Xcom 2 Skip Tutorial

• Xcom 2 Skip Tutorials
• Planetside 2 Skip Tutorial
• Xcom 2 Skip Tutorial For Beginners

After 10 years of intermittent waiting and just losing over and over again in, I can't describe how pumped I was for this game. I pre-loaded it the night before, got screwed by a for an hour, and finally got to playing.Wait, wait, sorry. Wrong game.Tutorials.Holy balls.

What was that, 3 hours long? I lost count. In fact, after wanting to slam my head into the table until it became one with the mahogany I quit the game, started again, and chose no tutorial. Then I felt bad (yeah, WTF?) and went back, finished the stupid thing, and started playing.Who at Firaxis thought they had to explain every single last element of the game to a baby?

Seven Mods That Make XCOM 2 Less Frustrating. Nathan Grayson. 2/12/16 4:00pm. Filed to: xcom Filed to: xcom. XCOM 2 is at its most obnoxious when you have a character in range to land a shot.

Waaaaay too much video in this game, that's the worst part. If you're getting riled up, hold on. I'm deep into XCOM now, and I'm super happy with it mechanically. In fact I like it.

But what in the world is with all the videos? Just in case someone from Firaxis is hovering around.There is a really, really big difference between receiving instructions (tutorial or otherwise) from an NPC as dialogue, and cutting to video dialogue. Huge difference. The former is in-game, the latter is (nearly) the equivalent of a commercial. When a video pops up I feel like my play is interrupted. If you would just zoom in on the Scientist, Engineer, etc and just have them spout the dialogue without killing the UI/resolution I would be way, way happier.

And I would trade simpler, lower poly characters for that too! I know this 'how they do it' for Civilization, but this isn't that game.Now all of you who thought the tutorial was mad helpful and provided a 'great narrative context' or whatever can chime in. Rant is complete. It does prevent you from thinking on your own at all, and I agree it should be toned down.I also agree on the videos. They needed to make them shorter, use shorthand. Instead they talk in long ass sentences.

'Research completed' becomes a full on 'I have completely my analysis of the devices you recovered, and have made some startling discoveries. But using alien johnson rods inside our capacitors, we can now make improved weaponry'.I get it, shut the fuck up.

Xcom 2 Skip Tutorials

A minor issue but one that comes up way too much. Maybe just because I'm still a bit early in the game. I thought the tutorial was great. Also really helpful, and I say that as someone who watched every bit of pre-release video that I could find. I think it kind of has to be as long and extensive as it is because this game has got just so fucking many systems going on. If the tutorial didn't cover everything, or wasn't in depth with as much as it was, it'd be extremely overwhelming to people who are new to strategy games or just XCOM, specifically.I also don't mind the video and dialogue.

They both help make your advisors seem like actual characters, and not just 'Talking Head What Talks About Science' (which is how it is in Civilization.) That's something that I feel adds to the atmosphere of the game.Edit: Specifically, how could you not like the video that plays after you first shoot down a UFO? I agree that the tutorial was really long and it took a long time before I felt like I had control at the base. On the other hand. It's a complicated game, so I did need to know a lot of that stuff.But as for the cutscenes. I think that they add a lot of personality to the game and they are fun to watch. If you want to be moving faster and not be interrupted by the cut scenes, then I guess I understand. But I personally love the pace of the game and I would definitely not like it as much if not for the cutscenes.

@bkbroiler: I'm definitely overreacting, but 1.5 missions? Don't exaggerate! It's at least 3 or 4. More important is the fact that you are locked on a tutorial path.@Pinworm45: Spot on. These are my thoughts as delivered by a more sane person.@CableCarrier: That video kicks ass. Best part of the game until the game really started.

But you know which videos aren't sweet? All the ones zooming up on a guy telling you to go talk to another guy. I take your point about the talking heads but I'm not sure I agree. I find it unnerving, for lack of a better word, to move from game to video to game, vs just talking to that person in-game. Mass Effect isn't a great example but that's a game where you talk to characters in-game and not via video. Sweet that people who don't have much experience in the genre can be eased into it, I just wish there was a middle ground between hand-holding and handless, uh, holding.@Rayeth: You're totally right, videos are in 720. There's no good reason,.

Gotta love PC users. I've yet to try it myself but seems foolproof.@Spoonman671: You can absolutely start a game very easily without the tutorial, and it's auto-skipped for Classic or Impossible (w.e it's called). But when you uncheck the box you get a pretty intense warning from the developer (not just about difficulty, but story). I guess I just felt like I had to play it to get the 'complete' experience.

Ah well.@Brodehouse: Is this for me? I can't tell dude. Seems like it should be, but I mentioned I sucked at UFO Defense and never said I thought Enemy Unknown was easy. It just has an overly controlling, overly long tutorial.@Ares42: Yeah when I started the game No Tutorial I was shocked to see I could pick Asia and Africa right away.

