by Elirian » Sat Apr 24, 2010 10:03 am
As a new player, this is the first thing that struck me that the game needed. It wasn't a big problem for me because I typically read every guide I can find and browse the wiki of any game I play well before I start playing it, but as I was making my way along it occured to me how many people must go 'what the hell?' and give up.
Now personally, I'm glad, as I don't even tend to enjoy the company of those who wait for the game to feed them answers, rather than trying things out or looking for information from other players on community sites such as forums and wikis (and I'm sure there are players who would laugh at me for using those resources too). However, I definitely think you would see dramatically higher player retention if there were a few wow style tooltip/hints available at the beginning. I was going to suggest having thought bubbles such as 'If I just did a, b would be easy', 'I'm getting hungry, maybe I should do c', or the like.
I did have a problem for a couple minutes figuring out that building a fire didn't consume reagents from my inventory automatically, and I actually had to stack them into it, but that's interface stuff, which overall is just fantastic. I'm not sure if there's an in game help menu I could have searched to show various commands and 'how-to' stuff regarding the interface, but it was perfectly logical once I worked it out anyway.
Oh and overall, this game is pure awesome so far.