I should play something new, maybe in a genre I've generally avoided like shmup or action RPGs or whatever we're calling that third person hack/n/slash routine these days. But golly, how could I ever decide which one? There are so many! No... really. There. Are. So. Damn. Many. Ever since Diablo 2, these things have been like romance novels for twitchy thirteen-year-old boys with no attention span: they are endless, they unjustifiably pretend to be one step above porn or FPS slaughterfests, they ceaselessly retread the same damn formula, and their audience never gets enough.
But there are a bare handful of interesting departures as well, and in trying to make a selection I decided it might be interesting to compare three examples' initial presentation, not only for what it says about the game itself but what it says about the role of tutorials or introductory levels in an industry whose conventions have become common knowledge as it closes on half a century of content.
Start up an engineer with a wolf pet. In lieu of tutorial, kill fifty ratmen toward your starter NPC. The Torchlight games are as straightforward a Diablo clone as you can get without inviting a lawsuit, so this is exactly the mindless grind I expected it to be, right down to the interface. Lotta colorful, bouncy kiddie appeal, notta lotta preparation or planning or anything to be explained.
Ugh, I'm not a fan of premade characters. Apparently I'm playing a bounty hunter. A female bounty hunter. Just like they all were in the old west! Aaaand the sheriff is female too. Riiiiiight. Welcome to Femtasia. The sad part is there would've been something so satisfying about playing a stalwart frontierswoman, shotgun on the porch and all that, stepping up to defend her family... if you hadn't so ridiculously overplayed your desperation to present her as absolutely superior to all men everywhere (who need to trip over themselves to make her look good) right from the start, just like every single other damn politically correct story, movie and game of the past decades.
I... what? What is this? Where am I? What's happening? I'm in a room? And it's empty? There's nothing to interact with? Clicking the door does nothing. Clicking anything does nothing. Oh, it's click-and-drag. Grab the torch, open the door, now I'm in a long dark branching hallway. Oh and there are axe-murderers. Or maybe zombies? What? But it's okay they're friendly? What?
Weird West again
Alright, bury some bodies, stock up on corn, travel to town (shooting some meat-e coyotes on the way) aaaand the very next scene has the two women interrogating a male villain about his male boss, threatening to break his fingers. Making sure to mention a villain named "pa" because of course. The town at least also offers some casual examples of theft, infiltrating a boarded building via a window, etc. Then a stopover to demonstrate shopping, then a stealth and ranged cover demonstration. Then of course after killing a dozen men you're helped along on your quest to save your useless husband by a supernatural female.
Torchlight again
I have a healbot now! Which is good. Healing is good. And right-clicking is gooder than left-clicking. Ooooh, skeletons instead of ratmen. Fancy. Click-click-click. Stuff dies. I get loot. I am amazing. I leveled up! I'm even more amazing. Click more monsters, loot comes out. I leveld up again. I AM SO AMAZIN OMG!!! wait-wait-wait... OMG boss fight! Click it MANY TIMES untl the lot cmes out. OMG I AM SO MAZNG SO AMZNG OMG!!!1
clickclickclickclickclickclcikcckcilckcicklcikckcikcklilcickidlckcidkcklclickmydick
Ooohh, bigger boss fight, it hurts me, now I have to click both the monster and click to run away. Click-n-click and click-n-click and click-n-click
I AM NOW A FAMOUS HERO SMZNGOMG!!!
Maybe I should actually allocate the past four levels' worth of stats and skills?
Weird West again
Cannibals' camp. Sneaking exercise. Unconscious bodies mean never having to say you're sorry. I try to poison the well, but a patrol spots me so I end up shooting my way through a few anyway. Let a prisoner out of a cage who comments he's glad to get out... because his wife must be worried sick about him. Okay, I was annoyed at the feminist idiocy at first, but now it's getting hilarious. Can we get this bitch to spontaneously break out into a Disney princess song about the medicinal virtues of estrogen? That'd just complete the package.
I am starting to enjoy the environment interaction elements though. Like the very intuitive cover/aiming system, or the rain refilling water barrels you can use to heal yourself. Hate the severely limited inventory though, especially as I don't have a chance to hit town in the middle of this quest.
