This is roughly what I’m thinking for the gyro gunnery tutorial:
Gyro aim is new, and will likely be new to a lot of players. The opening segment with a jet bike will likely be too high of an initial difficulty curve for a player who either hasn’t played the game before, or is just out of practice.
To fix both of these, it is revised to a rail shooter. In the intro scene, X is given a lift by an unnamed robot. That hunter is the one driving the bike, while X shoots: (“Try and keep’m off me boss!”)
This segment is actually an infinite looping tube, and the bike won’t hit actually die during it, just weave when hit.
The track will loop until X has hit a certain number of baddies. Every certain number of hits transitions to a more complex baddie routine, and a more dramatic stage, until the final threshold is reached. At that point, the speeder will take big hit, and the game will transition to cutscene
X and the Unnamed bot will be thrown from the bike, with X smacking hard against a wall. Hard cut to black, followed by a slow light’s on. X is being treated by a Medic. He asks about the other bot.
Camera pans over to the unnamed bot. Other Reploids are covering his face.
Medic: Sorry sir. We couldn’t do anything for him
Scene transitions into the ground portion of the tutorial/intro stage.
Action Hints
For handling the array of verbiage, I’m thinking the cleanest way is for
Any interactable object will highlight when the cursor is over it.
If the player has not performed that interaction before, a translucent image of the button, or buttons will also hover in front of the object. The more time the player performs that class of interaction, the more transparent the button will become, until it disappears.
The highlighting intensity will also diminish the more times the player interacts with the object, but will stop at a low intensity glow.
The hint counter may be reset to 0, turned off entirely, or turned on entirely in the menu
The interaction glow may be adjusted in the menu.
Thinking this should offer a streamlined way to get action hints, without disrupting anyone who is in the flow. Also, seeing something light up as you pan past it could be a good way to drop hints that maybe there’s something there to investigate. This doesn’t handle everything, like Jump, or weapon change. Weapon change could probably be shown along side the classic “You got new Weapon!” splash, without disrupting gameplay.
Character Interactions
Part of the backstory is that the Maverick virus was solved a long time ago, and the world has actually been in peace for a long time. It has been long enough since the last great war, that X retired from the Hunters; he just wasn’t needed there any more, and it was mostly a memory of pain. He’s essentially become a retired legend, but it was long enough ago now, that most of the Reploids were born after the last great war. He’s something from the history books to most of them, and he’s perfectly happy with that, working now as something of an elder statesman/diplomat, keeping the peace through far less lethal means.
When X must go back to war, the average Reploid response is something like “You kids are about to see something special” to “That antique can fight? No-one can be a big as the stories said. It’s just hype.”
This leads into reactions to poor player performance. The Old Hand’s response is, essentially “It’s been a long time. We all get rusty.” The newer Reploids are mostly just disappointed. Poor player performance is never mocked by friendly characters, but disappointment by unfamiliar characters is acceptable. High player performance is praised. especially early game. Late game, random friendly Reploids start becoming afraid of X, or otherwise uncomfortable around him. “I never thought the stories could be true. How could one Reploid… shudder”
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