How to make the game better for new players?

[van_arn]

When the game launched, the msq actually required attention to clear. Perhaps too much attention, given the situation with the Steps of Faith, but they overreacted to those complaints and made the msq mindless from a gameplay perspective.

With sync and such, we need a dungeon difficulty somewhere between their philosophy at launch and whatever the nonsense their current non-difficulty is. They’re leaning too far on visual novel for the msq and not enough on actual gameplay players experience in the game past the outdated (and comparatively nerfed) content.

[MarsAstro]

When the game launched, the msq actually required attention to clear. Perhaps too much attention, given the situation with the Steps of Faith, but they overreacted to those complaints and made the msq mindless from a gameplay perspective.

With sync and such, we need a dungeon difficulty somewhere between their philosophy at launch and whatever the nonsense their current non-difficulty is. They’re leaning too far on visual novel for the msq and not enough on actual gameplay players experience in the game past the outdated (and comparatively nerfed) content.

Yeah, that's actually what motivated me to write this post in the first place. I have a friend who's been interested in trying the game because of the new free trial, but once I told him all the early battle content is easy and slow, he kind of lost all interest. Which I think is a shame, because I love this story and wish it didn't require so much faith in people saying "it gets better".

I don't really think we need a grand overhaul or redesign, I just think they need to tune things so new players can still experience actual gameplay while they do the MSQ. Otherwise it's just a glorified visual novel with a generic first act, which can be kind of a bummer when you're expecting an MMO. It doesn't need to be ridiculously hard or anything, it just needs to offer an actual challenge. It shouldn't take hundreds of hours for the actual game part to become engaging.