Beginner's tutorial revamp suggestions

Suggestions and Contributions
1

Hello!

A tutorial revamp is in our to-do list and we’ll be working on it shortly, but before we start we would like to hear your thoughts in the matter!

Please, make relevant suggestions that you believe would make the tutorial more informative rather than suggesting minor details like changing the current tiles or music, for example.

Also, keep in mind not every suggestion can be implemented ingame due to certain things being hardcoded (like missions), but let your imagination come with as many ideas as you can get and share them with us, this way, we can make a well ballanced and helpful tutorial for our new players.

So, please tell us, what do you dislike about our current tutorial and how would you fix it?

Thank you!

2

Maybe the buneary can tell us more about partys and commands in general and maybe hint about how to evolve

3

I think the tutorial is fine how it is, but one thing you could definetly do, is before you start the tutorial, the game asks you if you already played PMU or not, if you do, you skip bunearys tips, simple as that, no need revamp

4

I agree with both Pakawaka and ILoveWater. I think there isn’t really anything wrong with our current tutorial; just need to mention more things like the parties, such as ILoveWater suggested.
One thing I definitely agree on is the fact that you should get the option to skip the tutorial or not. I’ve seen before many players get frustrated because it takes too long to do the tutorial because they already know how to play so I think this would benefit everyone who already knows how to play.
Other than that, I think just slotting things like parties and making it so you can skip the tutorial would be great!

5

While I think the tutorial is helpful, there are many other things in PMU that you can’t explain in a single level. I’d suggest spreading the tutorial out to two levels, with Buneary being an obvious tutorial and the next level being less obnoxious.

I still think you can’t fix PMU’s “newbie problem” until regions are completely reorganized in a thoughtful way, but doing this will at least help until an overworld reorganization could be seriously considered.

(EX: Traps, honey, certain statuses, where to go next, how to chat, telling newbies to not make their leader as their primary fighter, etc. aren’t explainable in a single go without chasing people away with a huge info dump.)

I’d love it if Buneary would tell people to go to town after the tutorial, and another Pokemon would ask them to help them with the next dungeon. This new Pokemon would tell them that they have a mission from the mission board to go to [insert newb dungeon here], and then would ask the player to check the mission board as well.
Gasp! It will just so happen that the player will have a mission on the board to the same place, so this new Pokemon says they should do their missions together. [A user can decline this mission if they said they have played PMU before in the earlier Buneary level.]

Before heading off, the temporary “buddy” Pokemon would ask them to change the leader of their party by talking to Chimeco and explain that if the leader faints, the entire party fails The buddy Pokemon will also suggest said user bring an escape orb so that if anything bad happens, the user can leave the dungeon without penalty. The new Pokemon says “I’ll see you there.”

(To make this work, the mission on the board would function as an escort mission; the new Pokemon would go with you until you reach the final floor of the dungeon.)

While in the dungeon, scripted things like the user stepping on a poison trap would happen, and the buddy Pokemon would give them a pecha berry (or maybe a pecha scarf, since that would help show the usefulness of items). Once you reach the final floor and find your mission goal, the buddy says he’ll be leaving and that you can use an escape orb to leave but that you’re close to the end and should go up the next set of stairs. If you miss the mission floor, when in town the buddy Pokemon will ask to try the dungeon again; if the user declines, the buddy pokemon tells the user how to delete a mission.

6

Perhaps instead of entering a dungeon right after choosing a starter, you enter a village and a pokemon sees you and says you look confused!

They welcome you to ____ and decide to give you a tour to help you remember what is what. They take you to a assembly first and tell you if you have pokemon join you, they will be found here! Handy place to call your teammates to help with dungeons.

They drop some poke and tell you to talk to them again (They explain how in parenthesis) and will be waiting by the pokemart. Once you are there, they talk to you about what to buy and say you can buy supplies here or just keep the money. Find them again once they decided what to get. They will be waiting outside the inn.

You go to the inn and they take you in and explain how it works.

There can be other shops like treasure shop and move tutor and the guide can explain them as well.

Finally the guide takes you to the edge and says that you don’t seem like the type to just sit around. They say that you should explore the forest dungeon and maybe you’ll figure out where to go next.

Enter exbel woods. (Perhaps an option to just go to grassroot directly but would be hidden on the far opposite of the area in a hidden location.)

7

i dont really think we need anything new, all i think its useful its the ability to skip the tutorial.

8

I think it would help to give players a sense of where to go or what to do. The tutorial is nice to explain the basics, but a lot of new players don’t know what to do after. I think something like the Eevee at Crossroads should be brought back (if anyone remembers Eevee). Eevee told people there was a town north and a dungeon westward that you can start at. It wasn’t much, but it helped a lot more than having nothing.

As a veteran option though, can there be a way to /giveup and still get my moves? Maybe on that map that leads to Exbel Woods, we have /giveup lead to crossroads? I guess I can TinyMushroom, but that doesn’t mean the system isn’t bad.

