After reading @firegod's post I do see better what the people who say it needs more direction are saying.
tl;dr larian explain better, better balancing on environmental effects, less aggressive outcomes from dialogue and more peaceful approaches, don't experience starve us from the start due to making "the peaceful choice into the wrong choice"
For experienced players of this game, the previous and rpgs in general it is a far easier experience for us and for people who just want to kill things like his friends do.
I do believe that there is a tutorial on the mentioned ship that they have just not released yet to EA or won't release in EA as it is merely a tutorial, not much testing needed there by us players I'd think.
But if the case comes that there is NOT a tutorial on the mentioned ship at that point there would need to be a vast improvement in the beach area as a makeshift tutorial area.
There is Tam near the shrine statue to give away the whole "we are sourcerers and were being imprisoned here and the divine order is "healing" us", the problem with Tam is that he is out of the way, sure you can see there is a statue and stairs leading to it, but most players just want to move forward and probably won't even notice Tam's existence.
The biggest problem I can see, even as someone who's sunk a lot of hours just into the EA of this game and pretty much got Act 1 figured out, is for sure the over aggressiveness of the inmates of Fort Joy, it is understandable that from the perspective of your character that they'd all be pissed and violent a bit since most are intelligent enough to know what is really happening and know that they are prisoners not patients, but that doesn't really justify throwing huge fights at new players who have no chance of winning, the biggest one being Griff's gang, who is unbeatable before you reach their level and even at their level are incredibly difficult to take on with your small, under-geared party. To go along with that the whole fact that you can't peacefully resolve the issue of the stolen cargo is really bad writing or design or whatever you'd call it and yes you can save Stingtail and not fight with Griff's party, but as I've mentioned before in other places and I believe in a post above, who in the world is going to figure that out without already having knowledge of it.
We are experience starved early on and though the theme is "a desperate and broke prisoner with nothing of their own", it is just too much for new players or players like Firegod's wife who aren't tactical, who can't see an oil barrel and think "i should re-position this and use it against this group before the fight starts" because they either just don't think like that or because Larian made a seemingly neutral or even positive sounding dialogue turn into a 7 on 4 battle out of nowhere.
That kind of design forces players who can't play like that into the easiest difficulty, which isn't a bad thing if they just want the story, but they should be able to at least have a chance to play on normal difficulty without bluntly being told "git gud scrub" or worse causing them to stop playing the game.
Some other things I would hope they could implement for helping new players is how environmental things like water puddles or barrels interact with battles, which at the moment I think also need some tuning as a lot of them are far too overpowered and underpowered, an example would be fire and poison I think as there are so many times those combine and you never could have planned for it and when it happens it is already too late and you have to load from earlier as it has completely wiped out your party or another fan favorite I think is how Contamination works...it is awful..using it is like sentencing your whole party to death since there is nearly ALWAYS a blood or water puddle nearby and it poisons your whole party and some asshole throws fire and its game over and I don't know about everyone else but it also seems to spread a little oddly, like more than it should, I could swear I've seen poison spread over bare land where it shouldn't be going..
Too add onto the whole fire poison crap, I think we need more damage options for other types of magic only because fire interacts with so many things and it is almost always a bad idea to use it due to oil spread or poison spread, for damage casters it seems like you HAVE to go Pyro, yet pyro punishes your own team more often than it does the enemy. I mean hell I don't even want a tank or melee person(s) in my party because now I can't throw a fireball or searing daggers because I'll hit them and wipe them off the face of the planet in the process, it is just a little absurd I think.
