FPS players play FPS games for a reason, they like to get stuck in hard and fast! This is why tutorials have always been a bit of an annoyance. The gamers would much prefer to just leap into the thick of it and learn as they go.

This is because spending ages learning all the controls is boring and can lose a lot of gamers fast. If the tutorial isn't really engaging, players will just let the game go as they want to immerse themselves in that world as soon as they can. Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 and Gears of War are two example games of which others should follow suit.

Gears of War allows people to skip through the tutorial and just get stuck in (which was the choice of 40%) which although it takes away from the tutorial, it lets them get stuck in and have fun with it increasing popularity. Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, on the other hand, carefully incorporates the tutorial into the first level.

"In some games we've tested, the first strongly engaging event does not occur until 20 minutes into the experience," says the study, "a lifetime for a gamer who just wants to have fun."

"These games engaged users quickly with a simple strategy," explains the study author. "Players were thrown into action and were threatened, and were expected to learn. The player learns to throw grenades not by tossing one into a dummy box target, but by utilizing them against enemies with real consequences on the line."

Dark Arcanine via gamasutra.com »