Imagine your friends invite you to try out a new Roblox game. You enter the game called Forsaken and you see some characters you recognize while you load into the game. Once in there, there's a timer in the lobby that says 30 seconds left.
You frantically search to find where the characters are and are having trouble decide on playing Noob, Elliot, and Shaletski. The round starts without you having enough time, and you're put into your first game as Noob. When you load into the round, you see a green thing thrown at you and pop-ups appear on your screen.
As you struggle to find out how to clear them, you hear the music getting louder and then it's over. You died 15 seconds into the round. While this story sounds dramatic, this experience has happened to many people.
The Forsaken experience as a player who has never played before is very discouraging and I believe it's hurting the growth of the game. Before we get into this reasons, I should say I'm a big fan of this game, but I also feel like negative opinions should be shared for the better of the game. I also do not want anyone to send hate to the developers since they're genuinely trying.
And even though there's a lot of controversy going on, I feel like they actually have the best interest in mind for the game. The biggest problem Forsaken suffers from is the lack of skill-based matchmaking. I have personally seen people with not even an hour into the game fighting against a killer with like 20 days played, and there's just like no genuine way that the survivor has a chance.
Even if the team played perfectly around the new player, they'll still probably die due to some complex mechanics they don't even understand, like Nolley and all the hallucinations that come with it. While of course there's argument that you could just look at the abilities and read them all, it's still a ton of information to take in. And once you actually understand it, it's way different from actually putting it into action.
So, you'll have to just play through experience. To put it in perspective, it's like if you were a bronze player in a ranked game versus a player who could be like considered in top 500 and you expect the person who's new to have a fighting chance. So, not only do new players have to take in how the game works, they have to figure out how each killer works and how their own like character itself works and what their teammates do and the map layout.
It's just a whole lot. The skill-based matchmaking doesn't even have to be permanent. It could just kick in until you get to like around 5 hours in the game or show a certain amount of wins to let you go into regular lobbies instead of the beginner ones.
This helps us move on to our next point, which is just basically adding a tutorial. While I personally always try to skip through tutorials in games, I think this one will really benefit from one. It could include things like if you do a puzzle or of a generator, 5 seconds are taking it off the timer and letting you choose one of the three starting characters and giving you a basic run out of the abilities could help a lot.
This way you have your own character out of the way and the basic idea how to win. If you could buy a tutorial and skill-based matchmaking, the experience for new players would be a whole lot better. Obviously, you'll have stuff to learn since the new game, but I believe you should be able to know your own character and how to play the game before being pushed into it, especially with how short the intermissions for Forsaken rounds really are.
The only other thing I can kind of understand is that the game is not intuitive sometimes. Earlier, I used the example of getting hit with an entanglement from a 1X and not knowing what to do. And this experience was not made up and actually happened to my friend who thought you had to click the X of the popup instead of anywhere.
Tiny things like this make a huge impact on a game, especially when you have no idea what else is happening. Understanding what certain effects get placed on you falls into the same category where you just won't know what they mean and it won't be explained. Like what does bleed mean?
What does poison mean? Why am I on fire? This feels like something that a lot of veteran players don't really think about, but the new ones will feel cheated by it, and it's kind of valid since they kind of are.
The reason I feel like it's important to make this experience better is because new players breathe life into the game and are going to help this game last. The Forsaken Phantom already has a bad name, and being toxic to new players of scaring them away will just do more harm. These concerns I'm sharing today aren't just because like I'm imagining them, but these are real comments I've had and people have talked about how discouraging it is.
And the only reason they push through a huge learning curve is because their friends just enjoy the game. And while of course there's always going to be a huge learning curve, I feel like these two ideas will help a lot with new players. If you agree with what I said or any other changes you'd like to see, let me know because I'm curious what could help the experience.
Thanks for watching and I'll see you guys next time. Bye.
