Why I hate the new Tutorial

OK my 2 cents worth,as a 5 year vet I do find the first part of the tutorial not of much use to me,but for someone who has never played the game it will help,voice overs nice but you need to listen to it more than once to get it all,a message box would be handy as well.Right we have gone thru the first part and are now in Atlas.First impression wow look at all these people ,where is my first contact ah that guy there with the big coin over he,s head, this could be a bit smaller I think,get the first mission and ah an arrow points to the area no thinking where do I find these guys.And so we continue even as a vet I find these new contact story lines fun and as a new player very informative,as to the way the game is going I think overall this is a very good change.I do enjoy the new trial which I did not know how to join so I asked in the help channel which is the one the F2P people will have access to and a lot of helpful people there as well,so a thumbs up to you guys for passing your knowledge onto others. I think this will increase the game population which the company want and hopefully people will spend lots of cash so we can look forward to nice full servers and if to many WoW minded players get on VIP players can always retreat to Exalted channel for civilized play and conversation *remove tongue from cheek*.

The tutorial is actually not that bad to me, although to be honest it feels more like a commercial more than a tutorial. The opportunity to choose Hero or Villain is nice and so are the voice overs. I'd like to give Paragon Studios credit for doing voice over the right way--short interjections to communicate meaning and not reading every single line of screen text.

I also have to admit I don't understand the fight with the Giant Shivan at the end. I have done the fight a couple of times and have had a lot of trouble targeting and the monster and understanding whether I am hitting it. I still do not understand what the blinking floor panels in this mission mean. Everywhere else in the game a blinking floor panel means the player needs to get out of the way. I eventually figured out the idea was to move monsters into the line of fire, but the blinking panels under the Giant Shivan are unclear to me still--does that mean "get out of the way" or "the monster is being shot by an NPC"--something that happens nowhere else in the game? The Giant Shivan is one of the best Giant Monsters in the game with great animations, but this isn't a real battle. The monster also seems to be "driven back" even if it still has half of its HP.

The way I wish that final battle worked is like this: as the monster emerges, a signature hero or villain casts Shields on all the newbies to explain why they aren't being obliterated. When the monster is driven back, it is announced that the players will need to finish the job in the future. That would set the stage for later action. Right now the event feels like a mini movie. Somehow your extremely weak character drives back a giant demon. Minutes later, she's struggling to defeat a Lost Lieutenant.

You know, I just thought of something: A problem that I've had with the game for a couple of years now - it's shoving theatrics down my throat.

Let's not feign ignorance here - City of Heroes is a pretty standard click-n-kill dungeon crawler where the majority of the meat of the game is going into window dressing dungeon and killing for spoils and money until you reach an objective and kill or click it. Everything else is dressing up the core gameplay in distractions.

To some extent, these distractions are good, in that they enhance the experience, but TOO many distractions actually distract from the actual game with fluff. You see this with the "continuing tutorial missions" that are 90% dialogue trees, you see it with contacts like Roy Cooling whose arc is 90% gimmicks, you see it with Praetoria where half the missions are awkward and devoid of enemies, and now you see it in the new "Tutorial."

The old actual Tutorial had you do things you'd be doing in-game - fight enemies, use enhancements, use inspirations, con enemies and so forth. It was like the game, but with instructions. The new "Tutorial" is - as someone said before - little more than a commercial, shunning actual gameplay in favour of shoving flashing lights, spastic voices and big explosions in your life. It's as if we had Michael Bay design our new tutorial, but without the robot balls. It's all flash and no substance. It's not a tutorial so much as a slightly interactive cutscene. And you know what? My original City of Heroes CD from 2004 came with an intro cinematic. If that's all the "Tutorial" is supposed to be, then why not make a pre-rendered CGI cinematic or a big cutscene or some such? Because that's all this really is.

The funny thing is that the more you try to present an MMO like this action-packed thrill ride of constantly pumping adrenaline and high-octane excitement, the more you'll have people crash and crash hard once they come to grips with what an MMO really is - slow, calm, sedate and methodical. Once upon a time, the old Tutorial was a lot like what the actual game was - you standing around fiddling with your settings, reading text and trying to decide what to do. That's the game in a nutshell, and no amount of theatrics is going to change that. This IS what City of Heroes is. And yet they choose to dress it up like an action game that City of Heroes simply isn't, and in the process serving only to hamper actual gameplay.

You know what a proper Tutorial SHOULD teach players? How to fight and how to run missions, because that's what they'll be doing for the majority of their gameplay.

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Also, I'm pretty sure the new Tutorial NPCs do have info on them, but not on their right-click menu. You have to select them, then expand the Options dropdown at the bottom of the Target window. There's usually an Info link there. For some reasons, someone decided not to put Info on the right-click menu of any of the new NPCs dating as far back as Praetoria, which really makes no sense whatsoever.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I wonder when we'll get a thread from a new player complaining that from what they learned in the tutorial, they swam right up to Lusca and started attacking it and died almost immediately, and what's going on there, are the ingame GMs bugged?

Eco

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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

I have to agree with NewScrapper and Sam that the new tutorial really doesn't teach you much about how to play the game.

And you do have to sit there for a good while making sure your keybinds are correct and all the other things you have to fiddle with. Not just veterans, but new players will want to make sure everything is set. It's the first thing I do when starting a new game.

The old tutorial taught you about conning, enhancements, inspirations, how contacts work. The new tutorial skips all this.

The continuing training missions are less effective in my opinion because it requires you to play the game for quite a few levels before they tell you stuff you need to know from the get go. How to use a Trainer to level your character you learn at what? level 8 or so? Way too late.

I feel there are game mechanics you need to know before you set foot in Atlas Park and the new tutorial isn't teaching new players that. The old tutorial, tedious as it was, did teach you the things you needed to know before you were set loose on the game.

I don't like how rushed you feel during the new tutorial. It was Champions all over again, whose tutorial also took place during an alien invasion. The game even looked quite a bit like Champions, but at least in that game you learned basic game mechanics during the tutorial.

While I applaud the effort to update the tutorial, I feel the devs missed opportunities to actually teach new players the ground rules during the tutorial.

If the Twinshot arc is now considered part of the tutorial then I think you need to be offered it far sooner. Is there anything it covers that you haven't already done by then? Plus the contact is optional so new players are more likely to miss it than old hands who are looking for new content.

The other new low level hero mission is quite good, if we could have just added that to the existing missions I would have been very happy. Dumping them all for that and Twinshot is a bit crappy imo

*scratches head* I don't think you go to the university till Twin Shot's second story arc, which starts at lv10.