What's a good game you played with an awful tutorial?

bermuda@beehaw.org to Gaming@beehaw.org – 82 points –

Either it didn't teach you anything at all, or it taught you the most irrelevant parts of the game.

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Minecraft. Back when I started playing, it wouldn't even tell you what recipes existed, yet gave you a 2x2/3x3 grid with hundreds of types of items/blocks to figure it out yourself.

Still one of my favorite games though.

Honestly a large part of my nostalgia was scouring the Minecraft wifi for updates and recipes.

Without external resources I would probably never have figured out what the 2x2 empty grid in my inventory was meant to be! I watched so many videos and read numerous wiki articles it could have been a college class.

I didn't know stone pickaxes existed. So I always saved a iron pickaxe I got from a friend to mine iron.

Same. I was tens or hours in until I found out by accident. Still didn't really use them. Was easier to jump straight into iron.

The early builds had few enough things you could make that it wasn't really that hard to intuitively figure out but in it's current state it would be near impossible to figure out how to make some things without recipes to guide you.

like early alpha builds I think the only thing that would have tripped you up hard would be trying to make dynamite firestarter, or shears even then you could experiment for a while and figure it out.

I think the issue was it wasn't clear what items were available to craft. If I had known that axes, pickaxes, shovels, etc. were all in the game then it might have been easier, but even making the crafting table (2x2 wood planks) wasn't very intuitive. Honestly, there wasn't much of a clear path forward with most of the recipes. Advancements and the recipe book later helped a lot, but it was pretty hard to play during beta and alpha without the wiki or a mod like TMI.

Then there's redstone. I feel like even today, redstone is completely unexplained in the game, and while you can kind of figure it out on your own, many of the intricacies are left unexplained (repeater locking, timings, comparators, how redstone is passed/not passed through different kinds of blocks, gates, etc). Without taking some time to learn about digital logic and basic computer engineering concepts on your own, redstone is basically magic dust that does a thing when put in a specific configuration.

Also, being pedantic, but shears weren't added until beta 1.7. Wool dropped from sheep before that. That being said, alpha had a lot of really weird mob drops (why did zombies drop feathers?) and there wasn't much use for wool anyway beyond decorative purposes and hiding doorways with paintings until beds were added in beta 1.3.

Oh yeah, I forgot, it's been a decade you used to literally just punch sheep and I vaguely recall when that update dropped. I recall eventually just looking stuff up, but a lot of it I figured out on my own first. Redstone is absolutely something that really needs an in game guide that the game completely lacks, nothing about it is intuitive at all, even if you know how digital logic works it behaves a little strangely.

I always played the game to build cool forts and castles so wool was definitely useful to me to make them look good.

zombies dropped feathers because the game didn't have chickens until sometime after 2012 (0.3?) and you needed them for arrows alphas are just like that. The Rust alpha was similarly nonsensical.

I always thought part of the appeal was just discovering the world and how it works, but it's so established at this point it's better to just have a guide in game.

All Paradox Interactive games ever created πŸ˜‚
The worst I had was Hearts Of Iron IV. I played a 2h tutorial only to not understand a single thing the real game threw at me afterwards...

This I agree with. Stellaris is very confusing starting out and such a huge learning curve the tutorial just doesn't cover.

Stellaris is far from the worst offender, and yet you're still entirely right.

Also, the tutorial has suffered bitrot quite a lot. The game has seen many significant changes since release, but the tuturial was only partially updated to reflect them.

Yeah I think this is a big one for me.

I come back after a major patch or every 6 months and its all changed again! Which is good as it keeps it fresh, but the tutorial is very lacking on the changes.

It's not nearly as complex as it initially looks imo, but I also play with a million mods some of which make the game needlessly complicated so maybe the vanilla game just looks simple in comparison to me now lol

I adore those games, and while I think they've made great strides with CKIII and Vicky 3, I agree that the tutorials are severely lacking.

You gotta just start with an easy country. The CK2 community used to call Ireland "Tutorial Island" since it was low key and a good place to learn the mechanics, same with Spain in EU, or Belgium in Vicky.

About what Hearts of Iron? I tried that game once (3 or 4, don't remember) and basically gave up when the tutorial ended and I still had no idea how to do anything.

Don't get me wrong, I love most of them, but the learning curve is very steep and the tutorials in most of their games just suck...

Thank god that's changing tho. CK3 and (though to a lesser extent) Vicky 3 both have relatively decent tutorials.

