Some of the things written here are clear complaints, some are just observations.
Before I start, the most important thing:
Who in the world made the model and textures for that floating balloon in deimos that features... erm... female equine genitalia? on top of it? How is this appropriate to have in a game? How did this get through quality control and quality assurance? This is not just me having a vibrant imagination, it's REALLY hard to not see it for what it is. I'd post a picture but then I'd probably get the thread closed for posting pornography.
Now. I originally stopped playing shortly after scarlet spear, not exactly when but it was before steel path. On my return I felt absolutely overwhelmed by the massive amount of quests and content that had been added to the game, and very little in the way of explaining what changed. (I've also noticed some of my rivens had been nerfed into the ground since I last played, because I guess people REAAAAAALLYYYY like Zaws.)
It took me a while to go through all the quests, trying to figure whats what, and having to rank up so many new syndicates at once. Thankfully I'm fairly high MR so it helped for daily syndicate reputation. Many of the new gamemodes were completely incomprehensible to me and I had to repeatedly ask questions or look up videos to try and understand how they work. It took a while for me to understand how the exoliser mission works in the zariman.
One of the things I noticed coming back, is that a good deal of the new thing seemed to be locked behind steel path. I wanted to get the new arbitration mods, but they were locked behind arbitration, which I did do a few times before leaving, but was somehow locked again. It was a short struggle to complete the remaining nodes I was missing, but it wasn't super clear that I had to do ALL the quests to have those nodes available. (because the nodes you need to complete are not visible until you finish the quests) I was very happy to learn that incarnons were a thing, and that my favorite Burston Prime had been graced with such an upgrade.
I also noticed that there are now many ways to get large amounts of kuva quickly, which makes me wonder why the hell do siphons and flood missions still give so little.
The main things I've noticed coming back, is that there are issues that have been in the game for years, that have been complained about by players for years, and that are still not fixed. I can understand when spaghetti code can hold back development, (after all I do also play Dwarf Fortress from time to time), but the fact that these issues are STILL in the game after YEARS without any indication that anybody ever bothered trying to fix them is baffling, if not straight up insulting. (I am very glad that the bug leading to stick corners is finally getting fixed)
Damage numbers can very easily become so overwhelming that you can't see what you're shooting at, and to illustrate just how absurd the current ingame implementation is, I made a lovely gif from a 24 year old game that normally doesn't support damage numbers, but some clever people managed to code it in the game from scratch, on their own spare time, without getting paid for it, and it is a million times better than what DE managed to come up with.
Numbers show up ABOVE the target, only go in the UPWARD direction, does not block the view of the target and disappear quickly without bothering anyone. Additionally, if 10 instances of damage are dealt at the same time, the damage number is added together, so you don't end up with 10 damage numbers every time you hit something. Normally numbers wouldn't be so far above the target.
And this, is what DE came up with. Note that those are the default settings, (Also note that the legacy damage numbers somehow had it almost right. Damage numbers flow upwards almost exclusively, but still obscure the crosshair)
This is an issue that has been complained about for years (I found threads from 2021 about it) and STILL hasn't been fixed. This is absolutely insulting. Here is what should be done.
1- Move all damage numbers so they only appear above the circular crosshair. (and make them flow upwards, preferably in a fountain pattern)
2- Damage from multiple pellets should, if at all possible, be grouped up in one/fewer damage numbers. (Maybe even grouped in 1/4 or 1/2 of a second) If my rifle is firing at 20 shots a second with at least 3 multishot, that's SIXTY damage numbers showing up on screen per second, that's absurd! Theres nothing we can do with that amount of visual information, all it does is clutter the screen with pointless numbers.
3- Fix the visual hit indicator being hidden behind the damage numbers.
Another issue that has been in the game for years is in the simulacrum. There is funky business going on with the spawning of enemies if you have killed some. It doesn't remember the original number you spawned, so maybe you'll spawn 4 bombards, 3 gunners, 4 ancients, 6 eximus crewmen and 3 chargers. You kill a handful of those, you try to respawn them, and all of a sudden the only thing the simulacrum is giving you is whatever you killed at first, so now you have to reselect everything by hand. This isn't so bad if you only have one enemy type, but if you have multiple this gets old very, very fast.
Another thing I noticed is that the game does not seem to be any more stable. I've been playing for 2 months since I came back, and I can confidently say I more than likely got softlocked due to bugs at LEAST once a day, usually more. How many times have we heard a teammate say "Let me die, I can't do anything", or have that situation happen to us? Just before writing this I was in a railjack mission that decided to softlock me as we were loading back to the dojo to complete the mission. In this infinite loading state, I didn't even have an option to leave the mission or exit the game. I also had multiple situations (usually in the circuit but not exclusively) where my character stops being able to fire and just face one direction exclusively, producing a somewhat funny looking moonwalk animation. It is absolutely unacceptable that the game is in such an unstable state that can lead to such outcomes so frequently. Absolutely unacceptable. And that's just the major softlocks, the amount of bugs I get everyday is staggering. I can't fathom how nobody gets fired over this.
Issues with missions not starting for no apparent reason, host migrations that end up in mission failures, people getting disconnected from relic cracking runs only to rejoin and lose their stuff (Did not confirm this one but I'm pretty sure it still happens, so take this one with a grain of salt), falling through the floor while joining the dojo, Enemies or environment bumping into you and sending you outside the map geometry. etc etc.
Hounds were not in the game when I stopped playing, and having been recently buffed with the bond mods, I came to the realization that hounds have received a staggering total of ZERO cosmetics since they've been added to the game. This is warframe we're talking about, where we're nickel and dime'd for such things as UI colors and backgrounds, not adding cosmetics to a pet for years? I would not believe it had I not seen it myself, very uncharacteristic from DE.
A lot of weapons I used to enjoy back in the days have fell on hard times very hard with the changes to status effect and the addition of steel path. It sucks, but I can understand it.
A good point is that the game looks really nice now, and the new tilesets are visually amazing, and (mostly) fun to play in and traverse, with some exceptions like with corpus tiles that are plagued with ditches all over the place in which you can fall and just make for an annoying time.
I noticed that the power creep that DE seemed to so desperately try to keep in check years ago has now been given free rein to break the game every which way, and I'm not sure I understand why. The addition of archon shards seem to exacerbate the issue even further, and while I don't shy away from using them, I'm just not sure what was the point of giving us this much extra power.
With the changes to link vitality on companion, it has become much more difficult to keep pets alive. Outside of pack leaders, a lot of abilities that affect allies do not affect companions at all. (Focus abilities, warframe abilities, several mods) This has led me on a wild goose chase of trying to figure a way to keep my kavat alive for a week and a half, only to eventually give up because nothing I did made a noticeable difference. I picked a hound instead, rip smeeta kavat. (why oh why does pillage not affect pets)
Now there's probably a lot more I could say, and I'll probably add more as I think about it, but I'll stop for now.
While this might have seemed pretty negative, I'd like to close this by saying that I am having a lot of fun playing the game even with all those issues which I absolutely wish would be fixed yesterday (two years ago). The new mechanics are interesting, the incarnons are fun, the new tilesets are pretty and refreshing, and overall the community is still great and helpful. I don't understand why rivens have become such a massive thing in warframe (and I disagree with the premise of rivens) but its been there for years so what can I do.
Have a nice day, thanks for reading my blog.
