New (and Formerly New) Capsuleers,
The new AIR NPE is now live on Singularity for testing. Please make new characters, try out the new experience and help us to create the best new player experience EVE Online has ever seen.
We are all very excited to finally be able to share this with you! This new version of the NPE is due to launch soon, in September.
Please use this thread to discuss and provide feedback.
Looking forward to it.
m
The quality of the intro video is very low. If you have audio disabled by default on your client it does not play audio either. Halfway through the intro video I got the error āYou must be located in a station to use this serviceā and it chucked me straight into the tutorial.
Editing this as I play through the NPE:
I think the pacing is good, but I think it could be fixed in some places. When I fight the hostile fleet in the cosmic anomaly, after killing the frigates you have to burn almost 40km in a civilian AB astero to fight the cruiser. That needs iteration because it took almost 90 seconds.
Lack of consistency when you die for the first time. Balin says he is pinned down and canāt repair me but he is 7,500 meters from me and there are no enemies near him. Suppose that needs fixed for continuity reasons.
I did not play through the career paths but I think this is a good start. Since you still get teleported to a starter system after, something needs to be done about the several hundred mobile depots that get anchored on starter school undocks in Mandarin advertising fraternity corps, or the characters named something like āWelcomeTo Eve Onlineā masquerading as system messages advertising the same corps.
the intro video is low quality and very stuttery.
the graphics are great and it ran smooth
its somewhat well paced
one big issue i find is that if things donāt happen exactly in the right way then the dialog skipsā¦ I probably had 5 or 6 dialog boxes get skipped through no fault of my own, so I have no idea what it was trying to teach meā¦
the final segment when you jam the battleship is a bit nonsense, it takes forever for you to die and itās really not that compellingā¦ Iām pretty sure its because the machs are orbiting you and just missing constantlyā¦ thereās also no real drama for āsavingā the civilian ship. it happens the microsecond that you hit the ECM buttonā¦
awkward lag when you finally do die, when you go into your pod the game doesnāt explain to you why you had to be ākilled twiceāā¦
immediately introducing you to fitting is good.
i get what youāre doing by having the armor repairer not being onlinable immediately but it still feels awkward and broken, because you get that legacy text popup center top screen that makes it feel like an āerrorāā¦
this skill plan UI isā¦ questionableā¦ obviously this is the first time I"m seeing itā¦ but isnāt the point of a UI supposed to be everything is obvious and intuitive??
when you get gifted the 2500 SP and asked to click the button, my button was grayed out and unclickableā¦
and thus ends my analysis because the tutorial was broken at that point
Sorry for crappy English. Want to write everything down with fresh memory rather than thinking about fancy and grammatically proper wording. Will edit and add more as I play thru tutorial.
Video is total garbage. Few old promotion videos stitched together with some poor editing and dialogs are ready by voice synthesizer. While tutorial itself has proper voice actors or better quality voice synthesizer.
There is lot of misleading information thrown at new players in tutorial.
Cosmic anomalies preventing from being scanned? I already see complaining new players when they are ganked in mission pocket or fancy looking exploration site.
There is more of similar fake āmechanicsā explained by aura and other characters just to fit narrative of story and make it more flashy. All of it will bite back as real gameplay donāt work that way.
Web lack explanation on what it does. Aura gives basic idea about AB, guns and ECM (in first battle) but web is left out. Only thing Aura says is to activate web and that cruiser is caught in our web. But zero information on what web is actually doing to enemy.
We are supposed to ECM battleship that āpinned down civilian transportā but it donāt have point or scram on them. And even after using ECM blue fleet isnāt warping of and orca is still attacked by small stuff.
It took literally few minutes for BS to kill starter astero quite wrong from gameplay standpoint (as mentioned above. Will give bad first experience and end up with new players being blaped by NPC BS or players. āBecause they where week in tutorialā.) and very irritating on other hand. You sit there for so long unable to do anything, probably wondering what is going on.
Going from fancy astero to corvette? How this is ārewardā for our heroic fight and saving bunch of civilians? Either go with better ship or simply redo corvettes models. Since itās quite obvious that astero was chosen for itās looks.