The imbeded tooltips are a real godsend. I have no idea how I would wrap my head around Vicky 3 otherwise. The tutorial is still worthless tho.

I still don't know how to play hearts of iron IV. I'd love to learn but I'm a trial by fire learner. It's really hard for me to make it through a 2hr YouTube tutorial with monotonous robot voices.

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Warframe explains very little of its systems, and what it explains is generally poorly done. Upgrading and optimizing your abilities, acquiring proper mods and frames, how the levelling system actually works, generally anything that isn't "shoot at enemy until it dies" needs to be taught by another player or read upon.

Came here to say this. The new player experience is an awesome upgrade in terms of getting people into the world and narrative, but you're still thrown into an ocean of systems and content without a map. If you're not following a guide or piecing things together from the wiki it's very easy to get totally overwhelmed.

The game that comes to mind is Dark Souls. They teach you the bare bones of the controls and that's it.

Nothing about where to go, what stats to level up, ways to defeat specific enemies, what spells/elemental attacks to use, etc.

I had to Google a lot of things in the beginning.

I still don't know what the fuck the intended use of Resistance is

I think the numbers that go up when you level resistance were supposed to go up more than they do.

Umm was it supposed to help you "resist" getting poisoned or cursed? 🀨

Elden ring was my first "souls like" game and it was also an open world game too. For a gamer who wasn't accustomed to these kinds of games, it was a totally different experience for me.

Elden ring I think is still much more accessible for a newcomer. If you try Dark Souls 1, you'll realize that the difficulty of the game also learns pretty hard into more tedious aspects.

Getting cursed in Dark Souls 1 means you're HP is capped to half until you find the cure, as an example.

I always figured this was an intentional part of the design philosophy. The game lets players write and read one- or two-sentence strategy guides anywhere in the world. I took the hint and figured they wanted me to look up strategy guides.

I can't believe no one said Crusader Kings 2 nor Dwarf Fortress yet. The tutorial in CK II is so bad, it somehow makes thing more confusing, it is much better to just start a game in an easy location like Ireland and learn the game by yourself.

Dwarf Fortress has a tutorial nowadays, but I started playing it many years ago when you had no choice but to alt-tab to the wiki and figure out things on your own.

When I first played CK2 I had a revolt before the tutorial had taught me how to fight a war.

The tutorial in CK II is so bad

You can't just talk that way about Ireland.

I don't have an exact answer, but there are a lot of games that you need the wiki up on your second monitor for. Their tutorials teach you the basic controls, but nothing about what you're supposed to do or anything like that.

I feel it's kinda lazy on the developer's side and leave it to the community to do their job. You see a 5-10 min video on youtube explaining everything, yet the developer couldn't do that?

Having your tutorial be a 10 minute video would be a bad tutorial

I get what you're saying but there are ways to implement it in the gameplay with prompts, descriptions and dialogue.

I love a lot of the games I'm criticizing, but sometimes they go too far. I'll pick up the fart machine 3000 and the description will just say "Butt Fart Pfffft Toot Toot" and I'm just kinda left like wtf and i have to close the game and go into the wiki to see what the hell i just picked up and if its worth the inventory space

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines tutorial was a good 30 minutes for me the first time I played it. Luckily they give you an option to skip it in subsequent playthroughs, but it covers pretty much everything you need to know for gameplay imo.

Yes, but that's interactive. I don't have an issue with longer interactive tutorials, more "sit here and watch a video" style.

That's how I feel about most farming sim games like Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley

Stardew Valley technically does give you a lot of the wiki information through the books and by talking to the NPCs, it's just a whole lot easier and less time consuming to use the wiki

2 of my favorites of all time. Final Fantasy VIII and Morrowind.

Final Fantasy VIII, to my knowledge, never once tells you that enemy levels scale. This wouldn't be a problem if you never grinded fights (for exp, AP, items, etc). I think the intention was that you would never need to grind so you never would (the game is actually super easy). But people do grind, and you can level up very quickly if you want to.

Morrowind just drops you into the world, for better or worse. There are some prompts to familiarize you to menus. But that's it. Most of the basic functions are self explainable. Except fatigue. Fatigue affects everything you do. And you won't realize that it's the reason whatever you're trying to do isn't working. Most players get frustrated and quit because they can't hit anything with their weapon, not realizing it's because their stamina bar is drained.

