It does teach you the basics like walking, running, the map, light attacks, heavy attacks, blocking and bashing interrupts, and the game does have other tutorial text when you do some things for the first time... like your first mundus stone, your first skyshard, your first public dungeon, your first visit to a riding trainer, etc. But the whole thing is based on exploration and discovery: it does not send you to that first mundus stone and only the original vanilla tutorial in the Coldharbour prison plops a skyshard in front of you within the tutorial - the Morrowind and Summerset tutorials do not. Both, mundus stones and skyshards are hugely important parts of the game and character building.
I did not find any explanation of walking, running, or the map, at least beyond having them listed on the keybinds menu. Knowing about quest markers on the map is hugely important, and I found it by accident without the tutorial explaining it and well after it really should have. There were brief mentions of light and heavy attacks, and either blocking, interrupts, or dodging, but not necessarily all three.
It started me out having been captured by Dark Elf slavers and trying to break free. The quest was called Broken Bonds. There were a handful of tutorial quest tooltips over the course of that quest, but everything that could really be called tutorial about it could readily fit on a single 3"x5" index card. After that, it drops you off in the main game world, in a small town where, as best as I could tell, the only quest was Divine Conundrum. I did that quest to completion, but there was nothing remotely tutorial about it at all, and it wouldn't have been out of place as a level 20 or 40 quest, at least in a game where level 20 or 40 quests are supposed to be easy.
You did the Vvanderfell tutorial which is one of the new ones but you did it on a game pad so I have no idea what that shows or doesn't since I've ever only done it using M&KB.
For me it showed just looking around and interacting with an object on the ship, the basic WASD movement is at the bottom of the screen as you regain consciousness, the block, bash interrupt and heavy attack happen in your bare knuckle fight with Naryu. The "M" for map pops up as soon as you leave that first hut, "I" for equipping items happens as soon as you find your first weapon, etc. But like I said IDK what they showed you or didn't when using a game pad.
I already said earlier in this thread that showcasing their new area by plopping you in either Vvanderfell or Summerset right after the tutorial is misguided and doesn't do new players any favors since they are not noob-friendly zones.
The game as designed originally sent you to one of your Alliance starter islands after the original tutorial and those are well designed to continue the early levels learning experience. That is still there and is the best way to start the game but of course, someone other than ZOS needs to tell you that before you'd know it.
Many, many people have suggested to them that the game should give you an option of which tutorial you want to do when you create a character and heavily recommend that original Coldharbour prison tutorial for new players.
Coldharbour is a very well done new player experience ......
The game as designed originally sent you to one of your Alliance starter islands after the original tutorial and those are well designed to continue the early levels learning experience. That is still there and is the best way to start the game but of course, someone other than ZOS needs to tell you that before you'd know it.
Many, many people have suggested to them that the game should give you an option of which tutorial you want to do when you create a character and heavily recommend that original Coldharbour prison tutorial for new players.
Not forgetting that very early on in your characters development you would get quests that would take you to the mage and fighters guild as well as the main storyline, first dungeon and so forth.
With One Tamriel they got rid of the tram lines but threw the baby out with the bathwater (for those familiar with the saying).
So yes an option to select a tutorial. And I would go further and allow people to do all of them if they wish. And provide some in-game Question & Answers such as: Q To learn how to move A: Do xxxx tutorial. Q: ... fight A Do .... Q To unlock your character traits A For Magic go X, For fighting etc. Q To access daily dungeons - go here. Not forgetting - as Iselin pointed out - how to use pets.
Collect the basic info together and put it in a Q&A. And have a big button for people to click on so they find out about them. Its a gameplay first thing!
I think the real discrepancy here is how detailed of a tutorial it takes to be useful. Let's take the map. A brief tooltip that shows once saying "Press M to bring up the map", doesn't really tell you anything that reading the keybinds menu wouldn't have. That I had already read through and heavily modified the keybinds menu before even starting the tutorial may be why I was so unimpressed. ESO has some such tooltips pop up, but they don't tell you much.
What it really needs to be useful is more information. Don't just say to press M to toggle the map and leave it at that. After the player opens the map, have some text that explains that this icon is your current location. The white arrows are key points for your currently active quest. The black arrows are key points for other quests besides your current primary one. And anything else that seems good for a player to know. That is, don't just tell the player that there is a map and leave it at that. Explain how to use it. That's what you need to do in order to have anything worth calling a tutorial.
More generally, don't just have pop-ups randomly summarize one line from the keybinds menu. Explain what the feature is, how to use it, and why the player should care. Give the player a simple example where using the feature is useful, and let the player click on whatever it is and use the feature in a situation where it matters.