Edit: So after that we are shoved into still broken career agents and as far as I can tell tutorial ends. I wonāt elaborate on how bad career agets are since many people already wrote pages of explaining issues and giving advices how to improve them. Yet CCP didnāt even touched them after so many years and goods know how many NPE iterations.
ps. Forgot to mention. When being in station for first time. Aura dialog box cover most of the windows and buttons she ask to press. Unless you take effort to move windows out of the way or click of almost invisible, minimalize button on dialog window. You canāt really progress further.
Maybe make text auto hide after voice over end, with blinking āexpandā button so it wonāt interfere
Iām seeing a few remarks about the intro video - donāt worry itās just a placeholder.
i quite like the new NPE. ill just assume the new intro video is a WIP 
visuals are great. all in all the tutorial shows you basically all you need to know to start the career agent missions, so thats good.
I do HAVE to object to teaching new players within minutes of opening the game that lasers on an astero are a good idea thoughā¦
I did it once without issues, and when i tried another char i got a black screen (crash?) immediatly after char creation and relogged which does break the tutorial and gets you stuck in a random system forever. EDIT: seems like that was because of skipping intro video immediately as noted in known issues
Same old CCPā¦ I started EVE in 2016. Back then there where no tutorial. Over years there where 5, 6? different iterations of introduction we have now. ffs stop going in circles, wasting money and dev time. Start fixing issues instead. Career agents need rework asp. There where few new missions added few years back so you have ability to work with that old code without breaking whole game.
Back when whole idea of focus on NPE where introduced. Different dev teams where announced. One that looks at first 10 mins of gameplay, 30, first hour etc. Over last 2-3 years (canāt remember correctly when this game of catching own tail exactly started). I curious what are result of those people work? Expect introduction that is changed each year (affects maybe first 10-20 minutes of gameplay) and addition of āopportunities windowā. Nothing really changed in actual NPE.
NPE donāt end when you speak to career agents
end of rantā¦
Ps. why you are getting back to āinceptionā style tutorial? Didnāt CCP said that idea of storyline type of tutorial didnāt work and thatās why they trashed it? Why make same mistakes over and over again?
Finally, the hard core mode we have always wanted is here.
Jokes aside, Iām am curious to see what you guys came up with and will check it out and provide feedback after having done so.
Stop revamping the tutorial portion and revamp the career agents. How many times is this in the last 5 years? 3 or 4?
The only thing I could give praise to in this yet another NPE are how the visuals LOOK - because they definitely donāt RUN well. On highest settings, with a very beefy gaming PC, every time the game loads a new face on the little tutorial window, the game chugs. The framerate is also chunky for whatever reason.
The NPE / tutorial is also mechanically pointless, and what little information it does give is misleading. For example, you had a chance to teach new players to align to destination before fleet warping - which would be awesome for future fleet PVP content - but nope, you just make the player automatically warp with the fleet.
You give the rookie an Astero as their first ship, make it look as if itās a straightforward combat ship and then take it away. Whatās the point of corvettes at this point? Either use the rookie corvettes or give the new player a real T1 frigate they can keep. Donāt give them an expensive faction frigate (and definitely not one that has a completely different role in the REAL game) and then take it away.
There is a fleet battle in the tutorial, and that couldāve served as such a great opportunity to introduce REAL fleet mechanics - but you botch that up too. You just send the rookie to kill multiple frigates, then tackle a single cruiser and kill it too, and finally ECM a couple battleships that SLOWLY kill the rookie. Itās both devoid of useful information and misleading at the same time.
Instead of having the rookie kill the frigates, why not have him tackle them and then have the rest of the fleet shoot them to death - to show the importance of tackling in fleet battles. You couldāve also done the ECM better. And finally, donāt have the rookie be SLOWLY killed by battleships. If youāre gonna kill the rookie and do it via a battleship, make it happen fast to show that battleships are not a joke.
And, once again, revamp the career agents, please. On rookie help channel, itās become almost a joke how often we link Mikeās or someone elseās guide video on how to do career agents. Especially Exploration 3/5.
I love the visuals and stuff, BUT it feels like at this stage the game just lies to me as a player. Thereās NOTHING in the game currently that looks as epic/cinematic or plays like this at all.