Totally thought I had to be beat the game or something. I don't know enough about the systems to really say if it's a super wrong direction, but you could be right. @KoolAid: Agree to it being complex and needing tutorial features, I just don't think their approach was the right one. It's too funnelled. About the cutscene: I like them. I just hate that there's so many at once right at the beginning of the game.

As the game went on I like the videos more because they were a real break in the action, and yeah, some of them are cool.@VideoGameKing: First of all, VGK, I just wanted to say what an honor it is to reply to you. Certainly a complex game requires a longer explanation than a simple game. What I'm questioning is where, when and in what fashion they try to explain the game to you (not that they do!). In a way, the XCOM tutorial could be called an Info Dump vs. Show, Don't Tell. @GERALTITUDE:Funny, considering i actually read your entire post and replied to a specific point in it.

But way to make assumptions.You asked people to chime in at the end, they did. Don't ask for responses and other peoples feelings on it, if you don't want to hear them.The tutorial is both necessarily linear and necessarily long, for people who have never played Xcom games, aren't used to turn based games. If you just give the audience today tooltips, half of them will skip them, ignore them or otherwise miss them. Tutorial itself is just two missions, the only further tutorialized stuff is for the first time the player encounters certain gameplay element/mechanics. Even with tutorials as liner and long as they are there are still people on these boards who managed to not understand or forget certain aspects. @RavenlightI started the game without the tutorial and I don't feel like I missed out on anything.My advice to people just picking the game up would be to disable the tutorial and not worry about it, as long as you're familiar with tactics-style games.Agreed.

Even as a complete XCOM noob, the tutorial doesn't let you do anything on your own in the base for about an hour or two longer than it should.Do they think people are illiterate? Because there are tool tips on fucking everything, plus the XCOM encyclopedia database thing, so there are more than enough resources at your fingertips assuming you have like a fourth grade reading level.

@GERALTITUDE:Apologies, it was a bit harsh, which is why I edited the post (sadly the notification system only shows the initial reply). But being dismissive towards people got under my skin too much.It has just been seen a million times in this modern era of video games, of games not explaining a lot of their stuff, and you get a flood of people complaining that it's too obtuse, which is why developers are tutorialising the hell out of everything that needs to appeal to a wider audience.As far as education from trial and error, Xcom still has that in spades:D. @Pinworm45 said:It does prevent you from thinking on your own at all, and I agree it should be toned down.I also agree on the videos. They needed to make them shorter, use shorthand. Instead they talk in long ass sentences.

Planetside 2 Skip Tutorial

'Research completed' becomes a full on 'I have completely my analysis of the devices you recovered, and have made some startling discoveries. But using alien johnson rods inside our capacitors, we can now make improved weaponry'.I get it, shut the fuck up. A minor issue but one that comes up way too much. Maybe just because I'm still a bit early in the game.Or you could just click your mouse and skit the video sequences.

One tiny click. Reading and digesting these comments hasn't changed my feelings, but they've been 'patched'. It's obvious from replies that many players found the toot useful, but I think there were also a lot of players in my position, middle-of-the-road players who wanted some explanation, and got too much. I liked Jeff's analysis on the recent Bombcast, which was about 300% softer than mine: there's a tutorial, it's pretty long.

One thing I saw come up on the 2k forums was that there's a benefit to doing the tutorial as you receive items and money you wouldn't otherwise. Food for thought! @GERALTITUDE: I can understand where you're coming from. But what would be a reasonable and realistic solution to that problem? Spend ressources on several tutorial tiers for complete newcomers, tactically minded folk and veterans?

That would obviously be ideal but it doesn't seem practical. I'd roughly classify myself as a mediocre turn-based-tactics gamer. Very reasonable experience with the field (JA2, Silent Storm, tactical RPGs, on the other hand sub-par UFO/ XCOM knowledge) but not a person that would actually skip a tutorial where available. And all I can say is: I really wasn't annoyed or inconvenienced any more than I usually am by introductory content. I understood that my hand was being held for a decent while so I breezed through that content. Some exposition and narrative was intertwined with that so there was value beyond explaining the game.And then the actual game started and from now on that's clearly where consecutive playthroughs will start for me but it's totally fine and not that big a deal.

@BaalSagoth: I'm glad you asked! Now, some games do have multiple tutorial tiers (Civilization, in fact) but I'm going to agree with you and assume that that's a greater drain on resources than having one tutorial. My rules for the ideal tutorial (or toot) are this:. toot is divorced from narrative. toot can be turned on/off at will. toot is adaptive rather than linearThe first two I think are self-explanatory. A linear tutorial tells you everything you need to know, when the game thinks you need to know it.

Xcom 2 Skip Tutorial For Beginners

An adaptive tutorial tells you in the moment. Here's an example: during the very first mission they teach you how to move.

