Worst Video Game Tutorial

[Happiness Assassin]

Europa Universalis 4 for me.

Jesus, the tutorial only teaches the bare fucking minimum of how to play the game. It took me 100+ hours of basically stumbling through various failed campaigns to grasp what is going on. I took me even longer to figure out trade. The sign of a bad tutorial is one that requires you to look up most of info outside of the game.

 

[RaikuFA]

Any and all fighters. Worst I can recall is MKX and Skullgirls. Both were"press buttons and hope it lets you pass.

 

[Bad Jim]

Which is worse?

A)A tutorial that utterly fails to teach you how to play the game, sending you screaming for the nearest Wikia or guide book.
B)A very lengthy, completely unnecessary tutorial that you cannot skip every time you start a new game.

I'd say B, because any half decent game will have a wiki that does explain things if necessary, and once you know what you are doing it is not a problem. But a lengthy unskippable tutorial will drag you down on every playthrough except maybe the first.

 

[Scarim Coral]

Let see-

Super Robot Wars OG- It was very unhelpful, dumping every info at you at once!

Fantasy Life- Considering that there were 10 professions to choose from the start, it wasn't so bad that is until you changed the profession again and again (the whole point of the game). It doesn't suprised me if most people end up skipping the dialogues with the other professions dues to it's similar tutorial quest.

Any and all fighters. Worst I can recall is MKX and Skullgirls. Both were"press buttons and hope it lets you pass.

This, definitely this (Skullgirl)! I mean seriously it doesn't have a instruction with the controlpad image display! I get confused with the buttons layout to the point that I had to look it up online and found a Youtube video on it!

 

[PinkiePyro]

when I think bad tutoral the first thing that comes to mind is Digimon world for the ps1... for the record its more a translation issue than the fault of the programmers but it was still a bad problem

so like any digimon game you raise and train one and it does a fairly good job showing how to do the basics like this is meat you can get some free everyday heres where you train ETC but then they drop the ball and fail to tell you where the damn toilet is and its a squat kind (something as a kid I had no idea existed prior to this game) so I end up failling to find the damn thing running past it many times thinking the thing is just a shed thrown in among all the other random crap in the backround

bottom line: if your game has toilets put a sign or tell the player where they are unless you want the town covered in poo

 

[StatusNil]

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

Coincidentally I just mentioned this in another thread, so I'm going to say the Injustice: Gods Among Us tutorial. Why? Since I was unable to complete the damn thing! It was all "Now do this combo!" and I TRIED to, but no matter how well I think I followed the instructions, the magic just wouldn't happen. So I had to skip it and just play the game. The SP campaign was way easier to beat.

This may have something to do with me absolutely sucking at fighting games.

 

[Ragsnstitches]

The Witcher 2 before The Enhanced Edition Arena patch. The tutorial amounted to a guide on the right of the screen that discretely fades in and out. The prologue was pretty harrowing for many players because as soon as they hit combat they were overwhelmed, even on lower difficulties.

I don't know how many times I died trying to take that ballista.

They eventually added a "true" tutorial of sorts to the start of the game which took you trough the basics. Still not perfect, but vastly better. It then pits against waves of enemies until you die and then recommends a difficulty accordingly. I came back to the game recently in anticipation for The Witcher 3 and upon completing the tutorial it recommended normal mode... I had already beaten it on Hard mode and wanted to do Dark mode. Fuck you game.

 

[Benpasko]

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.

That game had a tutorial? I didn't even notice, not that I thought it needed one. It's a shooter, shoot the enemies.

Any and all fighters. Worst I can recall is MKX and Skullgirls. Both were"press buttons and hope it lets you pass.

This, definitely this (Skullgirl)! I mean seriously it doesn't have a instruction with the controlpad image display! I get confused with the buttons layout to the point that I had to look it up online and found a Youtube video on it!

Skullgirls actually has possibly the best tutorial in fighting game history, which says a lot about the genre's tutorials. It doesn't display the control layout because that game uses the 'standard' 6-button layout.

OT: Dark Souls 1 didn't just have a bad tutorial, once you finished it the correct way to go is the least obvious path from the hub. I think we've all spent at least a half hour dying to skeletons.

Bloodborne didn't explain visceral attacks at all, I only figured out that you had charge attacks like 2 bosses in.

