CrownOfShadows

I don't mind this idea. I think the main issue is that there will always be a most current NW featuring the latest and greatest, and so the incentive to pick a previous season over the current one will be very low. However, as an option for after someone has completed the current NW that might be super nice.

It is actually.

I'm surprised there aren't a dozen threads on this already, but... we are going to fix this Wukong Titron problem, right?

Hm yeah that's a good point. They could maybe add a blatant warning in the trade screen: "Warning, trade items cannot be built yet, Insufficient MR" or something like that... idk, there's got to be some way to streamline this.

Once upon a time, maybe MR locking things in trades had some kind of sense behind it tied to progression. But those days feel like they're long gone, especially with lich/sister shortcuts and incarnons. Is there any real reason we still need this mechanic in trade? Does it still serve some purpose I'm unaware of? Because it's SUPER ANNOYING and I would be happy if it ceased to exist. Trading is enough work enough as it is, getting all the way to a trade and then having to cancel it because it's partner locked SUCKS.

I think it's fine. It's nice to have in the background, doesn't bother me, has a little extra incentive for logging in if you haven't completed it. Plus it's the best way to earn cosmetics in the game, which is great for people who don't have them, along with quite a bit of other stuff: auras, CERAMIC DAGGER, nitain... that's the home for those things, and it's fine.

