Gaming

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.

Kerbal Space Program.

Basically "do rocket science without instructions".

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.

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?

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.

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. 🤷🏻‍♂️

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Life

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.