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So, this might end up a bit of a wall of text but I'll try and keep to the points. To gather info for the Wiki I recently started an alt and ran it through to the first reforge taking notes throughout, here follows some thoughts on the experience and some bugs that I noticed, and reported, but that I feel new players may fall foul of. Now, like many here I have an opinion about these things and I can still channel my privilege well enough to decide you all need to hear my opinion on these things.
So, first things first, and I know I'm in a minority here but can the 21:9 community have some love, our subs are off to one side of the screen in cinematics and it's weird. This was also the first time I realised that we play as Kat in the tutorial (but somehow keep the materials). Just wanted to say this could be a great thing to revisit with some more Kaltauga style named behemoth content, the Lesser Gnasher felt underwhelmed as what Kat was fighting having learnt more about here later. Doing something with a named but soft behemoth that we can go run a mission against later, potentially a fixed gear challenge, could be fun.
Next thing that actually appeared to me, during To The Training Grounds! you meet the hunt menu for the first time, Hunting Grounds isn't shown as we haven't unlocked any islands yet. But we still see Escalation and Trials, admittedly greyed out, despite not having any of those unlocked. This feels like something new players don't need to see yet, and with Hunting Grounds hidden, it was a surprise that these weren't removed in the same way. Basically an inconsistency between the way we lock off Hunting Grounds compare to Escalations and Trials.
Here is as good a chance as any to drop into a few notes on Tutorials. We all love concept art, but using concept art for tutorial pictures is a bit weird. Though the idea is reasonable clear it's an unneeded extra step to have to presume that the object on the radar that looks most like the one in the tutorial is the one that it means, rather than just seeing the correct HUD assets. While we are here, tutorials can be simplistic compared to the real mechanics but they really shouldn't be wrong. The interrupt tutorial in game tells players that Chain Blades can't interrupt when they can, which is something that can be hard to learn for yourself when you've been told not to try.
Most of the progression was fine, unlocking new islands unlocks new quests, which makes some progress, rinse and repeat. There are a few issues with these quests, namely Behemoth Survey: Enemy Vine and Electrical Fire, which request a Koshai (Heroic) and a Tempestborne Stormclaw (Heroic) slain respectively but both accept the base variant of the behemoth, which is the only one accessible to the player when they unlock. I ignored the modifiers when I set out to complete the quest but fundamentally these quest are listing their objectives wrongly, which could confuse things for a new player.
I've one final thought to finish this out based on this playthrough and listening to various people going through the process themselves, and I'll admit this is the most opinion of any of this, but...
Gathering Weapon Experience to unlock nodes is bad.
So, it's not a bad idea behind things, but I think it's a bad way to solve the problem. Having people gain weapon XP to progress through the Slayer's Path is good, for sure, but using raw XP gates, worth noting this is the only place in the game that weapon XP is pooled, isn't good.
With the recent addition of level requirements to public queues and to provide a clearer progression system that also reinforces the idea of needing a higher weapon level to go to higher level islands, I suggest this:
Reaching a Weapon Level to unlock nodes.
Under the hood this could be almost identical, with only Milestones 2 and 3 proving to be a difficult translation, but as that's still in a heavily tutorial controlled section I'm sure this could be solved. But for most others you can simply convert from the XP requirement to a weapon requirement on a single weapon. This encourages people to progress as a weapon does, gives a simpler and more understandable interaction that isn't a special case for players, and encourages people to improve their weapons in a more direct way. I think this would feel smoother at the later stages where it would stop you unlocking node 12 without a level 20 weapon and also help you have the means to always interact with the content you're unlocking which. I'd say this is a key thing in the first playthrough when you've got enough to learn anyway.
Overall I quite liked the playthrough, though lacking my cells was a big loss compared to my main it was fun to test my core mechanics and see the questlines develop. I have a lot of love for this game and I'll admit all the feedback here is fundamentally polish level things, none of these issues are game breaking but they can make the game look a little unloved or overly complex. There is a lot of good complexity to enjoy in this game and that last comment is definitely not saying we need less, but players should experience the complexity in the places it belongs and not in finding their way through the beginning of the game.
TL:DR There are some bugs in the Tutorials and NPE that could do with fixing, and what if we replaced pooled weapon XP to unlock slayers path nodes with reaching a given weapon level?
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