A quest-building scenario: The larger structure: Quests can be started by talking to syndicates in relays, and in Iron Wake. Certain They come in two main varieties: solo and team. Teams are 2 or 3 players rather than 4. (While I'd love to accommodate up to 8, the difficulty naturally drops the more tenno are in play unless some truly spectacular mission design is on display, and I think that modes for 8 players are honestly much better suited to events, and that's where I'd put them) Quests can be started at any time, but only one quest can be active at a time. It is however possible to have a solo quest and a team quest running at the same time (this is so that if you want to play but your team you were running isn't on you can still have something to do). Whether or not the entire team needs to be present to resume a team quest IDK, but since we're limiting it to 2-3 players I think that it's probably reasonable that they all be there. Quests lock you in to playing them and cannot be paused, but some will have intermissions / checkpoints that allow you to save and exit to regular WF content. Quests can be resumed or abandoned via navigation. Abandoned quests offer consolation prizes based on progress. In team quests, a player disconnecting will not stop the quest, but they will need to be designed with failsafes so that mission goals can still be met. Quests feature a tier system. The tier system is 1-4, with tier 1 aimed at newer players roughly MR10-20, tier 2 aimed at experienced players roughly MR20-MR30, tier 3 aimed at legendary players roughly L1+, and tier 4 aimed at master players L1+ and for whom want a challenge beyond that presented for the average legendary player. Quests also feature a level system / unlocking system. As you finish a quest, if you then request another quest from the same source they will offer one that is longer, harder and that has better rewards. Levels for quests reset bi-weekly rather than weekly. Solo and team quests from the same source have different level trackers (thus you wouldn't be able to unlock a level 2 team quest by playing a level 1 solo, and vice versa) Longer quests should have intermissions that allow for saving, as they will have to be done over long periods of time. Quests further have a deviation mechanic, where to some extent it remember what quests you run the most, and the more those are run the more deviations in story and mode it will inject into it. It will also make sure not to present the same plot type one after another, and also make sure that if there is a boss that it is not the same boss as before. Quest length is designed so that a level 1 quest can be accomplished in one session, which I'm guessing is something like 1-2 hours. A level 2 quest should take 3-4 hours (with 1-2 intermissions), and level 3 quests should take 4-6 hours (with 2-4 intermissions). Whether there is a cap on levels idk, but I don't believe it would be practical for people to do anything beyond a level 5 (12-14 hrs) in the span of a week, so for a bi-weekly reset I would think something like level 8 is probably the max humanly possible and probably not healthy, so I'd probably cap it around 6 or 7. There's a balance here between the thrill of getting very deep into very high level quests with great rewards and asking too much of completionist types who will want to get to the end of anything. Some quest may feature choices which could determine story options ahead. This could be great for player agency and making quests feel more alive. Basic quest story design. When starting a quest, it builds a story out of modular story elements. We begin with a basic plot premise: revenge, adventure, journey, discovery, mystery, thriller, etc. We then decide on a setting, which will determine the dominant tile-set for this quest. After this we build an antagonist, which would ideally be somewhat modular themselves, and then we build a plot for this story based on the level of the quest. Higher levels will need longer and more complicated stories. I could list all the elements that could conceivably be used to build a plot, but that would take a lot of time and I think you get the idea. You use things like tragedy, revelation, relationship dynamics, political events, disasters, betrayal, etc. The only part of this that would be nice but not practical is VO, because synthesizers just aren't good enough for that even if we could pack them into a game, so story dialogue will have to be via text. We do however, have a pretty fantastic sidestep of this - the VO can be in a foreign language, of which WF has several, with translations to read, thus we can get some randomized VO but it doesn't strike the user as overly modular or repetitive. Most importantly of all, the player is not informed about any of this; they don't know where the story is going (unlike every single type of repeatable mission currently in WF). I would however probably associate certain story types with certain characters, especially for niche things, so that if a player just happens to love stealth they can visit the person who offers those types of quests. Further, quest vendors may offer multiple types of level one quests, such as a war quest (high action), a mystery quest (slower based clue chasing), a savior quest (starts slow but has rising action to powerful climax). Then if the player is in the mood for more of that content, they can re-request a quest and that type will have a level 2 option. Basic quest level design. Level design needs to be connected to story to some degree. For example, let's say the story starts with a disaster. This type of story element requires a big space with lots of destruction - one big tile. Or maybe we start with a stealth mission and we need very tight tunnels with lots of sneaking and cameras, trip wires, etc. Some types of story elements don't need ultra-specialized environments though and any of several options could be used. Levels should have multiple ways of accomplishing goals and focus heavily on tool use rather than mandated actions. We should have problems to solve not tasks to perform, wherever practical. What do I mean by this? As an example, let's say you need to find a way into an underground bunker, but the door is locked. If there are tools laying around to solve this problem with, we get to first search and then maybe choose (which is much more interesting and provides much more agency than plugging something into a console and waiting). Some tools might be a temporary heavy weapon (a mega welder, a massive crowbar thing, a mega plasma saw, a big drill, etc). There might also be consoles around to hack. There might also be secret ways in. There might also be a puzzle to solve. We might overhaul our gear wheel to be cool and fill it with cool tools for this very purpose. And so on. Then, maybe in another mission there's a big bridge we need to lower. If we find another plasma saw around it, then maybe there's something to cut with it. Tools can be used in multiple scenarios, that's the beauty of them. If we got really clever we could design around players collecting tools as they move through a quest. A well-designed obstacle is a pleasure to tackle not a chore. Quest levels should be designed around engagements rather than places for enemies to pool in like water, so that warframes hit a wall of resistance rather than sweeping through tiles like a tidal wave (although some parts of a story might lean towards that, and it's probably fine while moving from one important story point to another). No everything should be cannon fodder. For example let's say we need to enter a facility and we decide we want to go through the front door. We should have a battle at the front, we shouldn't be able to just walk in. For these types of engagements to work we need a new type of enemy structure: waves of minions (the types of enemies we currently face) that