Proposals to improve new player experience

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H-Hour
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Proposals to improve new player experience

Post by H-Hour »

Describe the problem you would like to solve

It can be difficult for a new player to know where to start, because there are so many campaigns, scenarios, factions and addons. The large number of choices is disorienting and this can reduce a new player's confidence. With more choices, they are also more likely to choose a game that isn't a good fit for them.

This problem continues for a new(ish) player who is enjoying the game. When they finish a campaign or scenario, they must make a decision about what to play next. However, they must do so with little understanding of what kinds of play they might enjoy (campaigns, scenarios, multiplayer), how to learn different factions or tactics, or how one game might relate to the one that they just played.

In other words, because Wesnoth's play is "episodic" rather than continuous, a new player must face their disorientation again and again. This is compounded by the fact that Wesnoth is not really one game, but a universe of games with their own names and norms, each one presenting the player with more uncertainty about their choice.

Describe the solution you would like to see

The following proposals seek to provide players with more guard rails to reduce disorientation and add new features to the game that will reward the player for experimenting with Wesnoth's many gameplay options. They do this in a few ways:

* Funnel new players directly to one campaign designed to introduce them to the game.
* Provide a narrative "frame" that pulls each campaign and scenario into a connected world.
* Add elements that track the player's progress, so that the sense of accomplishment accumulates as they play more campaigns and scenarios.
* Add hints to the UI which encourage players to experiment with new factions, scenario types, or alternate paths in campaigns.

This a long proposal with several ideas, some of them more or less feasible. I've worked them up into clickable wireframes/prototypes that demonstrate these ideas. But this proposal is about the concepts, not the design. The graphical elements (icons, fonts, buttons, layout) are simply there to aid the imagination and to help communicate the ideas. These proposals don't address all of the problems new players face, like whether they will grasp the game's mechanics once they start playing. But I think that they could help.

Image

Try it out or view the source code.

1. Play / Continue for immediate play

When a player loads Wesnoth for the first time, the main menu should show a Play button that stands out. This button would launch the player directly into a tutorial, which would then move seamlessly into a novice campaign (probably HttT). Every time after, the main menu should show a prominent Continue button that will load the player's last single-player save (or autosave) if one exists.
Spoiler:
2. Single screen for all play options with illustrative map and timeline

The player should choose what to play in one screen that brings all of the campaigns and scenarios together into one narrative universe. This will help provide a narrative frame to their choice of what to play, reducing the friction caused by lots of choices when the player isn't sure what they're choosing. It will also give them the sense that they are advancing towards completion, which will provide an incentive for players to grind through the tougher parts of a scenario/campaign.

(This screen also fixes the confusing structure that requires the player to access single player scenarios through the multiplayer interface.)
Spoiler:
3. Add Achievements to reward cumulative play and encourage experimentation

Achievements are often lazy accessories to games ("Good job! You killed 5 enemies"). However, I think they could help deepen new player engagement in three ways. First, achievements will reinforce the sense of completion that comes from playing a new scenario or campaign. They are an extension of the way the game already records whether the player has completed a campaign in a certain difficulty.

Second, incomplete achievements can provide hints to the player about all the different ways of playing the game which the player can otherwise only learn about by visiting the forums or reading a strategy guide. For example, achievements could be created for campaign branches, or to encourage the player to try out a new tactic (ie - village rushing, surviving a night/day, or reducing losses rather than increasing kills).

Third, achievements can enrich scenario play by encouraging players to try underused factions (any faction that isn't human-ish) or game modes (survivals). Achievements give the player a reason to try out a new faction on a new scenario.
Spoiler:
4. One difficulty scale for all campaigns

Currently campaigns have two different difficulty levels, but it's hard to know how these relate to each other. Is an "Intermediate" campaign on "Hard" difficulty more or less difficult than a "Hard" campaign on "Normal" difficulty?

I sugggest five difficulty levels that aim to be roughly consistent across all campaigns:
  • Novice: first-time players and young children
  • Easy: new players, young players, or players who play for the story rather than the tactics
  • Normal: challenging but not frustrating for a casual player familiar with the game mechanics
  • Hard: challenging for serious players who understand the game mechanics well
  • Nightmare: the ones who love losing again and again
I know this is would be a lot of work, but in an ideal world every mainline campaign would be available at every difficulty level.

