I wouldn't trash the Tutorial, but I do like this idea. Many other games have it, and it is a nice refresher on certain strategies/systems.
This is just my opinion but any tutorial should be designed such that our 80 year old grandparents could do it. People are bad at reading and even worse at actually following directions. Any tutorial put in place must make it very obvious where to go, what to do when you get there, and how to do it. When I say obvious, I mean giant animated pointing arrows levels of obvious. People who are used to this genre of game will probably find any tutorial mostly unnecessary and redundant anyway, so tailor the tutorial to the people who are completely new to this type of game. It's hard to make tutorials for this type of game. "Let's play" video series on YouTube are going to remain far better source of information. I wish there was a way to basically put a player into a "let's play" episode in the game!
First time I noticed an socalled angel was in a SciFi b-movie. The pilot stranded ona foreign planet and his speaking suit was going on his nerves after 10 minutes, giving him medical relaxing shots and so on. It was sooo funny. In games I remember Driver for the really great conversations. A speaking suit combined with some players answers and some basic selftalk will not balloon the file size and will spice up the game experience. When I was drilling my 1st ores, I was diggin too deep and was caught. I was jumping over 30 times to escape. Empyrion could flag the drilling and link more than 5 jumps after X seconds drilling and then the suit could say something like *great, is it just me thinking you are the worst miner on this planet?*... A big mistake is too much info in too short time. I also don't like complete HUDs / GUIs, because most of them will blow your mind. Empyrion has a clean GUI - that's a really good fact. I also agree to the *grandparents theory*. When I start a new game it's like Wesley Snipes in Demolition Man, saying "bla bla bla.... better tell me where the big weapons are"... lol
A few suggestions, having just (almost) played through the storyline tutorial: 1.) More intelligence in the mission objective updates. Make it so it doesn't break the tutorial if you do something out of order. 2.) Clearer objectives, and more fail safe design. I had trouble finding the control panel to oxygenize the greenhouse, so I just ended up skipping it. I might have already hit the switch for it earlier, but I couldn't find it anywhere. Also, instructions on how to remove an item if you place it wrong. I misplaced a window at first. 3.) Less objects. I had to thin out my inventory several times in order to complete the "empty container" objectives towards the end, since it's hard to know what is important to pick up and what's not. 4.) Make the doors to space only accessible when it is that part of the mission, so that you don't get launched 2 km out into space unexpectedly. 5.) More detailed instructions on how to place your ship. I got stuck at that part of the tutorial because I didn't know that you had to lower the blueprint to the ground to place it. 6.) Generally better level design. All the hallways and deadends are a bit confusing. More compact and open plan design would be better I think. 7.) Perhaps an alternative to the storyline tutorial would be a room where you can go in and just mess around with everything, with a computer console that has detailed info on everything, and a holodeck simulator that can allow you to test out real world scenarios you might encounter. In fact, I think I like the idea of a holodeck training situation much better. Less confusion, and might allow for the ability to restart a particular part of the training if you get confused, as well as replay it if you didn't quite get it the first time around, or just want a refresher on a particular aspect of the game. As said above, I got stuck at the ship placement stage, so I'll post anything else I can think of once I manage to get past that part.
Explain how to A.) Get the drill and B.) get ammo for the drill in the Robinson Protocol. More detail in this thread: https://empyriononline.com/threads/suggestions-for-new-player-starting-mission.37791/#post-241243
