A Concise Review Of The 'false Profits' Event And Riot Moa - A Letter Of Concern By Volkovyi

[Volkovyi]

Good day fellow Tenno,

          I wish to write a concise review of the recent False Profits event, including the Riot Moa. Or Canonically known as the Bursa Moa.
I am the artist who conceptualized and made the Riot Moa last year during the contest, “Enemies of the Tenno” sometime before Gamescom 2014. The same contest that conceptualized the Manic Grineer, and soon to be Juggernaught infested.
      This event has largely been met with mixed responses from the gaming community. I have received several private message on the Forums; a number of players complaining to me.

      On one hand I am immensely proud and honored to have my design in game, and the community’s support. I am proud to be in DE’s good graces with my work. I am very grateful for that fact.
However with the way the event has been accepted, I am tempted to just remain silent and leave my trust with DE that they will tend their game in due time as they always have.  

      On the other hand, if I remained silent I would be doing a disservice to Warframe, it would be a disservice to the community, if anything I would feel dishonest to myself. I wish to extend a hand of cooperation for this thread, to write the best unbiased and fair, yet short, review as I can for the better of everyone involved.

The Review

Overall I feel the event had a mixed atmosphere in design, in terms of its functionality and lore content. What I mean by this is that there is an incongruity between the story of the event, and the gameplay itself.

      I feel the Riot Moa’s original design and thus its original purpose has been misapplied in its current iteration. (Current, meaning what we last saw of it, even though the event is over.) I must honestly admit I am feeling sorrowful about its current implementation. Considering the positive introduction of the Manic Grineer, and despite initial bugs and balance tweaks, the Manic is a great feature on the battlefield and is exciting to fight every time. This left me in high hopes as you could imagine.

I believe the golden rule of designing enemies for gaming standards would be that each unit should have one thing they do very well. A unique feature, alongside an unique flaw. This balance is what potentially makes engaging and complex characters, encouraging the player to approach each unit in a different way, even if they all have a unifying theme.

The Riot Moa ideally was supposed to be a slow and solid stationary unit that impedes the player’s progress, assaulting him from afar occasionally with two weapons, and bonking him with his shields if they got too close. Bonking them once, with his body, sort of getting up from its crouching position.


      By contrast, the Bursa Moas are too much, simply said. It is true that overall their powers did hold the same theme: blockade. But their powers were scattered, and overwhelming in a frustrating sense. There was no need for three variations of the same unit either. Coupled with the way the event was designed, the player was particularly victimized by these haphazard powers of the Bursa over a longer period of time.

      The Bursa moved too quickly, they moved from Bunker to Walker mode very often, they cycled between attacks and behaviors just as often, it feels inconsistent with their visually heavy design.
 

• The Orange Bursa was in my regard behaved the closest the original design, I was pleasantly surprised to see how well it navigated to doorways to set up its wall of lasers. It was well coordinated. However it moves too quickly when it is relocating. If the next doorway is far away [in the tileset] it sprints incredibly swiftly, far too fast for its visibly huge and heavy body.
   
• The Blue Bursa is downright unpleasant. Despite it’s shields and description, it was more aggressive and less defensive. Far too aggressive, the “shield ground pound” is simply put a completely unnecessary move. It is too quick, happens too often, and the Bursa is misusing its own shields. The spindly arms holding up the shields would realistically break under such usage, and it is visually obvious.
   
• The Beige/grey Bursa behaves in a way that I feel is completely opposite of its original intentions. It aggressively chases the player, to the point I could actively run in tight circles in the same room and it would follow closely. The nullifier bubbles are odd to say the least, I am tempted to say they do not belong at all. The nullifying effect in general feels like a cheap way to impede a Warframe’s progress, simply by removing their powers altogether.
   
• In conclusion, I am feeling a bit blue, to put it nicely, about these iterations. From the Moa shooting multi-purpose bombs from their necks, to misusing their shields for slamming attacks, to even them being renamed from Riot to Bursa. 

 

 

Conclusion

          I do hope that a fine compromise between these two themes will be found and implemented. Consider this: Perhaps the event missions could have had an unique tilset that was like a Corpus Bank Vault where these data transactions happen and thus can be hacked. (Taking inspiration from the recent Spy Mission’s redesign?) This vault could have been the focus of the event, which the entry or escape of said vault are guarded or blocked by the Riot Moa. This is as opposed to the Moa itself being the point of entry (walking ATM machine) and so theoretically Nef Anyo could still have this event and credit transaction, and the Riot Moas still have their original job.

When the Riot Moa is reintroduced for permanent gameplay in the future, I do hope these issues will be smoothed out. I have my utmost confidence in DE that will do the best in response to the feedback of the False Profit’s event as a whole. I want to thank them for doing an excellent job in the realization of my design as a whole, for which I am eternally grateful.

Thank you very kindly my fellow Tenno, for taking the time to read this review.

 

[Kosen]

I actually did enjoy every version of the bursa, but it's true, the orange bursa was the closest and the one I enjoyed the most of. while it could get a speed nerf hopefully a very big one  this could be the corpus version of the manic! :D

[4MostlyHarmless2]

Personally, I loved the variety in the design and function of the Riot/ Bursa Moas, even if they seemed to stray quite a bit from what you originally intended. Although their AI could be buggy at times, I was quite impressed with the general performance: rather than simply shoot at you, they actually performed as advertised, and would cause merry hell as they did so. Of course, their attacks and powers could definitely use a lot of changing up, like you said. 
 

[Briar_Wolf]

It was a bit tedious of an event. Once we pulled together a team and figured out our roles, we were able to get it done easily, but it still took a while. It was however an interesting idea

 

It kinda felt like it punished you for wanting to make more money off of it, given the time it took. Especially given how there were at least three instances where the Riot Moa would just drop dead, generally because the UI wouldn't show most of the squad that the Riot Moa had been poisoned.

 

I'm okay with there being different variants of the Riot Moa, given how the Moa already have all sorts of variants. It does feel like they are a bit fast and can do too much, I agree with you. However I do like some of the powers, like the deploy-able laser wall.