I do get your point about it being accessible to newcomers, and some games can be very oblique for those not already immersed in the relevant knowledge and jargon; but there always has to be a balance: if everything was linear and immediately doable, it wouldn't make for a very interesting game and would have little replay value.
Yet there should be some impulse at the start.
You know, some people here say that without snipe game is hard. That was a surprise for me, because I never used that skill before and thought it was useless and the game was too easy even without it. Picking up a chest sounds great, but I never used this opportunity, didn't even think about it. But I would never start the game again just to test this. People here think that there should be some special features that will make a player do another playthrough. I, personally, would never do it just in order to test how picking up chests works, or how snipe works. So why don't you show a player from the start, that he actually has these opportunities? Great games have replay value and it isn't based on these small features. I have 2 examples of games that I replayed for dozens of times. It is Rage of Mages (both parts) and Space Rangers (every part). Both games are old RPGs and their replay value was based on how random the game could be. I played the previous patch of DOS2 4 times and every time I would go to the underground in order to pick a lvl8 item and pray that I would find a useful one. I didn't find one and reloading the game wouldn't change it. When I played RoM I could get some fixed loot from particular enemies or places, but 95% of time I would get something random. But it would be much more random than here, in DOS, where you just pick a common 1 armor helmet or 1 armor gloves and that is a random. The items in those games would vary so much. You could kill the simplest monster and get any cheap enchanted item with a weak enchanment. That refers to RoM. And in SR you would get a gun that weights 50% less and deals a little bit more damage (10-12 instead of 10-11, for instance). In RoM you would return to the town and see items in the store, but when you reload items would change. So I could spend half an hour, trying to reload and get perfect items for my heroes. Then I would go on a quest, find the strongest monster, and keep fighting against him with 1 hero while the other one would assist by healing. This way one of them would boost his weapon skill, and the other one would boost his elemental magic. In SR I had numerous planets, every of which had it's own market, so I would fly from one to another in order to by a perfect gun for my spaceship. And here I noticed that the post is a little bit too big.
Boosting the replay value is about letting people pursue perfection as long as possible. All those games like lol, wow, dota2, cs are never boring because they let you become better than others in every single matchup. And in those old RPGs you could have a stronger and better char after every replay. Add some of this and after some time the game would become legendary. In DOS1 the biggest disapointment for me was the fact that merchants had new goods only after you lvlup or some time passes, I am not sure. And the fact that the devs took out books with attribute and ability points also caused a little bit of frustration.
The Witcher 3 is so f*ing good, but it hasn't much replay value. It is not about perfection and competition, It is a great story. CoD series isn't about story or about competition, that's why this shit can't even reach the sales the devs wanted, people are tired of shitty stories with shitty multiplayer.
Is DOS a good of a story? For now that is a question. Does it have a potential replay value? Yes, it does. DOS1 was a good mix, like MW and MW2 at their time (both games still have fanbase), but you may see what happened with the franchise in the end. So what is the choice of Larian? Story or perfection? If you try to kill two birds with one stone, you end up with CoD. You will maybe have money, but it will come with angry fanbase for sure.
