The Fortuna Trailer on Steam feedback

[Renkuya]

I posted this on Steam and it got two steps before it was derailed by hunting talk. Forgive me if I'm posting in the wrong spot. I think the open world content is flawed in it's design. I've heard the statement, "they'll add more later don't worry" but I've been in and out of Warframe for 5 years and know that "later" means years if you're lucky and they don't just abandon it (Trials/conclave). Fortuna/Cetus/Plains of Eidolod/Orb Valis are "fine" but they're not really that special. They lack any real change in pace. Sure, you can fish and stare at rocks but I feel like they just dropped the ball on scope. 

I wish Fortuna lived up to the trailer on Steam. It gives you this vibe of factions and supporting a rebellion when in reality it's just 5 missions in a "quest" with minimal story. It's kind of something I struggled with in PoE as well. Sure you have characters but you get so little time with them they don't feel important. Perhaps it'll feel about on par with PoE with some events and a quest or two more but as it stands it feels like they introduce you to the vendor NPCs so you'll know who they are and then just tell you to grind unrelated tasks. It doesn't feel like the bounties (or the standing) is really helping the people of Fortuna. It just feels like any other mission.

Now, this isn't special to Cetus or Fortuna as you can see this issue throughout Warframe. You get started with a little bit of lore and you're told "oh look at these bad guys" but for the most part it's lacking any depth to the overall "story". It's like if you removed the story from a Borderlands game between the start and finish. You'd still have a fun game you'd just spend most of your time asking, "what am I doing this for again?": I remember seeing something where Steve said it was great to see the people of Cetus because you got to see "what you were fighting for". I might be a little off on his exact wording but I don't feel that feeling. I see a lot of lifeless NPCs and a few shop vendors/quest givers with a few voice lines that just rotate stock and send you on rotating random missions.

If I haven't lost you yet, let me continue. I feel like this is similar to the problem between "hand crafted" and "procedural generation". Hand crafted content tends to come slower and be "shorter" but leaves you feeling more immersed and connected. Procedural Generation tends to give you a lot of content but lacks any real depth. Without getting too off track and into THAT discussion, I'll get to how it's relevant to my point. The bounties are too random. You get a lot of technical replay-ability because the missions are never exactly the same or in the same place but you suffer in the uniqueness of the bounties. Bounties from Cetus and Fortuna feel a lot of like because they're structured so similar. You get X types of missions spread out over the map placed at pretty random locations. That's it. That's where it stops it's depth. Orb Valis is littered with those labs and outpost type areas. There is so much room for tailored content but they went with "procedural" and it feels flat. 

I imagine that it wouldn't blow your mind to have a stealth mission into one of those labs but it would be a lot more entertaining than the shapeless random missions we currently have. It would also afford them the ability to differentiate Orb Valis and Plains of Eidolon. Orb Valis could be more about breaking into secure facilities and rescuing rebels. Plains of Eidolon could be more about smashing and grabbing and getting out of the way before the Grineer stomp you to bits. 

So, you'd break it down like this:

Orb Valis: Spy, Rescue type missions
Plains of Eidolon: Defense, Exterminate type missions
Whatever Infested Planet: Survival, those infested modes nobody likes

You'd eliminate a lot of the "this is PoE 2.0" complaints and be allowed to create a better narrative both in and out of the actual open world zone. Instead, DE is blowing their load on these zones in basically a "star map 300.0" type thing. Just cram all the game modes into the current zone and pat yourself on the back for a job well done. Before anybody says, "that would get boring" the bounties are already boring. Once you've done one or two, you've seen all there is to see. This would at least give you a reason to do content between the zones for more than just "let's grind for X" reasons.

[peterc3]

27 minutes ago, Renkuya said:

I've heard the statement, "they'll add more later don't worry" but I've been in and out of Warframe for 5 years and know that "later" means years if you're lucky and they don't just abandon it (Trials/conclave).

They've specifically avoided releasing all of the Fortuna content at once. Later means over the next month or two.

