Generally speaking FromSoft’s games are synonymous with difficulty, and the “tough but fair” approach to combat has been applauded by gamers looking for a challenge. There’s certainly a masochistic appeal to getting your ass kicked for not pushing the buttons real good, but that’s really just one facet of a larger design philosophy: these games have faith that players will figure out how they work.
Elden Ring in particular makes the delightful assumption that maybe players already know the basics of how to play, and if they don’t… Well, they can go jump in a hole. I mean, they actually put a tutorial at the bottom of a hole. If you already know how blocking and rolling works, you don’t have to go down in the hole, you can just go outside and do Tarnished shit. If you’re new here? Get in the hole, idiot.
FromSoft’s games have a lot of old school sensibilities and Elden Ring’s tutorial hole in particular feels like the modern equivalent of an instruction manual. You know, those little paper pamphlets that used to come with games in the olden days when games only came in little boxes? They weren’t always required reading, but they were there to explain the basics if you didn’t know what you were doing. If you got stuck in the actual game, you could call Nintendo’s 1-900 number and they’d tell you how to get the ice beam or whatever and then your dad would yell at you when the phone bill arrived.
Even before Elden Ring’s educational pit, Souls games have been good at getting out of the way and letting players go learn from their own mistakes. In FromSoft’s earlier action-RPGs, the closest thing to a tutorial is a bunch of informative messages scattered around like a passive aggressive roommate’s Post-it notes, but you’re not forced to stop and read them. That might steepen the learning curve for newcomers, but it streamlines the experience for series veterans or seasoned gamers.
In terms of video game tutorials, World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. is essentially perfect: you learn by doing. There’s not a mandatory prologue that keeps you from getting into the action, you just hit the ground running, jumping, and so on. Most older games are like that, perhaps not in terms of quality, but they’re just as quick to get to the point. To their credit, older games were simple enough mechanically and narratively that it was assumed players would figure it out on their own.
Fast forward a few decades and most big games take at least an hour to get going. That’s tolerable the first time around but it makes a real chore out of return visits, and in the case of open-world games, it’s just infuriating. The vast majority of open-world games start out in fairly closed introductory tunnels before they actually open up, which seems a little antithetical to the fundamental appeal of giving players freedom.
Before they let players climb virtually everything and harness new laws of physics, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom have their respective training grounds. I’ll give the former a pass as it was such a huge departure for the series. But Tears, for everything it does right, feels like a step backwards: it literally opens with you walking through tunnels to get to a cutscene that plays before you get to that big tutorial in the sky, which you’ve got to do before you can dive headfirst into a world that you’re probably somewhat familiar with and eager to get back to. It’s a lot more succinct than Twilight Princess but that’s not saying much.
Two of the best open-world games of all time have had multiple chances to let returning players bypass their tedious tutorial zones. Skyrim and Grand Theft Auto V have each gotten at least two re-releases since their initial launch two console generations ago. Bethesda and Rockstar know how many copies they sold, they know they’ve got some repeat customers. Of all the bells, whistles, and other improvements those newer versions boast, neither has an official means of getting to the fireworks factory any sooner. Starting a new game in Skyrim makes you take that insufferable wagon ride and do that whole prison break rigamarole, and GTA has the North Yankton heist prologue.
The Skyrim re-releases do offer mod support and the modding community has graciously created ways of bypassing the introduction, but would it have killed Bethesda to implement a new “this is my third time buying this game, please let me start outside Riverwood” mode instead of, I don’t know, porting the game to Amazon Alexa? GTA’s prologue is maybe even more frustrating as it’s a prerequisite for not just exploring Los Santos in single-player, but also to get into GTA Online. Michael and Trevor’s antics in North Yankton don’t seem to have any significant connection to an MMO where you can take bong rips on a yacht while wearing a Zentai suit. It’s even more baffling when you consider GTA V introduced the extremely considerate and somehow divisive option of letting players skip missions if they die enough times and just want to progress the story to see what happens – a feature that is bafflingly absent during the prologue.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is a phenomenal game that deserves to be savored, but its long winded prologue is at odds with both its free-roam design and its cinematic influences. A mandatory sequence where the player has to physically make Arthur Morgan trudge through snow is immersive the first time around, but having to do it all over again is a barrier to entry for anyone making a return visit to Rockstar’s wild west. Movies can be fast-forwarded and they also continue to play if you walk away during the boring parts you’ve seen before. RDR2’s prologue is a literal slog for anybody who just wants to do some rootin-tootin’ cowboy shootin’. If and when the long-rumored next-gen overhaul of Red Dead 2 releases, you can bet a few returning players will put the controller down after remembering the game starts off how your parents went to school: walking five miles in the snow, uphill both ways.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is possibly my favorite game ever, but its opening is comically tedious. Okay, correction: it was pretty cool the first time around. It’s a little less cool when you have to replay it all over again as one of the final missions of the game, because reasons. Replaying it a third time because you wanted to start a new playthrough is a phantom pain in the ass. I would never dare question Hideo Kojima’s artistic vision but it’s a bit of a head-scratcher why an incredible open-world game with some of the best on-foot movement ever to grace a video game opens with you literally dragging Snake’s half-comatose carcass down a bunch of hospital corridors. Again, what’s compelling cinematically doesn’t necessarily have the same appeal when it’s interactive.
Cyberpunk 2077 is yet another phenomenal game that’s front loaded with ten hours of setup. In spite of all the branching narrative, player choice and systems that lend themselves to replayability, you’re going to be retreading a lot of familiar territory with each subsequent playthrough. Unless, of course, you grab the expansion pack. Upon starting up Phantom Liberty, you’re given the option to skip ahead to the point in the story where Cyberpunk 2077’s base game “finally opens up.” You can roll a new character, Keanu gives you a “Previously on Cyberpunk 2077…” exposition dump, and you’re spat out in Night City at level 15. Theoretically, this is so you can get right into the DLC content, but it’s also extremely convenient if you just want to screw around in the open world without yet another introduction to Johnny Silverhand. CD Projekt Red took a similar approach with The Witcher 3’s DLC, which undoubtedly contributed to its lasting appeal. Maybe they’re onto something?
What makes games special as a medium is their interactivity, but what that interactivity actually entails varies wildly and can sometimes get in the way of celebrating the classics. There’s already the barrier to entry for game preservation and appreciation thanks to hardware requirements and/or scarcity, and there’s the ever-divisive issue of difficulty, but the tedium of mandatory tutorials seems like something that could be sidestepped with a little foresight. Tutorials are a necessary evil, and I’m not by any means suggesting they be scrapped entirely, but there’s room for improvement.
You can flip past the foreword when reading a classic piece of literature, you can fast-forward the opening credits of a classic film and you can skip ahead to the best song on a classic album. When the appeal of so many open-world games is exploring their intricate microcosms, maybe Elden Ring has the right idea: throw drawn-out tutorials down a hole and let players play the game already.
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