support tougher opponents. We have to survive both the waves and the attacks of the tougher opponents. Once the tougher opponents are all eliminated THEN we can move in. This style is good for many reasons imo: it creates variety in pacing, it creates experiences, it encourages teamwork, it provides a sense of accomplishment and progress. In current missions, even in high level exterminates like EDA, people just fly through tiles, rushing to the end, groaning their way back if conditions aren't met. Force warframes to deal with problems instead of just running past them. This tactic is as old as gaming and it's a good one: beat the enemies, unlock progress. With extended engagements and high level enemies and/or other hazards, cover should (finally) become important, so part of the level design should include cover options. Create some scenarios where a warframe really just cannot handle the enemy. Force a retreat. This can be especially useful when building up over time to a big boss - if the player had to run from it at first, was able to slowly engage with it before running, and then at last is able to face it. More importantly this puts fear and uncertainty back into players, which is imo a critical element in both engaging gameplay but also in effective storytelling. This can also be environmental: sometimes you just gotta bail. A reactor is overheating, lava is pouring in, an area is flooding with chemical waste, we're flying too close to the sun, etc. Quests would ideally have special sections that allow for re-equipping especially if there are hints of unique mission elements ahead. This would not be a return to the orbiter, but a physical location like Teshin's cave, a place of safety where the player gets access to their arsenal. (these may also serve as checkpoints in case of disconnection). This is also great for pacing. For the ultra-hard sections this could be a useful tool as well, forcing a player to try many different things before finally finding a way to get past. (Warframes are tools when you think about it, and being to switch out and try a different tool can be great). Tile sets should be moving towards goals. Each section of a quest should have a definite goal, and tiles can lead us to that, get us inside, and even lead us away to an evac. Let's say there's a facility we need to get into. Instead of just dropping us into the facility or at the entrance we should enter at distance and progressively work our way closer, overcoming obstacles and enemies. We can move through randomized tiles to get there, but ideally we should be able to see the goal in the distance, getting closer and closer. Admittedly, this depends on DE's tech, but UE5 has good solutions for this as an example. This is good because it endows the player with a sense of progress and a higher goal. It keeps the story clear in mind and avoids tedium. If it's not practical to see the goal (for example if we are burrowing deep into a hidden vault) then we can have packaged VO to remind us of our progress and ideally the environment itself should change as we get deeper (clever material use here can be leveraged to tremendous effect while still using randomized elements). It can be green and damp at the surface, or oxidized and blue, and as we get deeper it can become orange and red, blackened from burns, and have heat FX. This creates immersion and a sense of progress in a closed environment that might otherwise feel repetitive and bland. One important thing to keep in mind is warframe speed. Warframes can move very fast. You'll notice some of our current missions do have a little bit of a space where you're on approach or on an exit, but these are currently enclosed in the space of one tile, which a warframe can cross in a few leaps (especially with the parkour shard revolution), so we need to modernize these so they are real journeys in and out with longer tiles and/or more tiles dedicated to getting in and out of things. It can and should take 15-30 minutes to get to the main goal of a quest segment, and more complicated quests might have multiple goals per segment, featuring long approaches and exits to each. Quest tile sets should feature more ways of moving through content. Rather than a hallway filled with enemies every time, there should be options. For example if you're in a derelict space station and see tons of enemies in your path, maybe you drop down a level and see if it's as bad down there, maybe you find an airlock and run around in archwing outside looking for access further down, maybe you slip into ventilation, maybe you do something to create a distraction. Destructible and dynamic elements can lend themselves to this well. A linear line to the goal is boring and has no agency associated with it. It's basically 'run along this dotted path'. Instead, there should be many ways to go. Especially if you know the player is solo, you can feature different paths that even cross multiple tiles. Similar to the previous point, being able to see the other paths and to even cross back and forth to them would increase agency. On this note: shortcuts. Think about all the missions tiles we have. I can only think of one that has a shortcut (the grineer crack in the rocks with the road that loops around the long way). Shortcuts increase agency and I would add more of them. And on a personal note I'd love a little more mood to be built into tile sets, especially with the new lighting tech. We now have the ability to move from dark areas to light areas, from smoky areas to clear ones, to highlight things with light, to hide things with darkness, etc, and those are powerful visual storytelling tools that could be further connected to story goals. With these tools you can create suspense, fear, exhilaration. For some clarity on moving between major segments of a quest where a complete change of location is needed, I would avoid using the orbiter and lander completely. Instead I would just go straight into a load, or better yet have an organic load like the Zariman elevator, or possibly use the RJ to catch a cinematic rail to a planet where you perhaps sometimes do some activities in orbit before leaving and /or before making planetfall. Do not revert the player to their orbiter where they have access to everything except at intermissions, as this destroys the sense of the quest as a continuous story, and using navigation in the orbiter to progress a quest also is very destructive to immersion. Hopefully this is enough to give you a strong sense of the vision for these quests. If you want extreme specifics on how levels would really look and work according to me, well at that point I'm modeling, texturing and lighting real levels, and sorry but you've got to pay me at that point, because that's real work. How is this visually different from our current levels? Well that depends on your imagination. If there are particular elements that aren't clear, I can try to expand on them descriptively, but I can only do so much to describe a picture before I actually have to paint it. To succinctly re-cap my level design philosophy: Design around engagements and story elements. Provide multiple paths and even multiple solutions, less linear. Changing and destructible environments can help with this by opening up new paths. Feature tool usage and problem solving. Better and longer journeys into and out of things. Create scenarios where warframes actually cannot handle the enemy/environment, forcing them to cover or to retreat. Design with an eye for progress, using things like distant goals getting nearer or changes in environment related to proximity of goal. Every mission should have a goal and the tile sets should organically lead to and from it. Use lighting and FX as visual storytelling aids and as progress indicators. Do not use orbiter and lander but provide more immersive story-based transitions when needed.