Morrowind was on another level compared to modern open world games. Map markers? Nah, fuck you. You get old world directions like "follow the road south east out of town and take a left at the fork then turn right at the crazy broken Dwarven machine and you should find the dungeon my brother went exploring".

Then the main story quest giver tells me to "come back after two moons have passed" to continue... I thought that meant two MONTHS. Left the dude at level like 3 or 4 and came back a walking God of death because I nearly completed all guilds side quests in 2 months... Learned years later he just wanted me to wait 2 fucking days.

That explains a lot of things! I couldn't get into Morrowind for this very reason

Mario & Luigi: Dream Team Bros, because the tutorials never stop. Even 20 hours into the game, it will explain which button to press in exhausting detail every single time. Gave up the game due to this.

On the opposite side, Ξ”V: Rings of Saturn. The tutorial does a really bad job of explaining the (very unusual) controls of the game. Worse, you can accidentally leave the area during the tutorial, which cancels the tutorial altogether so you have to restart the game. That happened to me twice. Third time was the charm though, and I did enjoy the game afterwards.

Hollow Knight is an excellent game with no tutorial whatsoever.

When you start a new game the ways you aren’t supposed to go are guarded by armored bugs you can’t kill, or a large guard who can one hit you. This teaches the player that generally if it’s bigger than you it will kill you.

After wandering aimlessly enough, because the game does not show you where to go, the only way to proceed is by challenging the False Knight boss, who is much bigger than you.

Sunset Overdrive.

Tutorial: Go from point A to point B.

Dies.
Dies.
Dies.

Failed to tell you the game operates under "ground is lava" rules. You are to go from point A to point B without touching the ground.

So many I can't even narrow down a specific one. Many new titles have tutorials that go over generic bullshit like how to move and aim and then don't tell you how to do anything that's actually unique to the game itself. I hate that shit.

Really hate having a tutorial objective of "put the goober in the jibjab" but then it doesn't explain what the fuck either of those things are, and it's not obvious by just looking at the situation.

Oh, The Ascent did this. Tells you to hack something early on; does not tell you how this is achieved. Everything up to that point was walk up to thing and press A/X. To hack you have to HOLD A/X. But it doesn't say that. I had to look it up online. Which is stupid.

Dark Souls also. But... It's hard to be mad at that one, since being vague is literally purposeful game design with those. πŸ€·πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ

Most if not all game prior to like 2000 didn’t give you tutorials. I guess they were in the booklet that came with the game so not in the game.

Super Mario Bros on NES starting point is the best. Simple and allowed people to die repeatedly to learn what the game is about.

Dwarf Fortress (before the Steam edition.) There was no in-game tutorial. I found a 2 hour long fanmade tutorial on Youtube, and even after that I had to learn a lot of stuff from the wiki.

To be fair, when starting a new game you were told to check the wiki. Which has a very long and detailed tutorial.

Baldurs gate has almost no tutorial for non-gamers, there is SO much assumed you know.

I’ve found that bg3 is pretty bad at telling the player things. Such as why you have a advantage or disadvantage on attacks. Another example is I had to search on the internet to figure out what concentration saves against. I know now that I can hover over things in the combat log to see the rolls. But you wouldn’t really know that unless you have played rpg’s like dnd before. It should tell you in a tooltip for concentration.

There are actually plenty tutorials, but because of the open exploring aspect, players aren't visiting those tutorial spots that the dev anticipated. They nudge you a bit using the enemy levels, but it should have covered more during the prologue.

I politely disagree. Baldur's Gate III teaches you absolutely nothing about its rules and systems. You are expected to discover the rules and systems on your own. Things like crowd control, the actual numerical advantages of height, and repositioning while in dialog are never explained.

It is the most frustrating aspect of Larian games, imo.

The EA tutorial was longer and MUCH more explicit. I was very surprised they truncated it.

repositioning while in dialog are never explained.

I'm a few hours in and I don't know what you mean? Do you mean being able to switch to a different character in a dialog? If so I'd love to know how to do that. I hate starting dialogue where I need charisma with my low charisma character

Well, no. I mean using other characters while one is in a conversation. During conversations, there are some buttons in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. One of those will allow you to swap to another character. You will then be able to do whatever you wish with those characters while the original character is in their conversation.

If you wish to use a different character for a conversation, you can simply start the conversation with the given character.

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Baldur'S gate tutorial was the manual. Unless you talked about the third one

I was practically a toddler when the others came out, I’m speaking of the one released less than a month ago.

