Well, after seeing what they’ve been doing with the NPE, I’m somewhat pessimistic. They have literally taught players things that were wrong, and seemed way more interesting in trying to hook players with a themepark style experience that wasn’t reflective of the actual game, than they were of actually teaching newbros what they need to know in order to have fun and success in this game.
And, I’m not just talking about basic mechanics. Don’t get me wrong, that’s definitely stuff that should be taught. But I’m starting to think that it might also be important to teach players other stuff as well. For example:
- Nature of the game stuff
- sandbox → many ways to solve problems and achieve goals
- UPvP → can’t optimize for PvE efficiency only / PvP avoidance
- harsh death mechanic → think about risk management
- Common player misconceptions
- players looking at ship loss as lost progression → player skill progression is way more important than what you have in your hangar bays or wallet
- players thinking bigger/more expensive/more skill intensive is better → bigger is not necessarily better. Instead, it’s all about picking the right tool for the job
- players thinking that power inequality is a problem → instilling in players a strong internal locus of control
Am I wrong here? It’s funny, the first few comments in the official dev thread about it focus on the extrinsic rewards. And, I’m just like, am I the crazy one here?
Anyway, I’ll check it out later. Hopefully, they at least got the basic mechanics stuff right (i.e. chose to focus on more useful stuff and it’s factually correct).