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.
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.
I’ve been going back to The Witcher 3 to play the DLCs.
I finished Hearts of Stone and started Blood and Wine. I really enjoyed the former, but the change of atmosphere and setting of the latter is simply something else and it feels like a new game with how much content there is!
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.
Last act of Baldurs Gate 3. Damn, does this game have a ton of stuff in it.
The third act is a bit of a disappointment though, compared to the first two. Not necessarily the storylines, or environment, but parts just seem unfinished, more glitches and bugs with quests, which is par for the course for Larian games I guess. It’s still great, and I’m thinking about doing a second playthrough eventually, but probably not before the Definitive or Enhanced Edition release in a year or something.
I hope to finish it in the next couple of days, then play the recently released Quake 2 Enhanced release as a palate cleanser, before jumping into the next bigger game.
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.
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
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.
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.
I’ve been trying to finish some games that I always wanted to play. So I just completed a first run through of NieR: Automata (WA complete). Now for the second!
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.
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