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So she spent more than an hour running around in light Mechs in the Training Grounds.
That's when we read about the PTS and the new tutorial.
Perfect timing for a new pilot!
I sat down beside her and took notes of her reactions to the new tutorial:
After the wow effect of the intro she felt totally overwhelmed by the HUD details and the cheat sheet ("Do I need all these buttons? Do I need to learn all of this?"). Maybe moving them to a later stage of the tutorial would be better.
We had a bit of trouble finding the alpha strike button as indicated by the onscreen hint - that's because on a German keyboard alpha strike is bound to "#".
She managed to bring up the battlegrid by pressing B. Then wondered briefly how to make it go away again before finding the "toggle battlegrid" hint at the bottom of the screen.
During the Pilot Challenge I she instinctively tried to take the shortest route and cut closely around corners. This resulted in missing waypoints. Maybe it should be made a bit clearer that the player has to run directly through the smoke.
She ran out of time on her way through the course, despite having spent an hour in the Training Grounds! Finding directions and where exactly to turn proved to be difficult. On her second try she made Bronze.
It was not intuitive that you have to double click to select one of the challenges.
It then was my turn to try and I wante to see what happens when you overheat suicide. Sadly, I was disappointed. You simply respawn in a powered down Mech without a comment from your instructor. A rookie might need a hint to power up this new Mech.
Going through Pilot Challenge I in a Locust of course gave me Gold
Then it was my fiancee's turn again.
Rapid Fire was way too hard and confusing for her. Not enough time, too many weapon groups, different weapon ranges, lots of frustration. She kept trying but couldn't make it.
During targeting practice she was told to headshot a Jenner. But its head was submerged. She also commented that it was often hard to tell for her where exactly the cockpit was.
On one occasion a CT kill led to the message "Headshot Execution"...
During Gauntlet it was a bit strange to read "Disabled for 10.00000 seconds". Why not just "10 seconds"? And maybe give the Mech a counter over its head (if it's easy to implement).
Running the Gauntlet she fell off the bridge several times. Finding a place where you can get up the hill again is very frustrating for a new pilot.
After 90 minutes of tutorial she decided to stop playing for today. All in all she enjoyed it, but found it hard, frustrating and overwhelming in some parts.
One last thing I tried before closing the game: you can push your instructor off his rooftop by ramming him. Try not to get shot, though!
Some final words:
I'm impressed by the production value and good ideas in this new tutorial! A big applause for all who were involved in its development.
Apart from some fine-tuning of the difficulty levels it is in a very mature state.