Hm, maybe, idk that was before my time.

Lol, I just had a vision of us playing a mode AS our pets - a bunch of Hounds and Moas running around, with sentinels flying around zapping things. NGL, that sounds kinda fun.

I personally haven't seen anything over 50% in... years(?) - a really long time. But maybe that's due to what this guy said.

I'll put together a more detailed scenario when I have time, but I hope you're not just asking for my creativity so you can punch holes in it, because I really hate that. Alas none of this will reach the ears of DE so it's ultimately wasted breath, but I'm happy to spend a little time on it for you if you're asking in good faith. There's no way that took months to build, even back then. Hidden Messages is just some VO / inbox messages, followed by treks to various planet nodes. It's a nothingburger of a quest. I'm not exaggerating for effect when I say that should take less than a week to do these days, in fact the mechanics could probably be built in one day. Hm, you're avoiding the point here it seems. Sure that might make it play slightly differently, same way sortie/EDA/Circuit restrictions can make things slightly more interesting, but that doesn't affect the goal of the mission at all. The objective is always the same. Regardless of what you bring, the mission is the mission. I do however agree about your point about missions trying to accommodate too many things and as a result they end up becoming overly generic. While this is of course true, it's also part of the problem. I posit that time gates are ideal for events - as you say it makes them feel more special - but that they are terrible for people who just want to jump in and play some warframe. I fire up warframe - I love warframe - but guess what everything's timegated and I have nothing to do. This is why I'm suggesting quests - things players can go involve themselves in for extended periods of time. Now true to your point here, even with quests you'd want some kind of structure to help rarify them, but that can be achieved without timegates (when I build my scenario I'll try to include an example of this as well). ... and that is not warframes. They are experimenting, yes, but not with warframe content, or more specifically, not with warframe mission design, not in any kind of meaningful way. I don't think DE should be so scared of doing new things. The primary reason is because they already have so much grind-a-thon content available, especially tied into the relic system, which is the core gameplay loop. None of that is going anywhere. People will always be playing that, and new content never affects that (in fact in energizes it). So why not try something new? People will engage with it if they like it. If they don't like it, whatever, just throw it on the stack of gameplay corpses. Like I said, I just want to be able to log on and play WF. I can log on, but if it's not monday or release week there's nothing to do, and there's really no reason why we have to enforce that sad state. I am actually prohibited from playing WF for more than a couple hours a week. Uh, how about no? Like why? How about I can play any time I feel like it? (And yes, I know, I can play any of the old grind any time I want yada yada - don't miss the point plz). I just got back from a long break from WF. I have a robust game library - almost all of them are play-and-forget games, WF is one of the few live service games I play. Ok, well at this point I'm waiting for titles that haven't been released yet. So I am now ready to play WF. So why can I not play warframe? Why is there nothing to do? Well... I guess there's dog days.... like c'mon son

