One thing I have learned to absolutely hate in recent years is the overabundance of tutorials in video games. Especially those in the form of endless streams of textboxes. Textbox after textbox after textbox. Not only are they annoying because they interrupt the game's flow, but they are also mostly useless (they tend to be a massive info dump about something that the player has no experience on, and thus they are pretty much useless. People can't possibly remember 10 pages of text explaining 150 small things. The human brain can't remember all that in one sitting. People learn best by doing, not by reading. Especially not be reading everything at once, before they have had any hands-on experience on the thing.)
It's true that you can go too far the other way, and have terrible tutorials that just sap the fun out of learning to play the game. But as the narrator in that video said, a simple starter quest would work wonders for easing players into the action, and putting them in the right frame of mind to actually enjoy the game...
The original Elite, in 1984, came with an excellent instruction booklet that was entirely written from an 'in-universe' perspective, which fully immersed you in the game before you even turned it on. But although it did tell you how to fly your ship, it also hinted at other aspects of the game, without ever telling you outright... for example, when describing missiles, there is a line which reads 'The missile launch mechanism is very reliable and hardly ever jams.' At first you might think that this is just flavour text - but no, missiles
actually could jam in the original game, and that one throwaway line served as foreshadowing!
That's not to say that there can't be good tutorials. There are several examples of games with absolutely excellent tutorials. Most often these are not in the form of text boxes, but practical play, ie. tutorials that are embedded in the gameplay itself. And from them the best ones don't even have an NPC explaining things to you (which is just a slightly fancier form of a tutorial textbox). The best tutorials teach you the mechanics by having you actually use those mechanics (think of the Portal series, for example).
Portal does do it extemerly well - but it guides you through a linear progression of rooms, with each room teaching you only one or two things, so that you can get to grips with the game's concepts gradually. In Elite, you are sat in your cockpit, and
everything is at your fingertips, right from the get-go... so, with no guidance at all, it's no wonder new players sometimes feel lost.
In elite you'd be messing around with figuring out the controls to switch to analysis mode to use the gravity gun to pick up stuff and then to combat mode to throw the thing at the zombie and you'd be fined by the resistance for stealing the circular saw unless you engage silent running before picking it up.
I'm laughing, but it's only funny because it's true... too much complexity can be bad even for experienced players, but for new players it's just an exercise in frustration.
It is very rewarding if you can learn it and pull it off in Elite in the same way not getting caught by a Dark Souls trap is. It's still a pain to learn and because you're ultimately failing due to stupid simple stuff it makes you feel so very dumb.
Yes - Portal makes you feel clever every time you solve a tricky puzzle, but Elite makes you feel stupid every time you can't remember which button to press.
For a new player even finding out about the engineers might be a challenge because it's a totally separate menu from outfitting. Unlike all the complicated flight mechanics there's an easier way to guide players to that - just put a half-engineered module/weapon on the starter ship that clearly tells you in the description you can improve it at an engineer. It would kinda need to have "broken/malfunctioning/anomalous" in it's module name to stand out and prompt players to investigate.
That's a good idea... but in my opinion, the Outfitting menu is one of the most bewildering screens in the game for newer players, so 'hiding' an engineered module somewhere within it might still make it too difficult for new players to find!
Personally, I wouldn't mind having a dedicated tutorial just to explain the basics of outfitting, in fact I remember coming up with easy-to-remember descriptions for each grade of module:
A = Advanced
B = Bulky
C = Classic
D = Delicate
E = Economy
An NPC who explains the difference between each of these could intrigue the player, and draw them in to the universe of Elite... instead of leaving the player in the dark, and obliging them to Google everything.
