DayZ comes to mind. I love the game but it kind of just throws you in and says , "Hey there. Survive."
Gaming
From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it's gaming you can probably discuss it here!
Please Note: Gaming memes are permitted to be posted on Meme Mondays, but will otherwise be removed in an effort to allow other discussions to take place.
See also Gaming's sister community Tabletop Gaming.
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Driver 2
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
Witcher 2, before they patched in the tutorial mission. (Which is still not very good as a tutorial.) Enjoy getting a shitkicking in the very first fight, since you've no idea of the controls.
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.)
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.
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.
Dwarf Fortress, for me. Even the graphical one on Steam, I needed to watch YouTube videos to really start digging in to it.
The original Runescape for sure