I'm 50 hours in, so I have had time to think about the start of the game new people are experiencing. The opening is weird, and in this day and age, you only have so much time to make an impression.
You get the mine prologue which is fine for some flavour, create a character, then have a pretty underwhelming out of the vault moment when there are infinitely better moons to have that in the game. Then you get into a fight. Get a ship, fight in space again, then land on another (pretty similar) moon, then have another fight in a mission that really feels just like a bad sidequest with some tutorials, then finally the game opens up a little but it's nudging you to get to the city asap so you might not even do that, then you finally get to Atlantis, which is a Citadel moment or should be, and you can have a million distractions (which I'm sure is the point, but doesn't make sense mechanically because Vasco is with you, and nothing else in the game has opened up) until you finally make it to the Lodge, and then finally the real Dark Souls begins. This point could be just an hour in, or it could be 6-8 hours in, and people can get frustrated because they are doing all these things without the tools they need or the larger context of why.
If the previous paragraph was tedious to read, that's because it was a bit tedious to do. It feels modeled after something like Fallout 4's start from vault to the museum to Diamond City jumbled up a bit, but it doesn't work because it's not a continuous space. They should've realized that. Either they let you loose right away, or they take you there in a snap with a bit more flair.
At this point in the intro, I'm still soaking in the game, trying to not miss details but a lot of people just want to get to the good bits and let loose and thus, they get easily frustrated. The opening could've been condensed into a single fight, a better reason to get a ship to your name. Maybe some Constellation member dies and you inherit their mission, or maybe it's not even Constellation's ship but a salvage or even the Pirate Captain's ship and you're compelled to find out what the artifact is (you can always get the Frontier later on). Anything, but a "here, take the keys, you're the captain now while I stay here doing nothing". Sometimes I can't understand what's going on with the writing room at Bethesda. Maybe there are not enough people challenging these things and it's just the vision of 1 or 2 people, or maybe it's the opposite and it's just the compromise of a dozen different opinions.
I love most everything else that the game is doing. I even love how it's paced from then on, but you lose a lot of people here. Even when they make good decisions, like making your skill choices more meaningful, they work against them with their structure. A couple missions into the main quest, you get your first Boost Pack. Now, you maybe already have one, or not, but either way it should feel exciting and rewarding (have a mission that needs it around the city or something) to compel people to understand why the investment to getting it going is worth it. But they don't want to make it mandatory either. It's a tough choice, I get it, but if it's fun show people why and then let them make up their mind.
I'm loving the game, and it frustrates me that some decisions like these might turn people away. It gets much better tho, I hope people who are not feeling it know that we've been there, and if you see a glimmer and stick with it, it pays off.
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