ESO most emphatically does not do that for anything that I could find. That's why I say it doesn't have a tutorial. It may have some few pieces of text that it calls a tutorial. But it doesn't have anything that fills the role in helping new players to learn the game that a good tutorial is supposed to fill. That's the problem.
I hope you don't ever try to play Dark Souls lol. Seriously though, have you never learned by doing and experimenting? Do you have to have everything explained to you in such detail in order to learn how to play a game?
There are so many resources available online in the form of guides, videos, reddit, etc., not to mention if you click the ? on the top bar interface, everything about the game is explained in so much detail, beyond what is ever needed...
How do you think the 2ish million current players learned to play the game? I have never seen this effect on someone from a game they tried to play...
People who try something and are happy generally don't provide much feedback to companies.
People who try something and are unhappy typically don't provide much feedback about why and a large number - up to about 70% of them in some countries - go on to tell others they are unhappy.
People who try something and are unhappy and take the time to say why are like gold dust for companies. Hopefully Zanimax will pick up on @Quizzical 's comments.
I don't think Summerset is required at all except if your curious about the story or like annoying Dr Who Skulls with Australian accents. Does it spam you on the starter screen to buy Summerset if you don't own it? If So, then that sucks. And yep, pretty much a whole scam for the unwary about all the aditional stuff you need to buy. But they do tell you. You get every DLC for free with ESO + Basegame + ESO+ is pretty much required to get the best out of the game imo.
I hope you don't ever try to play Dark Souls lol. Seriously though, have you never learned by doing and experimenting? Do you have to have everything explained to you in such detail in order to learn how to play a game?
There are so many resources available online in the form of guides, videos, reddit, etc., not to mention if you click the ? on the top bar interface, everything about the game is explained in so much detail, beyond what is ever needed...
How do you think the 2ish million current players learned to play the game? I have never seen this effect on someone from a game they tried to play...
There's a simple principle involved here: some parts of buying and installing a game are simply not fun. Don't make those parts longer or more painful than necessary.
For example, don't make a download take two hours if you could easily have made it take one. Don't make players modify any files in a hex editor before game will run. Don't make a player solve 10 captchas before he can enter a credit card number to pay. Don't make it so that the only way to pay for a game is using gift cards for random-seeming stores unrelated to your game. (Wakfu actually did that one, by the way.) Don't make it so that every update requires players to completely delete the old version and redownload the new version from scratch. And don't make it so that it takes a new player ten minutes of experimenting to figure out a mechanic that you could have explained in a two minute tutorial.
There's no advantage to making that sort of blunder. It will cost you players for no good reason. Even if it's not that many players, losing 1% of your player base for an AAA game costs you hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. Many players are very prone to quitting a game right when they start. Don't put a completely unnecessary pain point in the way that causes you to lose more of them than necessary.
I really, truly don't see what's so complicated about this. If you want to argue that they botched the tutorial, but a player interested in the game can figure out how to play anyway, then go ahead. I would agree with that. But arguing that they did not botch the tutorial at all is ridiculous. Games with a budget less than 1% of ESO's manage to have a far better developed and more polished tutorial than ESO does. It isn't very expensive to type out text, nor to have a programmer put a handful of hooks in to display that text at various points.
When I talk about players quitting, I don't mean that someone who has played for six months is going to suddenly quit because he doesn't like the tutorial. Of course that's not going to happen. But someone who has played for twenty minutes might. And a lot of people don't realize how bad the attrition rate for new players tends to be in computer games.
Let's take Spiral Knights as an example, which conveniently has Steam achievements to let you know what fraction of the players who play through Steam get how far. Here's a link:
Skilled, veteran players will tend to have Gold Survivor, as you naturally get that just by playing the game, unlike some achievements that you have to go out of your way to get. That's only 0.2% of the people who have played it through Steam.
But let's look at some of the easier achievements. Jump Start means you died and then revived yourself. Only 27.7% of players have that. Mission Accomplished means you cleared three levels. Only 25.8% of players have that. Someone who plays for an hour will probably get at least one of those. First Steps means that a player got a few minutes into the introduction, and only 77.7% of players have that. That's a pretty horrible attrition rate. And Spiral Knights is a good game, too.
I don't recall elder scrolls having a tutorial in any of their games. It was just a prolog of this is your situation and current location, now its your turn to do whatever you want.
I think the entire game from 1-49 is far too slow, and drives people off. The fun is at 50. I'm not sure why an MMO needs a tutorial. All of them have the pretty much the same concept.