28 minutes ago, Renkuya said:

I imagine that it wouldn't blow your mind to have a stealth mission into one of those labs

This is already a stage you can run into on Bounties on OV.

30 minutes ago, Renkuya said:

Before anybody says, "that would get boring" the bounties are already boring.

So they need to take a lot of time to handcraft things that will go stale anyways. Where is the upside for DE? Where is the upside for most of the players?

[Renkuya]

8 hours ago, peterc3 said:

They've specifically avoided releasing all of the Fortuna content at once. Later means over the next month or two.

This is already a stage you can run into on Bounties on OV.

So they need to take a lot of time to handcraft things that will go stale anyways. Where is the upside for DE? Where is the upside for most of the players?

Unless I'm wrong, the content that they "specifically held back" doesn't seem like it'll actually address my issues. Bounties are boring and flat. Hubs are just Star Chart 4.0 (or whatever we're on) and if the bounties were hand tailored to the areas they'd be more interesting. 

I know there is a stage you can run into, it's just randomly thrown into the middle of the rest of the random content. What I'm suggesting is that be something more tailored. That and rescues.should be a central focus of Orb Valis/Fortuna. Instead we get missions with no meaning and no value outside of "grind for X". They could've used the Invasion system from the Star Chart and mixed that with some semblance of "narrative".. 

There will never be any content that doesn't "get boring". Put enough hours into anything and you'll get tired of it. It's my opinion that the current setup is more boring than a tailored experience would've been.

What's the infested planet going to be like? I think we can probably predict fairly well. You're going to be able to mine and fish, there will most likely be a transportation system introduced or reused and there will certainly be a faction hub with bounties. Instead of being unpredictable and giving us custom content we're stuck with rehashed and remixed content. If they kept things under the radar for a little while longer and we were JUST getting Plains of Eidolon but it was way more polished and content rich do you think anybody would've complained? Imagine if the Eidolon fights were engaging and interesting, the bounties served a purpose and it was a perpetual community effort to keep Cetus afloat? 

It's my opinion that DE rushes out content and comes back way later to touch things up or just dramatically overhaul them. Melee 3.0 comes how many years after that last major melee change? I'm fine with the policy of "put it out and then polish it" but DE has their hands in so many different pies that it's hard to imagine that Plains of Eidolon or Orb Valis will have any meaningful content in the next 3 years. I'm just saying, I'd like to see this game develop in fewer more meaningful ways than numerous meaningless ways. After grinding PoE for everything I want, there is no reason for me to ever touch that content again (a problem with 90% of the Star Chart missions as well). It exists solely to keep you distracted long enough for them to release the next distraction and does nothing for the narrative of the game. 

Final thought: the Vox Solaris quest sums up what I'm saying pretty nicely. It's shallow, you don't get to form an attachment to any of the characters, it's full of random activities and there is no reason to ever go back and play it again once you've done it.

[Veridian]

Only thing Fortuna may need at some point to not go stale is a couple of Plague Star type events with some possible semi-permanent consequences akin to Balor Fomorian.

Edited November 16, 2018 by Ver1dian

[peterc3]

8 hours ago, Renkuya said:

you don't get to form an attachment to any of the characters

I must be imagining all the attachment to Thursby/Legs, then.

8 hours ago, Renkuya said:

if the bounties were hand tailored to the areas they'd be more interesting.

And done enough times, they would be equally boring. Meanwhile DE would have spent much more time and energy on it and gotten less player time out of it.

[Renkuya]

5 minutes ago, peterc3 said:

I must be imagining all the attachment to Thursby/Legs, then.

And done enough times, they would be equally boring. Meanwhile DE would have spent much more time and energy on it and gotten less player time out of it.

Nice joke.

