Guild Wars 2: An idea for a Tutorial Zone
In this particular post I would like to take the time and talk about how Arenanet could possibly add a tutorial zone to the game, where the goal is to not be overwhelming, but show enough that new players could understand the core mechanics of the game and very likely some other features.
I try to flesh this out as much as possible to explain how certain things could be taught or shown through this idea of a “tutorial zone” and will try to say as well why it should be the way I idealized them. I understand this idea is very ambiguous, obviously this is something that I wouldn’t expect to ever happen, since I believe it is a bit too much effort to do, just for the sole reason to teach/show new players very basic and core features of the game. Hence this is just my own little idea.
Tutorial Zone: But where?
So let’s start this off by explaining first where it should be and why.
I’ve seen a lot of people suggest or talk about this before, or simply mention some ideas, but there is a common issue. The place or part of the game is either extremely late in the game, or simply in a skippable part. Lot of people tend to forget that a huge part of the game can be skipped. Personal story and such is basically all like this. You can go by and never do any of them in theory or some of them are super late in the game and you as a player are already level 80 by then anyway. Nobody wants a tutorial in the end game. While the training grounds in Seitung Province in EoD is cool, it’s simply way too late in the game.
So let me ask, what is the first thing in the game you encounter that you cannot skip and are literally forced to go through it? Yes, the after-character-creation little “tutorial” zone where you fight the first little boss for visual flavor. The entire closed zone literally shows your and teaches essentially nothing, every new player is basically absolutely clueless, even on the little boss fight they just headsmash the boss even if it essentially tries to teach you at least dodging.
This zone is the perfect place… for a revamp. Yes, unfortunately this doesn’t work in the state they are, with the immediate “throw you into the story” and I don’t really think there is a huge loss to it, apart from maybe the Sylvari tutorial boss, for… reasons. While I understand they are part of the story, I believe they could be added to the personal story as first instance too, since it IS the first step of your character’s personal story. But to keep it less complicated, we do need the current “tutorial” zones to be our little sandbox for this or these ideas, instead of creating a new zone.
So we finally have the place for us, a clean tutorial place for each race right at the start, a not skippable place. The reason I want the very first time being not skippable is because I know very well there are always some new players in games who skip EVERYTHING in the game that tries to explain the game to you or its mechanics and features, then an hour later in the game they whine why they cannot progress or do a specific thing that the game tried to explain to them how to do.
Tutorial Zone: How it would work?
Okay, let me talk about this part and what I would like to see in the zone before going through them later on. I understand this zone has a story reason to exist in some way or form so I will also try to give an example idea of how this place could be implemented without any story spoilers, for new players especially.
Thinking about what system the game has, I tried to think up easier solutions for showing or trying to teach mechanics as you go through this zone.
So you may also ask now “but how can you fit this tutorial zone in story-wise?” This part gave me the most headache in all honesty. Probably the most fitting idea for this whole scenario I had was, that this entire tutorial zone is a “vision” or a dream, with some light hazy fog (imagine similarly the place when you talk with Soo Won in EoD in the story parts where you are in this strange underwater-like place) and you have a voice, possibly Aurene’s voice talking to you vaguely here and there as an unknown voice, not really marking you as “champion” or “commander” or anything, just tries to nudge you to complete this zone to “escape your dream” or to wake up. I think her voice would work the best, since it could be used for all 5 starter zones since it’s not some personal story-specific character voice. Once you are in there a little ghostly orb or something similar could guide you around who would very likely voice the tutorial parts for the player so they know what to do to proceed.
You could say that this vision is basically testing your character, like story-wise. I would like to keep it mysterious and try captivating a new player this way. I would like this part to be a very minor story instance, just enough that you would question why are you there. I’m very sure this part could be given some subtle story part without conflicting with the personal story early on, but maybe have a tiny impact later on once the player sees the BIG Aurene and be like “oh wait, it was her voice in the tutorial?” Or something like that.
The reason I don’t want to attempt to revamp the original tutorial zones is because they are in a scenario where your character is essentially under pressure. You go in there, and everything is on fire, you are being attacked, there is some invasion and so on, you can’t put a tutorial zone into a scenario what yells “RUN, BE FAST, QUICK! MOVE!” into your face. You need a scenario set up that is, in my opinion, calm but somewhat captivating with some flavors to keep you around for a tiny bit and thus the player can focus better as well and listen.
I understand this feels very complicated, because it kind of is, I believe the story implementation is the hardest part to make it have sense in the game and why people start there, since almost everything in game is part of the story in some way.
