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am0rtized

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Posts posted by am0rtized

  1. I thought that being stuck at home during a global pandemic would prepare me for the monotonous grind in Warframe's latest limited event, but it appears I was wrong.  Scarlet Spear is so agonizingly awful, I've decided to quit playing the game until DE takes the time to fix it.  There are more rewarding things to do, even in quarantine.  Doom Eternal came out last week, and id Software has infinitely more respect for my time than Digital Extremes.

    As a parting gift, here are some fun Scarlet Spear anecdotes from my experience with the event thus far:

    My first attempt at the Murex Raid event failed for no visible reason.  My second attempt (this time with a full squad) was unsuccessful because I was not able to load into the game.  My third attempt ended when my game froze on returning to the relay.

    After a few more attempts at Murex Raids and Ground Assaults, I started noticing that I was being awarded arbitrary amounts of bonus credits, which had nothing to do with my actual contributions to the event.  Without being able to rely on bonus credits grinding to acquire credits felt very tedious.  Apparently, this was a well-known bug.

    Logged in last night after the latest hotfix to play with a friend.  He tried to recruit two more people for Ground Assault, since we weren't getting matched with anyone in public games (I still don't know if public matchmaking even exists).  Got two people and tried repeatedly to find an open relay.  The Navigation display showed incorrect information about relay status, so after five attempts we were unable to find a relay with Murex waves.  Furthermore, the squad would get separated (presumably because of relay capacity) and sent to different empty relays.  Eventually, the squad just disbanded.  After searching some more, we found an open relay that would accommodate both of us but were unable to invite others.  After a few rounds of Ground Assault (which we again had to do with just two people), we were booted out because the relay had hit its Murex cap.

    Logged in around noon today.  Got a squad to do a Murex Raid.  Had a bad connection with the host, so there were immediate problems, since Railjack is extremely poorly optimized.  Eventually, glitched out in the last of three runs and had to extract.  Squad left the relay while I stuck around to help get it to 100/100.  After a few more attempts to join ongoing Murex Raids, I started noticing that Kill Codes were either not being sent or being sent and not received.  The relay display showed that there were teams both on the ground and in space, yet the Murex count was not going up.  Tried to switch to Ground Assault, but that didn't help.  The relay finished at 85/100, so I got no bonus for about 2.5 hours of playing. 

     

    I'd like to end this post with some constructive criticism for the event, but all I can come up with is the line "HIRE PLAYTESTERS" followed by deranged laughter.  

    • Like 3
  2. GOOD:

    The rewards are generally good (Stance Forma aside), and the missions were fun to do for the first couple of runs.

    BAD:

    The whole thing gets tedious very quickly. 

    The cooperative gameplay between the ground and space teams is virtually nonexistent and only manifests itself in negative ways (i.e. when there aren't enough codes being sent). 

    The mechanics of the event are, at best, explained very poorly, resulting in massive confusion.

    UGLY:

    The relatively low return on time spent makes the event unpleasantly grindy (especially since it runs for a limited time).  The bonus system that is supposed to fix this either doesn't work or works so inconsistently it may as well not be there.

    The relay system is atrocious.  Different squad members seem to end up in different relays.  Relay capacity/progress displayed in Navigation is inconsistent with the actual state of the relay.  The timer and total Murex count don't work well together.  Finding a squad/relay/mission that will give you the best (or even adequate) rewards is a total crapshoot. 

    There is a massive number of bugs.  Adding another system on top of the already dysfunctional Railjack is basically the kiss of death when it comes to any kind of stability.  In typical Warframe fashion, it is frequently impossible to tell if you've encountered a bug, a bad design decision, or a hidden interaction that DE never bothered to make clear. 

    • Like 1
  3. 6 hours ago, (PS4)GEN-Son_17 said:

    The size and layers of the railjack itself is clearly a method to express a sense of alarm and urgency, no different than when you see space or ocean movies where the crew is scrambling to put out fires or fix water breaches. Again, DE does not design Warframe to be instant win. It's a seven year running, highly artistic game with a ton of detail that the creators hope you enjoy and take your time over. It's no fun if everything is simple to do. Communicate and act to destroy the enemy, then explore and wander through detailed terrain and potential secret locations.