5. Scenario types

I think scenarios have a lot of untapped potential for casual players (like myself), but it's very hard to understand what a scenario will be like from the selection menu. A short list of scenario types will help reduce the cognitive overload from the long list, and help players quickly orient themselves on which scenarios they might enjoy and which they won't.

Other people will know better what kind of scenarios might exist, but I would suggest at least differentiating straight faction PvP-style maps from survivals, scenarios that emphasize RPG elements and cooperative scenarios.

Conclusion

I share these proposals in the hope that they will contribute to the conversations developers are already having. But I do so with the knowledge that in open source there are always more ideas than resources. Many years ago I was a contributor to another open source game, UFO: Alien Invasion, which could not sustain the contribution levels it needed to reach a wider audience. So I appreciate the challenges of executing complex, collaborative work with volunteer labor.

That said, I also always admired Wesnoth as the only open source game to achieve popular success. There were several in the works back then, but none managed to produce a game that was really fun for more than a narrow group of (usually nostalgic) fans. In my view, Wesnoth's success came down to its intuitive and accessible gameplay, with a lot of depth revealed gradually as players stuck with it. I was halfway through HttT before I really started to use ZoC properly (ten years ago!).

If Wesnoth was exemplary back then for being accessible to players, the environment is really different now. Players have so many gaming options and many of them free or almost free. But I still think that Wesnoth occupies a unique niche. It's an engaging turn-based strategy game, without the complex arithmetic and resource management of 4x strategy games. And it's got rewarding RPG mechanics without the endless XP grind. Its scale is in the volume of content, but not the grind of the game itself.

This is where I think Wesnoth has a competitive advantage, as a whole universe of episodic gameplay. But that big universe also makes it confusing for new players. If there is a way to organize that content, bring it together into one narrative, and make it funner to experiment in that universe, I think there's a lot of potential for new player growth. That's easier said than done, though.
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Celtic_Minstrel
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Re: Proposals to improve new player experience

Post by Celtic_Minstrel »

I like the way you integrated the timeline information into your mockup… and I'm kind of wondering how Under the Burning Suns (and a large number of user-made campaigns) would fall into that system when they don't actually fit into that timeline.

My only other comment right now is that I don't think players should be forced into the tutorial, and at the same time there needs to be a way to replay the tutorial if you want to. So, basically, I'm not really on board with the idea of the main menu being different on first launch in the manner you describe.
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gnombat
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Re: Proposals to improve new player experience

Post by gnombat »

H-Hour wrote: April 14th, 2022, 10:18 pm Describe the problem you would like to solve

It can be difficult for a new player to know where to start, because there are so many campaigns, scenarios, factions and addons. The large number of choices is disorienting and this can reduce a new player's confidence. With more choices, they are also more likely to choose a game that isn't a good fit for them.

...

Describe the solution you would like to see

The following proposals seek to provide players with more guard rails to reduce disorientation...
Overall, I think this goal is a good one, but some of the design decisions in your mockup seem kind of at cross purposes with the aim of solving the original problem.
H-Hour wrote: April 14th, 2022, 10:18 pm This screen also fixes the confusing structure that requires the player to access single player scenarios through the multiplayer interface.
I don't think that's a bug, though - I believe that's intentional. The scenarios are really designed for multiplayer use - while it's certainly possible to play them using the AI as the opposing player, they weren't really designed with that use case in mind and I think many players will probably find that boring. I think presenting them outside of the multiplayer context will likely just confuse people (especially beginners).

The timeline is another element which might be confusing to beginners - while it looks nice, it's something that is not really necessary for beginners to know about, and (as pointed out above) it adds additional complications for some campaigns.
H-Hour
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Re: Proposals to improve new player experience

Post by H-Hour »

I'm kind of wondering how Under the Burning Suns (and a large number of user-made campaigns) would fall into that system when they don't actually fit into that timeline.
I was thinking that the map image and the timeline would be configurable by the campaign. This would also help scenarios, which often don't have a place or time, and would reduce the art requirements for every scenario. For example, a PvP-style scenario could replace the map/timeline with an screenshot of the map layout.

