Either it didn’t teach you anything at all, or it taught you the most irrelevant parts of the game.
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.
The early builds had few enough things you could make that it wasn’t really that hard to intuitively figure out but in it’s current state it would be near impossible to figure out how to make some things without recipes to guide you.
like early alpha builds I think the only thing that would have tripped you up hard would be trying to make dynamite firestarter, or shears even then you could experiment for a while and figure it out.
I think the issue was it wasn’t clear what items were available to craft. If I had known that axes, pickaxes, shovels, etc. were all in the game then it might have been easier, but even making the crafting table (2x2 wood planks) wasn’t very intuitive. Honestly, there wasn’t much of a clear path forward with most of the recipes. Advancements and the recipe book later helped a lot, but it was pretty hard to play during beta and alpha without the wiki or a mod like TMI.
Then there’s redstone. I feel like even today, redstone is completely unexplained in the game, and while you can kind of figure it out on your own, many of the intricacies are left unexplained (repeater locking, timings, comparators, how redstone is passed/not passed through different kinds of blocks, gates, etc). Without taking some time to learn about digital logic and basic computer engineering concepts on your own, redstone is basically magic dust that does a thing when put in a specific configuration.
Also, being pedantic, but shears weren’t added until beta 1.7. Wool dropped from sheep before that. That being said, alpha had a lot of really weird mob drops (why did zombies drop feathers?) and there wasn’t much use for wool anyway beyond decorative purposes and hiding doorways with paintings until beds were added in beta 1.3.
Oh yeah, I forgot, it’s been a decade you used to literally just punch sheep and I vaguely recall when that update dropped. I recall eventually just looking stuff up, but a lot of it I figured out on my own first. Redstone is absolutely something that really needs an in game guide that the game completely lacks, nothing about it is intuitive at all, even if you know how digital logic works it behaves a little strangely.
I always played the game to build cool forts and castles so wool was definitely useful to me to make them look good.
zombies dropped feathers because the game didn’t have chickens until sometime after 2012 (0.3?) and you needed them for arrows alphas are just like that. The Rust alpha was similarly nonsensical.
I always thought part of the appeal was just discovering the world and how it works, but it’s so established at this point it’s better to just have a guide in game.
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…
This I agree with. Stellaris is very confusing starting out and such a huge learning curve the tutorial just doesn’t cover.
Also, the tutorial has suffered bitrot quite a lot. The game has seen many significant changes since release, but the tuturial was only partially updated to reflect them.
Some Paradox games literally teach you how to play wrong, CKII being an example IIRC
I adore those games, and while I think they’ve made great strides with CKIII and Vicky 3, I agree that the tutorials are severely lacking.
You gotta just start with an easy country. The CK2 community used to call Ireland “Tutorial Island” since it was low key and a good place to learn the mechanics, same with Spain in EU, or Belgium in Vicky.
Thank god that’s changing tho. CK3 and (though to a lesser extent) Vicky 3 both have relatively decent tutorials.
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.
Came here to say this. The new player experience is an awesome upgrade in terms of getting people into the world and narrative, but you’re still thrown into an ocean of systems and content without a map. If you’re not following a guide or piecing things together from the wiki it’s very easy to get totally overwhelmed.
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.
Elden ring was my first “souls like” game and it was also an open world game too. For a gamer who wasn’t accustomed to these kinds of games, it was a totally different experience for me.
Elden ring I think is still much more accessible for a newcomer. If you try Dark Souls 1, you’ll realize that the difficulty of the game also learns pretty hard into more tedious aspects.
Getting cursed in Dark Souls 1 means you’re HP is capped to half until you find the cure, as an example.
Kerbal Space Program.
Basically “do rocket science without instructions”.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1356/