    This doesn't make sense to me from a from a narrative standpoint or a design standpoint.  Why would these ships be made more more confusing for the crew to traverse?  Like, during a battle, how is it not extremely detrimental to end up next to the drive when you want to get to the forge?  There's a magical omnitool to fix every kind of hazard, but the layout is so confusing that rookie crew members have trouble navigating it?  Why not just make repairing hazards more involved?  What this looks like to me is the triumph of design over common sense.  In any case, the Tactical Intrinsic lets you skip all of this entirely, so I struggle to understand why it's necessary in the first place.

     

    6 hours ago, (PS4)GEN-Son_17 said:

    I immediately understood that the intrinsic system was not meant to be rushed and cleared but buffs over time. It's a long term functional vessel for future missions so why allow near instant progression? Just like with focus wayward abilities, these intrinsic mechanics stay with you in railjack but take a considerable amount of time to achieve completely. No problems there.

    I think you misunderstand my point.  As I've said in my first post, the problem isn't really that it takes the same amount of time to get from one level to the next as it did to get to the current one from the level 1.  The problem is that there's nothing in-between and the rewards don't get better as you go.  I'm currently sitting at 9 9 9 9, and I'm only halfway to the end of the grind, but I only have 4 abilities left to unlock.  Furthermore, these abilities aren't even worth it.  Why would I care about turrets snapping to enemy fighters when they're desync-ed in multiplayer anyway?  The amount of time spent on unlocking level 10 is utterly incongruous with what you obtain for getting there.

    When it comes to Focus, the abilities you get are much more useful (the Operator can be used everywhere, including Railjack missions), and there are multiple abilities you can pick up along the way to unlocking Waybounds.

     

    6 hours ago, (PS4)GEN-Son_17 said:

    If this was the original release, then you'd have a point with the bugs but, considering you wrote this 5 hours ago, I have to say I've yet to experience 5% of the bugs you mentioned unless I'm playing with a host with horrible connection.

    I have not played Railjack upon release.  I started about two month ago.  All of the things I listed I have had to deal with in the past month.  I'm glad that you've managed to avoid the worst of it, but I experience some kind of technical issue in every mission unless my connection with the host is flawless.  If the connection is horrible, then the issues are horrible.  I basically have to pray there won't be a softlock.  This is absolutely not the case anywhere else in the game, including open world areas.  If DE cannot design around the limitations of peer-to-peer hosting when it comes to Railjack, then they should offer dedicated servers.  Right now, the best way for me to play is solo.

     

    Rereading through my initial post, I've come to realize that my main problem with Railjack (apart from the BREATHTAKING NUMBER OF BUGS) is that there's just not enough to do for how long you're forced to play to get rewards.  I'm fine with smaller updates, I wouldn't even mind if DE stopped adding new content and focused on fixing some of the problems they've been ignoring.  However,  if they plan on coming out with something big like Railjack, then it should feel like it's worth playing.  It shouldn't be a frustrating slog, which forces you to replay the same Exterminate mission hundreds of times.  Fortuna, for all its issues, was a great example of how to do Warframe content.  Empyrean is an abysmal one.

    • Like 1
  4. For better or worse, Railjack is a typical product of DE's strategy of rushing out new content as quickly as possible.  The upside is it adds yet another module, providing a fundamentally different experience from the rest of the game.  The downside is that it is half-baked - signifincantly flawed both on a technical and on a conceptual level.  I will try to go over the multitude of problems I have encountered while playing.  Unfortunately, this only scratches the surface.

    1) The economy is terrible.  Warframe, in general, suffers from a disconnect between resource costs and resource availability.  This is most readily apparent in major research/crafting projects such as the Hema or the Sibear.  Railjack is no exception.  Obtaining the Titanium necessary to repair parts for your ship requires a great deal of dedicated farming.  This process is made incredibly monotonous by the lack of variety in the available missions, the variation in the stats (randomized within a certain range), and the low drop chances of the parts themselves.

