T w e n t y S i d e d
I hope you’re a looter-shooter fan, because that’s what the first 40 minutes of this show is about. If not, we also answer some mailbag questions.
Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Show notes:
00:00 Shamus stopped playing Warframe
I tried. I checked the wiki. I looked on Youtube. I searched the forums. I didn’t find anything that would let me clear the Pluto junction without having to do the dumb spy mission. Maybe I’ll get the itch to play through that at some point, but I’m shelving the game for now. I’ll probably come back when the Wisp Warframe is released.
19:59 Anthem is Officially out!
I’m having a good time with it for now, but the whole thing is pretty watered down. If the splash screen logo didn’t tell me this was a BioWare game, I never would have guessed it.
I looked on YouTube and I couldn’t find the particular trailer Paul was talking about. (There are a lot of trailers!) The closest thing I could find was this thing from Hollywood director Neill Blomkamp (District 9) which is indeed pretty cool, but had absolutely nothing to do with anything that happens or is talked about in the game.
40:22 Mailbag: Technical debt and the case for software sustainers
Dear Diecast,
While browsing LinkedIn I happened across a series of articles which I thought you might find interesting.
The author presents a notion that throughout the development cycle, software is created, sustained for a while, and eventually destroyed and replaced, and that the creation phase leads to the accumulation of what he calls technical debt (e.g. the costs of maintaining the code, fixing bugs, providing customer support etc.).
He then points out that the tech industry tends to put creators (developers) on the pedestal while marginalizing the work done by sustainers and destroyers (QA, DevOps, support etc.), often to the detriment of the final product, as the technical debt becomes overwhelming.
The series has immediately reminded me of Shamus’s writing style, so I’m sending it over on a hunch, in case you guys had any experiences that would go in line with or against the notions presented in the articles, or simply find the subject matter worth discussing.
Lots of love,
Pawe?
50:13 Mailbag: Nintendo with a more common console?
Dear Diecast
Nintendo is a very large and very successful company and they are currently doing very well with Switch. However do you think that if Nintendo had been more conventional, more open to risks and new ideas they could be even more successful than they are today?
(By conventional I mean less of a gimmicky approach to hardware, better third party support, more first party games in popular genres, more adult orientated games, less draconian views on streaming, etc.)
Regards
Eric
1:01:49 Mailbag: Andromeda setting.
Hi!
3 out of 10 question
I’ve started ME Andromeda (can’t just read your series), and while I agree with your assessment of writing, I actually have another gripe with it. Not sure, how legitimate is it, and don’t think I saw anyone bringing it up. May be I’m wrong and just imagined all this? I think the premise of you being a pathfinder, exploring new worlds for colonization in another galaxy, is wrong for the Mass Effect setting. If anything, that promise of finding new planets and exploring them more suited for the Milky Way (which was shown in Mass Effect 1), with mostly closed mass relays.
Andromeda didn’t suffer Reaper cycles (I hope), her civilizations had millennia to advance. Arcs should’ve arrived and find themselves in active gala-political (?) scape, with major powers having tech at least rivaling the Reapers, and minor ones, being lower than Milky Way species. It could’ve been unstable Cold War-like situation, which would become even more unstable with guests from Milky Way.
I know its a fanfic level of writing I’ve just displayed, but it bothers me to no end, that writers didn’t capitalize on main in-setting difference between galaxies. On the other hand, considering the level of writing in Andromeda, may be its for the best, that they decided to take way less ambitious route with the premise.
Best regards, DeadlyDark
In this section I mentioned my Andromeda retrospective and talked about “last week’s entry”. Looking at the blog, I now see that the post I was referring to is the one that will go up tomorrow. Sorry, this gets confusing for me. For me there’s the post that you’re commenting on, the posts that are about to go live, and the future posts I’m currently writing / proofing. Sometime I lose track of what’s made it to the front page.
Barring any major re-writes, the final Andromeda entry will appear on April 9. After that, I’m thinking about doing a series on programming languages.
This Scene Breaks a Character
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
Diablo III Retrospective
We were so upset by the server problems and real money auction that we overlooked just how terrible everything else is.
