!?Games with the worst tutorial EVER!? My vote - Disciples II

[Jams O'Donnell]

Witcher 2's tutorial is pretty horrible, with its here's-a-bunch-of-information-really-fast-hope-you-take-it-all-in-because-here's-a-big-fight-you-have-to-do-well-in-for-us-to-not-think-you're-bad-at-games-and-recommend-you-play-on-baby-difficulty databurst.

Also, I couldn't do a riposte and thus complete that miserable excuse for a tutorial until I sheathed and then unsheathed the sword, of course I had to google that one, game never told me.

Oh yes -- and the way you have to use only the one skill you're being instructed in and NOTHING ELSE in order to proceed, and the bit where you're being told to use throwing knives and the tutorial is telling you all about how if you hold down the throw button you can aim more precisely but it turns out that it's FREAKING IMPOSSIBLE to aim like that* and you're better off just tapping it and letting the auto aim do the work.

* with a 360 pad, because there's no way to adjust look sensitivity

Seriously - before the internet, how the fuck did people work out how games worked!?

Once upon a time, games came with manuals.

[QuantaCat]

Witcher 2's tutorial is pretty horrible, with its here's-a-bunch-of-information-really-fast-hope-you-take-it-all-in-because-here's-a-big-fight-you-have-to-do-well-in-for-us-to-not-think-you're-bad-at-games-and-recommend-you-play-on-baby-difficulty databurst.

After the super special edition too? Because that one wasnt too bad.

[Jesus_Phish]

It's a toss up between Assassins Creed games for taking too damn long, tutorials shouldn't feel like they're hours long and Planetside 2 for basically not having one at all.

[Avish]

The worst tutorials are the one that never ends. That even after 20 Hrs of gameplay they keep telling you stuff like "press C to crouch" or "you can switch weapons using the mouse wheel".

Most modern shooters seems to suffer from this.

[soldant]

Once upon a time, games came with manuals.

But they also had teeny tiny resolutions (by today's standards) which meant no tooltips, minimal text, and few GUI elements. You needed that manual because everything that could have been a button had to be a key command instead. Today with higher resolutions you can have tooltips and informative information in-game so that you don't need a manual.

[Dubbill]

X2 Reunion's tutorial is pretty terrible. I tried it multiple times. It would reach a certain point and I couldn't tell if I'd failed to follow an instruction or if it had stopped working. In the end I resorted to a Get Started guide on youtube but as I reached part 5 of 15 I realised I didn't care enough to press on.

[Drake Sigar]

Witcher 2's tutorial is pretty horrible, with its here's-a-bunch-of-information-really-fast-hope-you-take-it-all-in-because-here's-a-big-fight-you-have-to-do-well-in-for-us-to-not-think-you're-bad-at-games-and-recommend-you-play-on-baby-difficulty databurst.

Then you die and get booted to the main menu, both of which shouldn't be possible in a tutorial.

Today with higher resolutions you can have tooltips and informative information in-game so that you don't need a manual.

But we end up with developers relying on that instead of making a decent tutorial. Replacing pages of text with more compact screens of text doesn't seem like that big of a step up to me. The Sims Medievel relied on an in-game encyclopedia to guide the player, and on that encyclopedia was a page on how to use the encyclopedia. That's like a tutorial for a tutorial. Whenever possible I'd rather be informed in a more natural way through playing the game, like in the opening level of Legend of Grimrock.

[sonson]

Pretty much every single-player campaign for every RTS and FPS on the market nowadays is an extended tutorial for multiplayer.

Age of Empires 2 William Wallace campaign is one of the *best* tutorials ever though

The Witcher 2 one wasn't great, but wasn't terrible either. Combat is tough because that's how the combat in the game works and it takes some getting used to, ala Dark Souls.

CKII tutorials are bollocks

[Danny252]

Any RTS game that insists it teaches me camera controls - yes, I already fscking know that the scroll wheel zooms, holding down right mouse pans, and there's arrow keys and screen-edge scrolling. Even if they have a separate tutorial, I almost don't dare skip it, because they'll sneak something in like "you need to ctrl-shift-alt click with the middle mouse button to actually move your troops in this game, because we're awkward" and I'll sit there confused afterwards.

