No wonder no one plays it.
Ok, didn't play it much when it came out, so no experience in 'how it was before'. Then I left Warframe for a few years, now I came back and found Empyrean pretty fun. The base is solid - flying around, blasting fighters is fun but mission design... holy moly!
General FU to the solo players. It's all good when you need to destroy a Crewship and a few security nodes. Simple. Straightforward. Fun. Higher difficulty mission Crewships kinda have way too much HP and you just slowly chip away at it for waaay too long to be entertaining. There's nothing difficult about it since you are basically immortal it's just busywork. Also Forward Artillery should be usable by a pilot. At least if solo. Or at least to change seats with a press of a button. The need to jump from seat to seat to do one slowly charging shot is just annoying.
The problem start to appear when you need to leave your ship to go do this super annoying hacking mission. Not only it takes too long, you need to run around from place to place to kill these hacking drones. Sometimes you need to run 200+ meters to find it. All while Railjack being hammered. And you never know if your engineer will be able to fix a breach or if he's stuck somewhere.
The Skirmish. An absolute madness. Players are forced to jump from a ship to a Railjack multiple times. There's nothing challenging nor fun. It's just annoying. Can't you program it so if it's only one player, the objectives would just blow up themselves without us needing to return to our Railjack for a literal 10 seconds and then back again? Leave FA. Go to the exit port. Fly to the objective area using Archwing. Board it. Run to the objective using Warframe. Do the objective. Repeat. Did anyone ever tested this?
Volatile. It's fine. Until you need to shoot the couple of weak points with FA. Guess what - I used a shot or two to down a Crewship. Now I need to go to foundry, cook a new round, return to the FA and then fire. What a player supposed to do if he didn't upgrade intrinsics to be able to cook a new shot? I don't know.
Orphix. Is doesn't scale properly for one player or something. I don't understand how a Tenno supposed to do a high tier ones because the contamination rate is ridiculous and there's just no time.
Aurax Polaris MOA. You know the one. The one with dual 'immediate freeze proc" cannon and absolutely ridiculous damage resistance. You know if a player choses to just ignore them instead of shooting it with the most powerful Steel Path tier gun for a solid 4 seconds you messed up somewhere.
When I started playing the Empyrean I was wondering why I never get a squad. Now I know.
Pardon my English.