At least one, maybe two of the enemies you kill finally turn out to be a Karen, though of course she's also a miniboss, had to be more important than the male mooks.
You rescue a female prisoner, who instead of "my husband must be worried sick about me" brags she has eagle eyes. She's, like, sixty. No, I'm sorry, she has eagle bifocals.
Exanima again
I spend some quality time leafing through the manual, then try the combat arena. Holy hell this is infuriating! It's supposed to be a physics-enabled slasher setup. I'm familiar enough with that from two decades of Mount&Blade, but the mechanics here are more than unresponsive; they directly interfere. You're supposed to carefully time and throw your weight into attacks or dodges, orienting yourself with the mouse. Your body parts have individual rag-doll physics, so you might try moving forward only to have your leg catch on terrain, trip and fall. In practice, this plays as your character interpreting any mouse motion as motion altering or preventing other motion, changing your direction, swinging your arms around, or tripping over the littlest loose cobblestones because turning involves moving your feet. And if you try stepping off an ankle-high ledge in combat, you will fall flat on your face. Moreover, while attacks require deliberate mouse-holding and directional swings of the pointer, blocking is automatic and triggers some kind of global action cooldown, so overall it's neither here nor there, neither manual nor auto, neither quick nor decisive, with the AI constantly interrupting your own motions with your arm or leg catching on some random object.
Don't get me wrong, I see huge potential here in the sheer amount of physics detail provided, but in execution it's still very, very aggravating for my character to simply not do what I tell it to do. Hyper-realistic limb motion isn't playable when the player cannot (barring some haptic suit getup) control those limbs!
Well, let's try this again. Apparently there were weapons in my starting cell I missed the first time around. You can grab a barrel lid as shield, a board as club. That part I love, interpreting utility just from appearance. I get a few rooms farther before dying again, tripping over a wall corner while fighting two goons.
Best part?
It's a "hardcore" type of game with no save option, so you get to start over every time your character flails aimlessly face-first into an enemy's weapon.
So, class, what have we learned?
I mean literally, have you learned to play?
In the most dumbed-down variety like Torchlight, there's simply no information to convey beyond the instantly intuitive "click all the things" and thanks to MMOs, RP-lite mechanics like putting points into skills when you level or selling loot at a merchant were grade-school-level universal even back in 2012. With no explanations necessary, what would have been a tutorial is instead repurposed to hammer the player's subconscious with those operant conditioning kill>loot>level reward stimuli: lots of rats between you and your first NPCs, just waiting to make you feel successful and powerful.
For Weird West, the gradual pacing of aiming, healing, sneaking, etc. is more complex and worth stretching over several small maps, but not too outlandish, so it also repurposes the campaign's tutorial stage to market its political pandering. It's hardly the first game I've seen do so (e.g. Wasteland 3's
"patriarch" giving away the ending by level 2, or Wrath of the Righteous' ridiculous "I live with my
lesbian wife" dialogue) presumably in a bid for uncritical acclaim from professional critics eager to score social justice points. ( - and who probably won't bother playing further than the first levels before reviewing.) I'll bet that, ironically, that posturing will likely slack off a bit after the "impress game journalists" phase.
Oddly, Exanima, the only one of the three which would truly benefit from a gradual, carefully descriptive introduction to its rather novel mechanics, is also the only one lacking such. (Its in-game manual is actually pretty decent, both concise and informative, but not my focus.) The key here is marketing to the "hardcore" gamer crowd, who resent hand-holding or being made to sit through lengthy explanations. But I'll warrant it overshot its frustration / satisfaction ratios even by those standards. Being made to start over fifty times in the same 10x10 room due to obtuse controls and environment interactions, unable to discern if we're even inputting the correct commands, is not the sort of learning experience for which we gratefully pay money.
It's interesting that even as the strict need for tutorial levels has declined, they persisted as a controlled environment in which developers can showcase their product's strengths... however those may be perceived... even when, paradoxically, the very lack of introduction is implied to be a selling point.
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