Baldur's Gate 1 actually did have a tutorial in Candlekeep. Including temporarily giving you a full party to battle some critters in a basement.

Literally all of Candlekeep is a tutorial with the quests and the guys in green robes everywhere. It's kinda great, actually. Allowed you to skip it if you wanted, but there if you need it.

At least in the enhanced edition of the first game, there is a tutorial.

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Can't believe it's not in here yet, but Monster Hunter. I find the eventual understanding of the gameplay loop to not actually be as complex as I thought it'd be, but getting a good overview of all what you want to do and use isn't really possible even in the latest entries, just specific information about specific mechanics.

I couldn't get into MHW at all, and I lay the blame on the awful tutorial, which is less a tutorial and more interrupting you as you try to get to grips with the controls, with dozens of full screen pages of text.

Oh yes, legendarily awful. And again, I don't find it that impenetrable in the end, the delivery of the info is just so bad. If anybody wants to get into MH I'd love to help because I absolutely love the series now, but it took concentrated effort to teach myself without anyone to guide me.

Elite: Dangerous (pre-Horizons DLC). They teach you how to fly forward and maybe auto-dock.

Funny, thinking back to that tutorial they teach you a couple of mechanics (like rebooting your ship) that are almost never used in game. OTOH, there are, what, 300 different bindings in the game now?

I found the Odyssey tutorial was frustratingly opaque as to how the entire new UI worked.

Diablo 2. The extent of which you're given instruction is "here's a stick, go whack stuff."

Stat points? Better hope that you get it right the first time - you get three resets per character (unless you get a Token of Absolution which is a super late game item). Hell, before a certain patch this wasn't even a thing. Do it right the first time or you're restarting.

Same goes for skill points. Wanna put one point into everything, try it out before committing? Well those are now wasted points. Stats and skills get reset at the same time though, so you're not entirely screwed.

Rune words! The game tells you literally nothing about rune words and yet no build is complete without them. You get three runes that make up a rune word in Act 5 if you complete an optional quest. You're not told what to do with them, or that they must be in the right order (which the game does not provide), or that they must go in a normal, non-magic shield with exactly three sockets. Or that if you imbue the item after building the rune word you lose the rune word's effects. Put them in the wrong order? Bricked it - you cannot remove gems or runes from sockets. Or you can, but it destroys the socketed gems/runes. And you can only do so using....

Cube recipes. You get a cube, you use it a few times in the game. You're never told that it can be used to upgrade items, combine gems and runes, repair gear, craft items, or take you to the secret cow level.

If you never did extensive research on Diablo 2 before and while playing, you would be playing maybe a quarter of the actual game.

I am so glad I read this, because I've been thinking about trying out Diablo 2 lol. Looks like when I finally get around to it, I'll be doing a lot of research.

Fallout 2. That Game has the Opposite of a Tutorial. It does Not explain anything and throws you immediately into a Dungeon where you are supposed to solve it with specific skills. Can be really annoying If you have the wrong skills. It was literally tacked onto the Game because the Publisher demanded it. Love the Game, but the Temple of Trials ist one of the worst Things in the entire Series.

That aspect of the game actually ended multiple playthroughs for me where I just could not stomach it. I rolled the character, I got set up to play, I got halfway through the Temple of Trials, and I said no actually I want to do something else. πŸ‘Ž

The worst one I can remember is Final Fantasy 8.

But also the UI was so complicated and bad that it made me hate the game.

Does anyone remember Driver on the, I think, PS1? I mean the tutorial wasn't awful because it's irrelevant but because it's notoriously difficult to beat.

I never got pass the tutorial, because i was too young to understand the tasks πŸ˜‚ . I just explored the parking lot for an hour and then gave up.

I never got pass the tutorial, because i was too young to understand the tasks :D Played on my older brothers PS1 and gave up after an hour or so..

I didn't find it difficult so much as frustrating when I would do what it asked, but it wouldn't register until I did it like 10 times.

Elite Dangerous had a similar tutorial where you had to run through a checklist of things to complete it and move on to the main game. When I first got it back in beta, it was not optional and it also wasn't clear on how to do some of the shit it asked you to do, forcing you to check the controls constantly. It's an optional thing now, and there is also the option of running through the lift off check list every single time you launch your ship. Pointless and tedious, but adds some immersion.

It's not awful but, I'm playing Xenoblade Chronicles 3 now, 10 hours in and the game is still introducing new mechanics. This is undoubtedly the longest tutorial I've ever done.

