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’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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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The original Runescape for sure
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.
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.
@gk99 @bermuda I like that, games that do this should give you an option for a tutorial tho
@gk99 @bermuda that’s so stupid I hate when games don’t explain random things
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
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.
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
Raft is really fun but explains very little about how things work.
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.
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.
Baldurs gate has almost no tutorial for non-gamers, there is SO much assumed you know.
Baldur’S gate tutorial was the manual. Unless you talked about the third one
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.
I was practically a toddler when the others came out, I’m speaking of the one released less than a month ago.
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.
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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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.
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
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.
Some Paradox games literally teach you how to play wrong, CKII being an example IIRC
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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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Kerbal Space Program.
Basically “do rocket science without instructions”.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1356/