Yes this is where it gets complicated. How do you actually make something new. Well for starters, how about we just do something different. I mean, DE 'tries' with stuff like the mission types in the Zariman (of which cascade is decent) but they aren't thinking outside the box, they're strapped into formulaic mission design and they need to break out of it. I personally feel like DE's level design (while aesthetically beautiful and ergonomically sound) is in many ways boxing them into certain content formats and mission types, and that's where I'd start. It can still be modular, and should be, but it can change significantly from the current template. Secondly I'd address the way missions and mission goals are presented to the player, and focus on putting more meaning into them and in being much more original in both concept and scope. Thirdly and maybe more importantly is how enemies are encountered, this needs to be more... thoughtful. Yes, no matter what content you have, we will always be shooting our way out of it, and yes, because of WF's design that will almost always be by the horde, but even with those restrictions things can be designed much better. Spam spawning enemies and just throwing them at the player non-stop is pretty lazy design. Granted, a lot of this involves difficulty and enemy AI and all manner of sub-disciplines, but it's important. And as mentioned previously, they definitely need to quit worrying about how much time the player is spending on missions and just focus on making them fun. Instead of 'how can we get the player to sit here for 5 minutes' it should be 'what would be cool to go do right now?' For all of it's many flaws, the RJ missions (not taxijack) did a good job of this - dynamic environment, transitions to different styles of play, organic missions, lots of agency, etc, and my vision for quests is not terribly dissimilar from stuff like that just in a warframe-centric/story setting. Set up various goals and let the players decide when and how to do them, and maybe even make goals that are double or event triple deep in some of them so that there's some strategy about what to do when, break up the gameplay, do different things, different tasks, all in the same environment - an evolving mission, natural progression - not forced or timed progression. There's no real rush in RJ like there is in capture or exterminate because multiple things are being accomplished by multiple people at multiple locations and the mission's not over until everything's done. And even better some people have to help other people, that's great interaction even if it ended up being a little frustrating in RJ's case. If there was one example in existing WF for what I'm after with these quests RJ is it, but there are perhaps more meaningful examples in other games too. WF can learn something important about missions/levels from stuff like Helldivers, Titanfall, Borderlands, Destiny etc, but I don't necessarily like citing those because it's apples and oranges - WF's design is it's own, it's a tile-based horde shooter and not everything translates, and I don't want WF to just copy others, but there are valuable tenets of design that can be adapted in there for sure. Build organic and exciting missions, not tedium. The compromise is that you don't worry about new gear, new warframes, new tech, or not much, no cinematics unless there's time or interest for that. We're not building new open worlds here, we're not making massive story points. This is about taking our core gameplay and using it in new and more original ways. For that we do need custom tilesets - trying to get this to work in existing tilesets is not impossible but is more than likely doomed to immediate failure - and we need to address the other things mentioned above too like enemy encounters, mission goals and design, difficulty, time gates. Compare, for example, the New War to the quest to get vanilla Mirage (Hidden Messages) - massive, massive differences in dev time for those two 'quests'. They can slap that Mirage quest together in a week these days. But what if the Mirage quest happened in an entirely new tileset with interesting new mission types? How much dev time is that? Well it's hard to say, but it sure as fire is way, way less than what something like the New War would entail. Changing weapons and warframes and randomizing tiles increases variety but it does not change the mission design. Not sure what you're referring to with Duviri, but I'd submit that RNG has been a very good thing for 'end game' players. It's been pretty brutal for new players though, and that's where the Circuit auto-pick is. The idea of categories is just an extra idea to help make missions feel more unique. I'd happily sacrifice it if I got everything else, but I do think it has good potential, especially for late game players who are basically looking for an excuse to invest in obscure/niche builds. It's a more focused type of RNG, narrowed, but the gameplay would ideally make up for that by catering to it, and even if they went for it I don't think they should make the majority like that, but rather have those as special interest types. Your point about categories being unappealing and locking certain rewards behind that is very solid however, that would need to be addressed, which kinda dovetails into... Hm, this is a halfway fair point. I wouldn't say you cannot have it, but rather if you have it you need to modulate it. What you're saying here is the entire reason DE relies on RNG so heavily I believe, and there's good logic behind it, and that's why they rotate everything. So we could have it, but likely DE would want to rotate it. This is also probably part of the reason there are 16 bajillion currencies in WF, because currency is another way to get around this issue. Just give currency for all these new quests and set up a rotating shop, that works too, but I personally don't like it as much, so I'd put some more thought into how to balance out rewards vs mission types, there's surely a satisfying way to accomplish both. We may be differing in our view of "event." If you count weeklies, then I've recently just been doing EDA and bailing, unless I'm really in the mood for WF regardless of how braindead it is in which case I'll typically do EDA and the Circuit and maybe, maybe some netracells or some build tinkering. I do the Circuit only because the enemy levels make it interesting and it feels slightly challenging especially if I pick non-meta gear. I don't do the Circuit for the rewards, at this point I have a stockpile of hundreds of unveiled rivens with little interest in opening them. So the basic answer to your question would be "none", I don't do anything daily, I pop in once a week, do EDA and maybe another thing here or there and then leave. I haven't touched sorties in ... years? I think so, wow, and I rarely do arbis anymore, definitely avoid invasions like the plague unless they've got potatoes, and I mostly ignore NW as it just kinda ticks along on it's own just fine. My view of "event" was more more like NW quests when they happen, Fomorian, Razerback, and longer cycle things like Dog Days and holiday related events, and also custom events when they happen like Scarlet Spear. Same as conclave and quest comment, you're pointing to a non-relevant example here. Kahl isn't warframes. On a broader point, in case that was what you were striving for, the time spent on Kahl indeed could've been great and much more replayable than it is, but Kahl is mostly a failure of design. They tried something new, but didn't commit to it. I don't mind them experimenting, but they didn't design for the long term here either. NGL, even though I don't mind them experimenting, it really kills me that all those Kahl tilesets, missions, mechanics, squad tech, AI, and all those Kahl cosmetics... SO much dev time - all of that could've been warframe quests and warframe quest reward pool. I'd also like to point out that Veilbreaker was not a main quest like the New War (even though they built off tech introduced there). How much dev time went into veilbreaker? Felt like 3 months? Idk, but it's pretty crazy what they built in that amount of time if you think about it, so the argument that there's just not enough dev resources to make lasting content falls flat to me, it's not about resources, it's about goals. Yes, kaithes are essential to Duviri's gameplay. Kaithes serve no role outside of Duviri. They are content island mechanics, nothing more. The same will be true of atomicycles. Sure, as part of the content island package, they do their part in generating revenue. But you seem to be conflating content island revenue with long term development of the 'base' game, which aren't really related. As for game design, yes, there is a lot of interdisciplinary activity, and I do in fact have a very solid understanding of how development works, thanks. The sound design team does make a pass on levels after they are built or in their final stages. However I can assure you that the level design does not care about rigging, skinning and animating, and mission design doesn't care about that either unless it's new tech like Kahl. Rigging, skinning and animating team only cares about warframe (character) assets, and the mission designers and level designers don't have anything to do with that at any point. Different parts of game companies work on different things, and do so at different times, and they do not all necessarily overlap. Each department has their own marching orders, their own workloads and their own time frames and those change depending on what's being built. The real truth is that there is no "level design team", there are designers, 3d artists, VFX artists, sound designers, etc and those are a pool of resources that just move onto other things if there's no level design to do, so this is really a discussion about how much dev time is available to accomplish what and in what time frame, and interdisciplinary efforts are a result of that not a the other way around. To us naive outsiders, who cannot possibly comment in any meaningful way about how resources are truly being allocated for what goals, the best we can do is say "I'd like more of that and less of this." Well I'd like less Kahl, less Duviri, less romance (not trying to flame it before I see it but eh... I have doubts), less weeklies and instead more sustainable content involving quality repeatable quests, event overhauls and expansion, and more necramechs and RJ. It's interesting because you can see DE is trying to think about sustainable content, and their answer to that has been things like the Circuit, Netracells and EDA. Those are not bad attempts, and they're okay, but they're rehashing game modes/mission types in all of them, that's my main point. And it's not like they aren't innovating in missions, alchemy is probably the case study, but it doesn't feel unique or interesting and it's a timed exercise like all of them. And yes, I realize that no matter what content comes out it will always at some point feel stale especially if it's spammed, BUT that's not an excuse for not deviating from the formula. Just please stop putting us in missions like this where it's just waves of endless enemies for X amount of time with some meaningless objective and start putting us into engaging new experiences, doing interesting things that we care about with maximum player agency.