In Xenoblade, the entire story is the tutorial. Hunting uniques in the postgame is the real game.

If you've never played Fear and Hunger, it's really easy to assume that there's no tutorial. At the very start of the game, a pack of angry dogs appears and mauls you to death. If you go through the front door, the pack of angry dogs follows you and mauls you to death. You can escape from the dogs in battle, but they'll keep chasing you on the overworld until they maul you to death.

The lesson the game wants to teach you is "Hey, don't stick around and fight enemies that will maul you to death", and "Hey, you should actually check out the side passages instead of the obvious way forward" because the dogs will not maul you to death if you dip into the side passage in the very first area. The game has a lot of such side passages that you need to look for later on that will save you so much grief, but you have no way but to intuit that this is something to look for in the first place after being mauled to death by dogs a few times.

Witcher 3. Just huge walls of text, teaching you the most intricate details of some mechanics, and not enough for others.

Huh, I didn't think it was too bad. The movement/sense/fighting I thought was pretty good, and that was back when I was just (re-)starting gaming and hadn't touched a controller in decades. Granted, it didn't go much into any of the crafting or stat/character enhancement strategy except as a "first time in" walkthrough of each screen.

Skullgirls, which is now my favorite game, scares people away with its tutorial, so I ended up making my own for it instead. It was through resources for a bunch of other fighting games that I ended up realizing what I wasn't understanding about Skullgirls.

Honestly, you could probably just put fighting games here in general. Understanding what it means for a move to be plus on block is super important, but most new players will have no idea what that means. I can only name one game, Fantasy Strike, that teaches you to jump to escape command grabs.

Came here to say fighting games. SF6 is attempting to address this with the whole single player mode. The Battle Hub also serves as a better spot for casuals. I'm hopeful that more fighting games take a better approach to teaching the game. When I first booted SFV, there was a 2 minute tutorial teaching you how to move and block and then it just cuts you loose. We're likely in the next golden age of fighting games. It would be a shame if Tekken fumbled the bag with poor new player on-boarding.

Cliff Empire. I'm still on the tutorial technically, I think. There was one part where I had to produce 250 extra power (250 kW I think?), and even though I had used up all the available space pretty effectively, I never got above ~120. So, I went ahead and started building a nuclear reactor... which only got me to ~170. I eventually passed that step somehow. I think it was because there were more people? Anyway, after that I clicked through all the steps I passed (about 20 of them) before I was producing anything close to 250 'power' and I'm pretty sure I missed something; because my reactor caught on fire and exploded. Turns out the fire fighting drones never got water, because apparently I have to set it's delivery priority manually... Β―\_(ツ)_/Β―

So I rage quit, and here I am complaining about it. Beautiful game though.

Dark Souls 1. It's tutorial is decent for controls but it doesn't go nearly far enough. It doesn't explain rolling, weight and stats are only in level up screen, at least for prompting. So many things about the game you need to know that they leave to expensive trial and error.

I like The Backlogs' video on it. It's a flawed masterpiece.

I'm pretty sure Dark Souls is intentionally obtuse, that's like a core part of the game's philosophy. It doesn't explain them because it wants you to try and figure it out on your own or discuss with others.

Nah, I don't think so. It actually explains everything you need to know, but it's buried in stat and item descriptions that, especially in 2011, we weren't trained to read through to understand the game. So if it's all that missable but still in the game, I think it's fair to say that it just sucks at teaching you.

Well, sure, it sucks at teaching you. But you can learn enough through the tutorial and checking stat and item descriptions to be able to learn and discover the rest on your own, you won't get to a spot where you have absolutely no idea what to do, and if you do, you havent explored the available space.

Part of that game's specific appeal when it released was that most other games at the time treated you like a child that needed every detail explained for you to learn and enjoy yourself, they grabbed your head and said "go RIGHT here, right now". It both sucks as a tutorial, but succeeds at establishing a baseline level of expected effort, resilience, perseverance, and experimentation from the player.

That game specifically is not trying to thoroughly teach you how it works. Its job is to provide a world and mechanics that provide a sandbox for you to roll around and suss it out for yourself.