There's some work that would need to be done by a designer to signpost these changes. But I suspect 90-95% of players probably never play anything except the mainline campaigns.
I don't think players should be forced into the tutorial, and at the same time there needs to be a way to replay the tutorial if you want to.
You're right and I probably should have mocked this up in more detail. I'd like to use strong defaults so that most new players are guided directly into a game, but not forced. So the first-time user journey would look a bit like this:

1. Click Play
2. See interstitial screen with HttT teaser and a big Play button. This screen would also have a "skip tutorial" checkbox and a "back" button.
3a. Player clicks Play: they go into tutorial. After tutorial, player asked to select difficulty, and then into the campaign.
3b. Player clicks Play with skip tutorial: they're shown a confirmation prompt and told how to re-access the tutorial if they want.
3c. Player clicks Back: they're shown the main menu, but now the "New Game" button is added so they can choose anything.
The scenarios are really designed for multiplayer use - while it's certainly possible to play them using the AI as the opposing player, they weren't really designed with that use case in mind and I think many players will probably find that boring.
You're right that the current list of scenarios is dominated by PvP maps. I still think those scenarios have value for single player: it's the only way to play some of the mainline factions without downloading an addon. But I agree that the list probably needs to be curated for single player. The scenario types will help with that, but some way to make cooperative, survival and RPG-like scenarios more prominent would be better
H-Hour
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Re: Proposals to improve new player experience

Post by H-Hour »

Scenarios and achievements are probably the biggest change for the Wesnoth community, so I wanted to provide a little more detail. Another way to think of achievements is to think of them as community challenges. At the moment, new content typically comes from addons. Players must wait 2-4 years between major releases. Commercial games use new content releases to regularly re-engage players, and I think Wesnoth could do the same. Challenges provide a low-cost way to share and promote new content on a shorter release cycle.

For example, a 1.x.x release could add a new scenario with a special "capture the keep" objective. This scenario would be promoted on Steam and the website, and players would be encouraged to share tactics and screenshots of their success/failure on a forum topic dedicated to that challenge. The scenario would include an achievement for winning, but also achievements like "Win without recruiting any mages" or similar challenges that encourage the player to adapt their tactics.

Such challenges could be released on a regular basis, with much less effort than a new campaign or faction. There is already so much content available that many challenges could be done simply by adding achievements to existing scenarios or campaigns.

There is also still an active community making addons. I think many of these people (including me) would be excited to try to make such scenarios if there was the potential that they could be released in the near future. As Jetrel said in his post about attracting artists to the project, one of the important things is for artists to see their work in game as soon as possible.

In this way, challenges (scenarios + achievements) could offer several benefits to Wesnoth's player engagement/retention:

- Regular opportunities for marketing, so that Wesnoth stays on players' radar (I bet there's a huge number of lapsed players who have Wesnoth in their Steam game library).
- Events that bring Wesnoth players together around a specific challenge at a specific time, to engage more new players on the forum.
- An incentive for scenario/campaign designers to work on mainline content.
- Less pressure to do big 1.x feature releases.

This maybe seems like it is getting away from new player experience a little bit. But I think that new player experience and player engagement are closely related. Instead of forcing players to seek out new game experiences, Wesnoth should actively bring those experiences to them. This could increase player retention which is part of new player experience.
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Celtic_Minstrel
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Re: Proposals to improve new player experience

Post by Celtic_Minstrel »

H-Hour wrote: April 15th, 2022, 9:13 am But I suspect 90-95% of players probably never play anything except the mainline campaigns.
I suspect your statistics may be off by quite a bit there. I believe you're likely underestimating the proportion of Wesnoth players who primarily play multiplayer. I don't have any idea what that proportion is, but 5-10% sounds quite low.
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Pentarctagon
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Re: Proposals to improve new player experience

Post by Pentarctagon »

To get an idea for that:
  • The March file of the Multiplayer Activity Report has the average number of unique Steam users per day as 164.
  • Daily active users (as listed on Wesnoth's SteamWorks page) says there has been an average of 1,351 unique people playing Wesnoth on Steam each day for the last 7 days.
  • 164/1351 = ~12% of Steam users played a game on the official multiplayer server.
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H-Hour
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Re: Proposals to improve new player experience

