Can we Improve Tutorials for Complex Games?

Some genres are difficult to learn before they become fun. Grand strategy games, RTS games, city builders, and similar complex games often ask players to sit through a long tutorial before they understand why the game is worth the effort.

That is a shame because tutorials in many other genres are better than ever. They can be woven into the world and story, paced carefully, kept subtle, and sometimes made almost invisible.

Complex games still struggle because their learning experience can feel miserable. At their worst, tutorials stop people from ever reaching the actual game.

The question is whether techniques from other genres can make complex games easier to teach and easier to learn.

The biggest evolution in tutorials is the realization that a tutorial does not need to happen all at once before the game begins.

Lessons can be split up and sprinkled throughout the experience. This works because a player's willingness to learn grows with their investment. Dumping too much information at the start often asks for more attention than the player is ready to give.

Delayed tutorials also let the player reach the real game sooner. If each lesson is small enough, the player may not feel like they are in a tutorial at all. Portal's early chambers quietly teach one idea at a time while the player simply feels like they are solving puzzles.

Most importantly, delayed tutorials can appear when the lesson is relevant. A crafting explanation makes more sense when the player first finds a crafting table, not an hour earlier when the information has no context.

Complex games often frontload instruction because all their systems seem to need to be active from the start. Economies, diplomacy, units, cities, resources, and enemies all talk to each other.

But some complex games already have a natural ramp. Civilization is built around what Bruce Shelley called the inverted pyramid of decision making. The first turn may have one decision: where to settle. Soon there are two decisions. Later there are dozens, as the player manages units, cities, allies, enemies, and resources.

Because the complexity grows from a single settler on a foggy map into a massive empire, Civilization is well placed to teach systems bit by bit.

Frostpunk is an excellent example. It begins with one job: gather resources by hand. The game teaches that. Then the generator turns on, and the game teaches that. The campaign keeps adding small tutorials as each major mechanic becomes relevant, while the player is already playing the real game.

For many new players, the user interface is the most overwhelming part of a complex game. A screen full of buttons, bars, panels, and windows can be intimidating before the player understands what any of it means.

Designers should ask how much of that interface really needs to be visible on the first turn.

Mini Metro starts with almost no interface at all. The player only needs to connect train stations. As play continues, the line menu, clock, and passenger counter appear when they matter.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons handles the tool wheel similarly. The tool wheel is useful, but the game does not introduce it alongside the basic inventory. The player buys it later, setting their own pace for UI complexity.

Some complex games already do this, such as Total War: Troy expanding its UI during play. More could be even more aggressive about hiding systems until the player actually needs them.

Some complex games are meant to be played again and again rather than completed once like a story adventure. That opens another teaching possibility: spread tutorials between full campaigns, not just across turns within one campaign.

Fighting games offer a useful comparison. A new player does not need frame data, advanced matchup knowledge, and specialized terminology before their first match. They need enough to stop button mashing and start playing intentionally.

Mortal Kombat 11 breaks its tutorial into brackets such as basics, advanced, and strategy. Those sections are not meant to be consumed all at once. The tutorial pushes players back into the game after each segment so they can use what they learned, enjoy themselves, and return later when they are ready for the next level.

Complex strategy games could think the same way. A stripped-back first campaign could teach the core. Later campaigns could add more systems, until the player reaches the full version.

Civilization V showed how this can work, even if unintentionally. It simplified or removed some systems from earlier entries, such as espionage and religion. That frustrated some longtime fans, but it made the game much easier to learn as a first Civilization.

Expansion packs later reintroduced those systems. Because players already understood the basics, learning the new pieces was far easier.

That suggests a different kind of easy mode. Instead of the same game with weaker AI, the easier version could be a version with fewer systems active. The next playthrough could add more systems, and later playthroughs could keep building toward the full game.

This would not be easy. The game would have to be designed for it from the beginning. But if done well, it could teach players as their investment rises.

If a game must frontload some instruction, it can still make that instruction more active and effective.

Action games often teach by asking the player to perform the action. A door does not open until the player punches enemies, jumps over a gap, or uses the new ability. This is kinaesthetic learning: deep learning through doing.

Complex games try to do this too, but often in a weak way. They point arrows at the interface and ask the player to click here, click there, select this, drag that. The player is technically doing something, but often not thinking.

Blindly following instructions is not the same as learning. A better tutorial turns the lesson into a small problem.

The mobile puzzle game Threes gives a useful example. Instead of saying "swipe left twice" and then "swipe up twice," it asks the player to use walls to rearrange numbers and combine 1 and 2.

