How to make an in-game tutorial: Prey vs. Dishonored 2

   A few months ago, I picked up Prey during a Steam sale and then played the entire thing through in a single weekend. Even though I’m not exactly the biggest fan of sci-fi, Prey was an amazing immersive sim that tickled me in all the right ways – an interesting, well-built world, an impactful skill system that changes the way you play the game, and a cool story (even if the ending was a little abrupt). Having had my interest in immersive sims re-kindled, I took the opportunity to grab the other Arkane game I haven’t yet had the chance to play – Dishonored 2. Unfortunately, it wasn’t… exactly up to the standards of Prey, which is understandable considering they released Dishonored 2 a year before. But I’m glad that Arkane seemed to have taken the lessons they learnt from making Dishonored and applied it admirably in Prey. In particular, I found that the opening and tutorials of the two games were the biggest indicators of the difference between the two, and shows exactly how much Arkane improved in the one-year period between the releases of Dishonored 2 and Prey. So that’s what I’ll be discussing for the rest of this piece: how to make a good in-game tutorial.

Spoiler alert: I will be spoiling the openings of both Prey and Dishonored 2 (and Prey’s opening is great, so go play it first!) so be warned!

In Prey, you begin as Morgan Yu (male or female), the scion of a rich and powerful family that owns the mega-corp Transtar. Having gotten a job at the Transtar-owned space station Talos I (nepotism? Hahaha no way), you wake up the day before you’re supposed to be shipped out. Your first job is to go to Transtar HQ to do some tests and get ready for your long tenure in space. After a awe-inspiring helicopter ride across town, you meet your brother and go through a series of weird tests that ask you to do some really basic things (like moving boxes). Things start to go wrong when you finish your final test, when a coffee cup transforms into a black spider-like creature and sucks the life out of the researcher in front of you. Yeah. Not exactly the best start to your job. You are then tranquilized, and when you open your eyes… it’s the same day again, Groundhog Day style. That is, until you find the technician outside your door dead and desiccated like the researcher killed by the black creature. Both the elevators and the doors don't work, so you step back and pick up the wrench dropped by the technician. A moment of contemplation follows... and video game logic dictates that wrench + glass = success. You approach the sliding glass doors that give your apartment a stunning panoramic view onto the city San Francisco. 

 

Oh man, can't wait to stand out there and take in the view...

Still unsure of what to do once out on the balcony, you still press forward, knowing a solution will present itself as long as you keep going. The wrench is raised, and it slows down before the moment of impact - a massive crash - and you literally see your worldview break and crash and fall apart, as the landscape shatters into a million pieces to reveal a laboratory. Everything you experienced, from the helicopter ride across town to the elevators and the rooms, were crafted to fool you into thinking you were still on Earth as part of an experiment! 

 

Hold on, this isn't what I was promised!

Words don’t really do it justice – the introduction to Prey is a masterclass in subverting expectations. The “eureka!” moment when you realize you’re meant to use the wrench to smash the glass, the big reveal of what was actually behind it all along… it boggles the mind! But the truly ingenious idea is utilizing this opening sequence as a tutorial. It certainly gives you basic information; for instance, when you wake up the first time, you can interact with your computer, helping you learn how to use them and showing that they contain valuable information. There’s also everything else – walking, talking, interacting with objects, moving and throwing them, which you learn during the tests. The core of the tutorial, though, is in how it teaches the player how to be skeptical of the world around them – and how they can interact with it. We are introduced to the black creature – the Mimic – that can transform into any object and jump out to attack the player at any time. There’s also the Looking Glass, which is what created the illusion of the beautiful panoramic view from Morgan’s apartment in the beginning, as well as the fake helicopter ride. Because of this, you learn to constantly ask yourself, “who’s lying?” and “what’s real?” In more practical gameplay terms, this means the player is always keeping an eye out for out of place objects and making doubly sure that everything they see isn’t just a Looking Glass illusion. This is very important, because there are treasure troves of secrets through many of these Looking Glass screens throughout the game. In my own experience, I could recognize them by their unnatural beauty – intuition ingrained into me by the game. It was a floor-to-ceiling aquarium in one instance, and a pond in the other. There were also other ways the game illustrated game mechanics to the player; a locked safe in the beginning area told the player that sometimes you have to backtrack, and a scene later in the game showed an alternative way to use the GLOO gun as a tool for traversal. A mind-controlled person locked in the infirmary provided an early glance at an enemy type you haven’t seen before – and if you’re lucky, you can figure out that you can cure or avoid them. The game still has the typical text tutorials that occasionally pop up, of course, but these moments wove the narrative and the gameplay together to teach the player how they could interact with the world. The player learns how to survive in Talos I through the subtle guidance of the developers. Brilliant work!

