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Author Topic: New Player Experience SUCKS  (Read 2788 times)

BCS

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Re: New Player Experience SUCKS
« Reply #15 on: November 15, 2022, 10:21:09 PM »

I just want to point out that there's a difference between "the NPE sucks" and "game is complex".

No amount of NPE tweaking will get rid of the simple fact that all the game systems, tokens, etc. need to be learned by the player. At some point you just have to sit down and read the wiki. The only alternative is to remove 90% of game's content and I hope no one wants to do THAT.
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Linnis

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Re: New Player Experience SUCKS
« Reply #16 on: November 16, 2022, 12:29:26 AM »

That kind of sounds like the main menu missions to be honest.  Personally, I think it's a good idea to have new players at least try all the main menu vanilla missions, if not win at them, before going to the campaign.

Yeah, but new players will not be thinking of doing those first. Its normal nowadays to think that the normal "campaign" will offer a gradual difficulty curve, as it should.

I am of the strong opinion that this is a HUGE problem that needs to be fixed before its shown on steam or any platform.
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Lortus

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Re: New Player Experience SUCKS
« Reply #17 on: November 16, 2022, 12:54:14 AM »

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The second problem is the inverse difficulty. Letting the kids play with my saved games with an end game fleet they can go in with no experience and have a great time.  But you throw them into a wolf and tell them to fight a hound half of them will fail on their first try.

So true. The recommended start should be a pretty large fleet for new players imo. And I don't think easy mode solves anything. I'd sooner quit a game than start a new save on a game I wasn't enjoying just to try the easy mode.

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Start the campaign with an option to have them as a officer somehow and have the player participate is as many battles as they want. When a battle is lost the player loses no progression and the system continues.

I like this idea. I don't think the menu missions accomplish this nearly as well because they are not in the environment you will be dealing with, and again a lot of people will skip over the missions. I know I did.

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No amount of NPE tweaking will get rid of the simple fact that all the game systems, tokens, etc. need to be learned by the player. At some point you just have to sit down and read the wiki. The only alternative is to remove 90% of game's content and I hope no one wants to do THAT.

You only have to sit down and read the wiki because many of the mechanics are left unexplained. Plenty of complex games don't leave new players stranded.
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Grievous69

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Re: New Player Experience SUCKS
« Reply #18 on: November 16, 2022, 01:52:28 AM »

Let's all just remember what type of game this is. The joy of being a new player is exploring new things, figuring out stuff and strats for yourself. I don't disagree that the new player experience could be improved with better information and hints during the tutorial, but some people here are really overreacting. If someone took my first time with this game by constantly showing me "do this, take that, don't take on this fight...", my experience would be much poorer and less exciting. This is a subjective opinion but throwing a manual at players basically does the opposite, it ensures most people won't bother to read through it all.

And starting out with a big fleet is a dumb idea for new folks. You won't learn proper resource management and how the fleets scale, you're immediately thrown with a dozen ships, so even less chance someone take a shot at manual refits. Not to mention they'd already be expected to be good with managing a fleet of multiple ships with officers. And slow fleets tend to get caught more often. There's just so much wrong there.

So please keep in mind we're talking about an indie open world space game here. The last thing it needs is neon light pointing in every direction.

Btw there's nothing wrong with using the wiki for help, it's much easier to get the information you want fast. I played many games like that and I wouldn't call them bad or tedious experiences. If anything it would be worse to have everything cluttered in game.
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Yunru

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Re: New Player Experience SUCKS
« Reply #19 on: November 16, 2022, 05:10:37 AM »

There's no way any game can be successful without holding the player's hands, just imagine if Minecraft had no instructions or directions, and you had to look at the wiki to even know to punch tree, get wood - Oh wait.

Grievous69

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Re: New Player Experience SUCKS
« Reply #20 on: November 16, 2022, 05:17:14 AM »

Mate you contradicted your own point... And there is a huge number of games that don't hold your hand and are successful.

Unless you count success only if it's a AAA game developed by Ubisoft, EA or some other cesspool company.
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Hiruma Kai

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Re: New Player Experience SUCKS
« Reply #21 on: November 16, 2022, 08:23:59 AM »

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The second problem is the inverse difficulty. Letting the kids play with my saved games with an end game fleet they can go in with no experience and have a great time.  But you throw them into a wolf and tell them to fight a hound half of them will fail on their first try.

