New player Experience
So having two friends expressing interest in starting DBD, I decided to just see what the tutorial would teach them nowadays to see where they would be starting at after playing them, and found it strangely lacking in a couple areas, Specifically and thought up an idea on improving at least the survivor Tutorial
Survivor
- the current pallet tutorial is probably why baby survivors keep "wasting" pallets, it just tells you to throw it down, and while it showed that Meg stunned the killer to save you, having you do it a bit later reinforces the idea and shows they can help in chase not just rescue.
-currently, there's not an explanation on items, at the very least there should probably be a section on the flashlight, and sabotaging with a tool kit.
-finally, the tutorial does explain the resolve bar, though it lacks an explanation of the endurance effect.
Overall maybe a small scripted sequence where the trapper is trying to hook Meg so it tells you to grab a toolbox and sabotage the hook before he can reach it, he takes her to another nearby hook, starts a chase after you and the game directs you to a pallet when you get there it directs you to interact with the pallet and shows it stuns him then it tells you to pick up a flashlight and aim at his head to blind him, once blinded it directs you to then go and save the meg, and since it's such a common strategy have her take a hit because he caught up and use a freeze frame there to explain the endurance effect.
Killer
- the survivor section shows the bot breaking a breakable wall, killer section lacks an interaction, minor nitpick but probably worth at least mentioning them.
- just again a section readdressing the endurance effect from the killers perspective is probably also worth mentioning, as well as that flashlight can blind you while breaking pallets or picking up a downed survivor.
- also lacks any mention of bloodlust, while probably not necessary at least mentioning it so they can look it up in the game manual would probably be prudent or at least mentioning somewhere that the manual could explain other effects you run into
Both
-completely skip hexes and boons, if not introduced in the tutorials at least having them in the kill bots, or survive bots also in the tutorial page would introduce the concept and or
I was more focused on the survivor side since it seems to have the most information missing or encouraging bad habits while the killer side is just missing information for the most part.
is also possible i overlooked small written sections, work has been keeping me for longer and longer shifts so brain has been a bit scrambled
Comments
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Tutorial has tons of issues with lack of information.
I would like to see an option to let players play ANY killer against bots. So everyone can find if they like the killer, or simply learn how the killer works.
Otherwise I would just tell them to run away... This game is just not noob friendly at all.
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I think it's okay that the tutorial doesn't break down specific perk types like hexes and boons, that's probably outside the scope of teaching new players the absolute basics of gameplay.
That being said, I do think the tutorial could use some better explanations of chase dynamics on both sides. When it comes to Endurance, the only thing the tutorial should be impressing on new players is "don't try to chase recently unhooked survivors", but iirc it is missing that— or at least, it was when I did the tutorial myself a fair while ago.
I'm somewhat on the fence about it having tutorials for specific item interactions. I think showing it would prrooobably be a good idea? Just in the vein of, these are your options if you choose to bring in items, but you don't want to overwhelm a new player with a ton of information right at the start. Maybe break it up into Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced tutorial levels like some other games do?
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Sooner or later the have to improve the starting tutorials and information for new players.
As you said the game is horrible to new players. You can only hope that someone who starts today has a friend who can teach him the basics and practise a bit.
There was an idea to have some kind of "baby pool" for players with less than xy hours. Not a completely bad idea imo.
As we know at the moment it is no problem for a new survivor to get matched for his first game with a few hundred hours killer player - which should never happen.
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I have always had the opinion that the tutorial like the ones they have done are useless in the long run. You cannot teach everything well in a scripted event sandbox, if you wanna teach someone something someone who has full knowledge needs to stepup and talk to you like a real human being. I always found the first videos on how to play Survivor that bvhr made to be incredibly more useful in understanding Survivor than the tutorial.
Doing updated versions of these videos and implement them as so you have to watch them to complete the tutorial would help more in my opinion. Like honestly, I dont watch youtube and tiktok so much. Mostly because it gets mixed in with clickbait and bad advice, so I dont want to see it.
To sum my point up, I think dbd has been suffering from relying too much on player discovery or "show, don't tell" in regards to teaching players how to play. They could have provided solid advice and made the process easier for us as players, but instead we have been provided vague ideas and questionable advice.
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Finally home from work
Honestly that would be Ideal, but also probably a lot more work, and I was trying to keep my suggestion to be a lighter load until a complete revamp of the tutorials could be done at a later point. Yeah, I can see boons and hexes not being explained in the basic tutorial but at the same time with the current pool throwing baby survivors and killers against people with lots more perks that could have them, having it at least be in the bot games could help them recognize that its something that could happen, would love the bot game letting you pick from any of the free killers to mess around with powers.
and there's absolutely stuff that I overlooked in the Killer tutorial that I just didn't think about, most of my time in the game has been playing Killer so the most glaring issues I could see were in the survivor side, plus looking at it more closely from the Get-go since my friends were thinking of getting it to play together.
I know the vague information was originally probably to keep the horror aspect of the game, but it does seem like the game and information needed to get started have outgrown that.0 -
Thank you for your suggestions, I agree the new player experience is often overlooked and its the part of this game I feel needs the most love.
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