Sure, all content gets boring after a while. Chasing the pipe dream of avoiding any sort of content "drought" seems silly. How many games put out content regularly that aren't games like Overwatch where the new content is just a map or two and a character or two? Are you saying if DE took roughly a month or so to implement a bounty system that "mattered" it wouldn't have been worth it? I get that they want to keep the player in the game but you know who else does that the same way DE is going? Korean MMOs. It's all fine and good to give me content that has a long life but creating that life by making the grind just excessively time consuming tasks isn't enjoyable. To me, that's what it feels like. It feels like F2P MMOs I played in the early 2000's. You spend hundreds of hours farming silly tasks that mean nothing so you can finally get the thing you've been working toward and it's marginal improvements at best. At worst, it's just for the MR fodder. There has to be a point where we ask, "is this a game with fun grind" or "grind with a fun game". It's always been a delicate balance but the grind was always engaging tasks. Fishing and Mining isn't meaningful content. Bounties are not well designed. You're told in the bounty description that you have to do something but it rarely if ever feels like there is a coherent mission structure when you're actually doing the bounty. I don't feel like I'm taking down a traitor or stealing top secret designs, I just feel like I'm hauling butt through the open world so I can go back to the hub (thank god Fortuna at least adressed that major problem).

My question to you is, if the amount of work that they put into something has to be less than the amount of time a player experiences the content why bother with these short little preludes and tidbit quests? Why make us play through that terrible Vox Solaris quest that felt rushed and disconnected? There is some content that will be lengthy in development but the pay off is "wow, dude you gotta play this game it's freakin' amazing the open world areas are amazing and you get to be like a bounty hunter and break into places and kidnap people!". Instead we get a grab bag mode. That's fine, I just feel it's wasted potential.

[peterc3]

3 minutes ago, Renkuya said:

if DE took roughly a month or so to implement a bounty system that "mattered"

Your view of the time scale of game development is completely warped.

[Renkuya]

1 minute ago, peterc3 said:

Your view of the time scale of game development is completely warped.

Thanks for ignoring the entirety of my post.

Also, you don't know who I am or what I do for a living. Interestingly, I do know how these things go. It shouldn't take them that long to tweak the current system. A month OR SO isn't that bad.

I'm not going to engage in conversation with you if you're going to skip my entire post just to hurl insults.

[(PSN)guzmantt1977]

20 minutes ago, Renkuya said:

Thanks for ignoring the entirety of my post.

I'm not going to engage in conversation with you if you're going to skip my entire post just to hurl insults.

To be fair, I skipped over more than he did, and didn't even bother to do that. You disregarded the points that he made earlier, and just kept... I know that this is going sound harsh and I'm not actively trying to insult you, but the word I have in mind is "whining". 

We get it, you're bored and don't like the content you got. But what do you want us to do? We can't really sympathise if we don't agree, and it looks (from the beginning of the first post,) like you got the same treatment in the steam forum and decided to try and get more sympathy here. 

And he's right about your mental time line being off, a casual glance at the notes for the history of builds and hotfixes that followed, would show that after most of their big updates there's a lot of scrabbling in the code trying to pull the bugs out. If you expect them to try and do that now, while they're busy doing fixes, along with their other projects, then you'll probably want to rethink that. If you know much about these things then I shouldn't have had to point that out. 

[Renkuya]

2 minutes ago, (PS4)guzmantt1977 said:

To be fair, I skipped over more than he did, and didn't even bother to do that. You disregarded the points that he made earlier, and just kept... I know that this is going sound harsh and I'm not actively trying to insult you, but the word I have in mind is "whining". 

We get it, you're bored and don't like the content you got. But what do you want us to do? We can't really sympathise if we don't agree, and it looks (from the beginning of the first post,) like you got the same treatment in the steam forum and decided to try and get more sympathy here. 

And he's right about your mental time line being off, a casual glance at the notes for the history of builds and hotfixes that followed, would show that after most of their big updates there's a lot of scrabbling in the code trying to pull the bugs out. If you expect them to try and do that now, while they're busy doing fixes, along with their other projects, then you'll probably want to rethink that. If you know much about these things then I shouldn't have had to point that out. 

Whining it is not. It's not that I'm bored, it's that I'm disappointed. DE missed the mark here in a fairly major way. Steve was saying that Cetus was nice because you got to see "why" you're fighting. Why then, would they just flake on the one aspect that they put in the game that actually could've made you have some sort of connection to the hub? Instead it's just "talk to Bounty Giver, do bounty, repeat" until you have the things they locked behind them. Nothing different from the rest of the game.

