Gaming

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.

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

Donkey Kong 64's tutorial is very poor. Most 3D platformers give you a safe area or easy first level, within which you can explore and learn the mechanics at your own pace. DK64 instead forces you through several tiny tutorial gauntlets, and it's a little jarring.

Driver 2

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.

Dark Souls 1. It's tutorial is decent for controls but it doesn't go nearly far enough. It doesn't explain rolling, weight and stats are only in level up screen, at least for prompting. So many things about the game you need to know that they leave to expensive trial and error.

I like The Backlogs' video on it. It's a flawed masterpiece.

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.

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.)

Gears of War 1 in online co-op. If you take the tutorial path instead of the right-into-the-game path, you can end up softlocked because it expects you to throw grenades at one point but doesn't explain it.

Ultima Online. Idk how it is now, as I haven't played on vanilla servers in like 20yrs, but you basically just got dropped into the game. Luckily, I had a friend who did play who taught me the basics. Otherwise, I woulda just been running around town aimlessly.

Eve Online is kinda like that, too. Originally, I don't think there was a tutorial (I started in 2005). Over the years, they've implemented a tutorial and iterated on it. Or just completely re-did it over and over again. It was bad. Like Ultima Online, Eve is a sandbox MMO, so no tutorial can show you everything possible in the game. But even the basics felt like not enough and just long and drawn out. The system in place today is certainly better, but players are still better off making friends quickly to learn the ins and outs.

Planetside 2 also originally didn't have a tutorial. I played the original Planetside back in the day, but the games are pretty different from each other. So it was a bit rough in the beginning. I remember coming across the early biolabs and running around the bottom of it for a quite a long time until realizing there were then "satelite bases" which had jumppads to the top of the biolab entries.

Even when a tutorial was introduced, it was pretty crap. Like sure you learned the basics of how to move, and how to shoot, and how to spawn vehicles. But the game is so much more than that. Big parts of Planetside 2 is understanding the map and environment, flow of battles, where each bases' capture points are, and of course positioning. And that's all stuff you don't get in the tutorial because there are so many different bases and the continent are large. Plus, some of that can only be learned by playing the game. Which can be frustrating when a player is dying 50 times in a row while getting a single kill (if they're lucky), because they don't yet understand anything I mentioned.

Witcher 2, before they patched in the tutorial mission. (Which is still not very good as a tutorial.) Enjoy getting a shitkicking in the very first fight, since you've no idea of the controls.

The original Runescape for sure

That BF game, where the tutorial instructions were given in broken english by some manager from the company making the game. Pure cringe.