So Trials Rising sees the introduction of a few things which will be detailed, but we will start with the basics. Trials Rising really makes an attempt to make sure that lesser experienced players are taught the various techniques and skills to progress through the game, whether it be from simple leaning to pivoting and bunnyhopping your bike to get the right balance, Brad Hill has lovingly created tutorials that are not overwhelming or intrusive and only come up when the skills would be pertinent for a newer player (experienced players can very easily skip these tutorials). Even though I was still fairly familiar with all these tricks and skills, I sat through the tutorials anyway to get a gauge on how helpful and informative each of these were. “I’ve been able to put a huge amount of thought, a lot of stuff that no one would ever see, into even just thinking out how to go about teaching these skills. Do I just pick each track and just teach people how to be able to do that track? And then I thought ‘well, no’ because there are too many tracks for me to teach each one,” says Brad Hill. The idea behind a lot of the design and writing for Hill’s tutorials was to focus on a specific skill or skill set which would better equip a player for what’s to come, and rather than to just have a bloated and long tutorial stage, the tutorial is broken up into segments throughout the entirety of the game because learning an advanced skill and not using it for hours until you hit a later stage is a waste of your time.

What we got back to was just these core techniques. We tried to find the smallest number, because you don’t want to inundate the player with videos because then you run the risk of people not watching them. So how we boil all of this complexity and all of this nuance to the smallest amount of chunks that are going to be usable, practical and actually worthwhile including in a game like this? So I played through all the stages and figured out when these techniques were needed, so as the difficulty goes up, the number of techniques needed does too. I was then able to structure the releasing and availability of all the tutorial content based on when you needed stuff.” – Brad Hill

Now something that I have noticed with previous Trials titles is that the pacing of the games’ challenges was not always the most steady. For a game like Dark Souls or Hollow Knight this is okay, as there will be regular points where the game tests your skillset with a difficulty wall. Trials is not one of those games, however, and so a difficulty curve has to be as consistent and smooth as possible, as a ludicrously tough stage in the middle of medium-level tracks is not very indicative of what is next. Not to say that the difficulty curve in previous games was terrible, just not as consistent as I’d like for it to be. Trials Rising changes this, with some very consistent difficulty curves that never feel like a challenge is teetering on the edge of unreasonable. This is due in part to the placing of Hill’s tutorials which not only teach the player how to progress, but also make sure you actually understand what you are doing. There will be some techniques that you struggle with, but the pace at which you need them is steady. However, giving Hill and his work full credit for the better difficulty curve would be unfair to the people at RedLynx who also pivoted their design to allow for a more consistent experience. When asked about how his tutorials helped with the pacing and flow of the game’s difficulty, Hill stated, “That’s the intent, but it’s not just that. Tutorials by themselves are not going to fix that problem so there has also been a lot of work both from myself (through feedback) and the team themselves.” I was able to point out ‘hey this track might be rated for medium difficulty, but there is this one obstacle that requires this much more advanced technique or skill.