But instead of pointing a golden arrow at a car and literally forcing me to move my guy there, let me move him wherever I want. If I move him to a full cover/half cover/open spot, the game can chime in appropriately (You'll get some decent cover here/Don't stay here long!/NEVER STAY IN THE OPEN FOOL!). If there's only one highlighting, glowing object on the screen I can click, then just click it for me, knowwhatimsayin?I think most game tutorials tell us what to do before we get a chance to act, not how to rectify our mistakes.

I wasn't expecting XCOM to rewrite the book, but I found the tutorial to be 1) too much information at once, 2) too guided. I didn't feel like I was playing, but watching. And if you only have a small time to play, that can be really frustrating.

@GERALTITUDE: Yeah, I love the more modern approach of Civ 4 & 5 tutorials (as far as I recall). I'm not entirely sure how dependant that excellent style may be on very sandbox-esque games. But sure, that is a good way to teach players, maybe it's even superior to XCOM's attempt. It certainly is better in the sense that you could play an entire fool-proof game while pretending to actually propperly play Civ already. Which is impossible with the XCOM intro.I whole-heartedly disagree with your first point. To me, a mixture is the ideal solution (Warcraft 3's odd Thrall intro first converted me) but I understand this is controversial.

Of course this is coming from someone that does usually check out tutorials without being in dire need of explanations. Part of my interest admittedly is an abstract desire to learn how designers intent to teach players the ways of their game and part of it is a compulsive completionist desire.The second bit is very important but reasonably well realized in XCOM. Except if you wish to skip mid-game, which would be ideal but then again you can always quickly restart. You couldn't be in deeper than 20-30 minutes before you realize the tutorial is beneath you.The third bullet point kind of ties into the first. Civ does this better. XCOM is especially linear in it's explanations.

Ironic for a game that seems pretty free-form so far (I'm only 5 hours into my game, having captured the 2nd alien type alive). But again, doing adaptive tutorials really well seems madly ressource intensive. I'd rather have that budget be spent on the actual game than on softening my first encounter with it.Your final observations are spot on as far as I'm concerned.

It's just that to me these developments are curiosity items and not moments of actual concern. I'll applaud any real advancement in these sectors but them being underdeveloped doesn't strike me as one of gaming's biggest issues as of now. It's always good to think some of these issues through though! I played the demo a few times and assumed most/all of the tutorial was in that. Choosing no tutorial in the main game seems to still trigger 'some' things that guide you through the game.

You don't need a tutorial for the most part as things are explained anyways as you discover them. When you see a new enemy they talk about it, and give you more info if you do the autopsy stuff or capture one alive etc.' If' the full tutorial was in fact in the demo, the one I played, then it's hella short. Since I played the demo a few times it becomes easier to see how short it is in fact, was really sad at the time cause I wanted more xcom:) Now I have tons of xcom:S I played all day today and now I have to sleep cause I'll die if I don't (that's how my body works).XCOM can be extremely punishing, front loading the explanations instead of showing you a few times to get you to see it may have been the best option. It's not terrible, it may be grating if you're not in the mood for it. There is a reason you can turn the tutorial on or off, and if given the option I always skip the tutorials in games because I've played a video game before and know how to do the stuff or I'll quickly find out that button is action soon enough without control taken away from me and a text box in my face etc.NOW ONWARD TO SLEEP!

@BaalSagoth: I think WarCraft, and to some extent, World of WarCraft, are good examples of strong narrative tutorials, definitely won't argue that. I should have been more specific in my point! RTS games usually tie tutorial to narrative because the base RTS game tends to get complex in a linear fashion (ex: you unlock units and buildings as per the story, so the tutorial/gameplay/story element is introduced at the same time). As you mentioned, XCOM is pretty open and random, which is why I don't think it works as well here. Part of my interest admittedly is an abstract desire to learn how designers intend to teach players the ways of their game and part of it is a compulsive completionist desire.I like this, and certainly have this feeling from time to time.

Cool.It's true you could quit and restart without a tutorial, but this means no tutorial whatsoever and what I was trying to say is nice about the On/Off tutorial (like Civ) is that we can decide when we need help. For example, maybe 10 hours in I forget something or just feel like I'm sucking big time, it'd be nice to turn the tips back on. The database is something, but it's not interactive.I agree that adaptive tutorials seem more expensive, but I also get the feeling it's something you need to keep in my mind when designing from the ground up. And of course I think it's worth it! I know what I'm saying in the end is a bit dream scape at the moment (someone's gotta revolutionize tutorials!), but ah well. This sounds grandiose but I believe tutorials are really the wedge that separates people who love games from people who aren't interested.

I believe that an awesome tutorial system could help any player play any game. And what a world that would be! Crusader Kings, here I come!