I’m not a game designer
I was adding a new feature to the game in response to some of the test results: guides to finding things in the game world, presented in the form of unlockable functionality. We would even remove some guiding systems from the beginning of the game and unlock them as the players makes progress. Rationally I know it makes perfect sense to do this, and it will almost certainly improve the experience for almost all players. It prevents frustration and it allows for communicating play instructions bit by bit. But implementing the feature made me feel so dirty. Withholding information from the player, even if it is for their own good, is not something that comes naturally to us as designers.
Though it does to us as storytellers. So maybe that’s a way to approach the problem…
This is something I’m sure causes LOTS of problems in many games in their dev phase. You can take your game in 2 basic directions the “extended tutorial” route or the “sink and eventually swim” approach. The problem with “extended tutorial” is that you find at times very basic functionality being withheld for long (sometimes inappropriately long) periods of time. While I enjoy them, Half-Life 2 and it’s episodes can be rather guilty of this. At times it feels like the whole game is just one long tutorial. The payoff in HL2 was the citadel when you became a physics god and tore the place up. The other issue with extended tutorial is that it makes the player feel dumb if they have a high skill level. “Just give me the tools and let me do this already.”
If you just give a player all of their complicated abilities from the get go (one of my favorite games, System Shock 2, goes this route). This would be like playing Metroid with all your upgrades to start with. The difficulty curve is no longer gathering your tools, but learning to use them effectively while being bombarded with possible actions. With this method subsequent playthroughs can go really fast. A person can beat SS2 in maybe 3 hours max once they know how the game works (which becomes a bit of a challenge in itself too).
As you mentioned using the story to help explain and accommodate just be careful not to sacrifice too much. Stories can be like a sculpture, they are very pretty and can be immensely detailed, but imagine David where instead of a lifelike arm you see forced chisel dents. No longer is it a full embodiment of an idea, it’s just a collection of chips and cuts. Extreme example I suppose. And worse of all I don’t really give any answers to anything. Regardless best of luck in your decision =]