This is not my experience at all. SP is all anyone plays except for people who haven't unlocked it. Even Hydron is now as actively populated in the SP as it used to be pre-SP, something I honestly didn't think would ever happen. The old starchart is dead to us. The only time I ever play regular modes is during Prime releases when matchmaking tends to use that as a safer option for the general population, and nightmare missions which still have no SP variant. And events like Fomorian I guess, which also have no SP variant. This depends on the players. Some will be ready to stay, some will be ready to leave. Many things factor into this; schedules, interest, rewards. EDA is a quarter-step in the right direction, and is perhaps a signal that DE is leaning this direction. EDA's difficulty makes it the most enticing mode around anywhere. Of course everyone only plays EDA once a week - that's how it's designed. Duviri (not the Circuit) is in fact very close to this ideal - except there's no warframes. I agree with quixier here, these are pretty miserable. While on paper they might seem close to what I'm asking for, they are in reality very far from it, because they are simply repackaging the same old tired modes into a series with a little VO to rope them together. That's not what I'm looking for, I'm looking for a journey that feels unique. You can't possibly hold up our current quests and say 'see - nobody replays them, so nobody wants them'. That's like holding the Conclave up and saying 'see, everyone hates PvP'. I agree rewards are part of why they aren't replayed - the rewards for replaying quests are laughable, but that isn't the biggest part - the biggest part is that they aren't designed for that. They are designed from the beginning to only be played once... which is fine, I'm okay with that. But the kind of quest I'm asking for is not like that. Both types can exist. I agree Destiny does a decent job of this, but I disagree very much that it means you can't have variety/modularity in combination with it. One does not come at the expense of the other, you just have design stories with some modularity in mind. You say WF thrives on modular content with a regular update cycle, but that's not quite true. It thrives on regular NEW content with OLD modular content in the background, and even the new content is just old modes rehashed. The modes we play day in and day out while the new content (quests/events) is cooking are very, very old. Even tilesets have had multiple iterations, but the modes themselves are stagnant. While I'm envisioning this as more of and end-game activity, sure, we can accommodate new players that way if you want. As for using frames you don't like for an extended period of time - a few things: 1) you would otherwise never play it, right? So it gets you playing it. Maybe you warm up to it - this has been my experience many time. 2) Ideally there would be several to choose from, so if you don't like that one frame, fine, use another 3) Above that, there would ideally be several quests available to choose from, so you can just pick another quest. What's great about this is you can cater to niches that otherwise would get little love or frustrate other people. For example if you have a quest centered all around speed-running, then a Gauss or Volt player can have the time of their life. If you have a quest all about stealth, then the Ivara player can have the time of their life.... and it doesn't bother people. There aren't speed runners annoying nukers, there aren't nukers annoying defenders, etc. I disagree, I submit that that's what events are for. I want high level, interesting quests to go on whenever I want. I don't want to spin my wheels doing nothing, playing dull modes, praying for Monday (or next quarter, or next year, or 3 years from now) to get the reset so I can finally start playing something I like again. I disagree about caches - we have those in many missions and nobody slows down to do them, for many reasons. They aren't bad in concept, but they're very hard to do well. Collectibles are a little easier to implement and work better, I'd be ok with those. I disagree about Tau shards (and shards in general) only because they are valuable in the moment. By the time any quests like this actually got developed and deployed, they would most certainly be ordinary and not enticing though. Rivens can now be acquired about a bajillion ways so I don't know that offering them is really great - it's not bad either though, they still hold value - especially if they happen to be automatically unveiled as an extra bonus or something. I do agree about alternative rewards - for example if there were a handful of quests dedicated to replenishing supplies of Bile or other Helminth resources, that could be definitely be worth doing (especially if they then went in and balanced the Helminth costs against the quest rewards somewhat). Or a corpus quest that was a serious alternative to sitting in the Index for an hour or two. Rewards are their own subject, shards were just a handy example. DE can do better with these, but some of the things they could do would require dev time. Shards are still useful and sought after (I wouldn't call them useless), but their time as a meaningful reward is coming to an end. Rewards should scale with time spent (and difficulty). If you spend the equivalent of 3 full EDAs on a very high level quest - then you should get paid accordingly. This is true. But I'm not asking for full cinematic quests either. This is honestly more about level and mission design than cinematics. And DE wastes a lot of time on stuff that has very limited life cycles. We can look at Kahl as an example. All that dev time could've been put into lasting, replayable experiences. I'm willing to bet that all the dev time spent on the upcoming atomicycles will have about as much life as the Kaithes. They design shortsightedly, spend resources shortsightedly. One thing they could do is spend all their dev time on their content islands, like they do, but just do things that don't require too much level design. Then task the level design team to work on quests. Now I don't really know what percentage of total dev time goes into level design and tilesets, but I feel like they can easily get a few tilesets out per cycle if they were tasked with it. Sprinkle in some VO, some extra flair if there's time for it, voila, you can make a half a dozen new quests out of that at least. We could have 12 quests added every year. If they'd done that over several years already we'd be able to choose from 20-30 quests right now. The only thing you have to update over time is the rewards.