So true. The recommended start should be a pretty large fleet for new players imo. And I don't think easy mode solves anything. I'd sooner quit a game than start a new save on a game I wasn't enjoying just to try the easy mode.

I would tend to disagree on the inverse difficulty curve.  Let me ask Linnis this, did the kids refit the ships from empty with a pile of weapons at a colony, or did they use your already at end game fit ships?  If they are not fitting from scratch, then I don't think this proves the game has an inverse learning curve.  I'm guessing the fact they are finding success is because you are playing the hardest portion of the end game for them, the fitting screen.  It only seems easy because you're an experienced player discounting the fitting step as not being part of playing at end game.  Fitting is arguably harder and more important than having average piloting skills.  Especially for full sized end game fleets.

I think the appropriate comparison to the Wolf and Hound fight at the start of the game would be handing the kids infinite credits, a level 15 character with no skill points spent yet, 100 story points, and a set of colonies that can build anything in a month, and seeing if they have just as much success against an end game fleet such as a late stage Ordo, the double Tesseracts, or the Tesseract bounty.  My guess, which I admittedly have no evidence to back up, is they would have difficulty coming up with good fits and a good end game fleet composition without any prior experience that would have anywhere near the same level of success as your pre-fit fleets.

Hmm...  Let me talk to my spouse about gathering evidence.

As for starting with a larger fleet, I'm going to guess that just leads to a tendency for a new player to over deploy which in turn results in logistics issues.  If you don't know how to fight the easy fights with a minimal deployment, you really shouldn't have moved onto a big fleet which lets you win simply by virtue of over deploying and thus running into logistics issues on the campaign layer.  Personally, I would recommend any new player start with the Wolf and Kite and do the tutorial which will add in enough ships through salvage to have a reasonable fleet for a new player to run.  I tend to think the faster starts + tutorial is perhaps a tiny bit too big for a brand-new player.

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Start the campaign with an option to have them as a officer somehow and have the player participate is as many battles as they want. When a battle is lost the player loses no progression and the system continues.

I like this idea. I don't think the menu missions accomplish this nearly as well because they are not in the environment you will be dealing with, and again a lot of people will skip over the missions. I know I did.

So, are we suggesting this play as an officer in a larger fleet (that they do or do not have fleet command over?) be forced?  Or if this is an option, why wouldn't your typical player skip over it just like the tutorials, missions, and the easy mode option which people in this thread suggested they or other players do now?

Do we just need to ask if the player wants to try missions from the new game questionnaire?

1. Do the combat tutorial
2. Jump to missions screen to learn without penalty
3. Begin a normal campaign

Would this proposed officer in an AI fleet just be a similar question?

1. Start as an officer with fleet decisions made by AI to learn without penalty
2. Start a normal campaign where you decide everything

Would simply having the last option greyed out until you've done a sufficient amount of the prior options work?

Actually, would renaming new game to new campaign (and load game to load campaign), help at all to make it clearer that there is more to the game than just the campaign, and would that result in a higher percentage of players going from top to bottom on the menu (i.e. tutorial, then mission, then campaign?.  I'm pretty sure they are in that order on the menu for a reason.

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No amount of NPE tweaking will get rid of the simple fact that all the game systems, tokens, etc. need to be learned by the player. At some point you just have to sit down and read the wiki. The only alternative is to remove 90% of game's content and I hope no one wants to do THAT.

You only have to sit down and read the wiki because many of the mechanics are left unexplained. Plenty of complex games don't leave new players stranded.

I'd be really curious to see how new player experiences are done well in a complex sandbox game with multiple game layers. If a player goes through the combat tutorials, some missions, and then the campaign tutorial, I think it should be pretty comparable to explaining the mechanics in other games.  It then becomes a question of convincing players it's worthwhile to do those first rather than just jumping right in.

And I don't want that jumping right in option taken away for experienced players.  Certainly, I don't want a gradual ramp up of difficulty in the overall game as a veteran, since that just becomes busy work in a sandbox game.  I just want to play the game.  After playing the campaign a dozen times, I'd rather just add a mod that skips it, because well, it's relatively linear and only so many branches. 

