T w e n t y S i d e d
My column this week serves two purposes. First, I wanted to acknowledge the bad timing of my article two weeks ago when I praised Anthem just before a flood of news stories revealed that things were worse than they seemed on the surface. Secondly, I wanted to shine a light on Warframe because it really is strange how little attention the game gets.
Every week is a new discovery of something cool that Warframe does, followed by a new annoyance that makes me ragequit. I keep getting disgusted, storming off, but then coming back because I miss the gameplay. Nothing else feels this fluid. I don’t mean “it feels good for a grindathon looter-shooter”, I mean the game feels good to play, period. While you do spend a lot of time working towards long-term goals, I hesitate to call it a “grind”. I associate grind with static gameplay against repetitive enemies in the same environments, and Warframe is the opposite of that. It’s so good I keep forgetting just how annoying it is, and so I have to come back every day so I can be reminded of why I quit yesterday.
I don’t know if that’s a criticism or an endorsement, but that’s where I’m at with this game right now.
What am I Supposed to be Doing?
The good: The game has nightmare missions. These are missions where you have to complete the job under some restriction. Maybe your shields are disabled. Or foes explode on death. There’s a running timer and you have to kill mooks to get more time. Nightmare missions are guaranteed to drop some rare loot. It’s a fun idea and a good way to keep the standard missions feeling fresh.
The bad: The various missions are unbalanced to the point of bafflement. There are two modes in particular that illustrate this really well: One is where you have a timer ticking down and you kill mooks to get more time, and another is “vampire mode” where you’re constantly losing health and you have to kill mooks to gain more. Laying aside the fact that these are functionally the same in terms of gameplayKill dudes as fast as possible., they are miles apart in terms of difficulty yet inexplicably give the same rewards and are presented as if they’re comparable challenges.
The timer one is basically a normal mission. You start with more than enough time to complete the entire mission, and then every kill gives you even more time. Vampire mode is, as far as I can tell, a prank on the part of the game designer. Your health ticks down so insanely fast that if the level generation creates a single empty hallway or elevator ride, the resulting lack of people to kill results in guaranteed death. Even when gliding through the level one-shotting every single foe, I could not kill fast enough to complete a vampire missionI was even using a mod to regen health and a weapon to steal health as I killed mooks. It still wasn’t enough to keep me alive.. I searched for a solution in the forums, and found a post from 2013 complaining that vampire mode is dumb and broken and basically impossible.
The lazy excuse is always, “Hey, it’s NIGHTMARE MODE, why would you expect it to be easy?” But that doesn’t explain why some of it is impossible and some of it is trivial. This feels less like an intentional design decision and more like sloppiness. Did anyone test any of this stuff? Which one of these two modes is the intended “nightmare” experience?
Maybe there’s some secret combination of frames, mods, and weapons that makes vampire mode possible, but the point is that the player never has any idea what they’re in for. Sometimes a low-levelWarframe doesn’t have “levels” the way World of Warcraft does, but you do gain power over time. Here I’m just using the term “level” as shorthand for all the various forms of power acquisition in the game. mission will be a complete meatgrinder. Sometimes a nightmare mission will be a cakewalk. It’s infuriating for a new player who is groping around, trying to figure out what material they’re supposed to be engaging with. If I slam face-first into a difficulty spike, does that mean I just need to get better at the mechanics, or that I need better gear, or is there some strategy buried in the wiki that explains how to do this? Guess wrong, and you throw away a lot of time for no benefit.
I should stress that this particular issue of some nightmare missions being trivial and others being hard is, by itself, a minor issue. After a few tries I learned which missions to avoid. I’m offering this as an example of the frustration and confusion that the player experiences while stumbling around and trying to figure out what they should be doing.
I think all of my gripes lead back to this issue of random and unpredictable difficulty. I actually enjoy the feeling of pushing up against a game and doing content before I’m supposed to. If I see content is for players above me, I might take a swing at it to see what I can get away with. If I fail, it’s no big deal. I knew what I was in for ahead of time and the sense of danger makes it more interesting. But it drives me bonkers when I jump into some content that ought to be easy and get completely pancaked for my trouble. I keep getting caught in loops like this:
- Arg. The game acts like this challenge should be no big deal, but I can’t even come CLOSE to beating it. What am I supposed to do?
- I look on the forums and people say you should have a widget to overcome this challenge.
- I look on the wiki and see I need to grind for random drops in a totally different part of the game in order to get a widget.