Warframe's missions boil down to 2 basic types: Type I: Rush (rescue, sabotage, capture, spy, exterminate, assassinate) Type II: Sit in place for X amount of time (defense & mirror defense, survival, mobile defense, armageddon, cascade, hijack, excavation, netracells, interception, alchemy, flood) While this is perhaps a little reductive in categorization, I want to illustrate the lack of imagination on display. It's not that these concepts are necessarily bad, but rather that they are implemented from a primitive viewpoint and haven't been significantly iterated on since their inception a decade ago. Simply put, they are all designed to be 5 minute (or less) episodes - they are not designed to be "fun" - they are designed to keep you busy. That is the fundamental starting point, the worldview, the design philosophy... and I submit it's the reason why missions do not feel engaging. You may note that I didn't put disruption into the above categories, but this is because it doesn't fit well in either, although it is a bit of both. It's not because I believe it was designed under some other philosophy, I believe it was designed under the same premise as the others: 'what can we do to keep the player busy', not 'what can we do to make this fun.' (although it ended up being slightly more fun than the rest). Same category/philosophy is true for a couple other modes I didn't include like defection. Now you might say that even game modes that are designed to be fun will keep players busy at the same time, and this is of course true, but my point is that the motivating force behind warframe's mission design does not seem to be enjoyment but occupation. This should change. If I had to pick one thing to promote the growth of warframe on a fundamental level, it would 100% be the mission designs. They are ancient, clunky, unimaginative. How to make fun missions (imo): Difficulty: engaging play requires difficulty. Difficulty in WF is a deep subject, but regardless this axiom remains true. Complex Multi-Stage Story-Based Journeys with Mystery: Longer missions. We have enough fire-and-forget missions. Unless you get rid of those then we don't too many more of them. Instead, for new content I'd suggest focusing on longer progressive story-designed missions. These don't need a ton of cutscenes, in fact they might not need any at all, but all the missions should be part of a greater whole, a story unfolding - a quest. As a journey, it should have a natural ramp-up to a climax. The climax should most probably be a mini-boss, or else an unbelievable horde or some catastrophe. These should be randomized, so that the player does not know what they'll be up against exactly, preserving anticipation. If possible, eliminate loading, but replace it with 'down-time'; a place for players to relax for a second and maybe swap loadouts before going on the next part of the journey. All of it should be continuous and natural. We should not be loading players into a defense and then an unrelated exterminate - we should be moving through an environment, on our way to something - the 'missions' in between should be 'discovered'. Think about it like a movie. It needs to be smooth - scene to scene, all in the same 'landscape'. The 'mission' should be a part of the environment, a part of it, not the whole. We can briefly think about the Sorties and Archon hunts here. Aren't they doing some of this? No, they are forcing two throw-away missions that have no relevance or connection, followed by a boss fight. They aren't a journey, they're 3 independent missions that must be done in order. In Archon hunts there is some VO to try to rope them together, but the missions themselves are not special, they aren't doing anything, they don't lead into each other via gameplay, it's just old game modes slapped together. It's not a journey. Yes, we want quality experiences, not just the same old modes smashed into new shapes, and not even new modes smashed into the same old mandatory time frames. Completely ditch all the worry about time and focus on experiences, missions that make us go 'wow', that fill us with a bit of wonder. It's better to scale the rewards to the mission than to cram missions into reward-table-times. Yes, this is basically quests (with random elements) that are designed to be replayed. Randomize stories just the same as you would tilesets. (BTW with AI you could now create new stories on the fly... and also new events on the fly... that's the real gaming future, maybe get a head start on it rather than wait to copy someone else's, js) Mechanics and Warframe-Specific Missions: There's a lot of room for new and fresh mission mechanics. One benefit of telling stories is that the stories themselves tend to generate interesting scenarios. If you look at the quests in warframe they are filled with unique mechanics not found anywhere else - because the story needed them. One of the problems with difficulty is the massive amount of tools we have, but one possibility here would be to identify what warframes are good at what. You could, for example, have a category of mission designed for defense frames (Frost, Hydroid, Khora, Limbo, etc), and then only allow that category of frame for that mission type. This way you have a much narrower field to design for. Likewise you could have a nuke category (Mesa, Saryn, Equinox, etc) and design missions specifically to challenge nukers. A speedrun category. A support category, a stealth category. This is fairly simplistic but you could hybridize them further: Only nukers and defense categories are allowed for this mission, for example. Like randomization, this could help give players an excuse to play frames they might not otherwise engage with, and in the case of hybrid categories - it may open up more space for real teamwork. Further, it makes missions feel more unique. If only certain frames can do that mission, then that eliminates the 'i can take whatever I want because nothing matters' attitude that WF has encouraged for far too long (imo), even if it has to be artificially enforced by category (because we can't rebuild the roster into real categories). NOT weekly. Please, no more weeklies. Time gates tend to suck, both in mission and out of it. Let players do these any time they want. If you need to make them longer to compensate, fine, as long as the quality is there to sustain it. I'd rather play two long quests a week on my own time than burst down the circuit, archon hunt, netracells and EDA on Monday. Rewards: and lastly a note on rewards. I suggest halfway un-generalizing rewards. If you make quest-adjacent journeys then make each reward at the end unique rather than dishing out the same reward table structure for all of them. For example, perhaps one quest will award a guaranteed tau orange shard, and that is the only way to get that. Another type awards 3 regular emerald shards (the equivalent of a tau, but with more options), etc. Maybe both of those also have a random table of other smaller rewards that can be found in both - that's fine, but each should have a unique incentive. If you make all the rewards the same they won't feel special, and neither will the quests. Tying special rewards into the story/lore of each quest would be even better.

