Either it didn’t teach you anything at all, or it taught you the most irrelevant parts of the game.
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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 😋
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.
Dwarf Fortress, for me. Even the graphical one on Steam, I needed to watch YouTube videos to really start digging in to it.
It’s awful because it’s non-existent.
The original Runescape for sure
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.
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.
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.
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. 👎
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.
Pretty much any of the souls games or something like Viewtiful Joe
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.
That BF game, where the tutorial instructions were given in broken english by some manager from the company making the game. Pure cringe.
Limbus Company. Project Moon games are great but the tutorialization and UI design are both baffling.
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…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.
Some Paradox games literally teach you how to play wrong, CKII being an example IIRC
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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.
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…
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Which is super weird because the same developer (Rare) made Banjo Kazooie a year earlier! BK had a tutorial level with a bunch of easy enemies and platforming and it worked great. I have no idea why DK64 was so different in comparison
I would wager it was a last-minute change as a result of focus testing. There is a lot going on in DK64, and sometimes you’re too close to a game to realise that all those button combinations aren’t the most intuitive to new players - and given the slapped-together nature of the tutorials, it makes me think it was an afterthought at best.