- I grind for a few hours and get what I need. But then I see I can’t actually use a widget without a wheely-doo.
- I look on the forums, and to get a wheely-doo you have to beat a boss.
- I take a swing at the boss and discover he’s even more impossible than the thing I was originally trying to accomplish!
- Punchline: I join a group so I can have help with the boss, but nobody else is doing that content. I end up being dumped into this impossible mission alone, but now I’m in multiplayer mode so I can’t pause the game if I get a phone call or if my nose gets itchy in the middle of this monotonous ten minute fight. The game is tested and balanced for 4-person groups, which is fine as long as you can find a group. I’ve noticed I can always find a group except for when I really need one.
- Bonus punchline: I finally claw my way past the original challenge only to discover the reward wasn’t worth all the time and hassle. The game acted like it should have been easy, and rewarded me as if it was.
This is worse than nested problems, it’s obfuscated nested problems.
It’s Getting Better
This is why the new Nightwave content is my favorite part of the game. Interplanetary DJ Nora sets out a series of challenges: Kill any 100 dudes with cold damage. Do any 3 spy missions. Catch 6 rare fish. I can see exactly what the challenges are, I can choose which ones interest me, I understand what I have to do to get it, I can see what my reward will be, and the reward is usually appropriate for the difficulty of the challenge. It’s nice, clear, fair content where I know what I’m getting into and what I’m going to get in return. It’s the best content in the game at this point.
Nora’s tasks have been keeping me going for a couple of weeks now, and the only time I have a problem is when random assholesThe Stalker, the Wolf, and occasionally some syndicate idiots. Also, the occasional escaped convicts that randomly show up can be be pretty bad sometimes. In the early parts of the star map, they can be more than an order of magnitude more powerful than the locals. show up and LOLMURDER the brand new frame I’m trying to level up. I’ve given up trying to do story missionsThe Jordas Precept was my last one. At the end of a long chain of jobs, it put me in a boss fight using the Archwing. It’s like when Final Fantasy makes you fight a boss using the unleveled characters you’ve had on the bench for the whole game. or filling in the system mapThe missions get to be pretty friggin’ hard and the loot doesn’t seem to get any better, so I don’t see a reason to slam my head into that particular wall. and I’m just working for the space DJ now.
Having said all that, I know some people like it when games are obtuse, uncaring, and mean. Other people love it when a game has lots of content, and nobody can claim Warframe is short on content. If you like tons of content and you don’t mind random difficulty spikes, then Warframe is absolutely worth a look.
Footnotes:
[1] Kill dudes as fast as possible.
[2] I was even using a mod to regen health and a weapon to steal health as I killed mooks. It still wasn’t enough to keep me alive.
[3] Warframe doesn’t have “levels” the way World of Warcraft does, but you do gain power over time. Here I’m just using the term “level” as shorthand for all the various forms of power acquisition in the game.
[4] The Stalker, the Wolf, and occasionally some syndicate idiots. Also, the occasional escaped convicts that randomly show up can be be pretty bad sometimes. In the early parts of the star map, they can be more than an order of magnitude more powerful than the locals.
[5] The Jordas Precept was my last one. At the end of a long chain of jobs, it put me in a boss fight using the Archwing. It’s like when Final Fantasy makes you fight a boss using the unleveled characters you’ve had on the bench for the whole game.
[6] The missions get to be pretty friggin’ hard and the loot doesn’t seem to get any better, so I don’t see a reason to slam my head into that particular wall.
Ludonarrative Dissonance
What is this silly word, why did some people get so irritated by it, and why did it fall out of use?
Project Frontier
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
The Best of 2018
I called 2018 "The Year of Good News". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
The Mistakes DOOM Didn't Make
How did this game avoid all the usual stupidity that ruins remakes of classic titles?
Stop Asking Me to Play Dark Souls!
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
“The open world is really pretty, but it’s probably the most uneven content in the game. (I think it’s some of the oldest.)”
*embarrassed coughing* The open worlds are some of the newest content in the game actually. The Plains of Eidolon (the Earth one) was released in October 2017, and the Orb Vallis (Venus) was released November last year. A lot of people have said that they’re newbie traps, and they kind of are – the Plains especially on release, because a lot of the stuff you farm there is useful only in the Plains (e.g. you use (the War Within spoilers) ) so you can spend a lot of time in them without progressing anything else outside the game.
