thanks, reading through it now. specific comments follow
A giant wall of text. This seems obvious, but games still do that. Nobody wants to read a giant wall of text in the start of a game, and if you make it optional people WILL skip it expecting to be able to learn for themselves. The same applies to a long cutscene before the game begins, though a cutscene can be more easily made compelling than a wall of text.
actually some of my favorite games begin with walls of text, at least in the sense of a couple of pages. xenogears, final fantasy 4 (when you're crossing the bridge and it's talking about baron and the crystals), zelda 1's intro where it has a few paragraphs about the story and then a list of items, photopia and pretty much any visual novel, etc.
but it isn't clear what you mean here: do you mean text in the sense of plain narration (written in third person), or do you also mean dialogue? because almost any jrpg begins with a lot of dialogue, so it'd be weird to suggest that jrpgs not use dialogue in their intros, since how a character speaks is one of the best ways of introducing a character
this also feels as if it's true for some players, but not others. some players aren't turned off at all by text, even if a good chunk of players are. but the key thing here is: the players that like text would be turned off by a game without any text in the intro, because they're playing the game for a good story
if you tried a textless final fantasy or dragon quest or persona intro, it'd fall flat with fans of final fantasy or dragon quest or persona. so i don't think you can generally recommend that a game not use text in its intro, because it depends so much in the game's audience and genre; it's not something that can be universally applied to game intros: if a game's audience is people who play games for their stories and characters and imaginative setting, removing text from an intro would make the game *worse*
the points on jargon and repetition are good, though -- i agree with both of those. some jargon is okay if it's explained, but i don't like when a game, or even a book, overloads it in the front so quickly. i almost stopped reading dune (the novel) because of how much jargon there was at the start, but that'd have been bad since it's one of my favorite novels now
- No intro, suddenly complicated mechanics. I played one game which was some weird simulation thing, where you were supposed to be able to program AI's with a weird abstracted interface and they would walk around and do stuff. I assume the game was pretty neat if you could figure it out (screenshots and trailer certainly made it look neat), but instead it thrusts you right into a really complicated game with a complicated and unpolished interface that was just... impossible to figure out, and a lack of feedback made it not feel worth it to keep trying at it.
don't most turn-based strategy games begin like this though? i mean some, like the civilization games and even alpha centauri (which is notorious for a complex gui) have some form of helper/guidance, which is pretty mandatory in complex gui's, but it's not clear what you are suggesting here as an alternative: do you suggest that complex guis only gradually appear, when you need their functionality, and that the gui is introduced one part at a time, with the rest greyed-out or something? or do you suggest just having mouseover explanations over everything, so that you can hover a mouse over something and it'd explain what it does, like complex non-game programs do?
the rest of the article is okay, but still felt kind of incomplete; as you mention in the article i'd have liked a longer list of good intros and bad intros, something more exhaustive, but hopefully the comments will cover that soon. here's my own list:
good intros: lufia 1, dragon quest 2, revelations persona, final fantasy 4, symphony of the night, fallout 1, metal gear solid 1, ultima 4, final fantasy adventure, suikoden 2, lunar 2, wild arms, digital devil saga
bad intros: dragon quest 3, persona 3 and 4, final fantasy 8, planescape torment, baldur's gate 1, fallout 2, jagged alliance 2
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