I think the entire game from 1-49 is far too slow, and drives people off. The fun is at 50. I'm not sure why an MMO needs a tutorial. All of them have the pretty much the same concept.
I was trying 3-4 different toons and got all of them to about level 10 before deciding it just wasn't much fun......THe combat is slow and boring and other than a pretty world the game kinda stinks.
I think the entire game from 1-49 is far too slow, and drives people off. The fun is at 50. I'm not sure why an MMO needs a tutorial. All of them have the pretty much the same concept.
I was trying 3-4 different toons and got all of them to about level 10 before deciding it just wasn't much fun......THe combat is slow and boring and other than a pretty world the game kinda stinks.
To each their own but the game doesn't really even start until after level 10. You can't even PvP or do group dungeons until after that.
Plus the skill point system means that you're skill point starved until at least level 15 or so. Most builds don't even start coming together until the 20s and that only if you really know what you're doing and choose your skills and morphs wisely.
It's actually easier to mess up your builds than to get them right when you're first starting to play ESO.
Once you get it though, the combat is anything but slow and boring. It's fast paced with a lot of moving and reacting. Best way to learn is to do group dungeons even if you need to be carried for all intents and purposes. Chances are you'll be grouped with one or two players who know how to play it well and you can at least see what it looks like when you do. Early on when about the only thing you're capable of doing is basic weapon light and heavy attacks, yeah, that's slow and boring
It's not a game that holds your hand when you're new. In that respect Quiz is absolutely right in that it isn't very noob friendly. It's kind of old school in that way although not really hardcore like most old school MMOs... it's actually a pretty easy game once you get the hang of it.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
I don't recall elder scrolls having a tutorial in any of their games. It was just a prolog of this is your situation and current location, now its your turn to do whatever you want.
ESO is not like any other game in the Elder Scrolls genre, its probably easier if you forget everything about the elder scrolls games because none of it helps you understand or play ESO, thats from the combat to the magic system and the classes. Expecting something like Skyrim or Oblivion etc. will only give you expectations that will probably cause you to be disappointed in the game, if you treat it like a new unrelated MMO then your more likely to enjoy it, and not trip up over features that either don't exist or are radically different from what you thought they would be.
I don't recall elder scrolls having a tutorial in any of their games. It was just a prolog of this is your situation and current location, now its your turn to do whatever you want.
ESO is not like any other game in the Elder Scrolls genre, its probably easier if you forget everything about the elder scrolls games because none of it helps you understand or play ESO, thats from the combat to the magic system and the classes. Expecting something like Skyrim or Oblivion etc. will only give you expectations that will probably cause you to be disappointed in the game, if you treat it like a new unrelated MMO then your more likely to enjoy it, and not trip up over features that either don't exist or are radically different from what you thought they would be.
That's hardly different than going from one TES single player game to another one. The differences between them are far greater than the similarities About the only thing they have in common with each other is the default first person perspective and the common lore bits.
They've had class systems and open systems and everything in between. They've had spell crafting in some and none in others, etc.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
I think the entire game from 1-49 is far too slow, and drives people off. The fun is at 50. I'm not sure why an MMO needs a tutorial. All of them have the pretty much the same concept.
I was trying 3-4 different toons and got all of them to about level 10 before deciding it just wasn't much fun......THe combat is slow and boring and other than a pretty world the game kinda stinks.
To each their own but the game doesn't really even start until after level 10. You can't even PvP or do group dungeons until after that.
Plus the skill point system means that you're skill point starved until at least level 15 or so. Most builds don't even start coming together until the 20s and that only if you really know what you're doing and choose your skills and morphs wisely.
It's actually easier to mess up your builds than to get them right when you're first starting to play ESO.
Once you get it though, the combat is anything but slow and boring. It's fast paced with a lot of moving and reacting. Best way to learn is to do group dungeons even if you need to be carried for all intents and purposes. Chances are you'll be grouped with one or two players who know how to play it well and you can at least see what it looks like when you do. Early on when about the only thing you're capable of doing is basic weapon light and heavy attacks, yeah, that's slow and boring
It's not a game that holds your hand when you're new. In that respect Quiz is absolutely right in that it isn't very noob friendly. It's kind of old school in that way although not really hardcore like most old school MMOs... it's actually a pretty easy game once you get the hang of it.
One of the things I like about the game was how it just threw you out into the world. After playing with alts you learn the ropes. It encourages explorations and just wondering around and running into quests or just following main quest lines if that's your thing. No game is perfect but this one rarely forces you to do just one thing to play it effectively.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
I don't recall elder scrolls having a tutorial in any of their games. It was just a prolog of this is your situation and current location, now its your turn to do whatever you want.
