Generally speaking, teaching naive players how to play is one of the key challenges of game design. It becomes harder for multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games because of the complexity of game features and the challenge of teaching a multiplayer game via a single player experience. Since League of Legends is my favorite MOBA game and I am very familiar with it, I decided to take this game as a case study and combine it with my educational background to talk about its tutorial design and my suggestions.
Brief Introduction
League of Legends is a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) video game developed by Riot Games. The tutorial is a single player experience in which the player is guided to learn the basics and more complex concepts of the League of Legends gameplay.
Basic Tutorial - The Howling AbyssThe player is guided through the most basic elements of League of Legends to learn the basic mechanics such as:
- Moving the hero
- Attacking
- Moving the camera
- Using and leveling up skills
- Recalling
- Buying items
- Not running into a turret without minions
- Champion selection
- Chat box
- Rune and Masteries
- Skin selection
- Map and lanes
- Last hitting ambush attack
- Map awareness
- How to win
Analysis and Suggestions
One of the biggest challenges of instructional design is to raise and maintain players’ motivation. It’s common for players to skip the tutorial part or give up in the process. Some of them feel very confident to figure out the game mechanics without a tutorial; some of them don’t think it is needed and prefer to learn it by trial and error; some of them just want to save time. Overall, they feel it’s useless and boring. However, the tutorial is very important for MOBA games since MOBA games have a sharp learning curve and it is hard to just jump into a game and be good at it. No one wants to team up with a new player and lose the game as a result. The worst situation is a new player without training having a bad experience, causing others grief, and never playing again. But we don’t want to scare them into understanding the importance of the tutorial, the better way is to catch their interest and encourage them to learn.
The first impression is very important for players to catch their attention. Psychologically, the simplest thing we can try is to change the name of the “tutorial”. For example, if we change “tutorial” to “quests”, players feelings will be transitioned from “I’m going to learn something” to “I’m going to accomplish something”. The latter will be a better and more positive way to encourage players to go through it. What’s more, the tutorial is a very broad concept and it doesn’t have to be a specific gameplay mode. LoL has already implement a lot of different tutorial elements in other formats such as: the tips/missions in the pop up window on the left side, the AI mode is actually a tutorial for Players Vs Players (PVP) mode, and some transmedia products also count (eg. the video - Teamwork OP). As for the last part, the Chinese server did a really good job of merging the tutorial videos made by pro players with the launcher. Players can easily find videos focusing on different champions and different difficulties. So, Riot doesn't need to make official videos, they just offer the platform for information sharing because fans’ works are very insightful and comprehensive. Besides, the number and length of tutorials will also influence players’ choices. For now, League of Legends has two tutorial parts: this number is reasonable. However, the second one is very detailed and includes side quests so the length will be about 30 minutes, which will scare some players into quitting. Another problem is if I skipped the side quests the first time and I want to try them later, I have to replay this training battle to get there. My suggestion is to re-organise the information needed in the tutorial based on priority and pack them into smaller groups. Instead of having a 30 minutes’ long tutorial with side quests that people may skip, I think it’s better to split it into 2 or 3 more specific, focused, smaller sized tutorials for players to choose, such as splitting one class into smaller sections and putting them separately. For example, the core mechanics tutorial will be highly recommended in the very beginning. On the other hand, the advanced tutorial, which includes knowledge like jungling which will mostly applied in PvP rather than AI mode, will be recommended when players try to start their first PvP game. This way, it’s clearer to learners and less scary at the first glance. Last but not least, a reward system is always a great way to attract players and better rewards for finishing more sections will give them more motivation.
After catching players’ attention, it’s challenging to keep their motivation to continue to the end. That is to say, designers need to create and balance the interest curve for better storytelling. One problem to solve is “What to tell in the tutorial story?” As I suggested above, there needs to be more specific, targeted tutorials and less content in each one. Many players request advanced tutorials like introductions to respective roles: AD Carry, Tank, Support, AP Carry, etc. With this structure, we can have different short but more specific tutorials. Prioritize the content for players to learn and we can have more features in total. Another problem is “How to tell the tutorial story?” In the current version, there is a voice over to tell players what to do and give players feedback corresponding to their behavior. However, I think it’s better if there is a avatar of storyteller to guide the player’s avatar. The storyteller could be one of player’s AI teammates. Though the voice and the content may not change much, it will help players to better get into the world and feel connected to their avatars. I highly recommend using Lux and Garen to introduce the game to players. Lux and Garen are siblings, so if the player chooses one of them and the other one is the guide, it feels natural and make sense. It’s also easier for designers to write scripts for them. This change will reinforce the story element in LoL which is the weakest part in this game. Another reason I recommend this two champions is because they are more new player friendly than the default tutorial champion Ashe. UI also plays a significant role in telling the tutorial story. Since there are a lot of pieces of knowledge for players to learn in a very short time, the challenge is how to make the learning process more effective and efficient. It’s hard for learners to memorize things if they just see it once, especially when the upcoming features distract them. Learning by doing and repetition will help this situation. The tutorial of LoL has already implemented the learning by doing method but the repetition method could be better. For the right click to attack part, they did a good job, because every time when you move your mouse to the minion, the mouse turns out to be a sword with a mouse whose right button is highlighted. My suggestion is to create a new display window and put it on the top left corner (which is always empty and this location is the easiest place for players to read) and list every new control learned from the process for players to check at any time. That helps players to learn better. What’s more about UI, LoL team may want to look at these problems: some of the highlight effect is not obvious enough and some of the description words are hard to notice.