That is still a tiny task, but it makes the player engage their brain and perform the kind of thinking the full game will require.

Complex games can do the same. Planet Zoo starts by walking the player through fixing one animal's welfare problem. Then it asks the player to improve welfare across the whole zoo with much less guidance.

The player has to apply the lesson, inspect the animals, find the problems, and solve them. Offworld Trading Company similarly gives objectives and asks the player to figure out how to meet them. Removing the "click here" arrow can be enough to make the tutorial feel like actual play.

Hands-on learning has a problem in complex games: feedback can be slow.

In an action game, a mistake is visible immediately. In a strategy game, a bad economic choice might not reveal its consequences for hours. Players may need to complete a whole campaign before they understand how decisions unfold.

This is one reason short, repeatable campaigns are easier to learn from than campaigns that last many hours.

There are ways to help. A quick campaign mode could be framed as a training tool. Advisor characters can also warn players when a decision is likely to hurt them later. In Offworld Trading Company, being warned about selling aluminum below a useful price can become a direct lesson in how the market works.

Complex-game tutorials often teach how to do things but struggle to teach why those things matter.

It is easy to show which button builds something in Civilization. It is much harder to explain what should be built, when it should be built, or where it should go after construction.

Speeding up the feedback cycle helps because players see the consequences of choices sooner. Advisors can also offer recommendations and warnings, such as suggesting the player stop building workers and construct something more useful instead.

A tutorial should not only teach interface operations. It should help players start making strategic decisions.

Games are easier to learn when they lean on familiar ideas. Spikes hurt. Ice is slippery. Coins buy things. Keys open locks. Skulls signal danger. Plants vs. Zombies does not need to explain that a zombie wearing a metal bucket is more resilient than one wearing a plastic cone because players understand those materials already.

Complex games can use grounded or historical themes in the same way. Civilization benefits because players bring some understanding of history, technology, geography, and politics into the game.

The strongest opportunity may be in UI. Players already know how many everyday interfaces work. Reigns borrows left-right swipes from dating apps. Disco Elysium's dialogue layout resembles a social feed.

Planet Zoo benefits when lists sort like website tables, map icons resemble familiar location buttons, red and green mean bad and good, and filter icons resemble spreadsheet tools. The player can solve more problems because the interface feels familiar before it is explained.

Familiarity can also backfire when designers assume the wrong audience knowledge.

In playtests for Total War: Troy, some players struggled to find the end-turn button. One player spent 40 minutes on the first turn, unsure how to continue. The button used an hourglass, which strategy veterans might associate with ending a turn, but many players associate with loading or waiting.

The developers changed the icon to an arrow before launch.

Two lessons follow. Do not assume the audience already knows genre conventions. And playtest tutorials heavily, because tutorial failures often hide in details that expert players no longer notice.

Tutorial design also benefits from "show, don't tell." Walls of text are hard to absorb, and a small image or animation can often explain the same idea faster.

Into the Breach uses preview windows for weapons. Instead of only writing that a weapon damages a tile and pushes adjacent tiles, the interface shows a tiny animation of the effect. That visual explanation is much more effective.

Text will almost always be necessary in complex-game tutorials, but designers can still reduce word count, keep terminology consistent, avoid jargon, and make sure important information is not buried under flavor dialogue.

The goal is not to remove explanation. It is to make the explanation easier to process while the player is trying to learn a system.

Players also need ways to find information when they get stuck.

Tooltips, nested tooltips, encyclopedias, glossary entries, and replayable tutorial steps all help. If someone forgets a concept, the only solution should not be leaving the game and searching online.

Good reference tools also give designers more confidence to let players figure things out. If the information is available when needed, the tutorial can ask more of the player without abandoning them.

Different players learn in different ways. Offworld Trading Company supports both scripted tutorials and practice challenges. Total War often separates complete-newcomer tutorials from returning-player tutorials that focus only on what changed.

Tutorials are often undervalued and left until late in development, but they are crucial to a complex game's success.

Teaching new players is how a complex franchise grows rather than shrinking into a niche for existing experts.

Better tutorials can break learning across a campaign or across multiple campaigns. They can let players learn by doing rather than reading. They can use familiar interfaces and grounded metaphors. They can provide clear feedback, useful advisors, visual explanations, and reference material when players need help.

Progress is happening, with more thoughtful tutorials and more intuitive interfaces. But if a player still cannot get through a complex game's tutorial without zoning out, the genre has more work to do.