I'm not suggesting they do this now, I suggested how it could be improved. You know, like they do with almost every aspect of this game? Should they drop Melee 3.0 because "why bother with content that's already out, give us something new"? They've tweaked content a lot and downright removed content (which is a flat loss). They're still adding things into Conclave that NOBODY plays. 

As for the "treatment on steam", I thought it would be more constructive here, clearly I was wrong. I reposted here because that post was derailed into chatter about hunting. I don't expect you to read everything between the OP and the bottom but I would appreciate if you would read the full OP before jumping in with your thoughts about how I'm whining. I'm trying to create a conversation on how they could improve things but it appears that everybody is fine with Korean MMO grind style gameplay and "it's all fine, we'll get Eidolons 2.0 in Orb Valis soon so that'll be more content".

Chances are you skipped most of this, I won't engage further with people that just wish to skip my points and reply to one single sentence of my post with "teehee, you wrong". I've been gaming since 1996 and I've played a wide variety of games. I have had my hands in plenty of projects, I know it's not impossible for a company like DE to make a bounty system with some amount of depth without breaking the bank or leaving us in a "content drought" forever. You can't have it both ways, either the story content is worthless because of all the resources and time they put into it or the open world content is shallow and lacking. You act like, "oh god look at how much time that would take" is a meaningful argument, it isn't. Do you have any idea how many people they employ? How many worked on the open world content? Do you have any idea how many hours it would take to complete a job like what I'm suggesting? No, probably not as you're assuming that fixing the position of some of the objectives and applying basically the Invasion system from the Star Chart would take more than two months. 

[YUREtheFURY]

24 minutes ago, (PS4)guzmantt1977 said:

To be fair, I skipped over more than he did, and didn't even bother to do that. You disregarded the points that he made earlier, and just kept... I know that this is going sound harsh and I'm not actively trying to insult you, but the word I have in mind is "whining". 

We get it, you're bored and don't like the content you got. But what do you want us to do? We can't really sympathise if we don't agree, and it looks (from the beginning of the first post,) like you got the same treatment in the steam forum and decided to try and get more sympathy here. 

And he's right about your mental time line being off, a casual glance at the notes for the history of builds and hotfixes that followed, would show that after most of their big updates there's a lot of scrabbling in the code trying to pull the bugs out. If you expect them to try and do that now, while they're busy doing fixes, along with their other projects, then you'll probably want to rethink that. If you know much about these things then I shouldn't have had to point that out. 

Renkuya is right they did miss the mark here i agree 100%. Its the same exact play model as POE same type of bounties same type of fishing and mining. Just imagine if the bounties were like the kingpin system instead of the current POE setup it would have been new, more interesting and gave fortuna more uniqueness opposed to POE.

[OniDax]

21 hours ago, peterc3 said:

They've specifically avoided releasing all of the Fortuna content at once. Later means over the next month or two.

This is already a stage you can run into on Bounties on OV.

So they need to take a lot of time to handcraft things that will go stale anyways. Where is the upside for DE? Where is the upside for most of the players?

Don't expect much more from Orb Vallis in terms of what the OP is asking for. The stuff that's coming later is the system needed to fight the Orbs. That will most likely be Eidolons 2.0, which quite a few people already don't like. It's not going to be much more of an open world than PoE. Certainly, I think Orb Vallis is way better than PoE, but it's still lacking because it's still a large empty map and not a true open world with various NPCs and a story-driven experience.

[Renkuya]

3 minutes ago, WARmaro said:

Renkuya is right they did miss the mark here i agree 100%. Its the same exact play model as POE same type of bounties same type of fishing and mining. Just imagine if the bounties were like the kingpin system instead of the current POE setup it would have been new, more interesting and gave fortuna more uniqueness opposed to POE.

I'm willing to put it out there now, if they do an infested planet it's going to be very similar to Cetus/Fortuna. We'll have fishing, mining and bounties like what we currently have. 