Autoblography
The story of me. If you're looking for a picture of what it was like growing up in the seventies, then this is for you.
Quakecon 2011 Keynote Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Final Fantasy X
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
Yes please do. :)
*Does a little happy dance*
oh, you mean a shlooter
Haven’t listened to the show yet, but I’m surprised to read that Shamus has any level of positive feelings towards Anthem. The overwhelming sensation I got from other commentators and critics was one of disappointment and missed opportunity. And that maybe it would get good eventually. ( I have no interest in the game myself—reading the words “bullet sponge” anywhere is enough to make me walk in the other direction—but I’m always curious to see how games are received.)
It’s not “bullet sponges” any more, we’re calling them “RPG elements” nowadays.
I believe the common term is “hours of playtime”
Or “pride and accomplishment”
I haven’t listened to the show either, nor have I played the game (online shooters are not my thing). However, being a long-time observer of Bioware’s slow decent into the EA graveyard, I have been perusing various videos and articles about Anthem. One of the things that instantly struck me when I saw complaints about the terrible itemisation and loot was this game has obviously had all the pay-to-win lootbox content gutted out of it, post-Battlefront II drama, and they haven’t put anything in its place. I wonder what Shamus makes of that, and how it compares to Warframe (of which I know next to nothing, but I gather is a much more apt point of comparison than Destiny).
I don’t know this for a fact, but the loot is level-locked. You CANNOT get the unusual items until you’re level 20+. So if the reviewer hasn’t basically leveled all the way to cap, they aren’t going to ever SEE the unique loot.
Later on, the itemization gets more interesting, but the first 15 levels or so you’re going to have VERY bland gear.
This is actually a GOOD think in some ways, because the way you unlock crafting recipes for gear (which can help you get exactly the loadout you want) is to use the gear. You actually have to use, say, a Light Machine Gun to kill enemies to get crafting recipes. So if you want to unlock a lot of recipes it’s good that your drops don’t much affect your effectiveness early on.
I think I saw one headline about Anthem along the lines of Not As Bad As I Expected It To Be. Yeah, ringing endorsement there. OTOH, I hear that negativity draws the clicks. Not mine, I’d rather read good things, even if I know I’ll never play/read/watch/listen to whatever’s being discussed. Either way, there’s a kind of piling on effect. People line up to trash something as soon as they can.
Also, why buy something you expect to be bad? Just so you have something to complain about? Congratulations, you’ve just wasted your money.
Sorry, drifted off into a rant.
Could be lots of reasons, sometimes it’s “so bad it’s good” (or at least “so bad it’s funny”). But most of the time people don’t think the game is genuinely “bad”, they can think the reputation is exaggerated or undeserved, the game can be in a niche genre that someone likes, or the problems described could be something that some people don’t mind (for example someone can see “grind” as enjoyable mechanic).
In my opinion part of the problem is the issue of “forbidden numbers” (more professionally called “score inflation”). Basically a large portion of the gaming community expects that everything will be at least 9/10, especially when AAA titles are concerned, and conflate everything else into this amorphous blob of “bad games”. To be fair I can understand that if you’re planning to invest 60$+ (not counting collector’s goodies, potential DLC, microtransactions) and a similar numberr of hours into a game you want the experience to be really good but there is a world of difference between say Alien:Colonial Marines and Watch_Dogs.
I don’t think I’ve seen many people call Anthem outright bad, most negative opinions I’ve seen were in the range of “bland” and “somewhat meh” and “Bioware is wasted on a game like this”, so I can see a lot of people going into the game with the awareness that it’s not going to be something to write home about but still expecting it to decently fill the hours.
I am playing the game, too and like it a lot. My gripes with it are mostly technical, i.e. bugs, server stability, occasional rubberbanding. The underlying game imo is solid and very enjoyable, I haven’t had that much fun in a shooter in a long while. The core gameplay, i.e. moving around the place and fighting enemies, is better than Warframe or Destiny in my opinion. Anthem hits a sweet spot in between Warframe’s over the top “make 100 enemy heads magically explode all at once” and Destiny’s more mundane “you are a space foot soldier and sometimes summon a magical gimmick”. And it nails the physicality and viscerality of the power armor suits; it’s something that only really gets across when playing it yourself, there is a feeling of weight and heft to moving around.