On another note, I’m glad that you’re enjoying the Nightwave system. There’s been a lot of complaints about it (some of them justified even!) but as someone with 2.5k hours in the game it’s encouraging me to do more varied content, some of which I haven’t touched at all (e.g. it made me do conservation stuff on Venus for the first time, and I actually enjoyed myself!).
Re quests, I highly encourage you to do the main story quests if you can’t be bothered doing all of them; you’ve done The Second Dream and The War Within I think, so the rest of the chain would be The Chains of Harrow* -> The Apostacy Prologue -> The Sacrifice -> The Chimera Prologue. I’ve been really enjoying the main storyline, and can’t wait for the next instalment.
* Word of warning before you start this quest and get an aneurysm during the last part, visit the Quills of Cetus once you’ve done the War Within and get the mote amp – it’ll make the end fight a lot more palatable.
I liked what I played of Warframe, and had already read that there was a lot of content. However, it definitely felt like any of the interesting content was locked behind boring content I had to finish first, and I didn’t even know WHICH boring content would lead me in the right direction. Back when I was playing it, I tended to want to jump back in and try something, but then I would get tired of it very fast.
Why does the robot combat avatar look like a woman in a bikini?
Spoiler-ish lore reason: It’s not actually a robot.
Actual reason: Bikini babes are hot.
Also, that’s not a bikini, that’s a part of the little bit of skin it has left – that’s all exposed musculature leftover from a partial . . . vivisection? If you can call it that. Which it sort of was. And wasn’t.
And the newest one added is a muscle-girl – in a bikini.
Huh. I was under the impression that Warframes were some sort of (Often skin-tight) super-suits. From what I remember, though, it’s pretty gender-neutral. There were several ‘nude’-like Masculine frames as well, from what I remember of the game (I’ve not played in years)
I think the lore’s evolved a bit, over the years. Developments in the last few years have started to give the game actual characters and the beginnings of a story, even, which has also meant adding some definition to the relationship between the player and their Warframes.
1st of all warframes are not robots, they are largely biomechanical. Think a humanoid Xenomorphs: steel skin, insanely strong, engineered for combat.
2nd. Because a crazy techpriest of the religion of greed (the Corpus) captured her and tortured her with experiments to determine the inside workings of warframes, including literally tearing her skin off and using it to coat his robot dog. What you are seeing are the exposed muscles of the frame.
I am not even joking.
Her alternate skin (for irl $$) is normal looking (or at least what passes for normal in Warframe).
Not a robot, check. I don’t think that fully answers my question, but this line of inquiry has taken an unexpectedly nauseating turn and I am quitting before it gets any worse.
In that case, Warframe might not be for you – or at least, don’t look too close. This is a borderline horror game in spots.
I was actually strongly considering trying it until this point (I have been wanting an older style more open/somewhat harder game, even to the point of considering another go in *EverQuest*). So, thanks for sparing me that. Sounds like Warframe would just end up making me upset and angry, and I really don’t need that.
(hooray, I misspelled my own handle. -.-)
I was playing-and-stopping-and-playing Warframe for about 3-4 years now. There are usually three things that make me stop playing:
1) Repetition. Ungodly amount of repetition. I know it’s a grindy free game but jeez, is it really necessary to turn players into hamsters running in a wheel? Everything (and I mean everything) should be done at least several times. Say, I want Ivara. To make her I need 5 parts with drop chance about 7%. And I only can get her from spy missions. This means I have to do the same content minimum 60 times, but more likely about 100-200 times, Why?! In what world this sounds like a description of a good time?
2) Lack of polish. I get the feeling that Warframe devs live by the motto “Add now, fix later”. This is fine and all, but because of that the game is currently a bloated mess of old and new features, some in the process of refurbishing, some half-abandoned (or simply abandoned), It’s like living in an eternal beta, and I don’t want to be an unpaid beta-tester.
3) And the last, but the most important one: after you get used to glamour, you start to see how bland actual gameplay is. Is it something characteristic of all looter-shooters? Maybe. I don’t know. But I do know, that if developer themselves constantly need to “spice up” missions by suddenly adding a tough enemy from nowhere, then there should be a problem with how usually boring these missions are. And they are, for the most part, mind-numbingly boring.
Last time when I wrote a comment about Warframe I was accused of not being ranty enough. I hope this clears my honor :)
Yes, that is a proper rant, thank you!
