Guild Wars 2

I think a lot of us are in agreement that GW2 could use better tutorials to show people the ins and outs of the game. The question is how do you put good ones into the game, and not make them something everyone has to suffer through, and yet be able to revisit if they feel the need?

The answer is the Story Journal.

With it, you can actually make a tutorial that is a series of small, instanced missions where you can have NPCs interacting with the character to explain and demonstrate the various points of the game. To explain combo fields and finishers, for example, you could have an NPC give them a bundle item/weapon that makes field effects, then have them put the effects down in areas to “clear” that step. Next step is to have some other NPCs standing in combo fields, and give them a new weapon that allows them to do various finishers. Hit each NPC with a combo finisher from their field to complete that exercise. And so on.

As they level up, new tutorials can be added to the Story Journal, with them being unlocked for the account once they’ve been added. This would allow detailed tutorials without forcing anyone to replay them every time they make a new character. Put them in (rebuilt?) Lion’s Arch, and all races have easy access to them. This would also put you near everything needed for tutorials on just about everything from underwater combat (plenty of water), to dungeons (using the remains of the Aetherblade dungeon), to vistas and skillpoints, and even jumping puzzles.

After watching Wooden Potatoes video today about the Feature Pack tomorrow coupled with this thread I realized you could do tutorial videos in the Hero Panel! In WP’s video there are little preview clips of the finishers. You could do a similar thing with Downed State, dodging, traits etc. to explain the game better.

That’s not a bad idea, but I think it would be better to give people a chance to actually do what the game’s telling them about to make sure they understand. It’s fine for a new player to watch a character dodge, but to make sure they understand how it works it’s better to set up a challenge where they have to dodge through it to clear it.