Just finished my first playthrough of the game, had a blast and definitely looking forward to replaying it. However I feel that as a new player the tutorial section is really insufficient in explaining and teaching key concepts within the game.

The problem is two fold: First is that the Tips that do appear are very short descriptions; second is that they appear sometimes in the middle of a fight, making it difficult to catch them while avoiding death at the same time.

A fairly straightforward solution would be to expand the amount of information conveyed and then make the menu pause the game briefly. The tips could be added at specific intervals or on specific actions. I've put together a short example of how this could work below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnCG-3pcdGo&hd=1

Any other suggestions?

You could press 'J', thereby pausing the game forever, and read the aptly named tab "Tutorials".

Yeah, after hearing all the complaints about how brief the tutorial pop-ups are, I was really surprised when I got around to starting the game last night that you could just go into the Journal and re-read them all at your leisure. Not to mention, there's a pretty comprehensive manual. Most games released in Europe get a manual that seems to have been written by someone who watched the game being played for about 5 minutes, and is actually only a fifth of the size that it appears to be since it has the 5 major European languages in. TW2's manual is all in English and all informative.

Why have a tutorial at all if you intend to make it unintuitive enough to require users to quit playing to read the manual first or to pause the game to re-read something a second time because you didn't show it to them properly the first time?

Maybe because the game doesn't pause when the hints pop up, thereby making the act of reading them difficult anyway. If they stayed up for too long, then people would just complain that they kept dying while trying to read the hints.

Popping up for a short time at least compels the average player to take a look at the journal and figure that whole thing out.

The ironic thing is the tip that tells you there is a journal and to press "j" to access it doesn't appear until somewhere about the middle of the prologue.... wasn't an issue for me as I checked all that out and read the manual beforehand, but for those that have fallen into the habit of "screw the single page flyer they call a manual, I'll find out how to play from the tutorial stage", and that have not played TW1, it's kind of amusing that this tip appears so far in :)

The problem is, if you just jump into the game cold, which the vast majority of players are going to do, you will get yourself trashed and frustrated very easily because you aren't prepared for the game.

I actually like the little tutorial bits the original poster demonstrated, because they'd go a looooong way into making life easier.

The comment about pressing J to go into the journal. That doesn't make sense. Yes it's nice that it's there, but it doesn't explain everything, and second, that's not what anyone wants to do when they start the game, they want to get to trashing people. If you give them just the basic concept of what they need and then have them press OK to continue they are in a much better position.

It's fine if you don't suffer this specific disposition, but do not for a moment assume that everyone is like you or that just because you can, means that others can too, the reality of the world doesn't work that way.

I did a fair amount of reading and prepping for the combat ahead of time before I could get to and play the game, but I still got my ass handed to me at the beginning as I learned the nuances of the system, and now I am can walk into most situations w/o even prepping ahead of time and still make it out alive. It took a bit to get there, and yes, some additional tutorials would have been nice, including one that simply said "DON'T START WITH THE DRAGON!"

Now I need to go back to playing, harpies need killing.

Well at the very least the game should pause and mention that by pressing J you can find all the tutorial information there. Sometimes when people miss that brief tooltip about the journal it can really screw them up haha.

Plus they should explain what the signs do prior to casting them.

So you know that it's telling you something new and adding it to the tutorial section of the journal. Also, the majority of the pop-ups occur in a peaceful situation so you can read them, it's just the ones at the start pertaining to fighting that are hard to read. But still, as I said, you can hit J as soon as you see it and then read it in the journal.

I don't get it, people are complaining about certain consoley elements to this game but then they're complaining that it doesn't have a really hand-holding consoley tutorial. If you read the manual, just the control pages, or looking at the control config utility, you'd know what all the buttons do.

No, I'm pointing out that the tutorial requires you to do excessive work to get to information rather than being helpful up front, which tends to defeat the purpose of having a tutorial in the first place.

Is there even a Journal entry that tells me that a silver sword is only for monsters? I don't see it under Combat Basics or Switching Swords. Furthermore the Sign entries are painfully worthless:

http://i.imgur.com/hLxEU.jpg
The one on Quen doesn't say a single word about vigor not regenerating while in use.

http://i.imgur.com/fgcLP.jpg
The one on Axii doesn't say anything about holding down the button. In fact that very notion runs contrary to another entry:
http://i.imgur.com/2LUGi.jpg

To claim that the Journal and existing tutorial tips are a good system is pretty demonstrably untrue unless the goal is to make the game a pain in the ass to learn how to play for many users. Having to exit the game and open up a PDF of the manual or flat out requiring them to read the manual before even playing a tutorial section because the in-game information is lacking is an extremely glaring and poor design and should be changed.

I agree that the information given in-game is lacking, but my point is that that's always been the way for PC games. Baldur's Gate and Fallout 2 didn't really tell you anything in game at all and both game with manuals the size of novellas. That's just the way it is, whereas consoles tend to be more user-friendly (as is their general philosophy) and explain everything through the early stages of gameplay. Admittedly, games like Starcraft would explain how to harvest resources in the early missions in thinly-veiled tutorials but that was, and still is, very rare.

Am I saying that PC games shouldn't catch up with console games in this regard? Not at all, it is nice to just start playing the game and not need to bother with the manual. What I am saying is that this element of it is pretty typical of PC games and PC gamers usually take the "READ THE MANUAL" stance, so it's just a little strange to see complaints about this game firmly split between "It's too consoley" and "it's not consoley enough", that's all.

As a final point, the ability to just have an actual manual you can easily read through while playing a game, rather than a PDF manual, is one of the reasons I still like to buy games - particularly games such as this - in physical form rather than as a download. However, Steam has a browser you can open in-game and read PDFs and if you use Xfire, which runs in the background of games and provides additional features, so do all the games that support it (TW1 and TW2 included - just press scroll lock and W to open the in-game browser and put the location of the PDF into the address bar and there you go, in-game manual. In-game anything, really).