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.
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.
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.
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.
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? 🤨
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?
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.
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
Baldurs gate has almost no tutorial for non-gamers, there is SO much assumed you know.
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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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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 :D Played on my older brothers PS1 and gave up after an hour or so…
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.
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.
Pretty much any of the souls games or something like Viewtiful Joe
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.