Never forget that games are a cultural phenomenon and that public reaction is partially a bonding thing, i.e. discussing games is about having fun with like-minded people while the topic is hot. It’s even more true in the Youtube era as not making an unfunny video with you facepalming in the thumbnail means you miss out on hundreds of thousands of views.
You haven’t played a game and you are surprised someone likes it… but not surprised, apparently, that other people disliked it? Praise / hate bandwagons are a thing and you should remain sceptical, is what I’m getting at.
To be very clear, me having played the game or not has very little to do with my ability to predict if Shamus or anyone else will like it or not. Most of my game purchases are made by following a small number of people, trying to get a feel for what makes them tick, and trying to carefully parse their opinion of each game to see whether or not in each instance we’re likely to be on the same or opposite end of the spectrum.
And it still feels like a 50-50 shot at best…
In that case, I would recommend a coin as a purchase assistant: no better in terms of prediction, but decidedly less time-consuming.
Watching that trailer, the chicken-legs on the robo-suits look to be the same length as normal human-style legs. Do humans in the future get extra joints installed in their legs in the future, to be able to wear these alien suits?
There’s a normal knee joint above the chicken leg. I think the idea is that the chicken-leg bit begins at the end of the human’s leg. It’s like a really long shoe.
Having said that, I don’t think the joints line up with a human skeleton. Like, human shoulders could never line up with the shoulders in a colossus.
I think the models in that trailer might have been off, or the camera angles were at least hiding some portion of them. Looking at this image from the wiki, they do actually look like long shoes on the end of normal-length (or close enough) human legs. The video linked however, makes it look like the humans have broken legs… ^^;
For the Colossus, the big one, what Shamus says is correct. The head of the pilot is basically at the same height where the suit has its shoulders, you couldn’t comfortably have your arms in that position, if at all. For the other suits, it looks close enough to be realistic in that regard.
Watch the trailer closer. The “chicken-legs” are definitely longer than normal human legs. Those are actors walking on stilts.
If you run across someone in a suit in a cut scene, they are WAY taller than the people out of suits.
I still think something’s wrong with the models here. Look at this suit at 51s; The lower legs look about half a foot too short, like they end at the lower calf. The chicken part of the leg definitely extends far enough, but the part where a human would put his legs looks too short. This scene at 2:51 also looks like the lower leg is too short. This doesn’t look normal to me; Maybe Americans all have really short shins?
Either way, I don’t get the point of this shape for the power armor. Is it supposed to make everything seem more mysterious and alien? (Reading the wiki, humans apparently built the original suits, so it’s not like they were adapting alien suits or something.) It seems like that’s the artistic choice they were making.
There is actually a precedent for extending the human leg like that, which results in a greater efficiency when running:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5V356k-9a8
While this real world example is not exactly the same, it shows that there are mechanical gains to be had from extending the human leg with another, mechanical limb.
If you’re going for mechanical advantage, you’d be better off just having robot motors for everything, and having the humans either curl up really small, or train amputees. Even better, just make them jets / helicopters. The game world already has some kind of super-fuel for the jetpacks; Human muscles and chemistry can’t really hope to compete with that.
Listening to Shamus ranting about spy missions in Warframe hit too close to home for me :-)
When I started playing the game, I hated a lot of stuff there exactly for the same reason – “If you want me to do something, why I have to learn how to do it on the fly?”. This problem (lack of proper tutorials and place for safe practice) is one of the main reasons why beginner’s experience is often quite miserable, and even developers acknowledge that. They won’t change it though, because “learn it yourself” has became kind of a motto for Warframe. Reading wiki is almost integral part of the game now.
Another problem that new players face, is that they have limited toolset for solving problems provided by gameplay – like not having frames or weapons or mods that are best suited for the task. For example, as a new Excalibur I ha-a-ated spy missions. As a Loki with right mods and a powerful bow, I like them a lot, they are among my favorites.