Imagine if we got an infested planet that had bounties that were focused around survival type missions (probably timed, not endless) and whatever other mode(s) would fit into that type of environment? Where bounties weren't just titled, "Kill a grineer officer" but that's what they were centered around. I would see them similar but not as story driven as GTA V's heists. Lower tier bounties would just be setup missions and the highest tier would be some execution of specific tasks followed by a specific event. Now, I'm not suggesting they go as far as GTA V and give us cutscenes and lengthy voice lines. Just structured content that balances between "random" and "hand crafted". The results of the Bounty would feed into an "Invasion" type scoreboard with something happening if the community fails (triggering a rotating event like Plague Star?) while triggering a positive event if the community succeeds (better bounty rewards or perhaps access to a limited time mission where you "strike back"). It would be easy to keep people from falling into the GW2 trap of intentionally failing by making the failed event stick around until it was cleared, disabling bounties in the meantime and not being as rewarding as the positive event. In that right there, you'd have a form of endgame content and content that would allow people to not only go and do the "casual" tasks of fishing and mining "because it's fun" once they cleared content. Just as an added bonus, they could add in a leader board for top contributing clans/players, allowing for the claim of "bragging rights". If you wanted to go even further you could reward "top players" with a scaling reward system depending on their placement. 

Instead, we get the mixed bag game mode that bounties currently are, totally detached from that "this is why we fight" bit Steve spoke about. I honestly feel like the open world content is just a hype machine to grow numbers and shake up "vets". I was STOKED for PoE but when it hit (all the nasty bugs aside) I was left wanting and disappointed. It was open world sure, it just didn't have anything more than that. It delivered what it said it would by being open world but failed to take things beyond that. They missed the mark by delivering a barebones experience. I get that they could come back and do a "Plains of Eidolon 2.0" but when? Do we really want that 2 years or more from now? Is DE incapable of doing it right the first time? It starts to feel like Early Access titles, all the reviews are "there's so much potential here" but the developers never cash in on that potential.

[(PSN)guzmantt1977]

24 minutes ago, Renkuya said:

Whining it is not. It's not that I'm bored, it's that I'm disappointed. DE missed the mark here in a fairly major way. 

Really? Not bored? Then you need to go back and delete parts of your posts. Start with the first one:

21 hours ago, Renkuya said:

Before anybody says, "that would get boring" the bounties are already boring. Once you've done one or two, you've seen all there is to see.

And you're disappointed because you didn't get some fantastical dream zone that you envisioned off of a couple minutes worth of trailer? Especially when you admit a little lower down, that what you got matches the way the rest of the game is? 

 

26 minutes ago, Renkuya said:

I'm not suggesting they do this now, I suggested how it could be improved. You know, like they do with almost every aspect of this game? 

Sure, uh huh, OK, except.... 

21 hours ago, Renkuya said:

I've heard the statement, "they'll add more later don't worry" but I've been in and out of Warframe for 5 years and know that "later" means years if you're lucky and they don't just abandon it (Trials/conclave).

 

27 minutes ago, Renkuya said:

Chances are you skipped most of this, I won't engage further with people that just wish to skip my points and reply to one single sentence of my post with "teehee, you wrong".

Do what makes you feel happy. Obviously this is not it, so good luck with that? 

28 minutes ago, Renkuya said:

I've been gaming since 1996 and I've played a wide variety of games. 

I started in the 80s so does that mean that I should scoff at you for being a Johnny-come-lately? Or does it give me the authority to tell you off for not being as much of a gamer as I? No? OK didn't think so. 

31 minutes ago, Renkuya said:

I have had my hands in plenty of projects, I know it's not impossible for a company like DE to make a bounty system with some amount of depth without breaking the bank or leaving us in a "content drought" forever. 

Good, so then you wouldn't want to start threads on both steam and the game forum to do just that, right? ... Oh wait. 

33 minutes ago, Renkuya said:

Do you have any idea how many people they employ?

Around 250 is my guess, how close am I? How many worked on the latest Fallout? 

