With fighting games being a pretty difficult genre to get into, many titles give players tutorial modes that teach them how to play the game. That said, for every Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution or Skullgirls, we still have a number of more mainstream titles that don’t have these.
One of the biggest games that doesn’t have a dedicated tutorial mode is Bandai Namco’s Tekken 7. In a recent interview with PCGamesN, series producer Katsuhiro Harada addressed this issue, giving an answer to why they didn’t include one in their game.
According to Harada, based on the data they can harvest on what modes people play, players don’t actually spend much time in training mode. He compares it to the user manuals for most games and other products that people tend not to read when first opening a product.
That said, they haven’t given up on trying to teach the player, rather that job has now been assigned to the game’s story mode. He states that you can naturally learn certain things in story mode, such as whether a move can be sidestepped, or how a certain move can be used. He also states that the simplified commands in story mode can serve as a way to entice players to try to learn the actual commands for said moves in practice mode, for use in actual matches.
This approach to teaching players is interesting to say for sure. That said, not everyone may agree and some people may feel that certain concepts are best taught to the player directly. You can read the rest of the interview here.
Source: PCGamesN