Tutorial Zone: The order
I think it is extremely important to keep an order here, we don’t want to overwhelm new players with lots of information. You know those games that shove ten billion information into your face right at the game’s start and you just skip through it and all the panels then wonder 5 minutes in the game why you can’t progress? Yeah I want to avoid that. Issue is, Guild Wars 2 actually has quite some mechanics and features that are rather unique to the game.
I would like to approach this in a good old Guild Wars 1 way, however with the system GW2 has, I think it could be improved to think about veterans and people who often create new character, even if just for key farming or other reasons. Allow people with already existing lvl80 character a skip option via the guiding NPC, I like to believe it is possible to create such, albeit there can be people with a first boosted character, if they wish to learn a little, they can just choose to not skip with a second lvl 1 character.
The default tutorial zones already existing are big enough that my suggestions and ideas could fit in them, however to keep an order I believe we still need to make a little “line” and queue each part up after another. With that I mean the same system already used in story instances, when another part of the map opens up so you can continue that way without it trying to bounce you back. This may remind some old GW1 veterans of the old tutorial zones and parts of that game, especially GW: Factions where you went in circles to learn about the game mechanics and use of the UI in the game, BUT if you knew how to skip all of that, you had the ability to do so as well!
Just as GW”1″ had tutorial zones, they also had places where they explained most of their game mechanics, like spell ranges, AoE ranges, enchantments, hexes, conditions, certain spell effects etc. It was always nice because you had the ability to try them out or understand some basics related to them or their removal and so on.
So to get through here, first I would teach some combat with perhaps range indicators. Second area should teach healing and downed state and how to rally and revive allies. Third area should explain dodging in combat and show hostile AoE and friendly AoE indicators and with that, perhaps “timing” of dodge. Mind you, these will barely takes a couple seconds in reality to do, nobody will expect you to stand there and listen to some 5 page essay of how to hit a target. After this area a fourth one should open up (with the previous ones still available in case you want to try things more) where they should introduce conditions first and their effects. After conditions the map expands to boons as the fifth extra zone. And lastly, the CC zone. But let me go over each “zone” in a bit more details to tell what I would like to show there to new players and possibly how. Also I would like to mention here, I thought these up with the original idea of having this tutorial zone in a “vision”-like place as mentioned above, so it’s more unified (also it means easier to customize for its purpose) and there is only need of one map that can be used for all 5 races and thus it would also possibly not spoil your story starter area that you normally would do upon creating a character.
Zone #1: Combat & Range
This is where we would start, you go in as you pull yourself together in your little dream and move forward as this “mysterious voice” tells you to. You then bump into this little glowing orb as your guide, telling you to go grab a weapon from the weapon stand which provides you immediately a custom melee weapon.
There it tells you to melee attack the target/dummy and quickly explains most basic attack ability you have are chain skills, so you can see you have a generic “hit” -> ” hit” -> “hit” skill chain as you melee with a single skill. When you do one chain attack 2 more dummy spawns besides the main target dummy and the guide adds that most melee attacks, even the basic attack you have, cleave in front of you, hitting multiple targets. While this goes the guide quickly mentions that your first 5 abilities are based on your weapon you wield with any profession. You can move right onto the next objective. The guide tells you to grab another weapon from the weapon stand, this time it’s a ranged weapon.
Here let’s say you have to stand on a small point where multiple dummies show up randomly around you but each have a range indicator, let’s say there is one 600 unit away, another 900 and 1200 unit away, but NOT in a line to each other, so they are somewhat scattered. Guide quickly tells you that each profession has access to both melee and ranged weapons and that many skills have different range. The weapon you picked up gives you 3 ranged attacks, one has 600, second has 900 and the third one has 1200 range and the guide tells you to try them out, so you can see that a 600 range attack won’t reach a 900 or 1200 range target, duh. Hit one or two of them, lesson done. This may be also familiar from GW1 for some people.
If done relatively with some brain we are about 50-60 seconds into the tutorial zone, if the guide has VA then I would say it would take a minute and a half at least due to length of the talk I guess. Still not bad considering some MMO I’ve played before or similar games had 15-30 minute “tutorial” zones to teach you basic things.
