It isn't a question that the "tutorial" is (or was, the balance has been changed as of the latest patch and some of the mechanics of swordplay itself have been tweaked) difficult, or that the game doesn't do a particularly good job about making things obvious - if you're used to the beginning of a game holding your hand and telling you what to do and when to do it every step of the way, while placing you in situations where it's practically impossible to fail, it's going to feel like the developers have this personal vendetta against you. Unobtrusive little pop-ups that appear from time to time throughout the prologue and whenever you first do/encounter certain things like critical effects or your various signs do not "effective teachers" make.
The counter arguments that all the required information is already there and that the game simply leaves it up to you to experiment with the tools in your arsenal to discover what works are all well and good, but they don't render complaints about the "lack of a proper tutorial" invalid, as the game absolutely lacks a "proper tutorial". In point of fact it doesn't have a tutorial at all - it has a prologue, some tips that display, and a journal to peruse that reiterates the information covered in the manual.
What brings the animosity to the table isn't the claim that it's difficult (it can be, especially if you don't know what you are doing and have been conditioned by other games not to try things unless they tell you to specifically), but rather the assertion generally made by the people complaining about the difficulty that, by not
having a tutorial in any real sense, the developers have
done something wrong. Cries of "It's terrible game design!" or "In this day and age it's inexcusable not to have a tutorial or expect us to read things!" and of course "Here, go watch this Extra Credits video all about how it's terrible game design!" tend to irritate folks like me somewhat because while I understand that the more organic process of learning how to play a game by having it actively teach you is "the done thing" these days, I hail from an era where the thought of sitting down to something without reading the instructions and expecting success was
bloody stupid.
The problem with tutorials is that if you're good at video games, they're invariably torture - the only ones I've ever felt were justified were the sort that delved into peripheral functions of extremely complicated interfaces, and by that I mean
space simulators; I've never encountered any that were fun. They tend to break immersion, shovel in contrived circumstances, and serve as this barrier we have to slog through before games let us actually
play them for reals. A brief pop-up or reminder should absolutely be enough for anyone familiar with the controls who has any experience at all with modern gaming to know everything they need to about the game, and there are difficulty settings for a reason.
I fired up the prologue for The Witcher 2, and to my unfettered delight I was
not being put through a series of paces wherein my abilities would be trickled back into my possession while the game explained to me how to play it like I was particularly thick, I was actually asked to do stuff that was
fun. And this is the bone of contention - it's okay to point out that the game doesn't go out of its way to teach you how to play it, because that's absolutely true. Suggestions that the lack of a hand-holding introduction to the mechanics make the game shit though are going to fall on deaf ears - it's not a failing of the game when you fail because you were expecting to be coddled at the start, it's simply an old-school design philosophy that a lot of people found refreshing.
We don't actually care if you like the game or not.
Hate it for all I give a crap, just hate it because you didn't find it enjoyable - if you
haven't played the game, you can just shut the hell up:
you don't get to have an opinion on whether or not the game was good, because you don't know if the game is good or not, you didn't PLAY it (you may freely suggest that it
looks or
sounds good/bad/interesting/uninteresting, and that would be valid and entirely appropriate and nobody would argue with your conclusions because they're subjective impressions that you have formed).
If, like Yahtzee, you played the game, didn't enjoy it, but then went on to make a comedy video wherein you just made shit up about it instead of pointing out the
real flaws (of which there are a fair few, just sitting there ripe for mockery!) because you gave up midway through chapter 1 and therefore didn't have enough material to nitpick, it shouldn't be surprising when like a million people show up to point out you were doing more than simply exaggerating for comedic effect (i.e.,
lying).
And if you reflexively chimed in to defend Yahtzee's ridiculous claims that were based on falsehoods, having yourself not played the game in any way, you can
especially shut the hell up, seriously.
[hr]
As for all the animosity generated by the official review here on the Escapist, people mostly took umbrage with the fact that Greg Tito spent the bulk of it complaining that the tutorial was hard, didn't mention all sorts of things that were major selling points, and then assigned what amounts to an "eh, it's okay I guess" score to what is quite clearly a labor of love and an excellent game (only the "lunatic fringe" were suggesting that he's just bad at games, his complaints were valid enough but the dispute goes back to whether the conscious decision to not hold players hands is evidence of bad design worth significantly reducing the 'score'). But what
really riled up the fans is that Greg had earlier given Dragon Age II, a game that even people who enjoyed it (I include myself in that number) won't dispute was quite clearly deeply flawed and redolent with lazy design choices and re-used assets, he gave
that game a
perfect score, suggesting that Dragon Age II was what all other RPGs aspired to be.
The mind literally boggles - the disparity between "this is the second coming" for DA2, the obvious cash grab with a rushed out the door development cycle, and "buy it when it hits the bargain bins, maybe" for The Witcher 2 quite literally exceeds my ability to reasonably address while remaining civil, so I'll turn to the One Sentence Review section of Something Awful's Video Game Article which sums up each game quite concisely (and in one sentence - truth in advertising!):
One Sentence Reviews said:
Dragon Age II
An embodiment of lazy, aim-for-the-middle design with uneven writing and the most hilarious illusion of choice in an RPG to date; this made me double check to make sure this branch of BioWare won't come anywhere near Mass Effect 3 or Star Wars: The Old Republic. 4/10
The Witcher 2
If you were wondering where all the heart, creativity, painstaking detail, variety, and meaningful dialog that was supposed to be in Dragon Age 2 wandered off to, it's here, only without any of the useful UI or clearly communicated gameplay concepts. 9/10
