Worst Video Game Tutorial

[Knight Captain Kerr]

Overall I think tutorials are a good thing. It's easier to learn how to play a game by actually playing it than just reading a manual. Portal could probably be considered 2/3 tutorial, they were constantly introducing new gameplay mechanics but it was great.

Fallout 2 is a great game but the Temple of Trials at the start is terrible. It was included because the publisher demanded they included a tutorial and possibly to spite them the developers made a really crappy one. First off as a tutorial it fails because it doesn't actually tell you much about how you play the game, most of that you'll probably have to figure out on your own or by reading the manual/a guide. In universe it's really weird, these tribals renovated an existing building but then you have to ask why they live in tents instead of this massive temple. It's full of ants and the only weapons available to you are melee and unarmed so unless you tagged those skills then you'll either miss a lot or have to run away. Then at the end of the tutorial dungeon unless you've tagged unarmed, speech or steal you're screwed and you'll just have to keep reloading until you either manage to steal a key or win a fight with a boss. Also you can't skip it.

So, what's the worst tutorial you've played in a game?

 

[crypticracer]

Dark Souls 2 was really bad, but I think I have to says Resident Evil 6. It starts in a section later in the game which is jarring and The only useful thing it teaches you is that now you put herbs in pill cases instead of just... eating them straight up. The first thing you do is move via quicktime while in First Person, which just isn't useful cause you don't play the game in first person.

Good tutorials are a MUST these days. Considering that games don't even come with manuals. When I first started Last of Us multiplayer I was trying to learn how to tag enemies, it wasn't something you did in the base game so I hadn't learned it. There was no manual in the box. I installed the digital manual off the disc and that was just terrible and didn't describe it. I eventually saw it on a loading screen. It's an excellent game and I had no such questions trough the entire story, so why they didn't include a tutorial for multiplayer, I just don't know.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Okami's tutorial wouldn't be so vexing if it wasn't preceded by 20 minutes of an unskippable cutscene of the press-X-to-continue-text variety.

 

[kris40k]

X3

The tutorial was broken for the Trader class and impossible to complete. Basically, you get to a point where your teacher is supposed to walk you through basic combat. However, they given you two ships, and neither has a weapon on it. So you can not progress the tutorial any further than that point until you somehow make enough money and find a place that sells weapons that you are capable of installing.

By which point you no longer really need the tutorial.

As a bonus, they came out with multiple patches and multiple expansions packs for X3, where they could have corrected this oversight and they never did.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

Pre-Enhanced Edition Witcher 2. Enjoy getting your ass kicked. The Arena style tutorial added later is pretty good though.

 

[Spider RedNight]

What little tutorial the TellTale Games Jurassic Park has is kind of.... not good to prepare you for how to actually play the game. Let's say that game is VERY strict.

The tutorial for Catherine is frustrating if only because you can't just learn it all at once. You learn how to move a block and talking. You learn to climb a block and more talking. You get a couple of blocks and MORE FUCKING TALKING. It's SO frustrating, I'm like "Yeah I get it shut UP so I can just climb the tower already"

 

[Reasonable Atheist]

Final fantasy 8, its like they want to teach me how to do taxes while I am trying to run around and explore.

Although.... I did beat the whole game once without knowing how to boost a GF, and I really mean the whole game.

 

[Fox12]

I remember hating the tutorial in Assassins Creed so much that it made me quit the game. It did its job, but it was the most bland, uninspired thing I've ever seen. Like a soggy piece of paper. Boring monotone voice, white backdrop, no real motivation. Who signed off on this? It's like they were waging a war on fun.

Saints Row 3 might have had the best one though.

 

[Dragonlayer]

It's a toss-up between any Hearts of Iron game and Bloodborne, because neither of their tutorials tell you shit. I learnt how to play the former by pure trial and error on my friend's copy at his house - and even now I still don't fully understand how the economy works - and I died twice trying to judo-chop the first enemy to death in the latter because there was *no* information on how to change and equip weapons.

Fantastic games but completely useless at teaching people how to enjoy them!

 

[Dragonlayer]

I remember hating the tutorial in Assassins Creed so much that it made me quit the game. It did its job, but it was the most bland, uninspired thing I've ever seen. Like a soggy piece of paper. Boring monotone voice, white backdrop, no real motivation. Who signed off on this? It's like they were waging a war on fun.

Saints Row 3 might have had the best one though.

Urgh, you've just reminded me of the almost depressingly sanitized look of the non-historical portions of the first AC game....

 

[Fox12]

It's a toss-up between any Hearts of Iron game and Bloodborne, because neither of their tutorials tell you shit. I learnt how to play the former by pure trial and error on my friend's copy at his house - and even now I still don't fully understand how the economy works - and I died twice trying to judo-chop the first enemy to death in the latter because there was *no* information on how to change and equip weapons.

Fantastic games but completely useless at teaching people how to enjoy them!

Honestly, I love From Software, but I think its ridiculous that they don't properly teach people how to play their games. Just like how it's ridiculous that you can't pause. What eats me up is that it feels like an intentional design choice, as opposed to an oversight. Once you've played one of their games the others are pretty easy to understand, but it's unacceptable that you have to go through that much trial and error just to understand the basics of the game. They don't even explain the stats to you. For such well designed titles, I can't understand why they would do this. It makes things far too hard on newer players.

Thankfully, I had already completed Dark Souls, so Bloodborne felt like putting on a well worn glove. I can only imagine how the uninitiated felt (remembers Asylum Demon from Dark Souls and shudders).

 

[Sleepy Sol]

I hate bad fighting game tutorials. Luckily for me, there are LOTS (ridiculous amounts) of bad fighting game tutorials.

