Just Ran the Tutorial Again....

I was thinking of buying a new account for a mage character that uses Air/Earth, so I decided to run through the single player game with this combo first to see if I liked it. Well, that tutorial is really something.

I think that we experienced players forget how much information hits new players in the face all at once when they first start the game. So much writing to read! So much going on all at once at Solace Bridge! (I followed the game's advice and went with the Path of Love.) I'll leave it to others to debate how best to convey all of the complex portions of the game to new players in the easiest way possible.

I have 2 major concerns that I think will turn off most/all new players right away. First, the new Focus "tuning" is out of control for new players. I ran dry while fighting the first group of skeletons attacking Edvard the Bard. Now, I knew about auto-attack, so I turned that on and was able to fight all the enemies, but I don't think that's explained anywhere. I could be wrong about this, but, again, I didn't see anything about auto-attack (or Focus) in any of the giant walls of text that appeared on my screen. Why is Focus even an issue in the tutorial? If it declines at all, it should be miniscule. No player should run out of Focus in the current tutorial. You're forced to fight 3 groups of skeletons in rapid succession. There's no way for anyone to successfully manage their 125 Focus points in that situation.

New players will be confronted with a bar of 8 colorful icons on their screen and (probably) figure out they need to use these to attack. What are these 8 things? Some are attacks, some aren't. I guess they're just supposed to press them randomly and hope for the best. It starts to work in their favor when suddenly, the colorful icons are greyed out! They don't know why. They can't figure out that something called Focus is exhausted, so they can no longer fight. How many potential players are going to stick around after that?

The second issue I had was the choice in weapons. I wanted to choose a Mace for this character. I HAD to go with the bow instead. Okay, I guess I'll just switch to the Mace once I hit Soltown. Unfortunately, I can't do that, because , while I have 2 bow attack powers unlocked, I have no mace powers unlocked. Only Bludgeon is unlocked, but I can't use that since its not a "real" attack power. Again, I knew that I simply had to go into the Soltown Catacombs, put my mace on auto-attack, and let my character swing away at the first skeleton I found until Bludgeon leveled from 10 to 20. Then I could head back to Soltown and (if I have at least 100g at that point) I can unlock a single Mace attack.

New players are going to be stuck with the bow, whether they want to be or not. Why does the game force the choice of weapon on the new player? Why can't the player decide what he/she wants to use, and the game adapt accordingly?

Okay, I had my say. I hope this feedback helps. I remember being so confused when I first started playing this game, and I was disappointed to see that things haven't really improved since that time (for new players, I mean. I understand a little more about how to play! LOL)

Incidently, the jury's still out on the Air/Earth character. I like the concept, but I don't know if I should get a third account for it or just retrain one of my other characters to this combination.

 

One of the problems I have experienced repeating the tutorial with a new avatar is that my account settings from my previous avatars seem to stay in place, so I don't experience the tutorial with the default settings like a new avatar would. To test whether auto-attack is active by default I guess one could reset all settings to default using the reset settings button, but I've never done that.

 

That's a good point. On my attempt last night, auto-attack wasn't working initially, even though it is enabled on my "real" character on this account. However, it could ALSO have been that auto-attack was enabled, but auto-targeting wasn't targeting any enemies as quickly as I needed it to. So the issue is more like one of those word problems we used to do in math class in high school:

"You're facing 9 heavily armed skeletons, equipped with a bow, arrows, and only 125 Focus points. How do you best utilize your resources to win the battle? Extra Credit Question: As a new player, you know nothing of the 't' key (auto attack) or 'g' key (enemy targeting), so you're relying entirely on the game's 'auto' features."

Sounds tough!

 

What people seem to not realize is that this issue is present throughout the ENTIRE GAME.

 

Thanks Gregg247! Including considering expanding beyond the bow, we are still looking at how new players experience the tutorial. A lot of work is yet to go into it.

 

Certainly being able to pick play style and have it not associated with Virtue path is a must. You're not the only one to be running around with a bow but wanting to have some other weapon instead.