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.
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.
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.
A trap for the unwary.
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.
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 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.
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, ΔV: 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.
Elite: Dangerous (pre-Horizons DLC). They teach you how to fly forward and maybe auto-dock.
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 😂 . I just explored the parking lot for an hour and then gave up.
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.
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…
Kerbal Space Program.
Basically “do rocket science without instructions”.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1356/
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.
Pretty much any of the souls games or something like Viewtiful Joe
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.
Is there a reason why the dogs chase you down an entrance but not the other?
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
I just think it’s impossible to make a tutorial that will prepare players for how open Liberty Island is lol
All Paradox Interactive games ever created 😂
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.
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.
Escape from Tarkov