Zone #2: Downed state, rally and healing
Once we finish the combat zone, a new area lights up that we can approach. The guide tells you to be careful because there is a hidden opponent around ready to ambush you and as you proceed you simply get downed by some random figure, but deals no additional damage to you. The guide quickly explains that you can either use your downed healing ability (with a nice arrow pointing to it) to rally yourself back from downed state or attack your foe with your downstate abilities and the opponent dies in 3-4 hits and you rally and stay in combat in the zone. The guide then takes the opportunity to tell you that every profession has a healing ability, and this is where you get, either a custom or your actual default healing skill unlocked, and tells you to use it to heal up. As you do, you get out of combat, but the guide tells you that you have a fallen ally nearby and go to them and pick them up. So you get near and your character does the rub of healing on them, reviving them. Meanwhile the guide tells you that out or in combat in many cases you can revive downed allies and the same can be done to you too.
Well that’s a quick one and simple one, honestly it would take worst case another minute to get through this.
Zone #3: Dodging and Area of Effects
Once we revive our fallen ally, it disappears and a new area opens up to explore further. The guide tells you that to survive and last longer in combat you have to rely on your ability to evade damage and attacks by dodging at the right time. Here a stationary dummy spawns for example that swings a great sword right and left on the same rythm but without any AoE indicator, since many weapon or basic attacks have no AoE indicator. The guide then tell you to observe the attack and dodge the attack two times to get the “evade” effect. While you do this the guide explains to you that most attacks can be avoided, even Area of Effect attacks too and asks you to dodge through a pulsing AoE twice to see it gives you the “evade” effect. While it may be pointless to add this early on, I think a slight hint at “not all attacks in the game can be dodged” would be great, since later on there ARE attacks you cannot evade and will hit. When you are done with the hostile AoE part, the guide escorts you further and explains to you that not every AoE effect you see is hostile and tells you that friendly AoE effects are usually have a white indicator and prompts you to walk into a red one first that damages you a little bit until you reach half HP, and then spawns a white one that heals you periodically.
AoE’s done!
Zone #4: Conditions and cleanse
Once we are done, a new area becomes accessible, here we will see tiny fenced zones with different effects, each little fenced off zone has a sign post attached to them, telling the names of the conditions provided by the little “danger zones”. Your little guide’s speech will trigger based on which one you enter and I assume explains how they work in a sentence or two.
The conditions could be separated into either two or three little categories, since we have damaging conditions and non-damaging ones that usually mean crowd control in some form or way. Also would need to explain that damaging conditions stacks in intensity and non-damaging ones stack in duration.
This kind of presentation in the game may be familiar again from GW1 from the Battle Isles
Let me mention some examples how I mean these small little danger zones.
Burning: You enter this extremely small spot and your character starts to burn, each second adding a stack to it, but of course cannot kill you or down you. When you trigger this the guide swiftly explains that burning is a condition and its intensity and damage can be stacked on you and mentions how each second you standing in that zone applies an extra stack of burning on you.
Blindness: You go in and get a basic attack unlocked and have a dummy inside. The guide prompts you to attack the dummy while blindness pulses on you every 2 second and the guide explains that blindness will cause your next ability to fail to hit your hostile target and removes the blindness upon missing your attack or ability.
Fear: Once you try to enter you will get feared away from the zone, when triggered the guide explains very simply that Fear will… fear you away from its source.
Immobilize: You enter this little zone that is slightly more longer and narrow, imagine a tiny hallways-like zone. Once you enter you get a half second immobilize every second and the guide prompts you to walk through the zone to exit the other side. While you do, it explains that this condition will simply chain your character at your current position causing you to be unable to move while it lasts.
Taunt: You have a target dummy in the small zone, upon entering you get taunted every 3 seconds for about a second, so you can of course leave the zone too, instead of being eternally taunted otherwise you can simply destroy the dummy that will respawn after some time.
Once we are done with the conditions the guide would tell you that many professions have condition cleansing ability to remove condition from themselves or from others, then prompts you to enter the next little separate zone where you can stand in an AoE that pulses conditions on you and there is a friendly little NPC or ghost or something next who will AoE cleanse conditions every seconds (very visibly!) that you can walk into and it will remove a single condition from your character.
I would say this Condition area would take at best somewhere around 3 to 4 minute to finish, probably a longer zone since some conditions are different effects and not all of them are so easy to demonstrate.
Zone #5: Boons and boon removal
We all know boons are very essential for the game, but we also know not many people really seem to care about them or realize how much they do and/or matter.
Once we done with the Condition zone, we are given the Boons zone to “explore”. Similarly to the condition one, here we can try each boon in their separate little zones to see how they work. The guide here explains how boons are buffs that will enhance your damage, increase protection, heal you or affect your active abilities.