So yea, Warframe’s appeal is a bit… backwards :-)
Yeah, but he’s on Pluto – one of the late-game missions. In the case of Spy missions, the game doesn’t explain everything up-front but they layer the challenges over time. If you try to skip them all and don’t learn how to do it, well… yeah, it won’t go well later on. This is one thing I’m not sure is on the game.
I guess it’s the same problem a lot of people have with archwing – they don’t like it in general, so they never practice, and when a necessary mission (or a mission with highly desirable loot) shows up, they are not ready for it and it leads to negative experience, which makes them dislike it even more. I can’t really blame players here, honestly.
But yea, I would recommend Shamus to try one of the earlier spy missions for practice. The layout is almost the same, but less security.
I’ve just started Warframe, and I encountered a groaner of an example when I did my first extraction mission. I summoned an extractor, it ran out of power. and I was told to “find a power cell”. Said power cells are dropped by enemies with “power” in their name. Obvious, right? Well…the game had never had objectives drop off enemies before. And everything enemies had dropped up to that point (that you could use, anyway) was automatically picked up, where the power cells had to be individually targeted. *And* enemies drop a brightly colored assortment of ammunition, which you don’t pick up if you don’t need it (and given that there are four types of ammo and you can only wield two weapons, there *will* be glowing crap left on the ground).
All of which is to say that I had a few frustrating minutes until I decided to wade through a pile of glowing enemy drops and do something I hadn’t been prompted to do or ever had to do before. Which all could have been avoided if the in-game instruction had been changed to “find a power cell *on a nearby enemy*.”
I get that Warframe has a rep for being user unfriendly, but when four little words make the difference between “effective tutorial” and “riddle”, it’s comes across almost willfully obtuse.
Excavation is a great example of incremental complexity. When the mode was brand new, you’d be going into it with a sense of baseline enemies and drops from your Capture or Exterminate missions. The power cell enemies and drops would stand out by being the only part you’d never seen before, and when you don’t automatically pick up the cells, standing over them would show the X interact prompt from the Mobile Defense datamass, which follows the same rules. Since Excavation is now just another standard mission type, these exceptions are lost in the noise when you’re learning.
Even Survival was added to an existing game, with the unexplained note that big life support towers refill the life support meter by 30% with excess wasted, leading to inevitable rage when new players experiment with the mechanic in ways veterans see as wasteful.
Each individual player only needs to learn these quirks once, but a free to play game will have a lot of players.
What’s galling to me is that they *have* a character giving you pointers, but that character is handing out incomplete information. I haven’t done a Survival mission yet, but I’ll bet Lotus points out the existence of the life support towers in voiceover. All it would take is one sentence to clear up the confusion.
And as you pointed out, this is an *especially* bad problem for a Free to Play game to have. Somebody who dropped $50 will probably not walk away after one frustrating experience, but someone who’s spent nothing might. And the likelihood of that interest breaking increases with unnecessary complication.
They’ve occasionally made steps in the right direction, at least. For Survival in particular, one problem that used to happen was when two players noticed the Life Support level was dropping, and both individually triggered a tower. It takes a couple of seconds for a tower to kick in (discouraging you from trying to activate one in the middle of a horde of enemies without first clearing them out), so it was all too easy to see too late that you just spent two towers at 60%, wasting most of the second one (the first bumps you to 90%, the second caps out at 100%). Serious players just got into the habit of calling out in chat when they were triggering a tower, or waiting until 30% to trigger towers so that a double activation wouldn’t waste anything. The solution was to put subtle little icons right next to the Life Support bar, one for each tower, and the icon furthest to the right would start flashing the instant a player activated any tower.
That this was fixed but no-one has asked Rebecca to voice another Lotus line to the effect of “Life support capsules restore 30%, Tenno” is probably because the synchronization problem was something which continued to happen to everyone, rather than something you’d learn once and be fine (or be shouted at and quit the game, thus no longer providing feedback). The dev team does appreciate feedback, but there’s a very narrow window for playtesters to provide useful feedback about what new material is confusing.
The other pressure against extra tutorial lines is that by default you’d be adding those lines forever. It’d take clever writing to deliver more information per word, or some way of only delivering lines when necessary (e.g. Survival only telling you in the overflow case that overflow is wasteful) to avoid having some of those one-time hints from showing up for every time you play the mission type *after* you’ve learned it. It’s still kind of their job as game designers to do this right, but it isn’t a trivial problem.