The problem is that there's an enormous difference between:
a) here are a bunch of things that you can do; pick whichever you want b) there are a bunch of things that you could do, but we're not going to tell you about them
What is the advantage of the latter over the former?
I think the entire game from 1-49 is far too slow, and drives people off. The fun is at 50. I'm not sure why an MMO needs a tutorial. All of them have the pretty much the same concept.
I'm not saying that the game should start with three hours of pure tutorial. But is it really so much to ask that a new feature be introduced with a few sentences of text explaining it, rather than only a few words mentioning that the feature exists? What's the advantage to asking a player to spend several minutes fumbling around until he figures out a new feature rather than explaining it in twenty seconds? Games built on a budget less than 1% of ESO's have no problem doing the latter.
UI options in ESO is a mess and you need to download addons to make it 80 % better only..its still a mess..then the nightmare begins when the addon is outdated ot has been left by the programmer..
But just buying eso and pay for sub and think you have the whole game is like thinking you can play the batle of azeroth just buying wow vanilla and pay for sub..its the same thing.
Im not sure what lvl i am but its 5-600+ something and all my craft skills are lvl 50 and i have nothing to do since i have decent gear that i manage my way around the game..no need to be more op. Dont follow the yet confused mr. alocast or what he is called..he says 1 thing and post another on his site and makes video about a 3rd thing when it comes to 1 build he want to show you about.
But again im so bored i dont know what to do in this game anymore..and so will you
I'm glad that's so clear and the lines don't blur in the least.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
But just buying eso and pay for sub and think you have the whole game is like thinking you can play the batle of azeroth just buying wow vanilla and pay for sub..its the same thing.
It's not the same thing on several grounds. For starters, Blizzard makes it abundantly clear that if you only pay a subscription, you don't get Battle for Azeroth. To deduce that ESO's notion of "full access to all DLC game packs" doesn't mean that you actually get access to everything from ESO's web site is sufficiently complicated that none of the other people who have replied to this thread have yet tracked down a full way to see that. I've traced it down and it looks like the minimum number of pages that you need to parse carefully and cross-reference against each other is three. A more honest company would make the number of pages you need to check to learn that one, not three.
Second, no, the business models aren't the same. You can play WoW completely for free, albeit with a level cap of 20 and some other restrictions. You can't do that with ESO. You can also play WoW with just a subscription and have access to nearly everything, whereas ESO requires you to buy a box before you get access to anything at all. Meanwhile, once you buy that box, ESO gives you access to a lot of content forever even if your subscription lapses, while in WoW, you lose access to nearly everything. ESO also puts far more into their item mall, while WoW seems to be relying mostly on a subscription for revenue. I'd bet that most WoW players never buy anything other than a subscription and expansions. The business models are not substantially similar to each other.
That may sound pedantic, but you have to be really pedantic to figure out what you're getting for your money, as Zenimax tries to deceive you. Which is really my point: it's complicated enough that a large fraction of the people who are fans of the game, have played it for a long time, and trying to defend the company get it wrong, as you just did. An honest company wouldn't try to trick you like that.
Comments
With One Tamriel they got rid of the tram lines but threw the baby out with the bathwater (for those familiar with the saying).
So yes an option to select a tutorial. And I would go further and allow people to do all of them if they wish. And provide some in-game Question & Answers such as: Q To learn how to move A: Do xxxx tutorial. Q: ... fight A Do .... Q To unlock your character traits A For Magic go X, For fighting etc. Q To access daily dungeons - go here. Not forgetting - as Iselin pointed out - how to use pets.
Collect the basic info together and put it in a Q&A. And have a big button for people to click on so they find out about them. Its a gameplay first thing!
What it really needs to be useful is more information. Don't just say to press M to toggle the map and leave it at that. After the player opens the map, have some text that explains that this icon is your current location. The white arrows are key points for your currently active quest. The black arrows are key points for other quests besides your current primary one. And anything else that seems good for a player to know. That is, don't just tell the player that there is a map and leave it at that. Explain how to use it. That's what you need to do in order to have anything worth calling a tutorial.
More generally, don't just have pop-ups randomly summarize one line from the keybinds menu. Explain what the feature is, how to use it, and why the player should care. Give the player a simple example where using the feature is useful, and let the player click on whatever it is and use the feature in a situation where it matters.
