The biggest games around nowadays, Fortnite, PUBG, League, CS etc. offer very little tutorialisation, if any. Darks Souls got super popular with this. The survival genre too. Among indies, there's no shortage of games that are all about self-discovery either.
Even Nintendo, which is among the worst offenders of overtutorialisation has dialed back in games like BOTW.
I don't think we've ever had more games with minimal tutorials than today. From walking sims to hardcore action games.
1) Referring to SP only
2) Survival games are grindy, which falls outside the criteria of 12 hour to beat, 20 hours to exhaust of collectibles type games that I stated earlier in the thread; think about a typical 2D Mario game or a Platinum campaign like Bayonetta and Vanquish. I want tight, focused, fine-tuned level design with zero repetitive elements, so you can discard any games that have EXP bars, RPG-like inventory management, and other similar busywork. Celeste is a good example of a 2018 game that fulfills my wishes, it is a complete game designed exactly how I want my games to be like.
3) BotW allows freedom at the cost of having flat difficulty/complexity curves when it comes to dungeon/shrine design. They are all self contained in the sense that every shrine and dungeon is designed as though it's your first, which puts massive restrictions on how far you can take a concept. In other words there is nothing even close to as complex and satisfying as the Stone Tower temple in BotW, for reasons that follow from the choice of an expansive world free to be explored however one pleases.
4) This goes back to the BotW example; game design has taken a hit in order to ensure that you don't need to feed explicit tutorialization. If you simplify and homogenize control schemes across the board, so that an XBOX FPS game has the same button inputs as a Playstation one, etc., then yes you don't need to teach players anything! But you also loose innovation in the process.
The other side of the coin is not tutorials, but
guiding systems, well past the beginning stages of games. Like in Spider Man you have this person talking through the com unit informing you about things and its main role is to guide you towards your next objective, and all you do as a player is to follow orders essentially. BotW handles this aspect well, to be fair, because you are purely driven by your curiosity. However, to work around this fact, Nintendo designed the game such that you can make significant progress whichever direction you choose to go in, or whatever you choose to do, so it's kind of pointless. As a result, in modern games you never get the feeling that you are stuck, wondering where the heck to go and what to do next in order to progress the game further. You can understand this notion more clearly when you have people go back to play old games, say A Link to the Past or Super Metroid, because in those games it's possible to wander around aimlessly for hours without having accomplished anything that is trackable in the game, so it feels like you are "wasting time", and the players get frustrated and bored, either putting the games down or look up guides online. This is what has happened in the past decades, the shift towards frictionless gaming, and I find little pleasure from such games for the indirect reason that they must be simplified and made easy to work.
The fundamental problem games have today is that anyone, no matter their experience, must be able to pick up the controller at any stage in the game and be able to accomplish progress, i.e. have fun. Because a person who doesn't instantly derive enjoyment from a piece of entertainment would never buy it. For example, Bayonetta gameplay looks awesome and fluid in Youtube clips uploaded by skilled players, but good luck replicating that on your first try. So instead of expecting more from your players, you dumb the design down so that
anyone can make combat look amazing and cinematic, like what happens in Assassin's Creed, which is terribly shallow with a combat system that is essentially a QTE. This is what ruined gaming: developers expecting less work from their players, and players rejecting games that demand more from you.