    2)  The progression is terrible.  The Intrinsic system is currently among the worst, most intolerable grinds in the game.  The main problem isn't even the sheer amount of time you need to spend leveling them up but rather the tedium of doing so. If you want to level weapons, gain standing, farm focus, you can equip the appropriate weapon/sigil/lens and play the game normally.  If you want to gain Intrinsics, you have to play the same Railjack missions over and over.  Even worse, you are disproportionately rewarded for killing enemies normally, rather than focusing on Railjack-specific activities (shooting down ships, completing mission objectives, repairing, etc.). 

    On top of all of this, the rewards for unlocking higher skill levels are meager and spread too far apart.  Why does it take as many Intrinsics to get from level 9 to level 10 as it does from 1 to 9?  Compare this to unlocking Operator abilities, which is similarly time-consuming but paced much better.  The ultimate rewards (Waybounds) are actually useful throughout the game, rather than applicable to a very small number of specific situations.

    3) Railjack is filled with terrible design decisions.  This is, again, true of Warframe as a whole, but the number of times I've looked at something in Raljack and thought to myself: "What where they thinking?!" is genuinely concerning.  Why is the ship so confusing to navigate?  Why is it so poorly explained what happens to rewards and resources at the end of a mission?  Most players think that they have to go back to the dry dock to not lose anything.  Why are players forced to abort if they want to quit, but someone else chooses to continue on to another mission or to farm resources?  Why do random players have control of the navigation in the host's ship?  Is it so difficult to add an extract option for individual players? Why is the Anomaly event timed?  This encourages people to abandon games and force host migrations.  Why are squads disbanded if someone tries to join a Railjack mission from their Orbiter?  Why does the refine button exist?

    4) There is an enormous number of bugs. Some of these are minor (Mk I parts dropping in the Veil, archgun graphics persist outside of archwing mode).  Some are major (missions are impossible to complete because Crewships don't spawn).  However, these are incidental or minor annoyances as long as you are the host. 

    Conversely, it is difficult to overstate how bad Railjack feels to play as the client.  Every single issue with the typically dysfunctional Warframe matchmaking is magnified tenfold.  Enemies are hard to hit because they are not actually where you see them onscreen.  Parts of the screen are obscured.  Doors do not open.  The camera locks in place and refuses to move, persisting even past the end of the current mission.  Abilities and movement become temporarily (or permanently) disabled.  Turrets (and other parts of the ship) become unusable.  The screen goes completely black.  Dying (no matter the number of available continues) results in a permanently glitched state that cannot be reversed until mission end.  Crewships become unkillable, teleporting you around inside.  There are, honestly, more bugs than I can list in a reasonable amount of time.

    Releasing anything with this many technical problems is ludicrous.  Failing to fix them for months afterward is completely unacceptable.  It's still shocking to me that DE plans to use Railjack as the starting point for even more content, when it is borderline nonfunctional outside of singleplayer.

     

    In the end, I've found Railjack to be one of the worst additions to the game in all of my 6.5 years of on-and-off playing.  Some of this has to do with my inherent distaste for Archwing content (especially following the Itzal nerf).  However, most of it is because Railjack is unbelievably repetitive and unfathomably buggy.  Adding more mission variety, adding more abilities (grinding 512 Intrinsics to unlock some Railjack-only power is just laughable), halving the Titanium cost of parts, removing part RNG, adding some basic quality-of-life improvements, and most of all, TAKING THE TIME TO FIX THE UTTERLY OUTLANDISH NUMBER OF TECHNICAL ISSUES would go a long way towards making Railjack playable.  All it is to me, at the moment, is Mastery fodder.

    • Like 3
  5. This stuff is small potatoes, friend.  In addition to all of the things you've mentioned, I've seen some truly momentous game-breaking bugs.  Here's a small sampling:

    1)  The screen turns black during scene transitions and doesn't turn back until the end of the mission or until you die.  If you die, proceed immediately to 5).

    2) After hacking the crewship reactor, the camera becomes fixed, so that you can't change the angle.  All you can see is the reactor and an occasional glimpse of your frame moving around it.  If you die, proceed to 5).

    3)  When you enter one of the warframe-only mission areas (such as the Anomaly) your archgun overrides your other weapons, and you can't get rid of it.

    4)  You  desync from the warping tunnels inside the Anomaly, so that you begin floating above them.  You can sort of move back and forth along the tunnel path, but there is no way to get back down until the end of the mission.

