Mine always is, completely forgetting what I was doing and where I was going after not touching a save file for a long time. This is happening to me right now with Stardew Valley.
I’m in Year 4, married Maru, have a decent farm going, I have yet to build the movie theater I just found out so that’s something I can do. And I know up until that point, I called it a conclusion of a game, but yet I forgot completely about there being some minor goals or things I wanted to do. Completely out of my head. It was a year ago since I last touched that save.
This happens a lot with old saves, because sometimes I have had something in mind as to how I was going to play the game or where I was going with a character.
I really don’t like when games intermix tutorial with story. Unless the story is the main attraction, I cannot get myself to care for it. And then having to click through tons of story texts to pick out the tutorial parts, that is just cumbersome.
I also have to say, though, that it really doesn’t help my immersion when the fairy, that just told me she’s from the clan Uhgaloogah, then tells me to press the X button on my controller.
If you put in a lot of effort, you can make it credible that the controller is part of the game world and the fairy would know the buttons. But most games do not put in that effort. And then, IMHO it is a lot less immersion-breaking when the game just shows an info box, where we both know that it isn’t part of the game world.
Speaking for myself, the average game got way better when the industry figured out it was better to mix the tutorial with the story. Bespoke tutorials felt like homework, and a lot of people are inclined to skip them, never figure out how the game works, and then come away with a negative opinion of the game. In general, and I’m curious to hear your perspective on this, you can make it exciting by starting the story en media res, so your character is using all of their usual verbs; then you can sidestep that immersion breaking moment by having the button prompts exist in a freeze frame thing, outside of the context of the story, that highlights the action it wants you to do. Do you prefer the bespoke tutorials that we got in the likes of 90s PC games? Do you like the way Gears of War does it, where it still keeps it contextual in the course of the story, but they very clearly give you an option to say that you know what you’re doing?
I think, you’re perhaps conflating story with gameplay here? I do think, it’s good to incorporate the tutorial into normal gameplay. So, you start playing the actual game right away and get told the controls as you need them. And sure, if it is a story-driven game, that probably means there has to be a story segment before all that to explain why you’re starting on this journey to begin with. So, I’m not saying I want the tutorial to be an entirely separate thing, like it typically was in the 90s.
I’m mainly just complaining about when it’s too intermixed, because I’d like to be able to skip all the text boxes where they’re rambling about the story. If they switch mid-sentence to explaining what you’re supposed to do and what buttons to press, then I’m likely to miss that while skipping through the story bits.
Preferably, there’s a separate info box on screen after the dialogue ends (which is a good idea for several reasons), but it could also just be highlighted, if they want it to be within the dialogue.