EDIT: This comment does not mention that the introduction and tutorial are as bad as everywhere else in the game.
As someone who has played too much Warframe, Spy missions are one of my favorite mission types. They are probably the only thing in Warframe that requires some actual skill and can’t be solved by looking at the Wiki for a better build. They also show that one of the medium-sized goals of the developer is largely misguided.
Some background: If you look at the things DE (the developer) have added over the past years, it is clear that they are looking for game-modes and missions that are more based on skill and/or cooperation to provide some variety and challenge. Some examples are the Spy and Interception missions, the newer bosses, some of the enemies, and the side- and “endgame”-content on the open-world maps. Of all their attempts I think the spy-vaults are the most successful, and definitively show that the community is clearly not interested in this kind of variation even if it works.
Some explanation: all spy vaults have 2 to 4 routes each, besides the obvious (but well guarded) path there are a lot of hidden paths, shortcuts, and tricks that you can figure out by doing them a few times, paying attention to your surrounding, and exploring them. They are clearly meant to be fairly difficult until you figure out some of the shortcuts that make them easier. Eventually all of them become so trivial that invisibility is literally useless. This is one of the reasons the early vaults are very forgiving, with reduced cameras and lasers allowing you to take your time and explore a bit.
Of course, all of that goes against everything the rest of the game is about and how it’s played. So instead of solving these puzzles, the community responded to Spy missions by immediately complaining they’re too hard and mass-switching to Loki and Limbo frames to complete them. I want to make it clear that this is not really a fault of the community (or Shamus): as I said, the rest of the game plays very different, and almost every other problem can quickly be solved with a gun. It would be like adding one of the conversation puzzles from Deus Ex to Doom: 99% of players would likely not even notice it’s a puzzle.
I loved Spy missions (except Neptune) for that exact reason.
I haven’t played Warframe since last summer, and I didn’t get super far, about 3 or 4 planets in. I didn’t mind the spy missions too much. I had the bow to start, so I could kill quietly. I had many of the rooms figured out. My biggest problem is that some of the rooms were harder to figure out, and if you mess them up, you don’t really get a chance to retry it, until the next time it randomly appears in another spy mission. If you mess up early, you never got a chance to learn anything, and good luck next time it comes around again. There were a few where I would accidentally set off the alarm right at the beginning. Often in that case, I’d just run around the room like a maniac looking for pathways and things to possibly get a clue next time.
I kept playing them though, because the rewards for successful heists were pretty good, and I could usually get 2 rooms cleared.
“(Spy Missions) are probably the only thing in Warframe that requires some actual skill and can’t be solved by looking at the Wiki for a better build.”
Except…
“…the community responded to Spy missions by immediately complaining they’re too hard and mass-switching to Loki and Limbo frames to complete them.”
So they *did* solve them by switching to a better build.
I have a major pet peeve with with game designers getting bored with making what players want, and following their own muse regardless of what the playerbase thinks. Warframe, near as I can tell, *is* a game of grinding and loadout optimization; making something that throws that out the window is *bad game design*. Arguably, Spy missions *weren’t* bad game design, since the playerbase found a way to adjust their loadouts appropriately.
Using those frames is like finding the largest screwdriver to hammer in a nail. It’s definitely the best solution if all you have or want to use is screwdrivers, but there is no reason you can’t use a hammer in this case. Looking for the right frame to solve the vaults is the “wrong” philosophy for them.
And I mentioned that the community is (apparently) not really looking for this kind of variety. However, I do think that some variety to “kill everything and/or do it fast”-missions is healthy for Warframe, providing something to do when a player wants to do something else for a bit. The quality of the execution varies a bit though.
How I’d fix the Spy missions:
* Get rid of the ridiculous massive murder dungeon. The big bonus of the invisible frames is that they let you sprint through that crap without setting off alarms and summoning a bunch of trouble. The huge level isn’t part of the challenge. Just have the player start in a central room, which leads directly to the three vaults.
* Don’t have the “perfect spy mission” as a prerequisite for the Pluto gate.
