Diary of a new player
Posted: Sat Jun 20, 2015 12:43 pmHey guys, how's everyone doing? In most indie games I find interesting and especially ones that are planning to revamp the tutorial area and generally improve the NGE.
So far I've played fairly little, not even able to get past the first tutorial area yet mainly because I'm doing more research on the game then actually playing it but I do have some early first impressions that may prove valuable. When I made my character for the first time I had absolutely no idea how to move the camera, then on top of that when it told me to choose between the male or female characters I couldn't even see the female character and the male character, by default, was facing towards my avatar instead of towards the camera so I had no idea if it was a male or a female initially.
It was actually after randomly clicking MM3 to test if that was actually mouselook that I figured it out, this isn't very intuitive and should probably be explained initially. What I would suggest is enlarge the starting courtyard to make the two avatars more visible by placing them directly above where the player character starts (so their facing the camera) and then hide the gate you have to click to move to the second area behind the house. Then when a new character logs in for the first time tell them to choose a male or female as usual and then when you instruct them to open the gate tell them something like "Hold the middle mouse button (MM3) to rotate the camera to make the gate visible and then right click it to open it to proceed."
The last thing I want to note is the overlapping voices if I skip to a new step too quickly, I don't doubt this is already known about so I won't go into it to much, but suffice to say it's pretty confusing when it happens and makes the guidance dialog completely useless. Other then those things the character creation area is pretty decent, it's minimalistic and does what it needs to do in a short period of time. Now, moving on to the actual tutorial area.
The first thing I want to note is the first quest, giving the little rat a nut. I just want to point out that to everyone that already plays this game, giving items to a NPC or persistent object may seem normal but I can't tell you how many times I dropped something on the ground trying to give it to Nubs. Then finally, just on an off chance I left clicked to pick up the nut and then right clicked on Nubs and voila, that's how to do it. I would highly suggest that the tutorial voice explains to left click the nut in your inventory to pick it up and then right click on Nubs with the nut in your hand to give it to him. Otherwise you're going to get a lot of new players stuck on that part of the tutorial until they just quit.
Well, there are some early impressions, I'll write up some more later today or tomorrow.
So far I've played fairly little, not even able to get past the first tutorial area yet mainly because I'm doing more research on the game then actually playing it but I do have some early first impressions that may prove valuable. When I made my character for the first time I had absolutely no idea how to move the camera, then on top of that when it told me to choose between the male or female characters I couldn't even see the female character and the male character, by default, was facing towards my avatar instead of towards the camera so I had no idea if it was a male or a female initially.
It was actually after randomly clicking MM3 to test if that was actually mouselook that I figured it out, this isn't very intuitive and should probably be explained initially. What I would suggest is enlarge the starting courtyard to make the two avatars more visible by placing them directly above where the player character starts (so their facing the camera) and then hide the gate you have to click to move to the second area behind the house. Then when a new character logs in for the first time tell them to choose a male or female as usual and then when you instruct them to open the gate tell them something like "Hold the middle mouse button (MM3) to rotate the camera to make the gate visible and then right click it to open it to proceed."
The last thing I want to note is the overlapping voices if I skip to a new step too quickly, I don't doubt this is already known about so I won't go into it to much, but suffice to say it's pretty confusing when it happens and makes the guidance dialog completely useless. Other then those things the character creation area is pretty decent, it's minimalistic and does what it needs to do in a short period of time. Now, moving on to the actual tutorial area.
The first thing I want to note is the first quest, giving the little rat a nut. I just want to point out that to everyone that already plays this game, giving items to a NPC or persistent object may seem normal but I can't tell you how many times I dropped something on the ground trying to give it to Nubs. Then finally, just on an off chance I left clicked to pick up the nut and then right clicked on Nubs and voila, that's how to do it. I would highly suggest that the tutorial voice explains to left click the nut in your inventory to pick it up and then right click on Nubs with the nut in your hand to give it to him. Otherwise you're going to get a lot of new players stuck on that part of the tutorial until they just quit.
Well, there are some early impressions, I'll write up some more later today or tomorrow.
. 
and welcome to Salem.