Beta 6 Tutorial and New Player Help Feedback

I just ran into a level 1 who wasn’t able to harvest one of the mushrooms in the starter area. He was hitting the mushroom with his gatherer, and it was making a puff of smoke, but it wouldn’t harvest. I asked if he had the quest, and he said he did.

This should be fixed now, sorry about that.

I had a buddy over and asked him to give the game a go then to give me his feedback. He played for about an hour and echoed what KatVet and Kenneth_L are saying in another thread. I tried not to intervene and tell him what to do as I believe it should be obvious or explained in a well designed game.

  1. He liked the character creation but didn’t realize he would be able to play the other classes after he made the first discipline choice.
  2. After 30 mins of play he was still thoroughly confused about how he was supposed to play. I had to interject and explain basics: How to access the journal, how to equip tools and their use, and how his class, the Paladin, worked. His biggest complaint was that he didn’t feel like he was hitting anything, just kind of stuck his hammer into the enemy and did damage.

After an hour of play I don’t even think he knew that he could or should go into Highsteep. As an new player I am not sure he understood without me explaining it that the objective is: talk to NPC’s, get missions, kill / collect shit, gain xp.

Okay thats good feedback thank you for doing that, we will continue to work on improving the first 5 hours of gameplay including the tutorial.

I helped my friend through the first hour of playtime. A couple of things I had to explain:

  1. How to open the menu
  2. How to grab things off the toolbelt
  3. How to equip the harvester
  4. How to interact with the “continue” button on dialogs - it wasn’t clear that she should poke that with her controller
  5. That missions were found in a different location than lore quests (journal vs inventory menu)
  6. How to find Sicilus (I answered this 3 or 4 times from other people while helping my friend) - there needs to be a better indicator of the location of the ramp. An archway over it or something would make it easier to see. Also, some indication that Sicilus is associated with the dragon shop in the quest log might help.
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Okay I will look at getting those added to the tutorial, thank you for the feedback especially from the perspective of a new player. Was the combat class (whichever they played) explained well enough in the tutorial images that popped up to at least attack and play the class at a basic level?

I was holding aggro for her, so she was able to figure it out while I poked things with a hammer. She didn’t ask any questions about how to play Shaman, except she didn’t understand why some totems had throwable stuff and some didn’t. Oh, and the hex totem wasn’t very clear. Actually, now I’m not so sure she knows how to read the tooltips, since all of that is explained there…

Oh, one other one I overheard a player asking about was how to pick up and store loot bags. I know that one has an animation, but it apparently didn’t pop up for them?

For my buddy playing a Paladin, no. I asked him your question and he said he just didn’t know which of his actions would cause more damage. Was it distance from enemy, strength of hit, angle, etc. That would cause the damage. He didn’t see the pop-ups as a tutorial but more as “hint” which were good but didnt provide the information he felt he needed to understand the combat.

Some animations popped up midst-fight for me and I tried to get rid of them asap, this might be one of those. Once loot drops there can be already respawn outside HS or you pulled the next mob, so no time to ponder over animations.
People might be different, but it takes me more time to figure out the animations than reading a text. Things you need to know in a fight and all the very basics should be explained elsewhere, possibly in the tutorial quests.

Is there a way to reset the tutorials on a machine? I want to make a new character to give feedback from a fresh perspective but I’ve already closed them on my main account.

Currently theres not, we are working on getting this in game though so that if you create a new charchter they will show again, and then also we are working on adding an additonal menu option to view them again whenever you want to.

That’s a shame, not even a config file or something to reset it? Or would a reinstall reset it?
I’m do QA work normally, so I’m pretty good at pretending like I have no idea how to do anything with a system and really wanted to try it out.

This is something were doing in the next couple of days.

Would it perhaps be better to put the tutorial animations in the Journal?

I was thinking a wrist “watch” notification as it is in RecRoom. We still do not have equip for that slot.

Maybe have an “okay” button instead of an X for the initial “how to cast” graphic. I logged and that popped up and I didn’t really look at it the first time since I already knew how to cast. I assumed it was tracking my progress and would go away after I successfully cast a spell, and the X meant I did it wrong…I ended up running around for about 10 minutes with that in my face before realizing all I had to do was hit the X to make it go away:P

Says more about me, no doubt, but it’s something that could potential confuse other people too:)

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The X was pretty high up. I didn’t notice it at first because it was out of my field of view.

I love the new info menu! :slightly_smiling_face:

A couple of things:

  • Right now, the class mechanics only shows the single animated graphic. Would it be possible to either add a copy of the journal text about mechanics to the info screen, or put a note just under the title for class mechanics noting that the journal has more info about the mechanics?
  • When watching the runemage animation, there’s no indication for how to submit spells after they are drawn. Nor is there an indication for how to fire or guide the spells (though this last may be self-explanatory).

There are a couple of discrepancies in the actual journal, related to some QoL changes that have been made:

  • The info about the musketeer turret still says to shake it to switch between modes.
  • There is nothing about shield bash in the warrior section. It was pretty self-explanatory before, when it could be activated by accident. Now that it requires a trigger pull as well, maybe it needs to be added to the book? (Was doing a dungeon with someone who was experienced as a tank from regular Orbus, and it took us all two or three wipes to figure out that he didn’t know about the trigger pull mechanic)
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were currently reworking the journal pages for class mechanics so once thats live let us know what you think/if we missed anything, but I think we got all the new mechanics covered