Subtle Mechanic that leads to a LOT of Frustration (re: giving players crucial instructions)

[moondog548]

So I realized that a lot of the frustration about "I have no idea wtf I'm supposed to do for this big-hype-ticket event" actually comes down to just a subtle twist in one of the (otherwise fine) mechanics that DE does use to disseminate information/instructions to the players in game.   It results in many player completely lost and frustrated during their playtime, and then after the fact get to hear from other players how "NPC [blah] TELLS YOU EXACTLY WHAT TO DO!"

NPC voice-over is a tool that DE has been using to immersively give players information about the state of the world, events unfolding, and pretty good clues about how exactly the player character should get involved in them!

HOWEVERRRR.... 😛  The way its implemented makes it wayyyyy too easy to completely or partially miss these instructions.   

A lot of crucial explanations and instructions come from NPC's popping up on the player's HUD mid-mission.  It's immersive, sure, but it's not very practical.  More often than not the player is too busy fighting for their life against hordes of enemies to hear what the NPC is saying, especially since the NPC usually has an indeterminate number of lines and is deliberately not being explicit in their infodump.

Other times, the NPC is in town and gives their expository VO while the player is navigating menus of rote and tedious functions at the same time that canned VO lines the player has heard a million times before are playing.

The problem is essentially that you're always giving us important instructions while we're busy doing something else. The fact that the instructions are deliberately buried in narrative, character-heavy dialog compounds this problem.

I think that the clear intention of delivering information and instructions via immersive in-lore dialogue is a GOOD one, don't change that.   It's only the teeny tiny snag that you give it to us while we're almost certainly occupied with other tasks that needs to change.

So I propose a couple little things for the pretty simple problem:

• The FIRST time the player would receive this dialogue, PAUSE THE GAME.  Freeze/Invuln the player, zoom in on the NPC's transmission over our shoulder menu style.
  • Then after that first time, everything can stay just the way it already is in game.
• Use the in-game mail system consistently.  You already do it some times, so do it the rest of the time!  Use it just to say, "HI, IT'S ME NPC BLAH COME MEET ME IN TOWNPLACE TO GET STARTED; (AND OPTIONALLY CLICK ON THE "NEWS" CONSOLE FOR FULL DETAILS)" if nothing else!
  • You guys make great forum posts explaining stuff, but the in-game player has hardly more-than-zero indication this info exists
• Instead of cycling in-town NPC VO over the normal menus, add an option to the menu for "Hey tell me about the [WHATEVERS] again..." or even just leave a permanent button there that says "Hey, NPC, what's shakin'?" that does nothing but trigger their canned fluff VO and during events it tells you the event-relevant dialog instead!

Edited March 17, 2019 by moondog548

[DoomFruit]

Also, if things are to be done this way, there REALLY needs to be a separation between quest-important dialogue and the rest of the spam that we get. I've had the dialogue volume set to zero for years now because I'm fed up with all the repeated lines. Especially now that we have that obnoxious git Nora spamming us (seriously, why is there no option to not only mute her but to completely stop any and all of her transmissions?).