Thatās why I agree with the others that the whole game should need to update to this level and not just the NPE. People will go through this tutorial thinking āoh, cool!ā and then get disappointed and quit.
What will you do then? Design a new NPE again?
So, first thought, before I even get into the NPE: āShips of the Empireā in character creation. Can we get this to āShips of the [%N]ā where %N is the actual āEmpire/Federation/Republic/Stateā that each nation-state uses? I get that all four are āthe four empiresā, but it seems like this is a tiny, easy way to start giving people a hint about the differences between the four empires (ESPECIALLY if the NPE is taking new players out of the empires) right away.
Next thought: the first sequence (up to the point of exploding) isnāt terrible, but it introduces some inconsistencies that might confuse players later. For example: you get fleet warped, without being in a fleet, after being told to get into fleet formation. I can see this giving new players the idea that āget into fleetā just means flying over to where the other ships are. Yes, this can get quickly sorted out, but every misconception you add is something someone else has to undo. Introducing them seems counterproductive.
When I got to āenabling your station services panelā, yeah, it enabled that panelā¦ but thenā¦ nothing. Wasnāt in my pod, didnāt get a ship. The station hangar tab said was I in my pod, butā¦ no. Not in the pod. No pod visible. Experienceā¦ stopped.
Then, as others have pointed outā¦ this is a very different experience from, you know, EVE. That first sequence feels like it might be a decent intro for a single-player game, butā¦ overall, I donāt think any new player comes out of that fight with any sense of āI feel like I understand what happened thereā.
And yeah. No matter how amazing the NPE is, what comes next is more important, and hasnāt been touched in forever. An hour, maybe of slick, shiny, modern NPE that drops people into the same mission agent system, that still relies on a just mind-numbingly dense UI especially for the Agencyā¦
Fix that. Fix everything after the NPE. Because having new players log off in disgust, feeling like there was a bait-and-switch, is a lot more damaging to retention than having them go āok, this is hardā at first.
Considering all this, CCP is not interested in NPE. They are just interested in baiting people into thinking that EVE is awesome and make them sub before they realize itās not.
If they were interested in actual NPE, they would in fact look at the career agents because they are still the best introduction into basic and advanced features of EVE. CCP has never come close to replicating them in any of their attempts to āimproveā the NPE.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/papmku/improved_new_player_experience/ha69bes/
@CCP_Aurora The career agentsā days are numbered.
The only good introduction to EVE is being removed. And here I thought CCP could not be more delusional when they have never managed to create anything even remotely as good in terms of introducing people to the mechanics of EVE as the career agents.
is the racial selection screen new with this itās the first time I went to make a new toon in years and there is a lot of out of place, strangely worded or just wrong information on it. Like implying that railguns can swap damage types.
I got repped by the dude and then nothing further happened.
so I only made it to the part where youāre podded then after that it soft locked. So i can only comment on what was before that.
itās slowā¦ in a lot of parts there is just dead air with nothing happening for way too long as you move from point a to point b or wait for whatever is supposed to trigger the dialogue to do so. Worst was getting killed by the BBs it took over 5 minutes of me just sitting there with them trying to track me in my ship and then pod.
the Dialogue needs work its strange and feels out of place. Even if you donāt use the short hand use language that is common in eve. dont say
āenter warp formationā wtf does that even mean. Say align to __ and prepare to receive fleet warp. and even put the beacon in the overview had have the player align to it.
things like that were all over.
the fleet fight also could be handled better have the FC tell you what frigates to target in each order and then have him tell you to intercept the cruiser rather than aura. this is supposed to be their introduction and first impression of the game. You donāt need to make it exactly like what they will expect but at least make it a ācinematicā representation rather than something so detached.
finally im hoping the intro video is a place holder. the reuse of footage and the minimal editing looks really bad as the first thing you see but whats worse is the person doing the voice over sounds so board and disinterested in what is literally the introduction to this game and its universe.
No, itās been like that for a while now. And I think the intention on the Caldari listing is that they can switch between damage types by combining rails and missiles, not just by sticking with rails.
thatāsā¦ even more confusing as the rails arenāt needed to change your damage type and you shouldnāt be mixing guns in the first place.
im pretty sure they meant just that the missile can change damage types but worded it really bad and no one looked it over.