Post by H-Hour »

Thanks for the stats. It would be interesting if that same stat, with uniqueness, could be identified over a 6-12 month period, in order to answer the question: are mp players sticking around for longer than sp players or vice-versa?
Celtic_Minstrel wrote: April 15th, 2022, 2:03 pm
H-Hour wrote: April 15th, 2022, 9:13 am But I suspect 90-95% of players probably never play anything except the mainline campaigns.
I suspect your statistics may be off by quite a bit there. I believe you're likely underestimating the proportion of Wesnoth players who primarily play multiplayer. I don't have any idea what that proportion is, but 5-10% sounds quite low.
You're right, my proposals are completely focused on singleplayer, which may be a mistake. Maybe there is more growth potential for multiplayer, I don't know. I made the off-hand comment about mainline campaigns in reference to mainline vs. UMC play. But maybe my assumptions are wrong there too. However, I do think that player retention will be won or lost on the basis of mainline content. That is the gateway into the game, even if long-term players and contributors migrate to UMC eventually.
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Pentarctagon
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Re: Proposals to improve new player experience

Post by Pentarctagon »

H-Hour wrote: April 15th, 2022, 7:51 pm Thanks for the stats. It would be interesting if that same stat, with uniqueness, could be identified over a 6-12 month period, in order to answer the question: are mp players sticking around for longer than sp players or vice-versa?
Unfortunately I don't think so - SteamWorks only seems to keep a rolling average over the last 7 days, nothing further back than that. The Multiplayer Activity Report goes back a couple years now though.
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lhybrideur
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Re: Proposals to improve new player experience

Post by lhybrideur »

I like the idea of achievements. I do not think it would be a problem to have them for mainline (and even UMC) campaigns instead/on top of scenarios.
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Re: Proposals to improve new player experience

Post by name »

H-Hour wrote: April 14th, 2022, 10:18 pm 4. One difficulty scale for all campaigns
[...]
I suggest five difficulty levels that aim to be roughly consistent across all campaigns:
[...]
I know this is would be a lot of work, but in an ideal world every mainline campaign would be available at every difficulty level.
This is an excellent idea.
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Ender24
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Re: Proposals to improve new player experience

Post by Ender24 »

I just wanna say H-Hour's proposals here are absolutely fantastic.
Celtic_Minstrel wrote: April 14th, 2022, 11:17 pm I like the way you integrated the timeline information into your mockup… and I'm kind of wondering how Under the Burning Suns (and a large number of user-made campaigns) would fall into that system when they don't actually fit into that timeline.
Campaigns outside the map and timeline could just have a custom image in their place.
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max_torch
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Re: Proposals to improve new player experience

Post by max_torch »

Ender24 wrote: July 5th, 2022, 9:36 pm Campaigns outside the map and timeline could just have a custom image in their place.
I wonder what kind of image is appropriate for Under the Burning Suns. Maybe show a map of the territory that is known to the main character at the beginning of the story. This means it doesn't include territory that will be discovered in the campaign.
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Ender24
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Re: Proposals to improve new player experience

Post by Ender24 »

I've always subconsciously seen Under the Burning Suns as this weird bonus epilogue to the game since it's last on the campaign list and is completely detached from the setting of Wesnoth as we know it. I didn't even know it was the same universe until recently (it probably says it in the campaign opening, but I haven't played it in ages). I feel like giving every other mainline campaign a place on the map and timeline then having this bizarro campaign at the end that just pictures a binary sunset (without being too Star Warsy about it) would really work.
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Re: Proposals to improve new player experience

Post by shevegen »

There are too many ideas/suggestions made in this thread for me to comment, so I will pick only one:

- I think the idea of a "visual progression" cue is useful. So if I understood the visual mock then the
"Continue" has a lighter colour to indicate "look at me" to a new user, yes? So if so this may be
useful. I think the only question, while I think that should be done, is whether older users want
this or not; it could be disabled after e. g. having started wesnoth 3 or 5 times. Or perhaps some
configuration setting, like "display visual cues on the main screen" or something like this. Or
more generic "display visual cues".
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