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Early last month, we introduced the topic of Onboarding in RTS, and since then we’ve read your responses and talked to key players in the RTS space on the topic. In addition to the usual suspects, we also engaged with StarCraft II coaches HuShang and Bombs. They, along with Olimoley in a group feedback session, gave us some particularly invaluable feedback on what the typical new player experience is like.
For this topic in particular, we also received a lot of great responses and anecdotes from many of you on our subreddit, highlighting the challenges new users face in the genre. Special thanks to u/C0gnite/ for his in-depth response and to a few others we’ll get to later in the post.
As a reminder, for the purposes of this discussion, we consider onboarding to be the process of teaching a brand new player the basics of the game (newbie to competency) rather than the process of taking the player on a clear path to improvement (competency to mastery). In short the whole onboarding topic boils down to this: how do we get completely new players into the RTS genre?
This is a key focus if we want to reinvigorate RTS and take it back into the mainstream.
For most of us on the dev team and for most of the community, RTS has been such a deep-seated and ingrained love that we struggle to remember what it was like learning it for the first time. This makes it difficult for us to get into the headspace of new players.
A lot of the feedback we received from you revolved around improving the competency-to-mastery (bronze-to-grandmaster) stage. While we certainly agree that is a critically important area, it is less relevant if we can’t recruit new players in the first place. Moreover, we believe the challenge of onboarding new players is fundamentally a much more difficult problem.
A central issue many of you identified is that, even for competent gamers, basic RTS concepts are exotic and confusing. Some common concerns you brought up include:
- The top-down isometric viewpoint
- The absence of a player character to identify with
- The absence of WASD controls
- The user interface of screen scrolling and panning
- The user interface of unit sub-selection
- The need to harvest resources, build structures, and produce units
- The concept of a map
While MOBAs have helped to popularize some of these concepts, for most new players, RTS remains an interface-heavy game that can feel alienating and unsettling.
We believe there is yet to be an RTS onboarding experience that teaches RTS players at an appropriate pace, shows them why the game is fun, and engages them in a way that keeps them hooked. To this end, many of you suggested we study successful tutorials in recent games (Hearthstone, Portal, and Plants vs Zombies came up a lot in our conversations).
Another piece of common feedback we received involved structuring the campaign to act both as an onboarding tutorial and as the onramp for the versus/multiplayer mode. This came up a lot in private conversations and was addressed by /u/TopherDoll in his response. For the purposes of onboarding as we’ve described it, an RTS tutorial with campaign elements has the potential to be very engaging, but again, we’ve yet to see one that accomplishes this and doles out information at an appropriate pace.
As for using campaign as an onramp for versus modes, we have some thoughts as well. Upon the initial release of StarCraft II’s Co-Op mode, a common line the StarCraft II development team ran with in press interviews was the hypothetical progression of a player going from Campaign to Co-Op to Versus. However, after review of player data over the years, we learned that these game modes are highly segmented, where the majority of players like to stick to their preferred modes. There’s a large player-base that only plays Campaign. There’s one that only plays Co-Op. There are many who only play certain UGC games, for example, DOTA or Desert Strike. Then there are others who skip the versus AI content altogether and jump straight onto the ladder on day 1. And that’s ok. We believe in the vision of all these player segments co-existing in a large RTS ecosystem, hence one of our core values:
Get feedback from real players. The community is our compass. Every player segment matters: campaign, co-operative, competitive, and user-generated content creators.
To this end, we’re committed to making the best campaign we can that will stand on its own. Injecting competitive-centric tutorial elements in campaigns could be ineffective, and aggressive attempts to do so could draw away from the core campaign experience. Instead, we’ll try to handle training (competency to mastery) as a separate item.
Back to the topic of onboarding, we’d like to highlight a post we were particularly struck by, /u/Spartak’s response to our discussion topic, in which he pointed out that more than ever, players are being introduced to games by their friends and their first interaction with these games is through team modes like SCII’s Co-op missions. This is reinforced by /u/bakwards’ post in which he recounts bringing his wife to StarCraft through Co-op. Anecdotally, many of the StarCraft II players our team meets on an everyday basis have entered the game through Co-op — not campaign — because they were roped in by friends. (The experience must have been jarring, as Co-op was never designed with onboarding in mind.)
This certainly makes us wonder if there’s a way to build a more social onboarding process for the increasingly social experiences gamers crave.
Anyway, these are just some of our current thoughts on onboarding, which we’re sure will evolve with time. Traditionally, most of the RTS games our team has worked on in the past have punted the design of the onboarding/tutorial experience to the end of the project’s development. In contrast, we believe this is so core of a challenge that we’ll prioritize its design early on to allow for years of iteration before we release our game.
Speaking of future events, we’ll have the next discussion topic up soon, so stay tuned!
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