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Should DE fix old content at the risk of Content Drought 2019 or continue creating new content ignoring old ones?


NaoEthelia
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5 hours ago, ShortCat said:

Counterquestion: what did DE revisit this year? So far only some weapons and Frames. Thats it! Yes, they are working on melee 3.0, however it does not require this massive change they are opting for, just some mod and stat changes could work. Furthermore, biggest problem with melee is and will remain after the rework - AoE.

So in conclusion, this "contnt drought" is not caused because DE revisits old stuff, but because they horrible manage their resources and work on too big projects for themselves.

You're severely understating just how much revisits to old content there are this year. This is a big list of revisited content I compiled from all of the patch notes from Plains of Eidolon until The Sacrifice, leading up to Fortuna.

  • They revisited every single secondaries and primaries this year, a total of 216 weapons.
    • They rebalanced and buffed 122 primary weapons this year.
    • They rebalanced and buffed 94 secondaries this year.
  • They revisited 15 frames. Some major, some minor. Some simply buffs or nerfs, some much needed QoL changes, some are complete overhaul bundled with their own dedicated systems (e.g: Saryn, Atlas).
  • They revisited and buffed the large majority of Warframe Arcanes, 19 out of 30 existing ones.
    • They decoupled Arcanes from Syandanas, dedicating them into a separate system instead of a cosmetic add-on.
  • They reworked sniper system to include shot combo system.
  • They revisited and reworked the flawed beam primary and secondary system back to their old glory and brought back continuous weapons into meta (Amprex, Atomos).
  • They reworked and decoupled exalted weapon system making it possible for players to properly build their melee without completely gimping their exalted abilities.
  • They revisited Howl of the Kubrow and made Incubator Power Core an obtainable reward by completing the Earth > Mars junction instead of having to gather up 100k which is borderline horrible for new players.
  • They revisited The Silver Grove and cut down several plant requirements to make the grind more palatable to chew through (especially the infamous 25 Vestan Moss).
  • They revisited Daily Tribute change, which, although got a mixed reception, does give the more recent players a leeway to pick the milestone gear they wanted first.
  • They revisited certain painful Junctions on the Starchart and made them easier to progress.
    • Removed “Defeat 3 Eximus enemies on EARTH” requirement from Venus Junction.
    • Lowered “Defeat 10 Eximus enemies on Venus” requirement on Mercury Junction to 5 Eximus enemies in any region.
    • Lowered “Defeat 10 Sentient enemies on Lua” requirement to 5 Sentient enemies.
    • Lowered “Collect any 3 Mods from the Orokin Principle challenge rooms on Lua” to 1 Mod.
  • They revisited The Index and made the game mode a real endless game mode.
  • They overhauled their AI system, which admittedly is buggy at first, yes, but it ultimately allowed them to create more interesting and dynamic enemies like in Fortuna.
  • They gave augments to Sentinels and in turn breathed new life into Djinn as part of the meta.
  • They revisited gear wheel to allow infinite amount of gears to be brought into any mission, helping alleviate the problem with gear bloat.
  • They revisited and retuned every single Warframe Specter's AIs, some of the changes making them fairly useful, like Trinity Specters.
  • They revisited Invasion missions and cut down the amount of tedious grinding you have to do on endless missions.
  • They revisited Grineer Commander and effectively killed the forced 3-second CC on you as the player.
  • They revisited Kuva Guardian to make them much less of a hassle to kill.
    • This change helps making Kuva Siphon mission less of a hassle, and they also added new lines to Lotus to better clarify what players are supposed to do.
  • They revisited Vay Hek and made him significantly less wait-it-out.
  • They touched upon the ABC system of weapon build, appearance, operator looks and even loadout and made them swappable.
  • They revisited the spawns mechanic of Somachord, Cephalon Fragment and Frame Fighter Fragments, making them all possible to spawn at once instead of the three fragments fighting for one single spawn point.
  • They revisited and remastered Dojo system, improved functionality across the board, which also extends to decorating your own Orbiter.
  • They revisited Excavation missions for minor things, such as moving Lotus transmission to the right to not interfere the UI.
  • They added a "Founding Warlord" role to help alleviate the issue of a clan not having a Warlord at all if every single one left the clan.

You can tell by the size of this list that by no means only an insignificant amount of development resources has gone into these changes. The majority of these reworks are feature-based as well, they are not as simple as tweaking the numbers. Now, just try to imagine how much development resources has gone into these.

Edited by NaoEthelia
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2 hours ago, NaoEthelia said:

You're severely understating just how much revisits to old content there are this year. This is a big list of revisited content I compiled from all of the patch notes from Plains of Eidolon until The Sacrifice, leading up to Fortuna.