In summary, the current tutorial of League of Legends is comprehensive but still has a lot space to improve. This essay mainly looks through the tutorial with the question of how to raise and keep the player’s motivation in mind and offers my analysis along with my suggestions.Suggestions to raise the player’s motivation after his or her first impression:
Suggestions to maintain the player’s motivation through the tutorial storytelling:
The first impression is very important for players to catch their attention. Psychologically, the simplest thing we can try is to change the name of the “tutorial”. For example, if we change “tutorial” to “quests”, players feelings will be transitioned from “I’m going to learn something” to “I’m going to accomplish something”. The latter will be a better and more positive way to encourage players to go through it. What’s more, the tutorial is a very broad concept and it doesn’t have to be a specific gameplay mode. LoL has already implement a lot of different tutorial elements in other formats such as: the tips/missions in the pop up window on the left side, the AI mode is actually a tutorial for Players Vs Players (PVP) mode, and some transmedia products also count (eg. the video - Teamwork OP). As for the last part, the Chinese server did a really good job of merging the tutorial videos made by pro players with the launcher. Players can easily find videos focusing on different champions and different difficulties. So, Riot doesn't need to make official videos, they just offer the platform for information sharing because fans’ works are very insightful and comprehensive. Besides, the number and length of tutorials will also influence players’ choices. For now, League of Legends has two tutorial parts: this number is reasonable. However, the second one is very detailed and includes side quests so the length will be about 30 minutes, which will scare some players into quitting. Another problem is if I skipped the side quests the first time and I want to try them later, I have to replay this training battle to get there. My suggestion is to re-organise the information needed in the tutorial based on priority and pack them into smaller groups. Instead of having a 30 minutes’ long tutorial with side quests that people may skip, I think it’s better to split it into 2 or 3 more specific, focused, smaller sized tutorials for players to choose, such as splitting one class into smaller sections and putting them separately. For example, the core mechanics tutorial will be highly recommended in the very beginning. On the other hand, the advanced tutorial, which includes knowledge like jungling which will mostly applied in PvP rather than AI mode, will be recommended when players try to start their first PvP game. This way, it’s clearer to learners and less scary at the first glance. Last but not least, a reward system is always a great way to attract players and better rewards for finishing more sections will give them more motivation.
After catching players’ attention, it’s challenging to keep their motivation to continue to the end. That is to say, designers need to create and balance the interest curve for better storytelling. One problem to solve is “What to tell in the tutorial story?” As I suggested above, there needs to be more specific, targeted tutorials and less content in each one. Many players request advanced tutorials like introductions to respective roles: AD Carry, Tank, Support, AP Carry, etc. With this structure, we can have different short but more specific tutorials. Prioritize the content for players to learn and we can have more features in total. Another problem is “How to tell the tutorial story?” In the current version, there is a voice over to tell players what to do and give players feedback corresponding to their behavior. However, I think it’s better if there is a avatar of storyteller to guide the player’s avatar. The storyteller could be one of player’s AI teammates. Though the voice and the content may not change much, it will help players to better get into the world and feel connected to their avatars. I highly recommend using Lux and Garen to introduce the game to players. Lux and Garen are siblings, so if the player chooses one of them and the other one is the guide, it feels natural and make sense. It’s also easier for designers to write scripts for them. This change will reinforce the story element in LoL which is the weakest part in this game. Another reason I recommend this two champions is because they are more new player friendly than the default tutorial champion Ashe. UI also plays a significant role in telling the tutorial story. Since there are a lot of pieces of knowledge for players to learn in a very short time, the challenge is how to make the learning process more effective and efficient. It’s hard for learners to memorize things if they just see it once, especially when the upcoming features distract them. Learning by doing and repetition will help this situation. The tutorial of LoL has already implemented the learning by doing method but the repetition method could be better. For the right click to attack part, they did a good job, because every time when you move your mouse to the minion, the mouse turns out to be a sword with a mouse whose right button is highlighted. My suggestion is to create a new display window and put it on the top left corner (which is always empty and this location is the easiest place for players to read) and list every new control learned from the process for players to check at any time. That helps players to learn better. What’s more about UI, LoL team may want to look at these problems: some of the highlight effect is not obvious enough and some of the description words are hard to notice.
In summary, the current tutorial of League of Legends is comprehensive but still has a lot space to improve. This essay mainly looks through the tutorial with the question of how to raise and keep the player’s motivation in mind and offers my analysis along with my suggestions.Suggestions to raise the player’s motivation after his or her first impression:
- Change the name of the “tutorial” to “quests”
- Implement tutorial elements in other formats
- Split one long tutorial into smaller sections and recommend each to players at different times
Suggestions to maintain the player’s motivation through the tutorial storytelling:
- Prioritize and classify the content of the tutorial
- Use a storyteller avatar to replace voiceover instructions
- Use Garen as the storyteller and Lux as the player’s avatar, or vice versa
- Improve UI elements with repetition of important pieces of knowledge and clearer feedback
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