GW2 Tutorial improvments

[tanithryudo]

Servers seem to have crashed. Ah well.. More impressions while I wait, I guess.

Been skimming the forums, and I'm seeing a trend of negative feedback over features that all the people who've been following the production of GW2 already knew about. There's been people complaining about how you can't customize skills 1-5 (who apparently don't know about the skills bound to weapons thing), complaining about finding quests (who apparently don't know about the dynamic event system), etc.

Now, the default response to these threads have been along the lines of "you ought to have done better research before buying the game" along with the typical "lulwut" responses. However, I'm not sure that's a fair response. While it's true that the content of what these people are complaining about are not issues at all, the very fact that they are complaining about them after having played 10 levels or so is in itself a problem. And that problem is with the tutorial system.

Nowhere in the game itself does it ever advise you to get a different weapon to try out the skills there. Nowhere in the game itself does it explain the differences between dynamic events, heart quests, personal quests, etc. I can't believe that any game should be designed with the expectation that the non-veteran players, which ought to make up the majority of the expected playerbase, to have to go outside of the game to find out how the very basic mechanics of the game works. The wiki, the forums, etc. - those should be supplementary material, not required reading.

At the very least (and straight off the top of my head), there should be a popup hints box when you first get a weapon drop, telling you to that you get different skills if you equip different weapons. The first time you get a dynamic event notification, there should be a popup telling you what dynamic events are. And so forth. Then for people who are rolling their nth character and don't want to be spammed with these hint boxes, there can simply be an option to disable them from the UI controls.

Another option might be tutorial NPCs, kinda like there were in Kamadan/Chuhirr Fields in GW1, who are properly marked and who can give you helpful advice if you talk to them. Right now there are a ton of NPCs in towns and other areas who don't do anything. Making some of them tutorial NPCs in starting areas and in cities would give those bums a job. That way it's also completely voluntary for the player to talk to them if they are new to the game, and ignore them if they are not. (IMO, a great example would be some Ranger NPCs spread out in the world who when talked to might point you to the nearest place where you can find juvenile critters to tame. -_-)

Comments

[cashew.insanejournal.com]

Completely agree with your analysis. Thank you for pointing out that if non-veteran players and people who have not been following game development cannot figure out your system, your system is broken and needs work.

This reminds me of the EC episode on tutorials: IT IS AN ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY PART OF YOUR GAME. You need to beta test the crap out of your tutorial system, because if your tutorial is broken, NO ONE'S GOING TO TRY TO LEARN YOUR GAME.

Sorry, this is kind of a peeve of mine, I'm going to take this into my own journal to rant a bit.