Except that I'm not bored of it. I WANT to play it, there's just nothing to DO. It's a content problem. An easily remedied one, at that. If I could fire up a quest right now that would take 3-5 or heck even 5 days to complete, I'd happily be out doing that instead of coming on the forums (as long as the rewards were good enough) Yeah, idk why I bothered, no one hears or cares.

I just got back from a break. How about ONE game mode, just ONE that is designed for the long term? Is that too much to ask? Is it?

Ah yes, the old handicap-yourself-as-entertainment idea. Yeah, that sounds amazing. I could also stand on my head and invert my controls and play blindfolded.... but this isn't addressing the central issue.

No offense Voltage, but this is 'get lost' again in fancier text.

Not quite. Yes, I agree, there's no such thing as a truly endless content - except maybe for PvP but even then it needs infusions of rewards/events. BUT there's a world of difference between a release of content a few times a year and modes that are BUILT to be replayed throughout the year.

"I get that players aren't going to be interested in everything there is to do in the game" - hm, DO you get that though? You seem to be saying you don't get it. If I suggest you go get the high score in flappy bird are you going to do that? WHY NOT BRO? No really, why not? <------------ really ........... If I suggest you build and put 5 forma into every single kitgun and zaw combination are you going to do that? Is my codex complete? No. Do I own every mod in the game? No. Am I interested in doing that? Well, maybe .... BUT people need A REASON to go do things normally. An excuse to go do it. Some people will just go do things for no reason I guess - why? idk, completionism? - and that's great, but I doubt that's the majority. Why do I doubt that? Because most everyone leaves until new content comes. New content comes and suddenly there's a flood of players. It's farmed - whooosh, they're gone. I can't believe I'm out here explaining this to people after a decade of it but here we are, doing it again. ---------------- I just... want something to do. What's the problem? Why is this controversial? ---------------- We're not saying 'get lost'.... we're just saying get lost Lol ok 😆

Hey! Someone who wants to actually address the issue. TBH I wasn't sure if anyone like you would show up, kinda thought it would just be trolls for 5 pages. Well, some possibilities off the top of my head: Genuinely repeatable quests. (yes, ik, you can technically repeat quests, but none of them are actually designed for that) Overhaul events. Dog days / Fomorian / Razorbacks are mostly jokes, we've outgrown them long ago. Empower clans so that they can generate content / events on their own (and maybe clan wars/competitions) Challenge players, recurring - extreme nightwave basically PvP pipe dreams

I still enjoy EDA. NGL the randomization is what's keeping that alive for me (the challenge is what brings me, the rewards are okay but not enough to call me) I've mostly abandoned netracells however, depending on the week, I only play them when I need shards. It was painful from the beginning and they never did anything to fix it. Archon hunts are really getting the short stick from me though. I still do them sometimes but why do 3 missions when I can do netracells instead?

Uh, so.... your response is 'get lost' AGAIN? lel... you guys are funny... Sigh, sorry for pointing out something incredibly obvious, didn't know it would be so controversial. Must have hit some kind of sore spot, why you guys trying to get rid of me so hard?

'Get lost' again ey?

Lol. People spew that line whenever they don't want to engage on the issue itself. I seriously can't believe people still vomit that out on here. It's so disgusting, it doesn't take into account anything at all, not the player's interests, their time, their schedule, nothing. 'Get lost' is the lazy forum user's answer to someone bringing up a real issue. Are you trying to deny there's a content drought problem?