34 minutes ago, Renkuya said:

How many worked on the open world content?

What a silly question to follow the previous one with. A game development company is going to have a bunch of people who are good at specific things. There's going to be artists, and sound engineers. Do you expect them to be the ones to code your game, work on the AI? Come on. You need to pull the other one, it's got bells on, it has.

 

And after that little piece of intellectual dishonesty you just tried to pull, is where I cut you off. 

 

Good luck with whatever you're trying to do Tenno. I'm not giving it any more attention. 

[Renkuya]

3 minutes ago, (PS4)guzmantt1977 said:

Really? Not bored? Then you need to go back and delete parts of your posts. Start with the first one:

And you're disappointed because you didn't get some fantastical dream zone that you envisioned off of a couple minutes worth of trailer? Especially when you admit a little lower down, that what you got matches the way the rest of the game is? 

 

Sure, uh huh, OK, except.... 

 

Do what makes you feel happy. Obviously this is not it, so good luck with that? 

I started in the 80s so does that mean that I should scoff at you for being a Johnny-come-lately? Or does it give me the authority to tell you off for not being as much of a gamer as I? No? OK didn't think so. 

Good, so then you wouldn't want to start threads on both steam and the game forum to do just that, right? ... Oh wait. 

Around 250 is my guess, how close am I? How many worked on the latest Fallout? 

What a silly question to follow the previous one with. A game development company is going to have a bunch of people who are good at specific things. There's going to be artists, and sound engineers. Do you expect them to be the ones to code your game, work on the AI? Come on. You need to pull the other one, it's got bells on, it has.

 

And after that little piece of intellectual dishonesty you just tried to pull, is where I cut you off. 

 

Good luck with whatever you're trying to do Tenno. I'm not giving it any more attention. 

No, I'm not bored, I said the bounties are boring and they are. From a game design perspective they're shallow and uninteresting. Is that better? 

I'm disappointed because they talk up every aspect of arguably the most shallow content in the game. I've suggested several ways on how it could be improved and my thoughts on where they went wrong. You think I want them to snap their fingers and fix it, I don't. I would like them to commit to a project and not leave it on the shelf to gather dust. How long do you think DE will take to swing back around and add content to PoE? You think we'll get that when they're done with the open world areas they want to do? Perhaps instead of spreading themselves out on all of these different little things things they could focus on a few things at a time. They wanted to tackle open world content, nobody said they had to. They should've known that it was going to be shallow unless they gave it the attention it deserved. The problem is, they announce things too early, hype it up and then release it and everybody says, "don't worry, they'll add to it later". Yeah, tell me how that weapon damage rework is going. Or how Conclave is fairing. Maybe you want to talk about them ditching Trials? The mythical shield gating thing they kept talking about then backed away from?

My point about when I started gaming wasn't to belittle you but to establish that I'm not somebody that just recently rolled out of bed and said, "hey I know everything". It's great that you have been playing games since the 80's, I'd love to pick your brain on how you view the gaming industry and what you might think is wrong with it (don't tell me nothing, that would be a lie).

My point about how many people working on it is exactly your point. The division of labor means that they aren't doing one thing at a time. It's not like they have to create the assets THEN create the sounds THEN start working on code THEN start messing with the AI. Most of that stuff goes on at the same time, so it's not as daunting as you might expect to nudge some numbers and code around to take what is basically already there and improve it. Are you saying that they'll never do a rework of this content? that what we have is all we'll ever have because "omg it would be too much work to improve"?

How exactly was I being intellectually dishonest? That's some serious talk coming from a guy that assumes my points, skips my posts and desperately doesn't want to comment anything negative about the content we've been given. I've been consistent and honest about my opinion this whole time. You have shrugged off all my points and done little more than say, "stop complaining, what do you want them to do". I'm disappointed with the content of the open world areas, it's boring conceptually and it lacks any depth. I've given plenty of suggestions on how it could not be. You've just been pedantic and dismissive.

Enjoy your time fishing and mining, I'm sure you'll have 100s of hours doing that amazing content that's so exciting.