Also I know you said don’t suggest changing the music but PLEASE CHANGE THE MUSIC. That song is literally horrendous. I play it in my house when I want to torture my friends. It’s high pitched and grates the ears. It’s annoying before the first loop is done. Please, for the love of all that is holy, change the song.

9

these ideas are nice but dont make it too long or the player will lose interest (or not)

10

Awesome to see effort put on the newest of players! I really like the creative ideas so far, like the tutorial village! Definitely also agree that we see a lot of new people going “Where do I go now?” after reaching crossroads and town. Would be awesome to have something more so they know which dungeons are suitable for their levels and where these dungeons are. Not sure if the scope of this planned change reaches to this though, but I hope it could in some way!

11

I’m loving the ideas so far aswell! And while we don’t have a complete story yet here are some of the ideas that I have discussed with some other people and will probably be added.

  1. Adding way to skip the tutorial. You get a message asking you if you’re a new player or not. You can’t replay the tutorial if tou skip it so careful with that.

  2. As suggested ingame, when you’re taught how to dungeon some short information on different traps and weather should be added.

  3. Maybe the whole tutorial should be like a “mission” (even though we can’t add tutorial missions to the board itself right now) an when the player is done you get a short explanation on how to do more missions by going to the board? This should be explained by an NPC in town that also gives you the following information aswell:

-A short description on Town shops/places and,

-The most important point in my opinion: A brief explanation on beginner’s dungeons, similar to the beginner’s guide walk through but summarized.

So this covers pretty much what you suggested! Just need to be organized a bit more. Spitting the tutorial in diffetent points to avoid super a gigant story should be considered aswell.

12

the tutorial is ok but the first dungeon isnt that helpful. it has no traps and nothing to explain how stuff works. i think for new players…each level should explain what they should do next

lvl 20
“do you wanna learn about honeys and gummys”

lvl 30
“do you wanna learn about secret rooms”

13

  1. If i’m not mistaken, didn’t the eevee that used to appear only appear once per account (vs once per character)? Or was that removed before I could avoid a coincidence resulting in me thinking it did.
    Well, eitherway, having the tutorial appear once per account would be nice. (And perhaps optionally at character creation also?)

  2. Personally, as long as this information doesn’t appear in the initial tutorial OR the first tutorial is a scripted dungeon then i’m okay with that.
    The former is because tutorials need to be short so i feel like cramming everything into one dungeon at the start will be difficult/long to do - i mean, PMD does it very well by having tutorial windows the first time you encounter something new so that’d be nice if at all possible (and if a scripted dungeon is chosen I feel like it should take less than 2 windows of text to read. swiftness is key.)
    Eitherway i’d like that also to be optional, perhaps first character only/once per account as i’ve covered with (1).

  3. So long as the mission board is pointed out one way or another - be it through tutorial mission or not - it’s good.

Again though, i’d have concerns over it needing to be short to keep the players attention.

“-The most important point in my opinion: A brief explanation on beginner’s dungeons, similar to the beginner’s guide walk through but summarized.”

I wouldn’t explain dungeons but I would have something that says “go to pebble cave” essentially.

And then at the end of pebble cave is an NPC who is NOT a boss, maybe even eevee or buneary or any tutorial npc who then says something along the lines of they were exploring and heard someone was causing trouble in Tiny Grotto, and came here to train first. They then ask if you’ll go in their steed.

At the end of Tiny Grotto part 1 (hinthinthint you can teach players about status effects inside) is a scene where a Magnemite police officer comes up to you and says something along the lines of “A criminal always returns to the scene of the crime”, then the Kirlia quickly corrects him saying “That wasn’t who stole my Poké!”. Kirlia apologises (magnemite does not) and explains that they were waiting to help people out of Tiny Grotto if they weren’t ready for whats ahead, when a pokemon who came from Seaside Cavern, south of town along the beach (and yes, specifically both the dungeon name and that it is south of town is mentioned), came in and attacked her and stole her poké/money. The Magnemite peeps back up saying they’re trying to find who did it and that you should aid the search if you want to be taken off the hook. Kirlia retains her usual dialogue, and a Magnemite npc is placed in the mid point who is always suspicious of the player.

This points the player towards Seaside Cavern. At the end of the dungeon Poké is placed in the walls/blocked tiles of the map (prevents players reaching it), and Kingler is laughing to himself when you appear. He explains that “with the attack [he] learnt from the dungeon north west of town” he got all of this poke. He then laughs at you, saying “I stole this huh? That may be true” then a dramatic “HIYAAH” or something idk then fight ensues. After winning he sobs a little saying “Not even rare HM in the north west dungeon could make me strong” and leaves, but not before saying “Don’t tell the cops I was here.”
This encourages players to seek the “north west dungeon” (it is not specifically named because if you did name it, imo, it’d feel like walking the player through as if they were a baby. this also encourages players to explore NW, hopefully finding Sour Root Cave.)

