Stopped reading after life movement npc.
This is a ton of development time and money in the wrong direction. This is like the drifter npe (which was apparently worse than just career agents) and going even further in that themepark-like direction.
You’re right that later generations of gamers are all about insta-gratification and don’t want to look things up…but eve has always been a niche game. Eve was never full of the ‘average gamer’ and never had great retention. It would take a ground up redesign to interest todays todays ‘average gamer’. Notice how half of new players quit after a couple of hours. They probably log in, fly around a bit and probably decide that the very way eve works is too complicated, unintuitive and un-fun. Finding things via the overview, the market and trading, skill training, just the way your ship moves and shoots etc, all these are completely different to other games.
Even when eve was in it’s prime, it was still not like other games. The message eve players used to say to new players:
‘Forget what you think you know about MMO’s. Eve is not other MMO’s’.
And despite that, and despite eve being an even more complicated and unintuitive game with even worse UI back in the day, it still attracted players better than now.
Moral of the story:
Don’t pursue ‘average gamer’. Even if the average gamer gets past the first few hours in eve, they will not engage with the way eve works. They won’t engage in the sandbox but instead ask for more themepark. They wont understand why they can’t buy something off the market and have it delivered instantly and for free. They won’t understand why ‘player killing’ (lol) is allowed in high-sec. They wont understand the value of items. And so on and so on.
These players will not be here for long. Never will. They want a fundamentally different game or for eve to have a ground-up redesign.
Instead, the players that are going to stick around are going to be players that enjoy the social and sandbox elements of eve. These are the areas of the game we should promote and focus on. This should be where new players are pointed to.