Most recently, we've got Mortal Kombat X, which tells you which buttons do what, but not how to really apply any of that in certain situations. You just...press the buttons, but don't know why you should use those buttons at all. Plenty of fighting games offer literally no tutorial at all on common strategies in fighting games, instead opting for a trial mode that shows you...combos (sometimes practical, mostly impractical, as a quick aside, Mortal Kombat X doesn't even have this). You're not told which practical combos are ideal for certain situations or spacings. Just that there are certain ways to combo. In Street Fighter 4, it usually doesn't even tell you certain intricacies of the combo that you need to perform to actually finish the combo trial. Like differentiating between links/chains and certain types of cancels.

Luckily, there's stuff like Guilty Gear Xrd and Skullgirls, which both have excellent tutorials. I can't recall if Skullgirls has a combo challenge mode, but Xrd has a basic tutorial, tutorials for actual situations that occur in-game during matches, and a combo challenge mode. The full works, and quite nice.

 

[Rylot]

What eats me up is that it feels like an intentional design choice, as opposed to an oversight.

When looked at on their own any of the Souls Borne tutorials completely fail spectacularly to teach the player anything beyond the absolute bare bones workings of the game, but that is in keeping with the trial and error game design they were going for. They definitely wanted to design a game that rewards careful and diligent players and ruthlessly punishes the unwary.

For all the flak the community gets (not without reason) for rabid fanboyism and 'get gud' elitism, there is a thriving community of players sharing information and helping each other explore different aspects of the game.

 

[GhostHunter]

Far Cry Blood Dragon. Telling me how to do something wrong is bullshit. Requiring me to do it a different way than the instructions is even worse, but wait there's more! Having your STUPID WHINING PROTAGONIST quip every time i have to repeat that part, that he hates tutorials makes me want to microwave the DAMN DISC.

 

[Fox12]

What eats me up is that it feels like an intentional design choice, as opposed to an oversight.

When looked at on their own any of the Souls Borne tutorials completely fail spectacularly to teach the player anything beyond the absolute bare bones workings of the game, but that is in keeping with the trial and error game design they were going for. They definitely wanted to design a game that rewards careful and diligent players and ruthlessly punishes the unwary.

For all the flak the community gets (not without reason) for rabid fanboyism and 'get gud' elitism, there is a thriving community of players sharing information and helping each other explore different aspects of the game.

I'm fine with the difficulty and level designs of the tutorials. For instance, the boulder and the Asylum Demons can both be seen and avoided if you pay attention. This indirectly teaches the player how to interact with their environment, and to proceed with caution. Tutorial through level design is a stroke of genius that I wish more developers would utilize, as it doesn't break the flow of the game.

What I don't like is the lack of explanation of how stats and builds work, or how weapon scaling works. You can screw an entire playthrough if your not careful, through no fault of your own. There's having faith in your audience, and then there's From Software. They have the right idea, but they can take things a tad bit too far in terms of being vague. Doesn't stop them from making some of the most unique games on the market, though.

 

[FPLOON]

E.T. for the NES... *mic drop*

OT: Sonic 06... because it doesn't mention how to avoid the random glitches... nor warns you about the speed sections beforehand...

Other than that, playing most fighting game tutorials with a controller... There's a joke in there somewhere, but I digress...

 

[DementedSheep]

The witcher 2 had a pretty bad tutorial to start with though they patched in another one. It had a tendency to give you wordy pop ups in boxes telling you what you need to do as you need to do it without pausing the game. It doesn't help the difficulty curve isn't great either so the opening ends up being one of the hardest parts of the game.

Having played it recently I think The Secret World could use a better tutorial, especially since "levelling" is different to most games, as is crafting. If you want to craft you need to look up an external guide because the 1 min quest they give you is bare bones. Crafting gadgets and consumable isn't even mentioned at all as far as I know. Although I think TSW is kinda like Dark Souls where it is meant to be about experimentation and sharing information with other players so they expect you to be looking at external sources or using trail and error yourself and it's not as inconvenient as it has an inbuilt browser. Although speaking of the already mentioned Souls games, they could use better explanations as well, at the very least it should tell you stuff like that dexterity increases casting speed. I don't think how stats and scaling work at a basic level is something the player should have to try and work out.

 

[Rylot]

They have the right idea, but they can take things a tad bit too far in terms of being vague.

Being vague is what their games are based on. There are entire video series on youtube dedicated to the lore that is teased out from item descriptions two or three sentences long! They are definitely with holding information, a lot of information and expecting way more than almost any other game. Their games have as little hand holding as possible and let the players figure out the rest. I'd argue the reason the games are so interesting and have become such successes is that they create this interesting dichotomy between forcing the player to explore everything and try things out while punishing any mistakes.

Every single player is going to abandon their first few builds as they figure out what works and what doesn't. Even when you looking things up online you still have to try it out and see if it works for you. I fully agree that it can be frustrating not knowing how the mechanics work if a build is going to work, but that is definitely the game design they were going for.

 

[Meximagician]

Samurai Legend Musashi an action RPG for PS2: early in the game you get a combat tutorial, which includes leveling up. Problem is, this tutorial cannot be skipped, you have to do it again in new game plus, and experience drop doesn't change for the same early-game enemy you have to keep killing over and over until you level up.

Max Payne 3. What's more annoying than an unskippable tutorial? Doing one under a harsh time limit! No need to let your player get a feel for your game, they'll totally enjoy failing repeatedly because they haven't got a feel for aiming or moving around in the sequel that dramatically changed how these functions work.

Ghost in the Shell for PS1 didn't have a bad training mode per se, but it was dramatically harder to get a S rank in training than the actual game. Basically, training mode was far shorter and easier combat-wise, so to get an S rank you have to kill all enemies, find and hold on to max grenades, keep your health up, and beat the level well under the time limit.