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.
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 😂
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
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.
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.
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.
Kerbal Space Program.
Basically “do rocket science without instructions”.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1356/
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
A trap for the unwary.
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 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?
That’s how I feel about most farming sim games like Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley
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.
The tutorial in CK II is so bad
You can’t just talk that way about Ireland.
I think when I first played CK2 there was no tutorial.
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.
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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. 🤷🏻♂️
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That’s exactly how the original worked too, other than the manual.
Though manuals in those days were more lore than tutorial.
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.
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.