They've sanded that frustrating learning experience in subsequent games to the point where Elden Ring now has more traditional tutorial pop ups, and unsurprisingly, it's their most successful game to date. That and the aforementioned evidence lead me to believe that the experience a lot of people had with Dark Souls was not what they intended. And you can absolutely get to a few points in Dark Souls 1 and get stuck without a guide; I know it happened to me when it came time to walk the abyss, and even having read item descriptions, it's very easy to forget the one description of one ring you got potentially hours and hours earlier that would solve your problems.

It's hard to talk about Elden Ring's learning experience the same way since by that point the world had enjoyed around four or so similarly constructed From Soft souls like games that had entered the cult popular internet gaming vernacular.

It was no longer as uniquely obtuse as Dark Souls was at its time. But yes, it does teach better, and is more straightforward in a lot of ways, it aligns more with most gamers' common understanding. It has a map.

And I'm not saying Dark Souls is entirely impervious to the argument that it's obtuse, I mean look at the resistance stat. What I'm saying is that you can understand enough to become intrigued by the world and become hooked if it's your sort of game. At the point that you really get hung up you've got incentive to discuss it with others and do that legwork.

It gets you into the game well enough while also establishing that you may totally have some mental hoops to jump through later. If there were to be some Dark Souls full remake with some arguable quality of life improvements, I'd bet there'd be a number of areas you could make less obtuse while still preserving a sense of genuine discovery, and that'd be a very fun "ethical" discussion as well with so much grey area to be had.

Dragon’s Dogma, at least if you’re trying to play as a mage. How do I target my spells? How do I even switch to the new spells I bought? That was a trip to the wiki and then r/DragonsDogma for me.

Anybody who hasn't seen Steel Battalion should go watch a video of a first play through.

They really assume the player is going to read (have) the manual for that game and have a series dig at you if you don't.

DayZ comes to mind. I love the game but it kind of just throws you in and says , "Hey there. Survive."

Deus bloody Ex, the first one. Both the tutorial and the first mission are mostly useless and many players outright drop the game during the first mission. Afterwards the game shows its true colours, but the beginning is just rough.

I think Liberty Island is a brilliant introduction, showing you how you can take multiple different approaches to achieve your goal. But yes, it's also a serious trial-by-fire. I remember I couldn't even find Filben when I first played.

It seems we agree. In the hindsight: yes, it's a decent level. As an introduction: hell no. With player not knowing what to expect and with barely any character abilities it's one of the most confusing first levels I can recall.

Even better if you have no idea what a GEP Gun is. Which, without context, I can't imagine many people could work out

I always thought Deus Ex's tutorial was pretty good and well made, although it doesn't tell you anything about computers/hacking

https://youtu.be/ziWIU-M7DBk

I just think it's impossible to make a tutorial that will prepare players for how open Liberty Island is lol

Wait, the first mission is that bad? I just dropped the game because of it, maybe I should give it another try

I've bounced from it 3 or 4 times. Once I got past the start, I've had a blast, easily in my top 20 games of all time. Give it a try!

Donkey Kong 64's tutorial is very poor. Most 3D platformers give you a safe area or easy first level, within which you can explore and learn the mechanics at your own pace. DK64 instead forces you through several tiny tutorial gauntlets, and it's a little jarring.

Gears of War 1 in online co-op. If you take the tutorial path instead of the right-into-the-game path, you can end up softlocked because it expects you to throw grenades at one point but doesn't explain it.

Ultima Online. Idk how it is now, as I haven't played on vanilla servers in like 20yrs, but you basically just got dropped into the game. Luckily, I had a friend who did play who taught me the basics. Otherwise, I woulda just been running around town aimlessly.

Eve Online is kinda like that, too. Originally, I don't think there was a tutorial (I started in 2005). Over the years, they've implemented a tutorial and iterated on it. Or just completely re-did it over and over again. It was bad. Like Ultima Online, Eve is a sandbox MMO, so no tutorial can show you everything possible in the game. But even the basics felt like not enough and just long and drawn out. The system in place today is certainly better, but players are still better off making friends quickly to learn the ins and outs.

Planetside 2 also originally didn't have a tutorial. I played the original Planetside back in the day, but the games are pretty different from each other. So it was a bit rough in the beginning. I remember coming across the early biolabs and running around the bottom of it for a quite a long time until realizing there were then "satelite bases" which had jumppads to the top of the biolab entries.