In this one, where corporate bigwigs profit by making you suffer. After all, the duller and more frustrating the gameplay, the more likely it becomes that you will pay real money for it to go away.
And yes, this does seem like a proper rant. Well said.
This is both to you and to the OP. First ss a bit of an aside, I’m told Warframe is actually rather gentle about microtransactions.
That said this just goes to show how much people’s expectations differ. To me this is mouthwatering in terms of an MMO. I want a goal that I can achieve a week, a month, a year down the line. I want a goal where I can keep chipping at it daily and see it inching ever closer.
Don’t get me wrong, I can see this being off putting to a lot of people, and I’m sure I’d eventually stumble upon some kind of mission or something that I’d hate and would whine about having to play it 200 times, and yes, I would probably get burned out or bored eventually, before attaining all my goals. But I always aim to have at least one MMO with this kind of gameplay.
Damn, made a typo in the email.
I can totally see why people may love Warframe. I also don’t really mind chipping away at the goal, but I would say that Warframe is kinda inconsistent in that aspect. On one hand, most missions are “grind for a bit every day”, but also we have Nightwave with fixed availability duration, we have Argon crystals which disappear with time for some reason, we have limited events that force you to grind a lot in a short time if you want to get the items or resources you need. And so on.
All in all, Warframe is a beautiful mess :)
Needs more Caps Lock ;-)
The fact that Shamus originally described this game as “Destiny, but with ninjas” (I’m generally not into looter shooters. These days all I can see when I look at those kinds of games is a meaningless Sisyphean excuse of a game where you kill enemies to play a slot machine so you can maaaaybe get better loot so you can kill tougher enemies. Repeat ad nauseam.) and now your rant has basically killed all desire on my part to even try Warframe. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve also become a LOT harsher on games that are obviously trying to artificially extend the game’s lifetime or get me to pony up for microtransactions. Maybe it’s just a result of the fact that I have way less time now to spend on gaming and so I now have zero patience for games or developers who try to waste my time like this.
While it felt good to rant away at the game, I must admit that I feel kinda bad to kill someone’s desire to play it. It is not a bad game. It is actually a pretty good game, if you don’t chase goals and willing to do some wiki diving. It has a lot of annoyances, but I can’t say that devs are desperately trying to squeeze players for cash. All in all, I’m not sure if I can recommend it to people, but I definitely won’t tell to stay clear of it. It’s free, try it – it may be your cup of tea.
Warframe is the exact opposite, though. It’s a slower-paced progression, but that is not designed to get you to buy microtransactions (and there are no lootboxes). You can buy some fairly high-priced packages of stuff if you want, but I’m not known many players who did. And everything except cosmetics can be obtained in-game, including the rarer and powerful Prime gear. You can also get it via trade, so you can buy from and sell to other players. And the developers are pretty generous with handouts. The things to buy with your wallet are more inventory slots.
The cosmetics are a special case because many of those are designed by community members who get some money from them. I’ve heard a couple people are doing so well at it that they basically design cosmetics full-time now.
Seems like there’s a very simple fix: vampire health loss cannot kill the player. Just have them stuck at 1hp. As I understand it you have a shield system, so you should be able to build back up to a reasonable place when you do find a fight.
I believe that is already true. You bottom out at 1hp. Except it is no solution. You are absolutely going to take 1 point of damage from random enemy fire. Some damage transfers through shields.
The actual solution in game is healing consumables and warframes with healing abilities. Valkyr (the one pictured) will heal to full if she kills an enemy with her fourth ability. So it is more a matter of prioritizing movement and speed in vampire nightmare missions.
I tried this out on PS4 last year. Something about the field of view, blur or framerate made my head spin, and within the first level I stumbled into an open hole in the geometry that made me fall out of the world. Then you get placed on a ship with little idea of how anything works. I respect the movement options, which are closer to Metal Gear Rising Revengeance than any MMO or shooter I’ve seen, but this game has a hell of a rough start, and I didn’t stick with it.
The motion blur is absolutely awful. And the default field of view is tiny. Terrible defaults. Both can be turned back to sane levels in the options though. Understandable if a new player bounces before they look for that setting. The entire New Player experience is just bad.
Don’t mind me, I’m just here for the comments :D
To speculate about why Tikal is hidden behind Oro, I think it’s because it’s a dark sector mission.
Dark sector missions are these special nodes with built-in loot and XP multipliers. They tend to be a lot more rewarding than the exact same type of mission at the same level.