* Have stealth frame available from something BESIDES spy missions. (My son told me he got Ivara by doing spy missions.) This is the most wrong-headed idea of them all. You get a stealth frame by doing shitloads of spy missions, which means that you DON’T have a stealth frame when you’re doing them, and by the time you DO have a stealth frame you’ve memorized the stealth missions and don’t really need it anymore.
I think I could enjoy stealth jobs if resets were painless and I didn’t have to bludgeon my way through miles of mook arenas to get to the vaults.
Ivara is fine for Spy but its not her focus specifically. You want Loki, which you should have access to.
So they compounded the completely different gameplay with bit of good ol’ “open the box with the crowbar you find inside” loot distribution? Wow.
I think I’d say my reaction to spy missions is “I’d enjoy them if it didn’t use the core gameplay of Warframe (to wit, dicing fools) as a punishment”.
* I have a nasty feeling that “massive murder dungeon” is a deliberate stalling tactic from the developers. Veteran players can solve vault under a minute easily, so without the slog through a level, spy missions can become the best farming method, dwarfing all others.
* Agree
* As far as I remember, Loki acquisition isn’t locked in spy missions, you get him from boss at Neptune. Iwara is locked, but she is more of “Okay, we see that you have mastered this kind of content, so here is a frame that makes it trivial (with right mods, mind you). We don’t need to skill-check you anymore”.
If you return and want to clear Spies without being stealthy, try the following
Get Rhino or Nezha for damage resist and knockdown immunity with their buff up (or something similar)
Build some Ciphers, there’s a x10 bp in the market for less faff.
Learn somehow that Y is the default key to quick use ciphers when hacking.
Just run straight to the vault, using ciphers to clear the lock and open the vault.
You have to get 3/3 vaults, but undetected is not a requirement.
I love Warframe, but yeah, it’s got a lot of troubles and it was just the SA Goon clan that let me find the fun bits of the game.
EDIT : Alternatively get someone else (did you say Isaac played?) to do the mission with you in the squad. Less satisfying but works.
It boils down to – if you’re new and not good at the movement/traversing tiles stuff and cant handle spy – get a loki.
I never had any issues with spy, always liked them, always did good with them. But a friend started playing and wasnt, however he had me to help him and run the missions with him and give tips. Turns out he didn’t dislike the mode, he felt bad about them because he was bad at them, and learning turned him, and now actually loves to do farms in a 3 man party with me for plat making purposes on lua. Sounds like that’s what you needed most, someone to run it with/help get through the learning curve.
As someone with almost a thousand hours in Warframe I too absolutely despise the spy missions. Fortunately I have the resources, specifically the Warframe Limbo(the most hated frame in multiplayer for all of the reasons), to completely ignore the vast majority of the challenges in them, but I still do not like them at all.
My only advice is let the game rest for a few weeks then come back to it if you feel like it, and if you don’t, don’t.
Considering Limbo is both one of my most played frames and my go-to frame for whenever a mission needs cheesing, I feel honor-bound to point out most of those reasons are either outdated by months, apply to any troll with any frame with trolling potential, or just straight up wrong. Limbo best tophat boi.
But yeah, spy missions can be frustrating if you dont have the right frame for the job and the layout of every vault memorised (which you can only really start on once you have the right frame for the job). Ivara was the only frame I bought with plat for a reason.
Yeah, I haven’t played in about a year, so I’m running off the then just barely nerfed bubble wrap popper Limbo.
The cynic in me is saying that this FtP game made a mission type that necessitated completely different equipment as a way to push people to spend money on that completely different equipment.
… No?
Warframe doesn’t work like that. You can’t Wallet Warrior your way though the game. Spy missions are mostly player skill, and where a f’rame or weapon can help, its by recognizing the right tool. But everything you need is already free in the game. And some the most “powerful” stuff is literally handed out, including one option that particularly useful for Spy missions.
Players do pay for slightly-improved Prime gear, but you can also get that from in-game.
Next time can you please just put a spoiler warning in the show or something? I don’t care about ever playing Warframe but I was intrigued about this great reveal so not having it spoiled means I have to stop the show, google it, click the Warframe wiki, get hit with a bunch of terms I have no clue what they mean like tenno, then give up and search more links until I come across a reddit post of Warframe story for dummies. Why even mention something if you won’t say what it is?