In SRC the weepinbell quickly becomes angry at you, fighting you, and after you get cut and reach the final boss, the Vileplume does it’s usual trickery to begin with but upon defeat they have dialogue in which they mention something along the lines of “Freed from jail and defeated right away, bah! At least the savannah protects me from the police here…” your character does a “…” dialogue of their own and then the vileplume begins to run away saying “You heard nothing! Don’t head North West if you want to stay alive!”
Hopefully this encourages players to seek Jailbreak Tunnel, and tutorial ends.

This would play out once per character (or account), so they revert back to normal dialogue after this (perhaps with only breif implications/throwbacks to the tutorial story if anything as some dialogue in their normal states would need to be adjusted) that implies that the tutorial is an event that happened (i.e. the dialogue wouldn’t play every time you finish these dungeons after the first time, because it already happened and won’t happen again).

This 1. means you don’t need a huge text wall in a tutorial detailing all of the newbie dungeons. the natural story guides them through dungeons, and as i recall what i’ve wrote is the appropriate progression. 2. keeps the player interested - there’s a story there and they want to get to end of it! also provides a fun/interesting way in which initial progression is learnt.

EDIT: Where i’ve wrote west i actually mean east OOPS

14

Everything is fine to me. Continue with what you"re doing!

15

Also please add in a area telling you about explorer ranks along with how you get missions/complete them. (Not all beginners know to bring an escape orb.)

16

May be a less appealing option, but in the tutorial you could have an npc say “Hey look in the help section if you need to know anything else!” and said npc then tells them to esc > others > help and within are help pages on all sorts of topics - explorer ranks, weather, guides to town, the inns, housing centres, dungeon common traps, basic supplies etc etc etc.

You could even accept help pages as suggestions from the playerbase since they’re just png files of a certain dimension - I make help pages for my own TC guide even - it’s simple if a theme is picked.

Not that any of the info inside shouldn’t be contained in a tutorial but i do see a LOT of suggestions for content here. If EVERYTHING in this thread is put into one tutorial I think we’re gonna lose the players interest very quickly from how long and boring it would be unless you take pmd’s style of tutorial boxes when stuff occurs (first time you see weather a dungeon for example, that weather/all weather is explained) or really any style that doesn’t give you all of the info straight away.

On tutorial towns - The issues i see with it is 2 things:
-If you make a large town, people are 1. gonna get lost potentially and 2. just skip all the NPCs because they wanna play the game already.
-If you force people to speak to all NPCs it’s gonna get really boring. Personally, i don’t like being flooded with the knowledge of every single game mechanic straight away.

In general I prefer this idea to a huge scripted dungeon though because it’s way more interactive, fun, and provides a platform on which a lot of info can potentially be provided (as long as you’re careful not to flood a person with text).

On scripted dunegons -
-Same again, you have to be short. If it’s long people are gonna lose interest quickly, and imo, more so with a scripted dungeon than one that isn’t.
The tutorial for psmd infuriated me from how SLOW it was and the fact that 80% of the information was irrelevent to me as ive played every pmd game. If i wasn’t obsessed with pokemon and hadn’t paid £30 for that thing i’m not sure i would’ve even completed the tutorial before i quit the game. PMU is a free mmorpg, amongst many other games, if the tutorial is too long i’m just gonna quit and turn to other games instead because i don’t have commitment here to keep me playing from the point of me being a hypothetical newb.

-And on that note, spreading 1 tutorial across multiple dungeons/story sections is no different to having 1 gigantic tutorial if you don’t provide enough time and interaction between giant walls of text and scripted bits.
Giving people freedom works best - scripted dungeons like i’ve said above only work if they’re short because it’s basically like watching a movie where you have to press the enter button once every 5 minutes if they’re long (which is boring). If you do a chain of scripted stuff where the player has no choice of movement between them or very little break to do anything it’s just gonna feel exactly the same. (This is why my suggestion of beginner dungeons is mostly scripted scenes at the end of dungeons - they get the fun of doing the dungeon to make it bearable.).

In general i disapprove of the extended use of scripted dungeons - the tutorial we already have is already too long imo, and has some pretty pointless scripts that even as a newb i’d rather weren’t there. Imo, scripted dungeons need to cover the very basics - attacks, items, recruitment, and death - in a maximum of 10 boxes of text.

I think that’s the two main suggestions covered?
This is why I suggest having help pages. Yeah, people aren’t always gonna look, but if someone asks a Q on global people can be like “there’s a help page for that”, as well it gives information outside of the tutorial - perhaps to returning players who don’t want to make a new account/character - and gives the player the freedom to chose their own text walls, so to speak, essentially it doesn’t force a tonne of information down your throat unless you want it. Ofc, help pages + eg tutorial town would work best, as help pages alone WILL get ignored too much to be effective - it needs to be alongside some forced information.