Also, it’s an excavate mission, one of the endless mission types; you can potentially stay in there for hours, with the enemies getting progressively harder as time goes on. That’s not exactly newbie stuff, and if newbies really want to run excavations, there’s Everest just above for that.
From the article:
Don’t you mean “bannable offense“?
Well, you know what they say: the bannable defense is a bannable offense.
“After a few tries I learned which missions to avoid.”
I swear this is the essential gospel of Warframe. And at my current mastery level of 4, the missions to avoid are “anything that’s not defense or survival”, because the rewards for anything else seem to be piddly nothing. This is distinct from spy and hijack missions, which are not merely unrewarding but a punishment.
Spy missions are actually one of the most efficient ways to level up solo because they reward XP evenly towards your equipped weapons regardless of whether you actually used them. Frames like Ivarra/Loki or even Limbo trivialize most of them. Hijack sucks, I agree, but you can bring Nidus and ignore the mechanics.
All in all, it’s the same as bringing in Frost/Gara/Limbo for a Defense mission – you just bring a right tool for the job. That’s the theme of the game; for every single activity you can do there’s some overpowered cheese build that you can use to stomp over it. It’s just the question of whether you find this kind of thing appealing.
*You* can – I’m a new player who’s still waiting for my second warframe to finish building. If the theme is “right tool for the job”, I find it pretty annoying that they throw all the different mission types at a player who only has one or two tools.
This. The common defense that seems to occur whenever someone complains about a thing in WF is for a handful of hardcore players to show up and say “What? That’s easy: just bring frame X with mods A, B, and C!”
And I’m sitting there reading them ganging up on this poor newbie, thinking “I’ve been playing this game on and off since it first went public, and I still have none of those things”.
As with all MMOs, if you’re not the sort of player who spends hours in game every single night for months or years, you gotta just learn to take those that do with a lot of salt. They don’t really know what’s normal.
Irony is I play WoW, and nothing in that game is remotely this opaque. I get that Warframe regards cruft as gold, but hitting a new player with all their accumulated game types while (*by their superfans’ indirect admission*) not providing them the tools to succeed just seems carelessly mean.
Shamus, you’ve hit the nail on the head in terms of what I like and hate about warframe. Very fun game, but stuff like the Wolf randomly appearing and ganking me is just frustrating (I just got to Europa, this seems like late game stuff man!) Also, the further in the game I get, the more it feels very difficult to use the guns, since you’re incentivized to slide and bullet jump around, and i just cannot adjust to the aiming mechanics during those.
One day, Shamus, your lack of fanatical reverence towards the divine gift that is Dark Souls will finally get noticed by the Holy Inquisition of the Church of the Chosen Undead and then it’s torches and pitchforks for you all the way. Such blasphemy will not go unpunished forever, mark my words.
If Shamus spent as much time playing Souls games as he does complaining about Souls games, he’d have finished SL 1 runs of all three Dark Souls games and be somewhere near the end of Bloodborne by now.
He pretty much never complains Dark Souls. He just says it’s not for him.
Yes, and it’s very concerning! I had almost lost hope that he would complain about Warframe (since it’s relatively old, and pretty low-profile), but there’s still hope for Dark Souls! Make your next Retrospective be about Dark Souls*!
*Well, your next-next retrospective. As far as I remember, after Andromeda, you have a programming languages retrospective in store for us
Yeah, I totally agree. And maybe then he’d see the light and realize the folly of not devoting every fiber of your being to serving the glory of Soulsborne. Can I get an “Amen!”, brothers?!
You jest but I’ve finished Hollow Knight recently and now a streamer I follow is starting it and a friend is starting Dark Souls for the first time and I get the urge to fire up a DS game almost to the point of having the shakes.
I’m not into online games at all, but the Escapist column and this article made me quite interested in trying Warframe.
I don’t think I’m going to stick with it for very long (but hey, who knows, right?), but it looks like it could be pretty fun for a while!
Same here. As soon as I can find a nickname that’s not taken, that is.
Have you tried this one?
As much as I didn’t like the game, this is one of its strong points – although it’s an online game, you can totally play it solo. And if at any point you need help from other players, playing with other people is the most unintrusive of any multiplayer game I’ve played.
I got a friend to join on the mod system. And then I basically begged him to join me because of the hoverboards they just added.
It is so much fun to just pal around the Orb Vallis, being almost a surf ninja.
If you can, swing through the intorductory missions on Fortuna, over on Venus.
