{"id":46303,"date":"2019-03-20T06:00:19","date_gmt":"2019-03-20T10:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=46303"},"modified":"2019-03-21T19:37:04","modified_gmt":"2019-03-21T23:37:04","slug":"warframe-is-strange-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=46303","title":{"rendered":"Warframe is Strange Fun"},"content":{"rendered":"

My column this week<\/a> serves two purposes. First, I wanted to acknowledge the bad timing of my article two weeks ago<\/a> when I praised Anthem<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I don’t know if that’s a criticism or an endorsement, but that’s where I’m at with this game right now.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

What am I Supposed to be Doing?<\/h3>\n

Nice. A supposedly NIGHTMARE level that's the same difficulty as a regular level, but is guaranteed to give some rare loot. (I finally got the Animal Instinct mod from this one, and I've been waiting for ages for that to drop.)<\/div>
Nice. A supposedly NIGHTMARE level that's the same difficulty as a regular level, but is guaranteed to give some rare loot. (I finally got the Animal Instinct mod from this one, and I've been waiting for ages for that to drop.)<\/div><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> in terms of gameplayKill dudes as fast as possible.<\/span>, they are miles apart in terms of difficulty yet inexplicably give the same rewards and are presented as if they’re comparable challenges.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0Vampire 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.<\/span>. 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.<\/p>\n

This is the map for Earth. Each node is a mission. All of the missions here are between level 3 and 10. Except, the Ordo node is a boss mission and the suggested level is 30. Okay, so you're supposed to come back later and do that one. Fine. But then Tikal is locked behind Ordo and that's for level 10 again. Why is newbie content locked behind midgame content?<\/div>
This is the map for Earth. Each node is a mission. All of the missions here are between level 3 and 10. Except, the Ordo node is a boss mission and the suggested level is 30. Okay, so you're supposed to come back later and do that one. Fine. But then Tikal is locked behind Ordo and that's for level 10 again. Why is newbie content locked behind midgame content?<\/div><\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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.<\/span> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.) Foes of vastly different power levels are all mixed together and will engage the moment the two of you are in the same postal code.<\/div>
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.) Foes of vastly different power levels are all mixed together and will engage the moment the two of you are in the same postal code.<\/div><\/p>\n

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<\/strong> 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:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. 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?<\/li>\n
  2. I look on the forums and people say you should have a widget to overcome this challenge.<\/li>\n
  3. 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.<\/li>\n
  4. 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.<\/li>\n
  5. I look on the forums, and to get a wheely-doo you have to beat a boss.<\/li>\n
  6. I take a swing at the boss and discover he’s even more impossible than the thing I was originally trying to accomplish!<\/li>\n
  7. 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.\u00a0The 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.<\/li>\n
  8. 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.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    This is worse than nested problems<\/a>, it’s obfuscated<\/strong> nested problems.<\/p>\n

    It’s Getting Better<\/h3>\n

    A clear set of goals and a system of predictable rewards. This is EXACTLY what this game needed.<\/div>
    A clear set of goals and a system of predictable rewards. This is EXACTLY what this game needed.<\/div><\/p>\n

    This is why the new Nightwave<\/a> content is my favorite part of the game. Interplanetary DJ Nora<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

    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.<\/span>\u00a0show 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.<\/span> 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.<\/span> and I’m just working for the space DJ now.<\/p>\n

    Having said all that, I know some people like it when games are obtuse, uncaring, and mean<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46303"}],"version-history":[{"count":41,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46345,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46303\/revisions\/46345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}