I was recently playing through an older souls-like game called Blade of Darkness, and that game doesn't explain how to do comboes at all. It says 'left click to attack', but what is doesn't tell you is that you HOLD left click and tap directions to get different swings.

But I'd say the worst of all is pretty much any moba. To cut them some slack, it's an insanely difficult genre to tutorialize, but I have yet to find one that cuts down on the dozens of games of trial and error required to get the hang of it, or prepares newcomers to the genre in the slightest.

 

[Tuxedoman]

Elite Dangerous takes the cake for me. If the tutorial has been made better, then that's great. But it only really gives you enough direction to do the most -basic- of tasks, like flying in space and docking in stations.

Whats this? This quest says 'kill pirates'. Okay, cool. Sure is a shame that the game doesn't explain to you how you actually locate pirates beyond just murdering everyone with a wanted sign on their head.
Hey, what's this little blue marker on my ui? Man, it sure would be nice if it was explained what it was without me just working it out about fifty hours into the game.

Some things I can write off as 'you just have to discover it for yourself', like that you can't regain fuel at brown dwarf. Other things, like telling you how to join a faction in a warzone, i feel like these should have been touched on at least once.

I'd also say besiege is pretty awful for a tutorial. Yes, it all uses mechanical physics, but that doesn't make the game any easier to navigate. I can't help but feel you shouldn't need to rely on a wiki, or a walkthrough video, in order to get some basic concepts down.

 

[hawkeye52]

The Europe Universalis 3 tutorial. It doesn't tell you enough about the game to begin with. It's mostly just reading text so they might as well have given you a manual to read like they did in the old days like with the Civ 3 and Empire Earth and after one or two patches it broke due to how they redrew some of the borders for the sake of historical accuracy.

 

[Ihateregistering1]

I think it was the original 'Driver'. It tried to integrate the tutorial into the story by being about how you needed to show the local crime boss how bad-ass of a driver you were. Unfortunately it immediately put you on this driving course that was really, really hard, and you couldn't skip it. I think it took me like 3 hours just to make it through the damn tutorial.

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

Wasn't that the one where you literally started off on a bridge on fire, and had like 2 seconds to learn the controls and get out of the way or you'd die?

 

[IamLEAM1983]

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.

But that's the point of Blood Dragon's tutorial section: it's a mockery being made of bad tutorials in and of themselves. Rex whines because players whine at bad tutorials. Considering, I respectfully disagree, instead thinking that Blood Dragon's tutorial was sheer genius.

Well, if "sheer genius" includes the "so bad it's good" category.

In all seriousness, though, I'd have to nominate Resonance of Fate for having the worst opening three to four hours imaginable. Imagine spending hours reading text prompt after text prompt and the overall complexity of the experience requiring a notebook on the side or a kind of bachelor's degree on this specific game's mechanics. Prompts only appear once, the designers seemingly assume you've absorbed disparate button prompts and managed to divine some kind of deeper meaning out of them, and there's seemingly no end in sight.

The end result is an info dump that's so massive and convoluted that nothing can be consciously understood. It's the most Byzantine of the last-gen JRPGs out there, and so much of that complexity is utterly pointless you aren't likely to keep going after those opening hours.

 

[Dalisclock]

The Europe Universalis 3 tutorial. It doesn't tell you enough about the game to begin with. It's mostly just reading text so they might as well have given you a manual to read like they did in the old days like with the Civ 3 and Empire Earth and after one or two patches it broke due to how they redrew some of the borders for the sake of historical accuracy.

I think we could put Paradox games in general in here. Crusader Kings II has a bunch of Tutorials, but they don't tell you a lot, especially for a game like CK II.

 

[Aetrion]

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

I hate the arena tutorial. I've beaten the Witcher 2 on hard mode, but the tutorial keeps telling me I should play on easy, even when i'm doing it after just beating the game on hard.

There are a few parts in the Witcher 2 I really hate. The dice game is obnoxious, how damn long you have to play that if you care about completing everything. The absolute worst thing in The Witcher 2 however is those random moments where the game puts you in control of another character, and suddenly you have to fight a duel against someone, with absolutely no warning that this new character controls completely different than Geralt. Losing those fights doesn't seem to matter much, but it just feels so obnoxious to be suddenly put in control of a character, a second later you're in a fight, and one second after that you're down two thirds of your health because you didn't realize the person you control can't dodge.