Typo alert for Note #5:
” This is the equivalent the thing in Final Fantasy”
I’m guessing that it’s supposed to be “equivalent of the thing”? Even that’s a bit awkward, mainly due to the vague word “thing”.
Another typo: “come back every day do I can be reminded of why” I think it’s supposed to be “day so I can”
Typo: “pancaked for” has a double space (the comment looks like it truncates the white-space, but the double space was in the article). Could be that keyboard you were replacing?
For Vampire mode you need a specific setup with either a self-healing warframe or weapons. Hirudo is a relatively low-level MR7 weapon with life leech you can do vampire missions quite easily with.
And yeah, the game is extremely obtuse, doesn’t explain you anything and requires a wiki to play. At first I was sort of irritated by this too, but honestly I’ll take this convoluted mess of systems over super streamlined design of Destiny or Anthem where they’ve smoothed out the rough edges so much that all that’s left is Progress Quest with guns.
Also, I strongly recommend the Noclip documentary series on the game. This bit in particular where they talk about how every time they improved the “new player experience” it had exactly zero effect on player retention so they just kinda gave up and embraced the complexity is pretty interesting.
I play Warframe – a lot. For the ‘vampire’ missions, if you’re having trouble the best thing to do is grind for one of the ‘Frames that have a lot of health like Inaros. Inaros is all health, no shields, and has an ability to ramp his health up to around 3kish. And if you die – as long as there are some enemies nearby – you can even revive yourself. As you point out – the robot suits are tools and some tools are better for these jobs than others. And, of course, these missions are what passes for ‘end-game’ content in Warframe so it can be a looooong time before a casual player has the gear to do them.
But I do them with Excalibur – a ‘starting’ frame (there’s really no such thing in this game). Its all about the mods. With the right modset something like 3/4 or more of the Frames can do all the content without needing to shift to specific ones.
Yes.
Yes.
Probably not.
While the new-user experience is ‘better’, its still a complicated game that doesn’t explain things well.
Hell, I’ve been playing since the game was released but in one of the recent updates, the story mission (where you get a special frame that’s semi-autonomous) I kept getting steamrolled because I didn’t know that you needed to switch to operator mode to remove the shields from the boss before shooting him with regular weapons. Its *sort of mentioned*, if you’re paying close attention – but its not spelled out. And if you’re not normally futzing around with operator mode (and most people aren’t) then you’re just going to get pissed at why you can’t damage that guy.
Yeah, about that.
Its the newest content. Seriously – Plains of Eidolon and Fortuna are the last two major content updates. PoE is a little over a year old.
But I’ve never seen widely different power levels of mobs in the gameworld.
I feel for you. The current iteration of Archwing is the third they’ve gone through and each time it gets *worse*. When AW started out it was a tightly controllable thing that was very much like a bullet-hell shooter in terms of controllability. Now you’re trying to dogfight in an airliner. I did Jodas in an earlier iteration of AW and the consensus is pretty solid – Jordas is a painful slog under the current system. No one does it past the one time they need to to progress the story.
Levels listed on the map are for enemies. It really has nothing to do with player level. Like that Nightmare Ariel in the screenshot is listed “Grineer. 35-37”. That’s exactly what you’ll find there. Grineer that are between levels 35 and 37. Enemies can be level 100 on some missions. (And there’s the rare gimmick event missions that can have level 5000 enemies.)
Heh. I absolutely hate hate hate Nightwave. It is the daily quest grind I hated in WoW. And it will be resetting in a few weeks. So if a player isn’t at least rank 12 by now then it is unlikely they will finish. Also if you are unable to commit to clearing it every week, there is likewise little point.
I like playing Warframe and I like stopping playing Warframe. The Nightwave system is the antithesis of that. Big hate.
In a recent Extra Credits video they described Anthem and Destiny as a billion dollar marketing stunt for Warframe
Anthem especially.
Its been in development for as long as Warframe. And Warframe had more content and more things to do back in 2013 when it really was still in beta.
Anthem is, literally, the most MVP you can get. Its like someone there took a bet on exactly how little of a game could they release and still call it viable without laughing. But they’re all doing that. Its ‘release what we have now, get their money, and make ’em wait another 6-9 months until the game is actually done’. By which point there’s no one left so they . . . they don’t . . . have to spend as much money on servers god-damn this is genius.
Nightmare is an optional alteration to missions. If you click on the mission node you can just choose to do the mission normally without the nightmare modifier.