    5)  Occasionally, when you die in warframe mode, you stay permanently dead.  It doesn't matter how many revives you had at this point.  There is no way to come back until the start of the next mission.  

    • Like 1
  6. Not to sound terribly ungrateful, but what exactly is the point of these changes?  The single largest barrier to accessibility in Raijack isn't the cost of entry, it's the monotonous grind for upgrades and intrinsics that is incessantly interrupted by game-breaking bugs.  Sure, the Anomaly mission is currently impossible to complete, but this is only marginally worse than the normal Railjack experience. I have never encountered so many serious bugs in any other part of Warframe. 

    I have seen things you people wouldn't believe.  Crewships on fire.in the lens of an immovable camera.  I watched archguns glitter in the dark of a permanently black screen.  All those moments will be lost in time, assuming there's ever a patch.  Time to uninstall.  

    • Like 2
  7. For me, melee aim glide was always more about ease of use and control than about being able to block midair.  I should not have to furiously mash "E" after every jump just to be able to continue using the weapon I selected to use.  I should not have to unequip all of my other weapons to regain lost functionality (enjoy trying to disable EMP doors and cameras if you go that route).  Why take options away for no reason? 

    • Like 4
  8. I'm glad I'm not the only one who finds Mach Rush underwhelming.  It's an ability with a lot of flavor (running fast feels good) but very limited  functionality.  It's pretty sad that the best way to get it to be useful is to keep constantly canceling and recasting.  It makes for jarring, stilted, and unfun gameplay.  Then again, watching Gausses run into walls and fall into pits is, at the very least, moderately amusing.

     

    However, I don't really agree that Gauss needs to have a team role.  It's fine fine for there to be a frame that's more suited to solo play, and being able to run fast is pretty inoffensive when it comes to not working well with others (especially when almost every pub mission contains an Atterax-wielding maniac, clearing entire rooms just outside of affinity range). 

  9. Gauss has outstanding visual design.  He looks like he's fast, and the way he dances around during his idle animation gives him an air of confident agility.  Sadly, the unfortunate reality is that he is neither fast nor agile.  Yes, it's true that Gauss has an amazing base running speed.  It's also true that Mach Rush sends him hurtling forward at a breakneck pace.  However, Warframe is not a game designed around running quickly in a straight line.  The reason why Volt, Wukong, and Nova are fast is because their traversal abilities allow for rapid changes in direction.  Gauss has none of that.  Turning during Mach Rush is basically impossible in an enclosed space.  Doing anything other than running (i.e. jumping, shooting, etc.) cancels the skill altogether.  The initial dash distance seems to be fixed (i.e. unaffected by mods), and there is a cooldown animation so the dash cannot be spammed.  I haven't checked how the running speed during continuous Mach Rush compares to that of a speed Volt build, but Gauss does not seem substantially faster, even over short distances.  Over long distances the only thing he does better than Volt is running into walls.     

    • Like 2
  10. I haven't commented in this thread in a while, but I strongly dislike how weapon switching works while having gear items active (i.e. the scanner, fishing rod, etc.).  I don't know when this was changed, but it definitely happened after the release of the melee rework.  I used to be able to melee while using gear and then go back to the gear item I was using by hitting aim.  Now the weapon switch unequips the gear item and makes me use my gun instead.  I have no desire to hotkey every single piece of gear I use regularly just so that I can quickly go back to it when this happens.  If you're going to take away quick attack, then at the very least give us a convenient alternative for clearing enemies that interrupt open world activities.  It's honestly mindboggling to me that melee functionality would be reduced even further with no constructive changes being made whatsoever.

    • Like 1
  11. I check this thread periodically to see if there has been any response to the feedback posted by me and many other dissatisfied players, but it appears that 40 pages of people mostly saying the same few things over and over isn't sufficient to get the point across.  Or, more unfortunately, it is sufficient, but DE just doesn't care.  Melee isn't fun anymore, and having to make "gun-less" loadouts just to get some of the old functionality back is both tedious and maddening.  Adding insult to injury, I still see "Spin To Win" everywhere.  I know it's probably confirmation bias on my part, but It actually feels like there are more people using Maiming Strike builds now than before the rework (I wish I could see the stats on that).  I guess the future of melee is slide attack macros.  Maybe DE can officially add those in as part of Melee 3.0.