 

[FPLOON]

I'll just go ahead and say the one that usually gets me into trouble:

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days

That tutorial is absolutely infuriating, it's divided into little sections and all of them are unskipable. To elaborate on this imagine you make a combat tutorial for an RPG. What would you do? Explain all the menus in a single battle? Not in Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days you don't, each menu has it's own battle; for instance there's one battle that explains how to consume items and other one that explains how to attack. Fucking WHY

As someone who loves this game more than he probaby should... I agree 100% in terms of how the tutorial was handled in 358/2 Days... I mean, if I remember correctly, the game's tutorial last for a total of 12 in-game days! I feel like they only stretched it out just to showcase the Organization members you could play as in multiplayer despite [REDACTED] happening later on...

 

[Shoggoth2588]

Fallout 2 is a great game but the Temple of Trials at the start is terrible.

I've never beaten the first Fallout because (from what I understand) I have a finite amount of time and that kind of thing stresses me out in gaming to the point that fun is nearly impossible. I've never beaten Fallout 2 because I've never been able to get through the Temple of Trails. No, it's not the difficulty so much as it is the general confusion and the nagging thought that I could be playing something more fun...like Fallout 3! (beaten with multiple characters)

Fighting games in general are so notoriously bad when it comes to tutorials that the only one I can think of that's got anything close to a useful tutorial is Marvel vs Capcom 3.

 

[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.

But that's the point of Blood Dragon's tutorial section: it's a mockery being made of bad tutorials in and of themselves. Rex whines because players whine at bad tutorials. Considering, I respectfully disagree, instead thinking that Blood Dragon's tutorial was sheer genius.

Well, if "sheer genius" includes the "so bad it's good" category.

Making something thats shitty to bring with even worse is not satire, it using satire cover for your own shittiness. Also it was mandatory so that guarantees the joke will get worn fast.

I realize that most post were people talking about annoying or incomplete tutorials, but Blood Dragons tutorial was worse than fighting Smough and Orenstien solo and killing smough first.

 

[MASTACHIEFPWN]

Europa Universalis 4 for me.

Jesus, the tutorial only teaches the bare fucking minimum of how to play the game. It took me 100+ hours of basically stumbling through various failed campaigns to grasp what is going on. I took me even longer to figure out trade. The sign of a bad tutorial is one that requires you to look up most of info outside of the game.

To be fair, the entire game's trade system was kind of fucked for a long while. It works now, but it is so streamlined. I'm honestly surprised that most people don't just start off cheating their asses off in that game- I mean, I learned most of EU3 in about ten hours by cheats- and the exact same cheats are present in EU4 (Albeit the technology cheats are a bit different).

 

[MASTACHIEFPWN]

Fallout 2 is a great game but the Temple of Trials at the start is terrible.

I've never beaten the first Fallout because (from what I understand) I have a finite amount of time and that kind of thing stresses me out in gaming to the point that fun is nearly impossible. I've never beaten Fallout 2 because I've never been able to get through the Temple of Trails. No, it's not the difficulty so much as it is the general confusion and the nagging thought that I could be playing something more fun...like Fallout 3! (beaten with multiple characters)

Fighting games in general are so notoriously bad when it comes to tutorials that the only one I can think of that's got anything close to a useful tutorial is Marvel vs Capcom 3.

In the updated versions the super-mutant attack timelimit is upped to thirteen years. You could beat the entire game, side quests and all and still take your sweet old time four or five times before that time limit is up. The waterchip timelimit is easily workable, and you can buy more time at one part of the game if you need it.

 

[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!

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).

As enjoyable as a game is, you shouldn't have to have the online wiki open at all times in order to learn the most basic of information: what is "Scaling" and how does it work? How do I change my trousers? What's with the A/B/C/D ratings on my trousers? What does everything mean!? And there really is no excuse for not having a functional pause button when playing offline; I shouldn't have to retreat ten miles and hide in a corner because I need to go make dinner From Software.

Also: I believe you were one of the helpful folks recommending I get the game in my thread a week ago, for which I thank you kindly because I am utterly engrossed in it. Now I must get back to this essay while pondering how to kill Martyr Logarius....

P.S. Tell me that Logarius is *not* a dark and gritty remake of the Ice King from Adventure Time!