They’re also on a rotation, and you can’t grind the same modifier or mission repeatedly. It’s fine if they’re not all the same difficulty- you can only do them so often and you can’t pick and choose which ones are available, so getting better at the game or acquiring better equipment means you can take more nightmare missions if you want to.
Out of curiosity, does something in the UI indicate this? I don’t see anything in the screenshot that would indicate a ‘Nightmare toggle’ is available. I confess I haven’t played Warframe, so I may be missing a key symbol.
There is. When you click on that button you literally get a prompt to choose which version of the map you want to play.
And there’s a special icon on that node indicating there’s a nightmare mission available there – its different from the other nodes.
When you click on the mission button you get this prompt.
Gotcha. As big a fan of text-and-image format as I am, I must confess that for once, a video might have cleared this up for me. Thanks for the assistance!
Yeah well. On your advice, I went to have a look, and their account creation system is so asinine that I’m not sure I’ll ever see the game itself. Type your email, twice, and a password, twice, and an alias and then tick the I am not a robot box. _Then_ we’ll tell you that your alias is already taken, and erase everything except one copy of your email; try all of the above again. Randomly. Forever.
I don’t see the problem, why don’t you just choose xXxBongMasta421xXx?
/dad voice
Pshaw. First one taken.
Shamus you just need to git gud :)
Also, this weekend is going to be double resources.
You can buy a 3 day resource booster and they stack.
If you have any resources you’re short on , this would be a great opportunity to stock-up.
Also, also. If you by any chance done The War Within, this will be a REALLY good opportunity to get Kuva.
It’s a pain to get it normally.
You said in the article “Warframe doesn’t feel like a game designed to be a product. This game feels like it was built by a bunch of artists because they wanted it to exist, not because a publisher thought it was an optimal way to enter the online shooter market.”.
And that is, in fact, absolutely true. They had the idea long, long ago. (The original Dark Sector trailer dates back to E3 2005!)
But literally no publisher wanted to run the game as it was, which is why it was reworked into the fairly generic Dark Sector that hit the shelves.
Afterwards they made do with a bunch of work for hire, but eventually DE was on the verge on bankruptcy and betted literally everything on self-publishing the game idea they’d been stewing on for like ten years.
You should watch the documentary, it’s quite interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOE6528pwFc
Warframe doesn’t explain a lot of its mechanics – hell, even the wiki won’t tell you some aspects of the game outright – you’ll have to guess them, or learn it from other players, or through youtube content. Obtuse doesn’t even begin to cover it. The amount of content is vast, but a large part of it follows the ‘release and forget’ formula where it hasn’t been touched upon or reworked since its release years ago, but it has vital content like new frames locked behind it.
For example, the Infested Salvage missions are a horrible, grindy slog that you have to do in order to have a crack at Nidus, an incredibly fun and powerful frame. But in order to acquire it, you have to do one of the worst quests in the game – it starts out strong, showcasing an isolated community of space mushroom people that you’re trying to save from debt slavery (kinda like Fortuna 0.5, before Fortuna became a thing). But then it devolves into repetitive, boring, unrewarding runs of Index that comprise the last 3/4 of the quest. Then, even after acquiring the blueprint for the frame, you will still need to do repetitive Infested Salvage runs to acquire all pieces of Nidus, and it sucks. Why? Because Nidus has some of the most fun and interesting game mechanics of all the frames, and the game basically tells you: ‘suffer through this horrible, boring grind, and then maybe I’ll let you play this fancy powerful frame, or spend your shiny platinum now’. Shame, that.
Survival for new players is tough – shields are useless on almost all the frames (except the new Hildryn and perhaps Harrow, both of which require significant progression in the game to acquire unless you blow plat on them). Health, armor and energy (with quick thinking) are always more reliable in terms of offering damage mitigation and survivability. This is due to how health and armor interact: shields get no benefit from armor, toxin damage bypasses them completely and slash procs ignore shields. But you have to understand this sort of thing yourself, as there is no definitive ‘guide’ for the new players. The info is on the wiki, but it’s all scattered and non-systematic.
