Tutorial ideas

Hi there. I'm a former veteran of FFXI who has finally decided to take the plunge and check out FFXIV. First I'd like to thank Yoshi-P for all his efforts in the game since he took over. It's obvious that the current team has poured in countless hours into making this a game not only worthy of the "Final Fantasy" namesake, but as a game they themselves would like to play.

After playing for a few days, I realized one important truth. I was completely lost in what to do. I resisted the urge to look things up on various wikis and instead tried to force my way through the current "maze" of a UI with blunt force. After finally breaking down (and only getting answers to about half my questions), I realized that this game is in need of a tutorial mode badly.

Tutorial

After watching the amazing opening CS's, I was fully expecting to jump into a lowbie starter zone (ala World of Warcraft) to figure out the controls and the essential "how to's". But shortly after, I found myself in a major city without a clue. The general mission flow was obvious, but everything else was extremely vague. For instance, I had no clue on what to do until I found the Aetheryte Plaza. Even after that, I had many unanswered questions.

I feel that a 10-15 minute tutorial session would help players really sink into the game world. A quick battle tutorial (the existing one is fine, but essentially just tells you how to autoattack), a brief harvesting tutorial (perhaps 1 attempt at harvesting node), and one fast introduction to crafting would save players a world of headache (not to mention frequent alt-tabbing to check various wiki sources). You could also tie this into the story, perhaps giving each race (or starting class) a different opening tutorial before funneling them into the main city cutscenes.

Another potential idea is to have hot tips appear when you have items in the menu highlighted (with a mandatory toggle to turn them off or on).

One final idea for now is allowing new players to select one battle class along with a harvesting/crafting class at the start. If anything, it can highlight the flexibility of the amoury system at the start. More importantly, it may save others (like myself) from scouring a city to find a merchant for tools heh.

Thank you for reading

i agree that there should be a tutorial for the game, the only reason i blazed through the learning curve was because i have played a few mmos, warcraft runes of magic perfect world ffxi so i got used to the whole mmo into deal as i played those.

another good thing to get at the begining of the game is a linkshell to make the learning curve much more manageable, but you would probably need a tutorial for that if your just starting :P