What happended to the Tutorial

[Porcupine]

When I first tried Battle for Wesnoth it was verson 8.0, and of course I tried the Tutorial first. But now it has been changed. I personally think the one from 8.0 is far better. It teaches you how to play in a far more engaging and hands on way. In the new verson you have to scroll through screans and screans of text while Delfador explains evertyhing to you. A lot more borring and a newbe won't comprehend half of it anyway.

I suggest that it be changed back.

[martenzo]

Two levels that teach less aren't as good as one level that teaches a lot. But the perfect tutorial would be about 6-8 levels:
Basics
Resistances and terrain modifiers
Leveling and leveling trees
Abilities
Recalling
Artifacts
Fog of war and shroud
Final test (against a considerable enemy, that tries to kill Konrad, not your troops)

[jp30]

My mini-campaign "Orcish Incursion" could be used as a followup to the tutorial. It attempts to teach the player in succession how to deal with:

• defensive terrain (elves in forest)
  poison
  healing
  impassible terrain (caves)
  teleportation
  enemy resistances
  invisibility

I'd be happy to contribute it as the basis for a new, or second, tutorial if one is wanted. I think the existing tutorial has its place, though. It's purpose is to teach the player the game interface, rather than game tactics (which the old tutorial used to do in passing, and which is the aim of a mini-campaign like Incursion).

[Elvish_Pillager]

When I first tried Battle for Wesnoth it was verson 8.0, and of course I tried the Tutorial first. But now it has been changed. I personally think the one from 8.0 is far better.

I too prefer the old tutorial. I would not learn nearly as well from this one as from the old one, and I think that the idea of a subsequent 'strategy tutorial' is good.

[turin]

When I first tried Battle for Wesnoth it was verson 8.0, and of course I tried the Tutorial first. But now it has been changed. I personally think the one from 8.0 is far better.

I too prefer the old tutorial. I would not learn nearly as well from this one as from the old one, and I think that the idea of a subsequent 'strategy tutorial' is good.

I would say "blame Dacyn" but he's been gone since forum crash... should i bug him to make tutorial better, or do you want a completely new one?

[Dave]

I must admit, I haven't been overly impressed by any of the tutorials.

I think that rather than a boring tutorial, it'd be nice to have an ~8 scenario campaign that has an actual story, and slowly progresses the user through learning aspects of the game.

If any current campaign authors would like to suggest adapting their campaigns for that purpose, I'm all ears. Present your campaign, I'll apply the 'wife test', and we'll see how it goes

David

[ott]

I played both the old and the new tutorial several times, to try to get a feel for how they would appear to someone coming to the game for the first time.

Although the 0.8.8 tutorial has lots of information, I doubt much of that information is going to sink in unless a player keeps coming back to replay the tutorial, or takes notes. Neither of which is likely to happen, IMHO, which defeats the purpose of the tutorial. The old tutorial was short and snappy, but still far too wordy.

Having some way to highlight UI elements (eg. with a big red circle), and some way to insert events (like right-clicking to get the actions menu), would allow a tutorial to properly give background in how to play the game. This would also avoid the big wordy descriptions of what to do. Both the old and the new tutorials had some good parts, but they really are too boring, and I think this is purely because they go on and on describing stuff that would be much easier to show.

Then, the Orcish Incursion campaign would be really nice as the second part of the tutorial once the UI elements have been mastered in part 1. jp30 has captured some of the most important concepts in a succession of instructive scenarios.

[Invisible Philosopher]

Here is what currently exists of the tutorial I was making a while ago (GPL). Parts of it are based on the old tutorial. I tried to stage a battle and have things be mentioned when they became relevant. For example fighting from good or bad defense terrain, and levelling up (I made it easy by decreasing XP % and giving the enemy weak level 2 units. or at least they were weak at the time, when they had 0% resistance... I also wish there was a "level-up" event [maybe].)