Some weapons are deceptively strong for their apparent low or non-existent Mastery Rank (Hek (with Scattered Justice augment), Atterax, Guandao, Sonicor,) and can help you clear content with ease, while other weapons of much higher Mastery Rank are hot garbage (Glaxion, Boltor Prime, Ballistica Prime). The new Zaw melees added with Plains of Eidolon (Plague Kripath, Plague Keewar, Sepfahn, Dokrahm) as well as Kitguns (Catchmoon, Tombfinger, Rattleguts) added in Fortuna far outclass their conventional non-modular counterparts
I find it helpful to carry a mod like Life Strike (or Healing Return, if you’re rich and fancy) on your melee, or alternatively, a Winds of Purity augment mod for regular Furis in order to help you heal and stay alive in a tight situation. Don’t forget that ranking up with the Syndicates (I recommend New Loka and Perrin Sequence, to start) will give you access to large team health/energy restores
There’s a frame for almost every kind of content that makes it trivial. Inaros or Nidus make Nightmare missions a joke, Ivara trivializes Spy missions (of course, to get her, you need to do dozens of spy missions, so I suppose it’s a fitting reward). Nova trivializes interceptions, Frost / Limbo – defenses and excavations. Nekros makes farming materials easier. Saryn, through to her name, wipes entire maps clean of life, and even the humble Mag can become the queen of high-level Survival missions. Some of the newer frames excel at multiple things at once, being well-rounded hybrids, but it’s often unclear how to build them effectively and efficiently, as even the developers themselves often don’t know how certain frame abilities and gear interact with each other.
Infested Salvage isn’t that bad. Nidus was my last frame to bring me up to all frames being acquired. The annoying thing is that they’re more productive to be run solo because you can run the runtime of the missions down to about 12 minutes down from 20 (or worse with a bad group). Grab Nekros and an AoE primary and it’s easy.
Harrow is a billion times worse of a grind, and Khora is almost as bad – but at least you can level and do tangent stuff (level/forma weapons, warframes, ect ) while grinding for her. Harrow though has the most awful mission type in the world, and it’s not friendly for leveling weapons because the XP is so low. You can get those runs down to 15min a go, but they’re painful the whole time.
The most primary reason why Nidus really isn’t that bad, is that it’s GREAT for relics, specifically Axi and Neos. 12-13 minutes for a chance at 2 Neos and 1 Axi is insanely good, considering most of the time it takes 20 minutes to go through an AABC rotation.
Ivara is arguably awful, but get a group of 3 or just get good at solo and the missions are under 5 minutes. Plus, relics. Grineer sites are super obnoxious, though.
You know, having read about your . . . complicated relationship with Warframe, I’m starting to wonder if you should give Monster Hunter a try. There’s a gameplay loop of upgrading gear without worrying about character level, and I have yet to have encountered a jagged difficulty spike like what you’re describing here.
On the other hand, you don’t really have much in the way of variety when it comes to mission types, and the gear-upgrade cycle falls more closely aligned with your definition of grind. Also, it has a nasty case of not-free-to-play, which could be an obstacle.
It depends on which Monster Hunter. Monster Hunter World’s grind is pretty much spot on in my opinion: getting a monster’s armor and a weapon ussually takes about 6 tries, which is enough time to get comfortable at killing it without it becoming overly repetitive. Best is that you don’t actually need to kill every single one of them, as the game encourages you to mix and match various armor types (and look hilariously horrible in the process).
That changes once you reach the Tempered and Arch-tempered monsters, who are just one-shot monstrosities. Screw that “post” end-game they came up with. It’s terrible.
The investigations also help, since you generally get extra bits from them over the general question rewards.
Ever since Shamus started talking about Warframe, I was on the fence on giving it a try myself. I decided to finally do it. I’m away from my gaming PC, but it’s got a Switch release too. Then I found out that you can transfer your progress only from PC to Switch, and only once. Ugh…
No, I don’t want to relive the newbie experience when I get back to my PC, and I’ll probably prefer playing this on the PC.
Honestly Shamus, I’m amazed you put up with the Mastery Rank tests. I think they might be the worst thing in the game for me.
I played a little today; everything except the shooting/killing is bloody confusing. The shooting is fun, though.
Lol, in 2019 I ‘only’ played for a few dozen hours before dropping it. I’ve restarted on a new account late last year and clocked a few hundreds more since then… I have to say the new player experience has improved, the nightmare vampire missions are doable with any loadout that can do that level of content by killing enemies, but the open world are still a noob traps (and that’s not helped by the most recent one being available right from the get-go, though it neatly side-steps most of the issues of the three others). Though the core of the issue (grind, complex and not-really explained systems) is still there, but then it fits what I’m currently looking into a game.