Now that I'm doing actual real work on the early-game experience, I've been doing a little bit of thinking about the early game. Early game is where you learn how to play, hence the existence of Tutorial Valleys and Noob Islands. But I'm wondering if I shouldn't give the player a choice about how he/she wants to spend the early game, apart from any difficulty settings. I've thought about giving them an option when they start a new character. Select "Hold My Hand" and you get whisked off to Tutorial Island, where the game holds your hand and teaches you to play. Select "Come At Me, Bro" and you get dropped on some random island in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but your wits to see to your survival. No hand-holding, no guided tour of a carefully crafted island, just you and your Magical Throwing Rock on a harsh island filled with critters, baddies and trees.

After the first island, the games would be pretty much identical, it's just that Tutorial Island would be more carefully crafted to keep players out of trouble until they've learned the ropes. If they decide to replay with a new character, they could just select "Come At Me, Bro" to avoid the hand-holding. All this, as I said, would be apart from any difficulty-level settings, although I doubt I would bother tuning Tutorial Island for anything other than the easiest difficulty setting.