vbGore Free Online RPG Engine

Should a game include a mandatory tutorial at the start? or should it just throw you in the middle of the market trade center and wish you best of luck?

Should there be any sort of in-game tutorial? what should it cover? should it be easy quests that teach you how to paly the game? should it give you rewards (such as your starting equipment, gold, 1st level, ect...)?

Mandatory, no. Optional, yes. I think anything a complete idiot to games can't figure out on their own should be available to teaching, while at the same time, try not to waste time for those who know what they are doing. Give honest recommendations on to the level of your hints and let them choose which suits them best:

- Never played an online RPG before
- Have played a few online RPGs, but not much
- Confident in your understanding of online RPGs, and want to know only about what is completely new in this game
- Do not give me a tutorial, I know this crap already

Let them choose which "stage" (map) to start out at. Each stage has a little sub-stage that explains in detail on aspects under that difficulty. For example, if you choose the most newb option, you could have a booth for NPCs that teach what Health and Mana are, how to move, how to fight, etc. Let them pick and choose, never force them to take any. The quickest way to ever get me to hate your game forever is to either:
- Force me through a tutorial
- Make me watch movies/clips

As for rewards, I don't really like the idea since I see it more as a way to force people who don't want to take the tutorial to take it just so they can start off stronger. For example, in Redmoon (old old game), you could get to level 3 on the tutorial, or start in the game as level 1. Trying to start off as level 1 could be pretty hard, especially for newbies, so not only did it harm them in that aspect, those who wanted to make a new character had to go through the same crap again.

Well, unless its any different from the all other mmorpgs they're important.

They are important, even if just for getting people to know the controls of your game. (Way too often do I see people in mmorpgs asking the most simplest things..."How do I *insert random easy thing here*"

To not make the tutorial too boring and bleh it's interesting if you can make it part of the game already.. Use it as an introduction stage to your game, let people know of whats happening, the setting and such. Besides teaching them the basic things.

DAoC did a thing where you popped in and where given a quest to learn the controls (it was something like deliver this letter to your trainer.) The trainer gave you a quest to kill something nearby and loot it's body. They where regular quests, but the text of the quest told you how to do it.

My life is tutorials ahahahahah

i've been getting into vendetta online, and the way they approach this is pretty good. as soon as you start the game, you go to the mission board and can choose to do whatever you want. say there's a mission called 'Delivery' which say take this crate of crap to this place, good luck. above it there would be a mission called 'Training: Delivery' which is basically the same but will walk you through how to launch your ship, how to use the navigation system, and how to unload cargo when you get to your destination. each of the missions in the starting space station has a training equivalent.

Tutorials such as a simple control button list splash in the beginning of the game (* new player * ) should be shown. It's very important to help the gamer understand how your game works and how to play it, or else you face the possiblity of no one playing it.

Now i wont say that is 100% true like shoot-em-up genres, but for certain complicated games , lets say a puzzle game i'd think it would be best to go with a tut.

It's probably the first time people are using your game, so I suppose a good tutorial is going to give a good first impression, where as a bad one might put people off. I always sit through tutorials, even if I know it already, just because I'm afraid I might miss something.