I played through the extended tutorial now and the game is quite alright. Good job! Will definitely continue to play.
TL;DR section coming up, mostly for the (hopefully) benefit of Nathan.
I wish to share a new user's experience with you, so that you might gain some insight into a inept users' bumbling behavior. Perhaps it can be of help for game-design purposes.
First though a little bug I encountered after finishing the tutorial slime fight. Not game-design related but it was one of the first impressions I got from the game. I put walking speed on fast/high and wanted to rush back to the castle. The fast walking speed resulted in me being catapulted near the bridge over a hill behind some city buildings, which I could not escape from. So I had to load a save and redo the fight. No biggie, just a minor inconvenience. But a first impression that plants the "5 minutes in and this happens. Am I in for a bugfest?" thought into your mind.
While leaving the city for the first overland quest I'm being told to fight some slimes to level up my guys. On the overland map I venture South-West towards the quest goal and still wonder if combat can happen by random encounter. The first enemy I encounter is a goblin patrol. The strength gauge at the bottom says it's about equal. Half my army gets wiped out, I reload.
This time I see a flag on the map, thinking it might indicate a quest encounter or something special. It's an abandoned mine. Let's check it out! My army gets crushed, I reload.
Wondering if I need better gear even though I literally got dumped 2 dozens items on me shortly before going outside. The goblin trader doesn't seem to offer real improvements, besides the prices are out of my reach. So I try to find the slimes and go in circles. No slimes to be found. I decide to - for me personally counter-intuitively - ignore all encounters and go further west towards the quest objective. Hot damn, this is where all the slimes have been hiding!
A further hint/nudge to look for slimes further west would have been helpful here IMHO. Naturally the first thing a player does is try to fight the first thing they encounter once unleashed upon the world. Don't know if it's design choice to put the slimes further away without hint though, but regardless I personally didn't have a problem with having my ass kicked through experience. Yet I could see some people perhaps being turned off by this and quitting the game without ever to return.
After visiting the quest village, the first NPC I encounter says I better buy a skinning knife because it's super useful. I use 90% of my wealth to invest in a skinning knife. (spoiler: the first loot drop I got besides the slime stuff is a *drumroll* skinning knife. Little §!&$ scammed me! I feel a little shafted).
I also encounter a duo of barbarians that tell me about the cheese they are looking for. I still wonder if these special things are acquired via random drops from regular fights like the skinning knife, through special encounters marked by flags, from random encounters while traveling on the world map or if it's part of the main quest (i.e. bandit leader is also having the cheese/merchant with him) etc.
I get the hint that the Bandit Boss can be lured out by defeating Bandits.
I leave the village towards the north and proceed to fight some encounters in order to level up my army a bit. Including a single group of bandits. On the way I pick up some abandoned carts. I don't hover over the cart icons any longer to see the text-blurb describing what it is, because I expect by now that everyone is the same.
So I did not realize that the cheese is obtained by visiting a cart, since it also has the same icon as the regular loot carts. So I ignore the cheese cart that I can see on the map a bit further to the north-east thinking it's just a regular abandoned cart not worth going after. Only after quite a while roaming about a bit I almost accidentally hover over the cart and see a different text-blurb.
Since by design it seems intended to be able to differentiate between regular cart and cheese cart, it would have been nice to have a different visual as well (even low effort like a big yellow wheel of cheese inside the cart or whatever).
But back to the Bandit Boss. Since I got the hint that defeating Bandits lures him out, I would have probably chased Bandit groups thinking I need to kill X before the Boss reveals himself. By lucky accident after the single Bandit group I defeated like mentioned above, I visited the Village to the far west and discovered the Bandit Boss by accident. If I didn't had the curious urge to visit the village icon, I would have probably wasted some more time grinding bandits before questioning what I had to do in order to make a Bandit Boss stack spawn.
So yeah this has been my extended tutorial experience. Like I mentioned, perhaps it can be of help to you in regards to game-design learnings or whatever