  • -snip-

You can tell by the size of this list that by no means only an insignificant amount of development resources has gone into these changes. The majority of these reworks are feature-based as well, they are not as simple as tweaking the numbers. Now, just try to imagine how much development resources gone into these.

Man, I forgot about most of these. Thanks for the refresher.

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vor 9 Stunden schrieb NaoEthelia:

No, unfortunately DE can't both fix old content and create new one fast enough. They tried it this year with fixing and re-tuning older content and they paid dearly for that: Content Drought 2018 and bleeding playerbase. 

What are your thoughts on this?

they definitely need to work on the old content, to tie up the quests and make the whole experience a more "cinematic" one, introduce every faction,boss and also the syndicates via quests, the old events/alerts which are not in the game anymore which introduced some of the bosses and also "special" units/variants of the factions (which also had some lore) need to come back or be brought back as quests. the game starts with a cinematic intro in the prologue, but after the prologue... if it wasnt for the movement system, general gameplay and the fact that i was in the mood for some "horde mode" type game and a sucker for games like mass effect,borderland and sci-fy shooters, i would have dropped the game after venus. i didnt know what is going on, why i am i fighting those grineer/corpus, who this "lotus" is and why should i do what she says and kill who she wants dead (except i had no choice) and was excited for every quest with the hope of getting more lore and some explanation of what is going on, but was disappointed because evrie quest felt like a "side" quest in other games and that there is no "main" story, until natah,second dream.

BUT, they cant go and not work on new content, its a free 2 play game (even if it wasn't) and they need to release new stuff to keep the already existing player base engaged in their game.

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8 hours ago, CelticMoss said:

idk what you are talking about we keep going into content drought everytime they do this open world crap i was finished with it in 3 days it took them a whole year for 3 days worth of content  

Don't think you finished all the content then? Standing cap blocks that lol

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they should update and fix things a little and often IMHO.

Some things will be too complex or beyond cost effective tinkering, but looking at fortuna they have clearly learned much in the last year or so and I personally think it would be a shame if some of what they learned is not filtered down.

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4 hours ago, NaoEthelia said:

-snip-

While this list seems impressive, a lot of those changes can be boiled down to some number adjustments, especially in regards to weapons. Most of the "revisited" stuff, like the 100k crafting cost for incubator can be seen as a conceptional oversight right from the start and could be avoided althogether, if more time would be spend on Quality Controll. Other changes are so insignificant, I couldn't even tell you there was a change in the first place.

And as I already said in my first post, they have to do both. Every business has to do both parts - maintenance and expansion. Furthermore I said, that they should do better resource managament, because DE often launches half-baked products just to ship something and move to the next bigger project. And then the time comes when those unfinished chlidren bite them in the rear and they have to do double load of work.

I am also kinda curious whether this whole thread isn't a bait, since you are awfully familiar with all the stuff that was reworked this year, for a person who is apposing this idea. Together with "bleeding playerbase" face news.

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DE grew alot in the last couple of years. they are now more or less 250 people. Still not a big number for game developers but its a big % growth for them.
They raised the bar pretty high, so they want new content to be at a certain level, always better than previous content and that alone prevents them from releasing content at the pace they used to.
Combine that with the fact that they will for sure fix, rework and revise older content and just do the math. 2019 content will probably drop with the same pace of 2018, just always better alongside some old conted revamps.
right now alot of things are in dire need of some love:
-archwing
-pets
-arbitrations
-some bosses
Also there is plenty of other things that are filled fith bugs but are somewhat playable (like eidolons)

i think they really must realease new content, but they cant afford to rush too much buggy and unfinished content or they really will find themselves at a standstill

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I'd vote for fixing existing content any day.

Let's take PoE as an example: no additional content(no new quests, no additional fish or Zaw parts, no new bosses), some old bugs like being stuck in Dargyn are still there. It took DE how much time to make Archwing Launchers infinite? They released it, fixed some bugs, left other and went ahead without expanding on it. The same will happen to Fortuna. And then with Railjack. Sad.

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11 hours ago, NaoEthelia said:

At the risk of content drought, though? We've already seen the content drought caused by revisiting old contents. Would you be okay with that?

To me, yes.

Dozens of different things to do and hundreds of items to gain isn't really content that matters when so much of it is in need of update or repair that it isn't enjoyable to play or use.

The game is vast.  It's truly very big, and there's hundreds of different possible mission and mapset combinations.  Refinements that make them all fun and useful opens more doors than adding singular content pieces, in my opinion.

