Is it ok to temporarily break immersion in a tutorial for a game?
At the start of a game, you sometimes have some character explaining things to you, the player, instead of the character, telling them to press A to do this and that. Paper Mario I think even makes a joke by saying that what they are about to say is for a higher being who might be watching, aka the player.
Is it ok to do this in dialog, even if your game is a bit heavier on the story side? It's not like this will happen every time, it's mostly just at the start, so it should be ok, right?
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Why not? Some games have little messages for the player and, if well done, they add amusement. Sometimes they are even further into the game and an alternate remark by an NPC.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/40351. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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Unless your game is for young children who might find reading harder, you want game instructions to appear in text rather than voice-over. The reason for this is that players often change key-bindings, and you'd want to dynamically change the instructions to match.
Another consideration in favour of this approach is replayability: players already familiar with the game would want to skip the instructions, in which case you'd want to make them easily dismiss-able. (This consideration would only be relevant if the tutorial also contains story, and the players would not wish to skip the story. And the loot.)
Consequently, it might be possible for you to give instructions without breaking immersion. For example, a character might tell the PC to "pick up a weapon", after which a text message would appear, explaining how to pick up and use a weapon. Both the Dragon Age and Mass Effect franchises follow this method: the tutorial part is structured to make the player take the standard actions of the game (attack, jump, run, hide, use abilities, etc.), ordered from the easier ones to the more advanced ones, and each time a new action must be taken, a floating text provides the instructions. A bit of floating text doesn't break the immersion, unlike characters speaking directly to the player, since the text doesn't "belong" in the game-world in the first place.
Can you give the instructions in dialogue instead? Honestly, to me it would feel weird. I do enjoy some tongue-in-cheek leaning on the forth wall, (TV Tropes reference), like characters making remarks about loot, but what you propose is actively breaking the fourth wall.
In particular, the tutorial is the part where you're still working to get the player invested in your game - in the characters, the story, etc. Instead, you're throwing the player out of the story. You want to show the player what the game would be like, but instead have characters give the player instructions. Why would the reader assume that this is a tutorial-only occurrence, rather than an accurate representation of how the game would be?
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