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The tutorial, in-game hints, and official Wiki are the best new-player resources in any game that I've ever played. It's so refreshing.
Last Thursday I tried playing From The Depths for four hours trying to figure it out. The tutorial is useless, there aren't any contextual hints, and the Wiki is apparently 5 years out of date and is mostly filled with old info from when the game was in alpha (between all the autoplay video ads). Googling any simple question takes you to a four-year-old thread on an archived forum site where the answer is always either "google it" or someone posting a link to some hour-long YouTube tutorial video narrated by a 10 year old. After a while, I got tired of slogging through all the bullsh*t just to learn how to play. So I stopped.
Last Friday I picked up Factorio and spun up the tutorial. It's so refreshing. There are so many little things it does brilliantly. Like instead of interrupting the game at the very beginning to tell me that I have to click the "production" tab in the crafting menu to make the drill, it just... doesn't have tabs at all. Only when things start getting messy in that menu do the tabs show up, like a gift.
There's a hundred tiny things like that. Like a bit later, I was putting down electric poles and had to keep deleting them because I kept accidentally putting them too far apart. Right on cue, a hint popped up in the bottom left that said dragging electric poles and I clicked it. Instead of being met with a wall of text describing everything there is to know about electric poles, it was just an animation of a mouse cursor dragging the electric poles, and a one-sentence description below it. I closed the window and tried it, and when it worked the hint automatically disappeared from the bottom left. Why aren't other games like this?!
Most games have Fandom wiki sites, which will literally heat up my phone if I visit without an adblocker. Factorio's Wiki is their own dedicated MediaWiki instance and doesn't have any ads. It's completely up to date for the current game version. It's really well written with consistent tone and language -- which makes sense because... it has and uses its own style guide?! Are you kidding me?!
There's a lot of gatekeeping in gaming, where new players are expected to be frustrated for a long time, like they're paying their dues before being allowed to enjoy the game. But not here, not from this community nor from the developers. So thanks, devs, for the insane amount of effort you've put into these things, on behalf of all us newbies.
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