For reference....look at guns and their recent rework.  Sure, if you want the absolute bleeding edge of "meta", the choices are still relatively limited.  But the rebalance that happened in 2018 opened up the usability of a great many of the guns, and now a person can actually choose to use weapons that they enjoy.  Before this, guns essentially languished in a chronological order of dysfuntionality because older items where completely outpaced by the progress that is power creep.  Now we have a large amount of gun content in earnest, capable of being used in missions we actually want to play, rather than merely having them in the armory and at best taking them out for a low level spin just to fantasize about how cool it'd be to be able to usefully equip them for higher purpose.

Melee is already looking at 3.0, and needs it.  That'll be a good change.  After that, mission variety, AI restructure or variety, and perhaps even a reward/scaling restructure in the solar system could add a great deal of content without actually adding new things.

But on the flip side of all this, I rather agree with those suggesting that there isn't a content drought in the first place.  There's lots of new things since the start of 2018, and there's plenty to do---which does nothing more than reinforce the importance of revisiting the older stuff, because finding a way to give it a better replay value makes this vast quantity of content actually appear, which ultimately retains players and attracts new ones.

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9 hours ago, ShortCat said:

Doing both, fixing existing content and working on new one, would be the most optimal solution.

Counterquestion: what did DE revisit this year? So far only some weapons and Frames. Thats it! Yes, they are working on melee 3.0, however it does not require this massive change they are opting for, just some mod and stat changes could work. Furthermore, biggest problem with melee is and will remain after the rework - AoE.

So in conclusion, this "contnt drought" is not caused because DE revisits old stuff, but because they horrible manage their resources and work on too big projects for themselves.

Sad part is about this big project, that is Fortuna, it is not anything special or that different from PoE. 

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17 minutes ago, fashizzle316 said:

Sad part is about this big project, that is Fortuna, it is not anything special or that different from PoE. 

It was never going to be revolutionary. It is evolutionary. Now they have made a large open space that is bigger, has a better ability to "refresh" and not have to dump the players somewhere else while it reloads. Now they can take what they learned in Fortuna and tweak PoE with the new knowledge and better systems they created.

If you squint so hard you close your eyes, they are the same thing. Actually look at similar systems in both and see the changes.

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There's going to be content drought regardless.

DE doesn't have a choice and needs to keep making new things to bring new players in and make money. Unfortunately because of this the old stuff will just be left to rot after initial hotfixes when that stuff initially released. 

I think DE is just going to keep doing the same thing that they have been doing this year. One "big" update for the end of the year and tiny things along the way. 

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Nope, as long as DE tries some big update they will always be content drought.Then those big updates better be new things.

One example is WoW 4.0, players don't care BZ refresh the whole old play area, because it is OLD area nonetheless.

Edited by dEjAvU5566
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16 hours ago, (PS4)Zero_029 said:

Content Drought keeps getting tossed around but I haven't seen it really.

The title "Content Drought" is actually dead wrong. The correct phrase that folks are loathe to put into words is:

"I've burned myself out by dedicating my every waking hour to Warframe."

This couldn't be any more off point.

I play half an hour to an hour a day. Basically just Sortie plus occasionnaly half an hour above that if there's anything to do. Which there wasn't much this year.

Basically, a run of Onslaught a day for a couple of weeks, a few days of arbitration and... That's it, actually. There wasn't anything else this year.

You can count PA farming, but that's a hard scheduled content.

I've built a stockpile of couple dozens of eggplants of all things! Which says volume about how many weapons we received this year.

So yeah, as Steve himself put it, "Content Drought is real".

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14 hours ago, ShortCat said:

While this list seems impressive, a lot of those changes can be boiled down to some number adjustments, especially in regards to weapons. Most of the "revisited" stuff, like the 100k crafting cost for incubator can be seen as a conceptional oversight right from the start and could be avoided althogether, if more time would be spend on Quality Controll.

At least 17 out of the 24 bullet points listed are feature overhaul or changes, not just some small number adjustments. Weapons and Incubator changes like you mentioned are only 7 bullet points out of 24, less than a third of the list. You can't just adjust some numbers or slap on extra reward to fix how beam weapons work.

14 hours ago, ShortCat said:

Other changes are so insignificant, I couldn't even tell you there was a change in the first place.

Revisits or quality of life changes to older content are by nature insignificant. Both you and I myself did not remember more than a few of the listed bullet points until I compiled it off the patch notes, which, sadly, really reinforces the point that old content revisits are often more irrelevant than new content.

14 hours ago, ShortCat said:

I am also kinda curious whether this whole thread isn't a bait, since you are awfully familiar with all the stuff that was reworked this year, for a person who is apposing this idea. Together with "bleeding playerbase" face news.

Trust me, this thread is not a bait. I was never in any side and it's really just a genuinely curious discussion, and I do realize there are three sides to this argument, along with their advantages and disadvantages.

