Dev 122; Road map to 2019?

[Stillent]

I am sure by this time everyone has considered what DE had to say for what 2019 has in store for Warframe, no flagship piece of content for this year but more of a glance on the overall game. 

Well, that GLANCE is not enough I need DE to LOOK back at the game and acknowledge that they need to fix it!

For context I suggest watching these two videos covering content in the past year and what people think of as end game in Warframe: 

Warframe: 2018 Update Breakdown - Content Versus Monetisation?

Warframe: New content ISN'T always a good thing.

Ok, keeping those videos in mind, we must consider the following Warframe is F2P and needs to keep players engaged to stay alive, so they consider that adding new content will keep the game alive and keep veterans coming back, but as the late TotalBuiscuit said: "Warframe is a castle built on the ruins of another castle". Eventually, you built so much on top that the foundation will has to crumble.

The foundations are the loyal players and veterans that keep the game going and the work they do to improve the game. I don't believe that new players are the ones that support the game, no one just goes into a F2P just to go and drop a fat stack of cash on something they do not even know they will like in the first place. Where the money comes from is the goodwill DE has been able to generate all this time, support comes from the veterans that wish to support the game. I personally seldom use plat. except for some very minor microtransactions here and there, sitting on my 4k of plat I just feel good that I know that $80 I spend will be going to the devs to continue working on the game, that's it.

I am not an accountant, nor do I know DE's budget, but I think that the right now DE needs to look back and take this year to go through Warframe overall. No amount of passion and love will just be enough to fule the game for the better, in the end, the bottom line is always a top priority for any company. One can say that if they do that DE will not make enough money to satisfy their investors if they turn this year into fixing their game but in the long term I believe it will suit them better overall, not only will they have a more polished product to attract new players with, they will also have the ability to then cleanly incorporate new content for veterans.

To illustrate a point about the new content and how it is implemented let us take my experience of Fortuna:

There is all this talk about the polish to content before sending it out, but I could not be bothered to play an ounce of Fortuna for at least 3 weeks after the launch. Why?

1. Once it was added there were performance issues and huge bugs that made it pointless to go out an enjoy the game, more of an eyesore than anything really

2. Why bother with this content in the first place? It will just remain there unchanged a day, month, year after it is released anyway. I only really started playing POE 2 weeks before Fortuna, and that is me at MR 21, and I now notice that the POE fish span in the land, rather than the sea, but at this point, all I can say is that this is content is so old there is no need to spend my time to point this out anyway.

What point is the new game content if the old content is just as broken. You don't plough through hundreds of hours of a bad series on Netflix just because if there is something you do not like you probably stop watching it. Same with Warframe, if there are bugs and weird things happening in the game you now play, you would just assume the same is expected elsewhere down the line, no matter how much the NEW is polished if the GROUNDWORK is faulty it will just FLAW the NEW content.

But this is all my opinion, based on what I have seen and my personal experiences.

Do any of you feel the same or different?

I'd like to know.

 

[Cicasajt]

no content? -complain

content? -complain

[Stillent]

5 minutes ago, Cicasajt said:

no content? -complain

content? -complain

Fix to make useful - Complain?

[Cicasajt]

1 minute ago, Stillent said:

Fix to make useful - Complain?

no, that barely makes sense but fixing leads to no grofit

[Stillent]

3 minutes ago, Cicasajt said:

no, that barely makes sense but fixing leads to no grofit

Obviously, but it needs to happen if the game wants to last.

Edited January 20, 2019 by Stillent

[Urlan]

To be fair, what you are saying, looking through DE's warframe ground work was what happened in 2018. Weapon changes and two modes aimed at challenge seeking players while in 2017 they were aiming at a status 2.5 rework and Kingpin system. Content droughts as were exemplified by 2018's releases occur due to holding back trying to test how internal mechanics can be rejiggered. This is something DE is always working on, if you mean to say bug fixes and such; that is more on the line of how some errors can crop up, be squashed, and pop up again due to different teams working on issues at different times. Consolidating these dev builds might be a good idea, but its possible that work-load to parallel development restricts the effectiveness of this approach. So far, Warframe has many bugs here and there - controller trigger buttons releasing randomly right now among others - but I am not coming up with many old areas of content that are 'broken' right now, as to say unplayable. Which are you particularly pointing out?

[Cicasajt]

20 minutes ago, Stillent said:

Obviously, but it needs to happen if the game wants to last.

obviously, but it has to happen while constanly producing new content. 

Edited January 20, 2019 by Cicasajt

[Loza03]

Something I'd like to point out.