Even when a tutorial was introduced, it was pretty crap. Like sure you learned the basics of how to move, and how to shoot, and how to spawn vehicles. But the game is so much more than that. Big parts of Planetside 2 is understanding the map and environment, flow of battles, where each bases' capture points are, and of course positioning. And that's all stuff you don't get in the tutorial because there are so many different bases and the continent are large. Plus, some of that can only be learned by playing the game. Which can be frustrating when a player is dying 50 times in a row while getting a single kill (if they're lucky), because they don't yet understand anything I mentioned.

Yeah but Eve Online isn't a good game either πŸ˜‹

You're right...It's the best! 😎

It's an OK game. I say that, yet I keep getting sucked into it. Quit for like 10yrs, then I came back in 2018. Stopped playing again at the start of 2022, only to come back again at the start of 2023. I have a problem...and her name is Eve!

I've also been playing Eve like 10+ years myself and every time I think I've won it I haven't yet.

One of the best aspects of the game is the community around it though, rather than the actual gameplay. In fact, a lot of the gameplay is rather stale these days.

Agreed. I'm in the one of the null blocs, and have been since for last 4-5yrs. I'm not particularly deep into the community, either the alliance or Eve in general, but I just like playing with other people. Are F1 Tidi blobs fun? No, but I'm still playing with people. Logi wing can be fun, trying to get everything organized, and then keeping cap chains organized and going while get melted. I was doing FW earlier the in year, which is ofc much smaller scale, so I got to chit chat and know the regular gang that I ran in. Which was nice.

Compare that to FFXIV, where I really don't have to talk or work with anyone, other than in instances. A single player experience in a world filled with others doing their own single player experience. Yeah there's community, but it never feel like it resolves around the game; it's all just extraneous stuff like nightclubs and stuff.

Gameplay wise in Eve, I feel like I've done everything I've really wanted to do in the game. After this many years of playing, the mystique and curiosity is gone. But the players do still make it interesting from time to time. Thank god for that.

A game came out recently (called Palia) that essentially forces you to make "pals" to achieve certain things and even be able to gather certain resources. My other half has been playing it and was complaining about the "forced" interaction in the game and I told her similar things to what you're saying about Eve, that interacting with others to achieve goals will actually become the best part of the game in the long term.

Witcher 2, before they patched in the tutorial mission. (Which is still not very good as a tutorial.) Enjoy getting a shitkicking in the very first fight, since you've no idea of the controls.

Cultist Simulator. However, finding out how stuff works is half the game...

(The devs also posted a manual meanwhile, that explains the most obsucre mechanics.)

That BF game, where the tutorial instructions were given in broken english by some manager from the company making the game. Pure cringe.

The Binding of Isaac, just some drawings on the ground that don't actually tell you anything.

That game is very good at introducing concepts gradually though, and plenty of other things you'll discover by accident, as intended.

The Darkness was pretty decent with tutorials, except for one particular part that involved moving a giant bell out of the way. A friend of mine who was watching me play at the time finally ended up telling me how to do it, because up to that point in the game - and this is a pretty far part into it, not like towards the beginning where tutorials usually happen - this mechanic was never mentioned or used at all. Even in the sequence of moving the bell (I assume to learn the skill??? idk), there are no prompts given to tell you how. It was the only frustrating part for me in an otherwise really cool and fun game.

Acceleration of Suguri 2 has a tutorial that is just 9 pages talking about the games systems telling you about how specific buttons are for what attacks and which button combinations and other stuff, but it never tells you what those buttons actually are, it just says they are the attack A, attack B, dash button, hyper button, super button. It took me an hour of playing the game to figure out what all of the buttons were.

This is super common with fighting games. The expectation is that people will be playing on all kinds of input devices, many of them custom. I wonder if part of it comes from the older game’s tutorials being written for arcade cabinets where that’s how the buttons were actually labeled

Limbus Company. Project Moon games are great but the tutorialization and UI design are both baffling.

Exo-Primal. Seriously it is really, really fun. But the tutorial is awful. It's so slow-paced and then it takes a few hours of playing to really have the game show you what it is. By hour 7 or so though i was hooked and it's just kept delivering.

Guild Wars 2 falls into this category for me. Being from the boom of MMORPGs I'm not sure if the deva figured everyone would just get it kr what. The game has a lot of odd choices in places and it does a poor job explaining those choices or even pointing them out.

Voices of the Void. Even though it does talk about the basics of the game, it really didn't make the important aspects of these basics that aren't known from other games clear at all.

It's a demo, however, so that's excusable, even if the tutorial was actually reworked too... I dunno why you need to launch it in order to get into the game though. :D

Tunic, but that was kind of the point.