Also, tutorials that have timed popups that take an age, rather than "click ok to continue", or take forever to notice you've done what it told you. Children of the Nile was a horrible, horrible offender in that regard. However, if you don't sit through it, half the game mechanics are rather obscure. I made several cups of tea whilst waiting for it to conclude I'd read five lines of text...

[Tikey]

I remember trying to play Eve online a few years ago.
Half an hour into the tutorial I was bored to tears. After I saw that I hadn't completed not even half of it I exited the game and uninstalled it.

[Faldrath]

Another vote for Paradox here, EU2's tutorial was amazingly bad - however, it did not make me plainly uninstall the game. That honor goes to X3 and Dead Space (the latter mostly because it bugged out in the tutorial. And then it changed my difficulty setting. And then it had a pathetic control scheme, and wouldn't let me rebind keys. God, what a mess Dead Space was).

The worst one in recent times was Chivalry, though. I wonder if the patch fixed it.

[soldant]

But we end up with developers relying on that instead of making a decent tutorial. Replacing pages of text with more compact screens of text doesn't seem like that big of a step up to me.

Some devs get it wrong, but I like for example hovering my mouse over something and having the game tell me exactly what it is, why it is, and why I should care.

Whenever possible I'd rather be informed in a more natural way through playing the game, like in the opening level of Legend of Grimrock.

To be fair though that's not exactly a super complex game to begin with. Something like EU3 (like someone else mentioned) requires more than just a simple tutorial since there's so much stuff to know, so while the tutorial will scratch the surface the tooltips explaining all of your important statistics (and what's affecting them!) are much more useful in the long run. Chances are I'll forget what limits manpower about 20 minutes after the tutorial ends. But it's okay, because the tooltip will remind me, and then I'll remember.

Civ5 is another game which gets it right (or Civ4 if you prefer since it's the same concept) - tooltips expose the mechanics of what's going on so that you can play without a tutorial if you really want to stumble your way through (or you can listen to the advisors... I guess). It's combined with Civlopaedia, which explains everything, and it's in-game and searchable. That's a big advantage over a static paper manual.

Another point to consider (particularly with more complex games) is that patches can come along and change how the game plays quite dramatically, rendering the old printed manual inaccurate and sometimes useless. Back in the 90s when each game came with a brick for a manual it was less of an issue since patches weren't quite as common as they are today (well... they probably didn't achieve the same distribution as they do today). I do miss all the storyline fluff though!

[coldvvvave]

After the super special edition too? Because that one wasnt too bad.

Tutorial first appeared in Special Edition, I think, there was none in the base game, probably for the best.

[Drake Sigar]

To be fair though that's not exactly a super complex game to begin with. Something like EU3 (like someone else mentioned) requires more than just a simple tutorial since there's so much stuff to know, so while the tutorial will scratch the surface the tooltips explaining all of your important statistics (and what's affecting them!) are much more useful in the long run. Chances are I'll forget what limits manpower about 20 minutes after the tutorial ends. But it's okay, because the tooltip will remind me, and then I'll remember.

Fair enough. I was mostly thinking of all those Xbox 360 games where the entire tutorial consists of a picture of the controller with arrows pointing out the functions of buttons. My words don't apply to the PC quite so well since PC specific games are more varied, and have more complex options available to them. The constant genre mixing for example, is one of the things which makes it harder to establish a... familiarity with the controls or rules, and they can be just as hard to explain.

[trjp]

Fair enough. I was mostly thinking of all those Xbox 360 games where the entire tutorial consists of a picture of the controller with arrows pointing out the functions of buttons. My words don't apply to the PC quite so well since PC specific games are more varied, and have more complex options available to them. The constant genre mixing for example, is one of the things which makes it harder to establish a... familiarity with the controls or rules, and they can be just as hard to explain.

That's not confined to the 360 by any means - any game which just shows a controller layout and thinks that's useful should be shot.