It is a little late, but here are some spy tips in case you do load up Warframe again:
1) Enemy Radar & Run speed- There are mods that mark the enemies on the map and increase speed. Allowing players to effectively see around walls and move fast enough to avoid obstacles. They are worth equipping in general missions and definitely for spy missions.
2) About half the warframes can pass through lasers with an ability. Excalibur can with his #1. So can Rhino. (The most likely first two frames.)
3) Corpus have cameras/lasers. All warframe abilities are silent. A nuke ability (like Mag’s #4 or Shield Polarize) can kill weak enemies like cameras through walls without any risk of detection. An ability like Mag’s #1 along with Enemy Radar can allow you to safely target what you want to hit and avoid what you don’t. (Grineer don’t have cameras. Grineer instead have strong enemies.)
And the big one:
4) Once a spy vault is pass/failed, you don’t have to leave immediately. Take some time to look around. Start at the objective and work backwards to the entrance. Look for vents, check the ceiling, the floor, the walls and do a little exploring. Ignore the one door that opens on success that is a shortcut out. There will be alternate routes that are easy to see when working backwards. Learning this way means it is just a couple of minutes to learn a vault.
Due to that last tip, I don’t believe standard “Do it Again Stupid” applies. Players only need one vault success on the early missions, and can do 4) to get ideas for next time without any consequences nor time pressure. You are free to disagree though.
If I had kids, I wouldn’t let them run off to buy some unspecified Nintendo game (as in, game for a Nintendo console but not necessarily by Nintendo). Switch has Doom and Bayonetta 2, for example. The 3DS had Dead or Alive and, I think, some Resident Evil game.
What are you talking about? Those games are clearly meant for children – the women have such large mammary glands with which to do feeding!
I thought “Nintendo game” referred to a game made by Nintendo as a company?
Calling games for a Nintendo branded console “Nintendo games” seems fair. They are after all, games for a Nintendo thingy.
Exactly! I wouldn’t expect my hypothetical children to care very much about that distinction ;-)
I’m sorry you won’t be playing Warframe. I understand why, too- they had almost lost me until all of Destiny 2 happened.
If it intrigues you, I was under the impression that this year they gave out their roadmap for the next year- revamp the beginning was one of the priorities they talked about, and they already have a team working on it.
Maybe, if you get the chance, you could compile a list of tweaks you’d suggest?
As much as refactoring some spaghetti might not be fun or “new”, the tools to do this refactoring are a lot better nowadays, so that the cost is a lot lower. Jetbrains’ IDEs are pretty damn good at refactoring most languages; They can even handle most cases of weakly-typed languages like Javascript, Typescript, or Python. Renaming things within a function is trivial. Renaming things at the class, module, or higher works preogressively less consistently, but works at least like 90% of the time. If you hook the IDE up to look at git / Github, you’ll be able to see your changes easily, assuming you’re committing frequently enough that the differences are small.
In addition, you’re usually refactoring gross code, because it’s impossible to fix bugs or add new features, with the state its currently in. Refactoring everything and anything is pointless, but fixing grossness is often a prerequisite for the fun stuff. :)
I think the Anthem game trailer I saw was this one:
https://youtu.be/DPf-EATqFng
Or, maybe an even more trimmed-down version? Anyway, the music-visual sync isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty good! And the score is tight!
Eh. The voice over really wrecks it for me. It is so banal it could be a parody of itself.
Unleash your power!
Feel the power of your javelin!
Show your true power!
It actually does feel like a parody of power fantasy ads. So ridiculous.
Wow. That trailer is SUPER bro. By the end I had chin stubble and a backwards baseball cap.
They should have just repurposed the early cinematic trailer as the launch trailer, so much better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFwylDNpgFc
Hello Shamus,
It’s me your friendly Warframe link provider again,
Steam guide for how to do every Spy vault without frame powers with individiual videos for all grouped up by planet and factions (with minor spoilers for newbies):
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=587545211
ps: you should check some other steam guides, there are some really good ones for the game.