I don't grasp why this change was made as it only hurts replayability, especially when paired with unskipable cut scenes, walk + talk, or generally tasking the player with chores that everyone already knows. I always find it funny when the tutorial doesn't know I've remapped the keyboard and gives the wrong key to press.

Tutorial levels are a great way of teaching someone what they need to know without forcing it on people who just want to play the game... all the games from the 90's I remember used tutorial levels to teach but when did this change?

Earliest I can remember straight away is 2001 and then I can think of several from before 2005.

console boom of the early 2000s most likely.
around the ps2 launch era is when i first noticed it increasing.

StarCraft was like that and it was first released in 1998. That's the first game where I really noticed this.

Not honouring key-rebindings is really a widespread problem. "Press [E] to open door."
Nope, it's [F] over here.

Hard to pin down exactly, but it goes hand in hand with cutting back on printed manuals. In the old days, most players would read the manual to get enough information to play the game - so the tutorial could be safely segregated out from the game. These days, with some gamers having the attention span of a goldfish, there's a lot more hand-holding used. Otherwise, you get the inevitable flood of reviews of people going "it's too hard, I have no idea what to do".

Baldur's Gate 1 hat in-game tutorial (vandlekeep). It's from 1999 as well, but released in December. Gets really annoying if yopu play the game more than once or twice.

Around 1998 seems about right.

Half-Life (1998) had a long intro and some tutorial elements ... but i would not count it, as it is done diffferent.

Half-Life still had a separate tutorial level.

But I can imagine a few people have been pissed off by the long intro sequence. I still like it though.

I think it's not bad to incorporate tutorial elements into the game and explain game elements when they are introduced. But there should be an option to turn off those messages.

Before tutorials you'd simply hit pause and read up on the new stuff in the manual, that's not much different.

How do you pay respects then? :(

The worst offender I've experienced in this regard was Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness (2003). Not only is the beginning an obligatory tutorial with voiced instructions, but it actually locks player movement during these unskippable lectures. You can't experiment with the controls until the voice tells you so - you can't even jump up and down impatiently while listening. Not to mention that it is all really trivial stuff that any player of previous TR games would understand right off the bat if left to their own devices. It made me quit the first time I tried TAoD, before I even got to the actual game.

The approach I like best is intuitive level design, making the start of a game play like a "learning by doing" tutorial without even needing to lecture the player about it. Some games don't even require prompts for you to understand what you're supposed to do. And if all of it is optional or just about bonus rewards, as a returning player you could just run past it or see it as gathering your first resources or something.

I think it's heavily related to printed manuals falling out of favor. As printed manuals were scaled back into little more than an installation/trouble-shooting pamphlet, the in-game tutorials expanded to take their place.

Around the late 90s and early 2000s I remember a sharp rise in players saying, "I don't want to read a manual - I just want to jump in and start playing." So the manual was morphed into the first level of the game.

Tutorials that treat you like you are a lobotomized monkey that is seeing the strange device that is the mouse for the first time in its life are the worst.

In Command & Conquer 3, the first GDI mission really made me want to punch whoever was responsible in the face.

As for how in your face the tutorials are, it directly correlates with how mainstream gaming has become. You have to think of gradually more and more casual players. As with anything that becomes mainstream, it gets ground to the lowest common denominator.

At the very least, if you want to include a tutorial for people who are absolutely clueless, make it separate and skippable.

agree , i like how some games have that you can either start the tutorial mission separately from the campaign or you can just press skip tutorial

Daggerfall (1986) has a tutorial in the first level. You can turn it off (IIRC), but you still have to go through the first level regardless before the game becomes open world.

(Side note: The tutorial is supposed to continue after you leave the dungeon, but due to a bug, it will stop when you leave the dungeon.)

I actually approve of this development. I think games should be enjoyable in themselves, without any need for manuals. In my book, it's a good thing if you learn how to play in-game. But it all comes down to how it's implemented. It should not feel as dry as studying and that's why so many tutorials suck. Just moving the instructions from the manual into the game does not make them any more exciting, even if it is the easiest way to get the info across.

Oh, and one of my favorite tutorial quotes (experienced in several games):
PRESS JUMP BUTTON TO JUMP
(Yeah, no shit, sherlock. ;P)