That said tho, for racing games it's all I need. They've become so standardised in driving that all I need to know are

1 - which button is the handbrake
2 - which button changes the view out of third-person FOREVER

;)

[Nalano]

That's not confined to the 360 by any means - any game which just shows a controller layout and thinks that's useful should be shot.

That said tho, for racing games it's all I need. They've become so standardised in driving that all I need to know are

1 - which button is the handbrake
2 - which button changes the view out of third-person FOREVER

;)

I'm actually scared of cockpit view in racing games. When I drive, my head can swivel. In racing games, it's like I'm wearing horse blinders. The few games where I like cockpit view still have mouselook, but they're not racing games, natch.

[sinister agent]

BAD:


Planetside 2, for explaining nothing and dropping you directly into a random fight where you'll almost certainly be shot to death within seconds. Then you're asked where, on an entirely alien and meaningless continent, you want to respawn, many of which will also be in the middle of a random firefight, or three kilometres from anything.

Black and White, for the opposite reason - an unskippable eternity of patronising repetition. Eventually patched to be skippable, but by then hundreds had died in apoplexic fits. Probably.

Burnout Paradise, for being a racing game that thinks it needs 10 minutes of unskippable blathering before you're even allowed to start a race. (necessary tutorialising for every racing game ever: "These are the buttons for Left, Right, Go, and Stop. Now have fun.")

Any game where it's unclear when the tutorial ends and where the game begins. Strategy and open-world games lose triple points for this. Far Cry 2 and 3 (not played the first), XCOM 2012, several GTA games.


GOOD:

My favourite tutorial: Outcast. The shooting tutorial is quick and easy, as is the swimming one. Then there's the stealth one, which is a frustrating and arbitrary pain in the arse. But if you fail it a couple of times, your trainer will get bored and just lie, pretending you passed with flying colours. This made me laugh lots.

Deus Ex wasn't spectacular, but it was a well-done and thoughtful tutorial with minimal bloat, and it had a secret room in the spirit of the game itself. And it was optional. Ahead of its time, really.

Just Cause 2: Start the game by freefalling from two miles up above an enormous snow-peaked mountain, into an enemy military base which you're then encouraged to obliterate with assault rifles, grenades, flak cannons, miniguns, and a grappling hook. It tells you the controls and a few tricks as you go, but you're free to ignore the instructions if you want, and just destroy everything you see. The end result is the same anyway. Explains what the game is about and how to do things while putting no cramp on your fun. Excellent.

[sinister agent]

The worst tutorials are the one that never ends. That even after 20 Hrs of gameplay they keep telling you stuff like "press C to crouch" or "you can switch weapons using the mouse wheel".

Most modern shooters seems to suffer from this.

Seeing "PRESS [whatever] TO HOLD YOUR BREATH" in my scope three hours after my 100th sniper kill ... urge to kill ... rising.

Although having said that, I played as an infiltrator in Planetside 2 for weeks before I found out you could do that. Cough. Oh well, it honed my skills a lot, I suppose. BUT showing it once would have worked, y'know?

[Nalano]

Seeing "PRESS [whatever] TO HOLD YOUR BREATH" in my scope three hours after my 100th sniper kill ... urge to kill ... rising.

Although having said that, I played as an infiltrator in Planetside 2 for weeks before I found out you could do that. Cough. Oh well, it honed my skills a lot, I suppose. BUT showing it once would have worked, y'know?

PRESS F TO VAULT THIS LOW COVER.

Really? I forgot which key I was supposed to be using IN THIS COVER SHOOTER

[The JG Man]

The worst tutorials are the one that never ends. That even after 20 Hrs of gameplay they keep telling you stuff

See also Skyward Sword. It's not just an FPS problem, unfortunately.

Can I submit one that fits both worst and best? Driver. Other than the final level, it's probably the hardest mission in the entire game. You're forced to complete a check-list of moves within 60 seconds otherwise you simply cannot proceed. The disadvantage is that it's bloody hard and not everything is super clear (although a lot is) and you can and most likely will get hung up on it for ages. The advantage is that on completing it, you pretty much know how to do everything in the game. It also fits the game really well and whilst is obviously a tutorial, makes a lot of sense in context.