Compared to Prey’s, Dishonored 2’s opening is terrible. The “tutorial” is a flashback of Emily’s training with Corvo, and it is boring and irrelevant to the narrative. It tutorialized basic traversal controls with the barest of plot justification. It feels scripted and fake, and it teaches things that could’ve been explained in a popup. Furthermore, it misleads you by providing obstacles and situations that do not actually appear in-game later, like the grate that slowly moves downwards that you have to slide under before it closes. This caused a big issue in the first mission for me, when I had to reach the basement of a building, but the elevator was blocked from descending by wooden planks. I tried everything from finding an alternative entrance to attempting to break the wooden planks at the bottom of the elevator shaft that led to the basement (because they looked breakable, like many of the pieces of wood in the game). I got tired and looked up the solution – which was to break the cables at the top of the elevator, to make it fall down through the planks to the basement. What? How the hell was I supposed to know that was even possible? I had visited the room at the top of the shaft, but it was so dark I couldn’t even see the links that were breakable. But the most egregious thing was that I was never presented with the opportunity to see this in action. How was I supposed to know that something that seemed very permanent, like an elevator, was destructible? The tutorial contained a scene in which we were supposed to break the chains to drop a crate on top of an enemy to attack them – but not permanently change the environment in such a drastic manner! The problem with the tutorial was how the game misled me into thinking that these chains served a combat purpose while implementing it in obscure, unexplained ways throughout the game. There were other annoyances: half open doors that were not openable or breakable; hound skulls that transformed into dogs when you get near them, and other terrible examples. I felt like I never fully understood what I could actually do in the game for two reasons. One: the design was inconsistent. If a certain type of object was breakable in one part of the game, it should be breakable in the rest – or else the player will never fully understand how the world operates. Two: the game either never teaches the player – or teaches them badly – about interacting with the world. The hounds were not probably introduced, but instead thrust into the player’s face as if they had seen it before a million times. Prey taught the players the limits and rules of the game – and then let the players loose to have fun. Dishonored 2 lets players run around, only for them to run face first into invisible gameplay walls.

Prey’s in-game tutorial taught you how to view the world and interact with it; it built within you a mindset, while also providing you with a few clues to guide you through Talos I. It also presented a major narrative point and offered a compelling motive. It was one the best openings I have seen in a good long while. On the other hand, Dishonored 2’s was truly terrible. You had a narratively incoherent parkour tutorial sequence that taught you something a menu could’ve. You don’t need to know how to slide to play the game, really. Furthermore, it didn’t tell you how the world works and how you can play within it. It’s all scripted, a far cry from the freer and more open world the game provides. It is awkward, disjointed, and fake, and worst of all, unnecessary.

If the game was made after Prey, I think the opening would have looked a little bit more like this: Emily would be off with her lover somewhere when the coup against her went down, and the player’s first mission be to get to the castle safely. A set of parkour obstacles could be set here, and the Duke’s soldiers shown to be enemies as they execute the citizens of Dunwall and the Royal Guard. Then present an unsuspecting soldier – maybe a drunk one leaning against a wall – and give the player a little popup to teach them the basics of combat and stealth. A few branching paths and options, and there you go – you’re at the throne room, and the story begins in earnest. An introduction like that would create a sense of mystery and tension, rather than the tedium and confusion of the original tutorial. It would also reduce the lengthy cutscenes and put the player in more control, something the game should showcase since the beginning.

If you’re making a game all about immersion (an immersive sim, for instance) make the tutorial sequence narratively interesting, and focus more on the role of the player in the world rather than basic controls. If done right, you get the majesty of the Prey opening – a hook that keeps people playing and an unforgettable plot-twist.