As of now, the Buneary in Exbel Woods does provide new players with a small tutorial on the gameplay, but the gameplay tips are restricted to what you can do in a dungeon.
New players who exit the tutorial are instantly teleported to the Crossroads without any sense of direction, which is not a very fluent gameplay flow and confuses a lot of the newer players, leading to them not knowing what to do and having to ask around before starting their PMU journey.
Something that would be both feasible and able to tackle this problem is to lead beginning players to a (new) small starter area/town instead of Crossroads, containing a few NPCs that each explain you the basics of PMU. Things that could be explained here are, for example:
Where to find your first dungeon
How to evolve your pokémon
How kangaskhan and chimecho work
Opening boxes (xatu)
Guilds
Mission system
(maybe other things i missed, feel free to add your suggestions).
I believe something like this is quite feasible in the short term and will help a lot of the issues new players have when first getting into PMU.
Sure and I hope we continue to help new players even if this feature is added! One doesn’t have to exclude the other, but new players being forced to ask isn’t a really good sign of the game having clear directions for new players.
the question is, how to show them the way to the first dungeon without them just getting confused on where to go after that? I think it would be more benificial to have an in game map. either like the town map item in the main series games, or a selection under the menu. it could bring up the map which is on the wiki (the one that looks like a town map, with dots and lines), or a cutting of it that just shows your current region. you could also have numbers written on the dungeon dots that say the lowest wild pokemon level that exists in that dungeon. telling them when they will be able to handle at least the first few floors.
(yes I am aware that this is not currently feasible in the games engine, but It really does need a map in game. telling people “follow me” or “check the wiki” is not ideal)
<correction: the map thing is possible in the engine. just saw that pmu displays an picture telling what the controls are in the help menu. the help menu only has one entry being those controls, so new player stuff can go there if we want to simplify things>
yeah, I think having an ingame map is definitely something that would help players (not just new ones lol) having a better sense of direction and where to go. However, that’s something that can totally co-exist with my suggestion!
Having a better starting place as suggested not only helps players know where to go after they finish the tutorial, but it also gives them a better sense of immersion and teaches them things outside just knowing where to go. You know, sort of like the starter towns in the mainline pokémon games.
So tl;dr, i don’t think these suggestions have to be either/or, rather both, in order of priority and feasibility!
maybe a small map like picture that shows in the beginning or just make the world map for pmu map that was made long ago available in general to be viewed