Far more detailed adventuring and crafting tutorials are needed

There are a lot of issues this game has, and I'd like to start with what I feel is missing the most: Detailed combat (including deck building/free attack) and crafting (for every type of crafting) tutorials. For crafting tutorials, it's been a really long time since I've played FFXIV, but I think that game may be good inspiration for how to do tutorial quests. It may also help to add crafting daily quests that can be done for rewards (there are already resource gathering ones in the form of storehouse containers). Crafting feels extremely complex to me and I understand very little of it.

For reference: I originally found out about this game through a Youtuber, who managed to completely miss out on setting up a combat bar beyond adding Aimed Shot to it, and then switching to sword-fighting, without actually dragging skill glyphs to the bar so he could use them. He ended up autoattacking with a sword the rest of the way through his review of the game because he didn't know about how skills work and how you have to set them up, and this is stuff that would happen in the outskirts areas, before you even get to consider deck building, which I still don't fully understand myself.

There are other things, but those will have to go in separate topics.

 

I do believe this is the early game experience for the vast majority of the player base.

Many attempts were made to try and raise devs' awareness of the shady early game.

Some players will say it's meant to be vague and "mysterious" so new players aren't spoon fed with information and have to find out. Some say it's a game designed to have a strong community and you should look for "that great YouTube video with a player made comprehensive tutorial". There are good tutorials out there indeed.

But I digress, long story short is devs aren't very likely to make a tighter early game experience.

 

Instead of coming in the aftermath of a "great" battle, the player should run right into the middle of it. There should be a greater sense of urgency and excitement. You can start out with a hundred or so fighters. If resources are a concern, you can quickly thin those numbers out as fighters fall on the battle field. To me, it is almost as if Catnip doesn't want to lock the players into an exciting set-piece that gets them riled up for an epic adventure, from the start. It is as if Catnip ONLY wants hardcore players who suffer through a milquetoast intro to get to the good parts. As if they have so many people trying to join, they have to set some sort of admission fee. Come to think of it, are there any real exciting set pieces in the whole game?

 

Fwiw, there have been a lot of efforts to improve the new player experience, but it's still kind of a mess. I remember when I first started, cursor mode was not the default, so you couldn't even open the options menu or anything else without first figuring out the UI hotkeys through trial and error, so at least it's not that bad anymore.

I agree though. Starting the game still needs to be a whole lot more intuitive and informative. For all of SotA's faults, single player combat is pretty fun once you understand how it all works. Getting people to that point should be a top priority.