ESO most emphatically does not do that for anything that I could find. That's why I say it doesn't have a tutorial. It may have some few pieces of text that it calls a tutorial. But it doesn't have anything that fills the role in helping new players to learn the game that a good tutorial is supposed to fill. That's the problem.
People who try something and are unhappy typically don't provide much feedback about why and a large number - up to about 70% of them in some countries - go on to tell others they are unhappy.
People who try something and are unhappy and take the time to say why are like gold dust for companies. Hopefully Zanimax will pick up on @Quizzical 's comments.
This isn't a signature, you just think it is.
For example, don't make a download take two hours if you could easily have made it take one. Don't make players modify any files in a hex editor before game will run. Don't make a player solve 10 captchas before he can enter a credit card number to pay. Don't make it so that the only way to pay for a game is using gift cards for random-seeming stores unrelated to your game. (Wakfu actually did that one, by the way.) Don't make it so that every update requires players to completely delete the old version and redownload the new version from scratch. And don't make it so that it takes a new player ten minutes of experimenting to figure out a mechanic that you could have explained in a two minute tutorial.
There's no advantage to making that sort of blunder. It will cost you players for no good reason. Even if it's not that many players, losing 1% of your player base for an AAA game costs you hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. Many players are very prone to quitting a game right when they start. Don't put a completely unnecessary pain point in the way that causes you to lose more of them than necessary.
I really, truly don't see what's so complicated about this. If you want to argue that they botched the tutorial, but a player interested in the game can figure out how to play anyway, then go ahead. I would agree with that. But arguing that they did not botch the tutorial at all is ridiculous. Games with a budget less than 1% of ESO's manage to have a far better developed and more polished tutorial than ESO does. It isn't very expensive to type out text, nor to have a programmer put a handful of hooks in to display that text at various points.
Let's take Spiral Knights as an example, which conveniently has Steam achievements to let you know what fraction of the players who play through Steam get how far. Here's a link:
https://steamcommunity.com/stats/SpiralKnights/achievements
Skilled, veteran players will tend to have Gold Survivor, as you naturally get that just by playing the game, unlike some achievements that you have to go out of your way to get. That's only 0.2% of the people who have played it through Steam.
But let's look at some of the easier achievements. Jump Start means you died and then revived yourself. Only 27.7% of players have that. Mission Accomplished means you cleared three levels. Only 25.8% of players have that. Someone who plays for an hour will probably get at least one of those. First Steps means that a player got a few minutes into the introduction, and only 77.7% of players have that. That's a pretty horrible attrition rate. And Spiral Knights is a good game, too.
Plus the skill point system means that you're skill point starved until at least level 15 or so. Most builds don't even start coming together until the 20s and that only if you really know what you're doing and choose your skills and morphs wisely.
It's actually easier to mess up your builds than to get them right when you're first starting to play ESO.
Once you get it though, the combat is anything but slow and boring. It's fast paced with a lot of moving and reacting. Best way to learn is to do group dungeons even if you need to be carried for all intents and purposes. Chances are you'll be grouped with one or two players who know how to play it well and you can at least see what it looks like when you do. Early on when about the only thing you're capable of doing is basic weapon light and heavy attacks, yeah, that's slow and boring
It's not a game that holds your hand when you're new. In that respect Quiz is absolutely right in that it isn't very noob friendly. It's kind of old school in that way although not really hardcore like most old school MMOs... it's actually a pretty easy game once you get the hang of it.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
They've had class systems and open systems and everything in between. They've had spell crafting in some and none in others, etc.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
a) here are a bunch of things that you can do; pick whichever you want
b) there are a bunch of things that you could do, but we're not going to tell you about them
What is the advantage of the latter over the former?
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Second, no, the business models aren't the same. You can play WoW completely for free, albeit with a level cap of 20 and some other restrictions. You can't do that with ESO. You can also play WoW with just a subscription and have access to nearly everything, whereas ESO requires you to buy a box before you get access to anything at all. Meanwhile, once you buy that box, ESO gives you access to a lot of content forever even if your subscription lapses, while in WoW, you lose access to nearly everything. ESO also puts far more into their item mall, while WoW seems to be relying mostly on a subscription for revenue. I'd bet that most WoW players never buy anything other than a subscription and expansions. The business models are not substantially similar to each other.
https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/updates
That may sound pedantic, but you have to be really pedantic to figure out what you're getting for your money, as Zenimax tries to deceive you. Which is really my point: it's complicated enough that a large fraction of the people who are fans of the game, have played it for a long time, and trying to defend the company get it wrong, as you just did. An honest company wouldn't try to trick you like that.