Space-based MMORPG
In a bid to attract new players, NCSoft has launched Operation Immortality for its MMORPG Tabula Rasa. With a brief to deliver an entirely new opening experience for new players, NC Soft has delivered, with Susan Kath, Lead mission designer running through the myriad of changes designed to create a better experience for everyone.
Revamping the New User Experience
When we started planning for Operation Immortality, one of the first questions that we asked ourselves was, “What can we do to make the Tabula Rasa new player experience great?” We’d come up with a few things on our own in the last eight months – our own personal hit list of things that we wanted to change about those first few levels of the game – but we really wanted to explore a larger revamp, even if it meant re-working the entire tutorial.
Our first step was usability testing. We brought in a variety of people ranging from casual gamers with little experience in MMOGs to the more hardcore players with multiple games in regular rotation. We sat them down in front of computers, filmed them playing our tutorial, quizzed them, and sent them on their merry way with our thanks.
What did we learn? In short, the opening experience was neither cinematic nor inspiring enough, and then, once the action of bootcamp got going, players became confused. There was a disconnect between the advanced concepts we were teaching and how they truly unfolded later in the game, and other concepts were not addressed to the extent they should be. So we started over.
Armed with this new data and our own lists, we sat down and brainstormed a huge wish list of ways we could improve the new player experience.