To say some example of how they could be shown:
Aegis: Once you enter you gain a pulsing Aegis effect on you every second with a static dummy in the area that swings a sword and then swing their sword again every two second, and maybe call it Colin. Here the guide would explain how the Aegis boon can block the next single incoming attack against you.
Might: In the zone a weapon skill is given to the player (and if possible, a weapon that deals exactly 100 damage on every hit by default) and might is applied to the character every 3 seconds giving 5 stacks of might (and will stack up to 25) and provides a target dummy to hit from the start and the guide explains how might increases your character’s power, yielding more damage done against targets. So the player can see their damage increasing as more might is added very accurately compared to the base weapon damage it did.
Quickness: Gives a target dummy to hit with a weapon skill, pulses three second of quickness on the player every 6 seconds, giving you a visible difference between quickness use and no quickness. The guide explains how quickness increases your action speed so your abilities and actions are done faster.
Stability: When entering the small area you will be given 5 stacks of stability and will see a target dummy doing a shield-bash like animation, while the guide explains that stability will protect you against crowd control effects such as knock down or knock back included and prompts you to approach the dummy, the dummy will attack every half a second and the guide also explains that resisting a CC effect will remove a stack and once you run out you will be essentially knocked out of the zone and once you re-enter you regain the stability stacks.
I think each boon could be shown here in some way, there are examples for all possible boons to use.
Once these are checked out, the guide could escort the player further once again to mention that boons can be removed from both enemies and the player by foes. So it the guide tells the player to enter another specific AoE that pulses different boons onto the player with longer duration and to enter the attack range of a dummy which attacks remove two boons for each hit.
And with that we are done with this zone too and there is one last left. I would say this zone would take another 2-3 minute to go through since it’s easier to understand in my opinion.
Zone #6: Defiance bar and crowd control
I think it is essential to explain to new players and… honestly, every player what is CC aka Crowd Control and what it does exactly and what is a Defiance Bar, which sometimes is commonly called “Break Bar” among players.
This part is relatively quick in my opinion compared to the other previous ones. The guide will summon some kind of dummy or perhaps a foe and explain that some foes in the future will be very “defiant” and won’t be easy to deal with them. The guide could say that to stun them, the player or players together have to use abilities that can impact such enemy’s defiance bar.
Here the player would be given 5 custom weapon skills, each having different CC effects, let’s say as examples:
Skill #1: Knocks back the target. Defiance break: 200
Skill #2: Knocks down the target. Defiance break: 250
Skill #3: Stuns the target. Defiance break: 300
Skill #4: Launch the target into the air. Defiance break: 500
Skill #5: Petrify your target, destroying it’s defiance. Defiance break: 1200
The dummy or target has a defiance bar of 1000. The guide would explain clearly that these abilities with control effects will have different damage against a defiance bar. Here the player can use their first 3-4 abilities to see and experience that the bar moves once a CC effect applied and is broken fully once enough CC ability is used. Obviously there are simply details to it, but wrapped up, it is pretty much this about CC and the defiance bar.
I know it feels really lengthy in text to see this idea, but I believe the entire tutorial for a new player would take about 10 minute, if the player has never played any MMO in their life before I would assume it is still possible to complete under 15 minute. I think it’s a fair trade-off that eventually newer players would understand the core mechanics of the game, nothing profession specific, but something that is for every profession and is common in the game, either early on or later on. Again, this all is in mind that it is skippable for people who already have a level 80 character, in no way this is meant to annoy people who just want another alt. In a way I could understand it being still annoying to alt accounts, since those will always have a new character without a lvl 80 one, but considering people nowadays love to skip tutorials to essentials and yet still complain they don’t understand anything minutes later in the game is just too much to have the idea that every single person has the ability to skip it. Could be considered however, but I would rather keep it un-skippable for a brand new character with no level 80 characters on the account.
Also this is and was just a general idea, nothing is strict, but wanted to give proper examples and ideas in some cases to explain how I think it could be done. Obviously I am no game nor Anet dev, I don’t know the effort any of these would yield, but I tried to keep things as simple as possible for this whole idea.
Lastly to mention again, I understand there are many, many, many features one could push into a tutorial zone, including gears, gear stats, accessory etc, how skills work, professions etc, but I had to think about something that is relatively fast to get through, easy to understand (as much possible) and is common between professions and isn’t extremely UI related like traits, gear etc. Therefor I stuck with these decisions and ideas.
Thank you for reading, and please feel free to leave any feedback if you wish!
