Tutorial design for a survival game: Quest-driven, Contextual, or Open Manual?

[u/Typical-Cat73]

Hey everyone!

I'm working on a 2.5D survival game and trying to figure out the best approach for the tutorial, balancing dev effort vs. player experience.

I'm torn between three options:

A) Quest-driven: Step-by-step tasks. You get a tip/quest, and the next one won't show up until you complete it.

B) Contextual / Reactive: Tips pop up based on what you do. (e.g. you craft a furnace for the first time -> a tip shows how to place it).

C) Open Manual / Codex: A basic in-game guide always accessible in a menu or corner that you can check whenever.

My main worry with B (Contextual) is that if a player skips an item or action, they'll miss the tip entirely. On the flip side, A can feel too hand-holdy/linear for a survival game, and C might just get ignored by most players.

What system do you usually prefer to implement or play with in survival games?

Thanks!

[u/Dartillus]

I'd go for B while simultaneously adding in some kind of mission/quest/whatever that requires you to interact with the most important objects. That way players understand how the game delivers information, hopefully teaching them to seek new things out to interact with.

[u/SoulloopDev]

I'd mix A and B rather than pick one. a short quest chain for only the first few minutes (move, gather, craft one thing, survive one night), then switch to contextual tips that fire the first time the player actually needs something, like the first time they're cold or their tool breaks. survival players hate being held by the hand for long, but they also hate dying to a system nobody showed them.

the open manual (C) works well as the backup: one place to reread a tip you skipped. the cheap win there is logging every contextual tip into it automatically, so you write each one once.

[u/loulo88]

One thing that helped us on Forgebound (a medieval survival game we're making) was tracking what players actually did in the first 20 minutes. Most tips nobody saw weren't skipped, they were for things players hadn't realized were possible yet, like that a forge could repair gear. So we ended up with B plus a small "you haven't tried this yet" nudge that only fires after a few in-game days if a core action never happened. It feels a lot less naggy than a quest chain and catches the people who would otherwise miss stuff.

[u/KodelkaEnchanted]

Whichever mix you choose, I'd want it to recognize things I've already done. If I build a furnace while exploring and the tutorial later tells me to build one, having to make a second would feel worse than a missed tip. I'd rather get credit for it and keep the instructions available to reread.