  12.  

    I've been playing with the rework for over two weeks, so I think that's time enough for a second feedback post.  While I am generally unhappy with how DE approached the update (removing options rather than replacing/improving them), the way aim gliding forces a switch away from melee is the only real deal breaker.  To be specific, melee Volt, my favorite build in the game, is functionally unplayable without unequipping both primary and secondary weapons. Hitting right mouse while jumping immediately drops a carried shield, which is deadly against high level enemies. In fact, carrying anything with a melee warframe has become a tedious chore.  Ironically, for these builds, the best way to achieve the "gun & blade flow" mentioned in the patch notes is to exclusively use either guns or blades.  

    Between the melee update, the bug-turned-feature affecting arcanes, and the ever-growing number of annoying problems that never seem to get fixed (wouldn't it be great if waypoints worked properly?), my motivation to play the game is at an all-time low.  I realize that Warframe is a work-in-progress, and that changes to the core game mechanics are inevitable, however, this is the first time in a while I've felt like Warframe  might just not be for me.

  13. 8 minutes ago, Tubsie said:

    The new stuff is nice and all, but I rather take the old working combos. Since we are unable to do the combos which use right mouse button currently (unless you equip only melee weapon to a mission), I assume you are going to fix this in phase 2? Or are you going to rework all the combos that use a right mouse button? I hope this won't be one of those things you half-ass and leave behind and move on to other projects.

    It turns out you can actually do block combos (I was wrong before), but you have to use E (in the default configuration) together with the aim button.  I don't think it's possible to do them using left mouse to attack unless you unequip your guns.

  14. While my own personal opinion is that the changes to the melee mechanics in the latest patch make the game significantly worse, in the interest of being fair, I'll mention the few things I liked before going to the many things I hated:

    The Good:

    1) Switching to melee is fast, and if you primarily enjoy Warframe for its gunplay, you will likely find that new system makes for an overall better experience.

    2) The new slam attacks are much more convenient to use than the old ones.

    3) The new effects look nice if you're into that kind of thing.

    The Bad:

    1) Picking up an item (i.e. data mass) in melee mode and switching to gun mode will drop the item.  This is massively annoying if you plan on primarily using melee weapons during a mission.  The only reason I have it listed under "bad" instead of "terrible" is that I think it might be a bug.

    2) Blocking is now automatic, so builds that rely on taking damage to generate energy will find it more inconvenient to do so. 

    3) The switch from melee to gun overrides exalted weapon abilities.  This cancels the abilities' effects while in gun mode, but still keeps the energy drain.  I can't see this being anything other than annoying (or downright deadly in the case of Valkyr).

    The Terrible:

    1) Quick melee is gone.  This is incredibly inconvenient.  There are many situations when weapons (e.g. polearms) have a much better quick attack than stance attack.  I don't understand why taking away the flexibility to use both is a good thing.  

    2)  Aim gliding in melee mode forces you into gun mode.  There is no melee aim glide by default.  The only way to get back this functionality is to unequip all of your guns.  This is irredeemably bad.  Instead of making Warframe's hybrid combat system more seamless, it separates the gun and melee portions completely.  I should not have to fear dropping items because I decided that I might want to use more than one weapon type.  I should not have to desperately mash E before landing because I might otherwise end up trying to ineffectually club a ravenous horde of Infested with my Rubico. 

    3) Block combos.  Why are there still block combos when you can't block manually?  I should not have to unequip my guns to make these combos work consistently.

    I'm sure that I'm missing more negative consequences of the new system (for example, I do not use channeling, so I don't know how removing it affects the game), but considering I noticed so many problems after only a few days of playing, I think this list would only get longer as time goes on.

    Overall the changes seem ill-conceived.  Warframe is not a spectacle fighter like Devil May Cry.  The latter has combo mechanics that make switching between gunplay and melee feel rewarding.  In Warframe you can't juggle enemies (if only because most properly-modded weapons vaporize them in one hit), you can't chain moves together (in fact, stance combos override the so-called fast switching), you don't get bonuses by being stylish.  What exactly is the point of trying to force something that doesn't fit the core gameplay?

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