not feel like me about tutorials, and will happily follow one and learn how to play faster that way. Perhaps some players who will eventually become natural Factorians initially need to be told about WASD. I agree it's important to bring these people into the fold. However I don't think that a tutorial is a time-efficient way to do this, I think that job should be up to friends of the individual player, the community, wiki articles, or a short "help" document on the main menu.
I definitely see your point of view Abregado.. but I still think a full blown tutorial is too much, and even in some sense runs counter to the experimental spirit of Factorio. "Your goal is to launch a rocket <Press tab>" is enough in my opinion, and any more starts to feel too hand-holdy. I feel that the precious dev time is better spent on things that improve the free play, because that's where the vast majority of player time is spent.