  • Continue working on new content ignoring old one and we have a broken game on its fundamental.
  • Continue fixing old content and not developing new content and we have content drought which bleeds playerbase.
  • Try both working on new content and fixing old content and DE cannot keep up, resulting in a mix of broken game and content drought both to a lesser degree (which is what DE did this year).
Edited by NaoEthelia
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Lol....so umm, what DO you people like? And "i dont like it" =/= broken. Most of the content isn't broken, people are playing it just fine. Fortuna may not be mind-blowing to you, but it still adds to the overall game which is filled with tons of content.

Edited by Hypernaut1
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They need to place a huge focus on fixing, revamping and reworking our current roster of Warframes. We’re getting new, mediocre Warframes a few times a year but I would much rather they make a pass through every single Warframe and polish them before making new ones and new missions/content. 

Not only will they breathe new life back into the game but it could also inspire them and help improve the creation of new Warframes in the process. 

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If we compare how much game time we got out of Fortuna, and how much time they invested in it, it's not worth it from a player's perspective.

With that much dev time imagine how much they could have fixed of the current game. Warframe already has a ton of content, the problem is not how much, the problem is the very low replay-ability. Adding yet another open world or game mode that's going to be played for 3 weeks and forgotten doesn't solve anything. They have ideas, the problem is, they release their ideas and it still need a fair amount of tweaks, but the tweaks never come, or come year laters.

Fixing everything that need to be doesn't make for big announcements with fancy trailers though, so I don't expect it to really happen on the scale it should. It will always remain a side task for a handful of devs.

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4 hours ago, NaoEthelia said:

You can't just adjust some numbers or slap on extra reward to fix how beam weapons work.

Beam weapons used to work like they do atm. If they had code from older iterations, there should be little to no work to change those. Or take a look at the current DevWorkshop about Nyx and Titania - all they do is play with numbers, especially for Titania. Thats not a rework. And in case of Titania, negative feedback was raining several days after release, why did they wait 2 years to come back to her? Isn't it more efficient to improve her as long as you have code lines fresh in your head, instead of coming back to the same issue years later?

4 hours ago, NaoEthelia said:

Both you and I myself did not remember more than a few of the listed bullet points until I compiled it off the patch notes, which, sadly, really reinforces the point that old content revisits are often more irrelevant than new content.

I did not recall those cahnges, because they are just insignificant. Changing a junction from 10 to 5 sentients is a difference of 2 missions, or 10 minutes playtime. This is a joke. Grineer Commander? People were upset with him, but this is some kind of a first world problem born in heads of utter idiots. We encounter this unit once in a blue moon and his mechanic was in no way game breaking. The issue itself was out of proportion and they go and dedicate time to it - just one more example of bad resource management (or because it is easy to do and it creates an impression like "look, we care").

4 hours ago, NaoEthelia said:
  • Continue working on new content ignoring old one and we have a broken game on its fundamental.
  • Continue fixing old content and not developing new content and we have content drought which bleeds playerbase.
  • Try both working on new content and fixing old content and DE cannot keep up, resulting in a mix of broken game and content drought both to a lesser degree (which is what DE did this year).

There is no BUTS. You have to do both, idealy with better management.

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There isn't a "content drought". There are very few other games constantly adding something for people to do or get as often as this one does.

What this game does have however, is a large portion of people who rush everything, pay little attention to anything they've done other than getting to "an end" (that doesnt exist), then moan when they have "nothing left to do".

I'd rather they fix old things than continue to try feed the bum-rush.

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22 minutes ago, ShortCat said:

Beam weapons used to work like they do atm. If they had code from older iterations, there should be little to no work to change those.

While I understand where you're coming from and agree with some of your points, I need to point something out: The Dev Workshop is a lie. OG Beam weapon ticks at a different formula than NG weapons. Look at this video of OG Ignis and you can see the numbers rain down at a speed out of proportion from what their fire rate suggested. This means that whatever changes they made to the current beam weapon is an entirely new iteration of code.

Edited by NaoEthelia
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14 hours ago, peterc3 said:

It was never going to be revolutionary. It is evolutionary. Now they have made a large open space that is bigger, has a better ability to "refresh" and not have to dump the players somewhere else while it reloads. Now they can take what they learned in Fortuna and tweak PoE with the new knowledge and better systems they created.

Then why just not improve on PoE first and figure out what works and how it works? Why did they work on Fortuna when they have Plains, which are still unrefined? "Fortuna is 4 times as big" and 4 times as empty. There are 30 caves, yet there is little to no reason to visit more than 5. The map is bigger, yet bounties have even less local variaty in them: this hijac mission? - 3 optional locations. Spy? - 2 locations. And so on.

Didn't know DE stuff had private accounts here to whiteknight everything done and block every proposed change imaginable.

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