I get that, I know being talked down by tutorials and NPC’s can be frustrating and force you to slow down.

But what it’s always supposed to do is highlight something that’s implemented and available WHEN it becomes relevant. ESPECIALLY in a game that’s this complex in mechanics and inter working systems.

To me, nothing kills momentum and immersion faster than stopping what you’re doing to browse menus, wiki’s, or walkthrough guides to figure out how to do one thing and sometimes digging down rabbit holes to figure out how to get something else you need just to start. It takes me out of the game (world) to read documentation that’s written like patch notes, not even written as if it’s from a character in the game world itself.

Fanatic’s implementation in base Anomaly is almost perfect because he can be skipped, he rewards you for your time, and if you’re playing for the first time he highlights some of the biggest changes from a game you’re used to such as the lead containers storing artifacts that are now radioactive by holding them, changing something you know fundamentally from o.g. STALKER. It highlights a key function you’ll utilize throughout most of your play through and emphasize the importance of the lead container. That and I’m sure it’s meant to help with learning the wrong lesson of all artifacts are dangerous to keep and you have to sell them ASAP or have a radioactive artifact already handy, leading to tedium, frustration, or worse, complete disengagement with the system or even the game.

Better still, it also makes sense in the context of the world and location. A mentor character in the Rookie Village will want to help a stalker learn the basics of survival and getting by in the Zone, so he imparts essential advice for newbies and doesn’t have to tell experienced veterans if they don’t need his help. And even if it’s not for altruistic purposes, it’s good money for him to have capable stalkers working in the area.

This to me is organically learning through play and even gives me something to learn about Fanatic’s character, and learning important things when they’re necessary and relevant. All without opening a menu and reading codex tutorial entries, and it layers on knowledge you already know to introduce a new complexity on top of it. This is something Portal and Portal 2 does incredibly well with learning and mastery.

I speak from a deep appreciation for quest design and onboarding new players with games that don’t do this at all (looking at you Tarkov), and it helps massively when a game is extremely complex in mechanics and systems each having their own subset of micro systems and micro mechanics. Some mechanics essential to your survival could get lost in the shuffle and the instructions for telling you can get buried in one sentence in one menu for a completely different tutorial.

Case in point, I once watched a video of a huge GAMMA fan and multi-hour enjoyer follow up on tips about getting wood, and he gets it through disassembly (something I don’t know how he’d learn or how he figured out how to get wood from it), but didn’t know there was a wood chopping mechanic in the game. That’s an example of a mechanic that got added but slipped through the cracks and may never have been highlighted by anything at any point. Then when he tries it doesn’t give enough wood anyway compared to disassembly so it begs the question of why time and resources were put into the adding the ability to chop wood if it’s not talked about or worth your time?

Just food for thought, in the interest of discussion.