What's a good game you played with an awful tutorial?

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.

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...

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.

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.

Kerbal Space Program.

Basically "do rocket science without instructions".

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.

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.

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?

Permanently Deleted

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.

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. 🤷🏻‍♂️

When I staated playing Elite: Dangerous, they basically just gave you a space ship and said have fun.

Baldurs gate has almost no tutorial for non-gamers, there is SO much assumed you know.

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.

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.

Can't believe it's not in here yet, but Monster Hunter. I find the eventual understanding of the gameplay loop to not actually be as complex as I thought it'd be, but getting a good overview of all what you want to do and use isn't really possible even in the latest entries, just specific information about specific mechanics.

Elite: Dangerous (pre-Horizons DLC). They teach you how to fly forward and maybe auto-dock.

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.

Fallout 2. That Game has the Opposite of a Tutorial. It does Not explain anything and throws you immediately into a Dungeon where you are supposed to solve it with specific skills. Can be really annoying If you have the wrong skills. It was literally tacked onto the Game because the Publisher demanded it. Love the Game, but the Temple of Trials ist one of the worst Things in the entire Series.

The worst one I can remember is Final Fantasy 8.

But also the UI was so complicated and bad that it made me hate the game.

Escape from Tarkov

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.

Pretty much any of the souls games or something like Viewtiful Joe

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.

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.

Life

If you've never played Fear and Hunger, it's really easy to assume that there's no tutorial. At the very start of the game, a pack of angry dogs appears and mauls you to death. If you go through the front door, the pack of angry dogs follows you and mauls you to death. You can escape from the dogs in battle, but they'll keep chasing you on the overworld until they maul you to death.

The lesson the game wants to teach you is "Hey, don't stick around and fight enemies that will maul you to death", and "Hey, you should actually check out the side passages instead of the obvious way forward" because the dogs will not maul you to death if you dip into the side passage in the very first area. The game has a lot of such side passages that you need to look for later on that will save you so much grief, but you have no way but to intuit that this is something to look for in the first place after being mauled to death by dogs a few times.

Witcher 3. Just huge walls of text, teaching you the most intricate details of some mechanics, and not enough for others.

Driver 2

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.

Cliff Empire. I'm still on the tutorial technically, I think. There was one part where I had to produce 250 extra power (250 kW I think?), and even though I had used up all the available space pretty effectively, I never got above ~120. So, I went ahead and started building a nuclear reactor... which only got me to ~170. I eventually passed that step somehow. I think it was because there were more people? Anyway, after that I clicked through all the steps I passed (about 20 of them) before I was producing anything close to 250 'power' and I'm pretty sure I missed something; because my reactor caught on fire and exploded. Turns out the fire fighting drones never got water, because apparently I have to set it's delivery priority manually... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So I rage quit, and here I am complaining about it. Beautiful game though.

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.

DayZ comes to mind. I love the game but it kind of just throws you in and says , "Hey there. Survive."

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

That BF game, where the tutorial instructions were given in broken english by some manager from the company making the game. Pure cringe.

The original Runescape for sure

The Darkness was pretty decent with tutorials, except for one particular part that involved moving a giant bell out of the way. A friend of mine who was watching me play at the time finally ended up telling me how to do it, because up to that point in the game - and this is a pretty far part into it, not like towards the beginning where tutorials usually happen - this mechanic was never mentioned or used at all. Even in the sequence of moving the bell (I assume to learn the skill??? idk), there are no prompts given to tell you how. It was the only frustrating part for me in an otherwise really cool and fun game.

Dwarf Fortress, for me. Even the graphical one on Steam, I needed to watch YouTube videos to really start digging in to it.

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

Tunic, but that was kind of the point.

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.

Guild Wars 2 falls into this category for me. Being from the boom of MMORPGs I'm not sure if the deva figured everyone would just get it kr what. The game has a lot of odd choices in places and it does a poor job explaining those choices or even pointing them out.

The Binding of Isaac, just some drawings on the ground that don't actually tell you anything.

Exo-Primal. Seriously it is really, really fun. But the tutorial is awful. It's so slow-paced and then it takes a few hours of playing to really have the game show you what it is. By hour 7 or so though i was hooked and it's just kept delivering.

Limbus Company. Project Moon games are great but the tutorialization and UI design are both baffling.

Raft is really fun but explains very little about how things work.