Don't get me wrong, the campaign is great, but David can only write so fast and so much. :)

I think the campaign tutorial and pop-ups could definitely be expanded upon by touching upon more mechanics, perhaps a more depth in places, and a more direct pointer to the main campaign, but I'm not sure the overall format really needs to be drastically overhauled.  It is a sandbox game, and at some point, you've got to just be cut loose.  You will not always have a clear arrow pointing to the next place to go (other than in the main campaign).
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Schwartz

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Re: New Player Experience SUCKS
« Reply #22 on: November 16, 2022, 08:41:57 AM »

The thing with the tutorial is that it's both on-rails (you can mess that up) and covering things that are just plain not easy, like sneaking around and kiting (you can mess that up, too). Afterwards there's ample opportunity to drive your fleet nowhere good and either get killed or supply-starved there. Logistical planning is integral to how you play the game, that's why we get fuel estimates on the map. You have to hustle at the start of the game.

Even as a veteran, I messed up the tutorial before. Force-repairing your salvage instead of getting free repairs through dialogue. Forgetting to bring crew or not hitting "suspend" before you're dry. Getting in between the two guard fleets with a fleet that can't handle them. Plenty of things to go wrong. So it's not "Baby's first tutorial" like so many games do, but I consider that a positive.

Going into a core system and getting nuked by a big fleet is kind of a rarity if you're not hostile to the system faction. It can happen when there's a pirate raid there, but then you get told beforehand via Intel. You can go dark and sneak in, have a look around first. A lot of grief can be avoided and it's often down to the player acting care-free when he should have paused and taken a moment to consider things.
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Mortrag

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Re: New Player Experience SUCKS
« Reply #23 on: November 16, 2022, 09:13:55 AM »

Quote
The second problem is the inverse difficulty. Letting the kids play with my saved games with an end game fleet they can go in with no experience and have a great time.  But you throw them into a wolf and tell them to fight a hound half of them will fail on their first try.

So true. The recommended start should be a pretty large fleet for new players imo. ...

I strongly disagree with that. After I played the tutorial mission, I immediately started a new game with only two ships, because the big fleet you get for the last fight of the tutorial was for me an overwhelming amount of data/information.
I really prefer to ad one ship after another, so I can understand the capabilities of each ship and so learn the game step by step.

Giving the player more options for a small start, instead of just 4 different ships, that's something I would really appreciate.
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snicka

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Re: New Player Experience SUCKS
« Reply #25 on: November 18, 2022, 01:11:19 AM »

It may be a good idea to put a mission with bare bones hulls needed to be outfitted and a selection of weapons - to emphasise the importance of fitting.

All that with autofit disabled.
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Slim_NZ

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Re: New Player Experience SUCKS
« Reply #26 on: November 18, 2022, 05:14:52 AM »

I can't even finish the tutorial section after three goes

Hmm - I'd *love* to know exactly what is giving you trouble in the tutorial, especially on the easy difficulty. It can be hard for me to step away from the game enough to see what might be a major stumbling block, and I'd really appreciate hearing the specifics of what's causing you problems.

There is a real lack of structure that is going to prevent new players from even getting past the tutorial.

(I mean, I hear what you're saying! And improvements can always be made. But a "lack of structure" is also kind of a key thing with a sandbox game, isn't it? And I'm not sure that putting the tutorial on hard rails would do the player any favors in the long run.)

My biggest issue is that all of the quests in the early game are so far away that you don't have the logistics to get there.  I couldn't find anything worth doing in the initial sectors.  The first time I actually used the emergency beacon, the fleet that turned up refused to help me and then smoked me in a fight.  I've just had a playthru that I got to level 6, but AGAIN, got trapped doing a bounty that was too far away.  I assume that there will be some resources in the outer systems - but there is literally nothing in EVERY system.  No fuel.  No one to steal or buy fuel from...

No sandbox game ever just throws you into the sandbox with nothing you can do early game.  There should be enough pirates in the first couple of sectors to farm and build up.  The initial bounties shouldn't be so far away that you will lose the game going for them.  The game never explained that there is NOTHING in the outer systems.  The only reason I even got to level 6 was because I stumbled across a space station that gave me a $300k item to sell.

