Avatar Frontiers of Pandora Tutorial

Avatar Frontiers of Pandora has a great tutorial but in my opinion it has some serious flaws that easily could be remedied but lets start with the brilliant bit

It starts with the player getting to learn the crouch mechanic. This is done with no enemies around and the player can at its own pace learn the mechanic.

In a cutscene the player encounters some enemies and here the player is teached how to sprint. By doing it this way the designers is subtly telling the player that in some situations running might be the best option.

I think this bit is just brilliant. The player now knows how to crouch and is right now sprinting away from enemies. So the player will naturally crouch here and without any text learn by themselves how to slide.

This is repeated several times which is great. It will in that way be easier for the player to remember.

But in the middle of the slide onboarding the player is met with this. As a jump tutorial its really nothing wrong with it BUT 

The jump mechanic in this game is different from most other games. The player has to hold the jump button to charge the jump. So the next time the player needs to jump they are greeted with this.

So what is the problem then?

Between the charge jump tutorial and the next time the player needs to charge jump or even a regular jump there is a sneak tutorial and alot of just walking listening to dialouge.

There is a wasted opportunity here. If I where to redesign this I would simply cut alot of the areas where the player just walks

But an even simpler solution to fix this would be to put new prompts here (almost the end of the tutorial and the first time after the real onboarding that the player needs to jump) and put some more jumps after this where the player needs to charge jump.

I can only speak for myself but I forgot about the charge jump mechanic at this point the first time I played it. So I think putting more repetitions would increase the chance of every player learning it.

Closing thoughts

What I love with this onboarding is that it shows that with good design there is not necessary to put text and interupting the player at every turn.

It is proven that most players dont even read the text so I think solutions like the sliding onboarding is the way to go for games in the future

But it is also important to not overload the player with information so I think it would be great to move the jumping onboarding and give it enough room on its own with many repetitions to make an even greater tutorial

Thanks for reading this and remember its just my own opinions.

Have a great day everybody!