Here's the problem as I see it. Joe Smith is shopping in Best Buy and sees Silent Hunter 4 on the display shelf. He picks it up and checks it out. He sees a game where he'll be an American submarine Captain in the Pacific. So far so good. Now he checks the specs on the box. He determines that his system can handle it. He buys it and takes it home.
At home he installs the game and starts to read the user manual. This doesn't take him long because about half the manual is full of pictures of ships which can also be seen within the game.
Joe Smith is a casual gamer and he has never played a sub sim before. He loads a mission. He decides to start in the port. So now he encounters his first problem; the user manual says that he can turn his sub in two ways: Click on the rudders indicator or click on the compass. So his first problem as he attempts to leave port is that he can only see the compass and can't see any rudder indicators. On the keyboard he can see the keys for 'hard to port', 'hard to starboard' and 'rudder a midships'. Nowhere in the user manual does it tell him he can click on the button at the bottom of the compass to show the rudder indicator in order to make directional changes in much smaller increments.
So let's say he manages to leave port having destroyed half the US Navy in the process. Now he needs to plot a course. The user manual isn't very helpful here either, but he manages to place some waypoints. He decides that he wants a totally different course and he wants to delete all his existing waypoints. The user manual tells him to use the eraser to delete individual waypoints, but it doesn't mention that selecting SHIFT and using the eraser will delete all the waypoints at the same time.
These are the kinds of details that are vital to a new player in order for him to enjoy the game and not be frustrated by it.
In my opinion, much more attention to detail was required in the making of the user manual in order to ensure that a new player can really understand what he's doing.
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