Chapter 2: “A Sour Smell”
The tutorial could not be skipped.
The support AI displayed an overview of basic game information that the player needed to know on top of an image of the game world. That was fine and all, but as mentioned, there was no way to bypass the tutorial, and it would periodically ask “Did you understand that?” to check that you were paying attention, so you couldn’t even zone out or daydream until it was over. You could skip the tutorial in the closed beta, so some tester must have run into some serious problems after skipping the tutorial for them to have changed it.
To summarize, the bits that were probably the most important were:
“The game system doesn’t treat player characters (PCs) and non-player characters (NPCs) any differently.”
“To the system, the only difference between PCs and NPCs is whether or not they can receive system messages.”
“The system does not differentiate between NPCs and monsters.”
“While the player is logged out, the avatar remains in the same spot in-game and goes to sleep.”
The tutorial had gone on for nearly an hour when the support AI made sure to emphasize another point: The AIs given to NPCs versus those given to monsters differed in terms of knowledge, but each individual AI was also unique.
When that came up, Rare interpreted it as an attempt to instill a sense of ethics or morality. In other words, you shouldn’t mistreat NPCs just because they’re NPCs, you shouldn’t callously massacre monsters just because they’re monsters, and you should try to behave with some amount of consideration, something like that.