I don't know exactly what you do, but I feel like you need to do something to keep players in that first 1-4 hours because at the moment it is deeply frustrating.  If this were on Steam I would have refunded to be honest.
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Grievous69

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Re: New Player Experience SUCKS
« Reply #27 on: November 18, 2022, 05:34:52 AM »

Yeah, the importance of tankers should really be highlighted. Some will assume you'd only need those to trade fuel but they enable you to go outside of the core casually.
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Megas

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Re: New Player Experience SUCKS
« Reply #28 on: November 18, 2022, 06:00:56 AM »

I dislike early-game combat (especially with how bounties spike faster than player can build-up).  In my last game, instead of diving into fights immediately as I have done over the years, I took Apogee start and abused the infamous black market loops until I had millions, a fleet with close to twenty ships, and enough xp from trade to reach level 6 and Hull Restoration to get pristine ships from loot and lower victory threshold from flawless to several ships lost.  All of that before my first real fight.

Does not help that after about two in-game years, the easy trade loops become rarer (and harder to exploit regularly), so I am incentivized to abuse black market trades as often and early as possible.

I prefer to overdeploy when possible and finish fights quickly, especially against the (post-0.8 release) cowardly AI.  Player can save money by deploying overwhelming force for fast flawless victory instead of losing money by losing ships and/or burning CR beyond deployment costs because too few ships could not kill the enemy fast enough before PPT timed out.
« Last Edit: November 18, 2022, 06:08:50 AM by Megas »
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Hiruma Kai

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Re: New Player Experience SUCKS
« Reply #29 on: November 18, 2022, 07:19:25 AM »

I dislike early-game combat (especially with how bounties spike faster than player can build-up).

The difficulty scaling for the intel bounties is probably faster than what a new player should be expected to handle, although military contacts can mitigate some of that problem for bounty focused playthroughs.  If you can get a military contact (or even better a few of them in a locallized area), that can help make a combat only playthrough smoother for a new player. 

Personally, I think there needs to be more breadcrumbs pointing to the guaranteed military contact on Coatl.  If you progress through the campaign (which a new player will likely do, assuming they realize it is there), you get handed the option to grab 1 military/trade contact guaranteed, and another depending on your choices, so that is at least something.

Alternatively, one might be able to add a nice perk to commissions - a guaranteed liaison officer contact like how we have Alviss with the academy.  Maybe turn whoever you ask for a commission into a contact?  A typical first playthrough might then be pointed towards a start with a hegemony commission and a military contact in Jangala.  If you leave the commission and come back, the same liaison should be assigned to avoid spamming contacts.  Alternatively, any faction that offers commissions might have a designated and fixed liaison officer (perhaps with unique dialogue and unique faction specific missions like Alviss?).  Text from the Jangala mission might indicate the commission means having a liaison officer assigned that can provide you combat missions.  You might even imagine one of the offered missions being a return to the academy to do a quick patrol of Galatia or drop off a Hegemony officer at the academy.

Edit:  I will point out it is a bit rough when you take a commission, say with the Hegemony, and it goes to war with Tri-Tach, which makes the one guaranteed campaign contact hard to reach. By ensuring a commission comes with a contact like Alviss, it guarantees you have at least one accessible contact when your faction decides to declare war on the entire sector at random.  The problem with RNG only contacts is that some new player somewhere will statistically not get one for a while.

As a veteran player, I will note it is possible to do intel bounty only runs all the way up to end bounties, but yeah, I wouldn't say it is an easy thing to do or expect a brand new player to be able to do so.  On the other hand, as a veteran player I like that scaling, but I'm probably in the minority there.  Expecting a new player to skip early game combat is probably doing them a disservice (unless they've become accomplished at combat outside of the campaign via missions), given just throwing them a bunch of money from trade and saying build an effective combat fleet without experience with smaller fleets or what various ships do isn't necessarily going to work out.  So I think the pick your difficulty contacts are the way to go, but need a bit more of a guarantee that you actually have that as an option as a new player.

« Last Edit: November 18, 2022, 07:31:22 AM by Hiruma Kai »
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