Steve has, at this point, made it clear that Railjacks mod system is a trial run for a modding 3.0. If we're fine with the modding in Railjack, then they'll expand it to the rest of the game. One thing he pointed out was 'Armour should not be multiplicative' 

In other words - if all goes well then they're fixing mod power creep and enemy scaling.

[Stillent]

10 minutes ago, Cicasajt said:

obviously, but it has to happen while constanly producing new content. 

I am saying that they do not need too much new content right now, veterans will just blow through it, while new players will just be confused as more will be put on their plate. Trying to make a case that Warframe will always make money even maybe not all the money like Activision or EA, but that is why DE is a much better developer and them taking more time to polish Warframe overall will serve them better in the long run.

36 minutes ago, Urlan said:

To be fair, what you are saying, looking through DE's warframe ground work was what happened in 2018. Weapon changes and two modes aimed at challenge seeking players while in 2017 they were aiming at a status 2.5 rework and Kingpin system. Content droughts as were exemplified by 2018's releases occur due to holding back trying to test how internal mechanics can be rejiggered. This is something DE is always working on, if you mean to say bug fixes and such; that is more on the line of how some errors can crop up, be squashed, and pop up again due to different teams working on issues at different times. Consolidating these dev builds might be a good idea, but its possible that work-load to parallel development restricts the effectiveness of this approach. So far, Warframe has many bugs here and there - controller trigger buttons releasing randomly right now among others - but I am not coming up with many old areas of content that are 'broken' right now, as to say unplayable. Which are you particularly pointing out?

More recently it has to be Fortuna, when I tried to play it in the week of launch I gave up. There were major performance issues and it was laggy as anything, my computer is 4 years old and runs the game just fine, but I just don't understand why this part of the game ran so poorly, combined with the poor waypoint system(a problem that is universal to the game) it was so unenjoyable to play I just left it and do not see myself coming back for at least another couple of months. I recently picked up playing POE (MR21) and despite the eyesore that is the eidolon fights, I noticed that fish spawn in the ground and they can't leave that terrain because they spawn on the underside, also I can just make the Cetus main entrance door disappear allowing me to just walk off the edge of the map and walk underneath. 

Or how about having to choose when to extract in endless missions (excavation, survival)? I play with newbies sometimes and need to explain to them how this works, that if they want to leave they need to ask us all to leave. Is that option not possible to easily implement because of some spaghetti code?

Sometimes you really need to handle the game with kid gloves or just live with what you have to work with.

[LightZodiac]

8 minutes ago, Loza03 said:

Something I'd like to point out.

Steve has, at this point, made it clear that Railjacks mod system is a trial run for a modding 3.0. If we're fine with the modding in Railjack, then they'll expand it to the rest of the game. One thing he pointed out was 'Armour should not be multiplicative' 

In other words - if all goes well then they're fixing mod power creep and enemy scaling.

Well I'm really glad to hear that, remove multiplicative armor and mod power creep from the game and you have a solid base to make difficulty scale linearly with enemy levels.

[Stillent]

11 minutes ago, Loza03 said:

Something I'd like to point out.

Steve has, at this point, made it clear that Railjacks mod system is a trial run for a modding 3.0. If we're fine with the modding in Railjack, then they'll expand it to the rest of the game. One thing he pointed out was 'Armour should not be multiplicative' 

In other words - if all goes well then they're fixing mod power creep and enemy scaling.

See that is the problem, they only look back on something when they have something new to add to the game.

It is like having an old car, it gets you from A to B but breaks down once in a while. But instead of just doing the bare minimum of work to bring it to a usable state if it does break, you go all out and add some new over the top modification. Although it is nice to have to have a functioning car with an upgrade, you are still driving a jalopy.

[Stillent]

7 minutes ago, LightZodiac said:

Well I'm really glad to hear that, remove multiplicative armor and mod power creep from the game and you have a solid base to make difficulty scale linearly with enemy levels.

But you must see that this Railjack and any new update is a carrot on a stick. People are enticed by the carrot but never really consider who is holding the stick up (like a proper and fair armour scaling).

[LightZodiac]

33 minutes ago, Cicasajt said:

obviously, but it has to happen while constanly producing new content. 

But not just mindlessly churning out new content. 

Just take a look at PoE, it's a big good looking map which doesn't really have enough content. It has generic sorties which players quickly grew tired of and just fastrun them, Tridolons which are basically three versions of the same boss, 2 quests, 2 events and it's really poor on lore. Basically a content which gives really low gameplay value... but hey you could always make players play more by giving them fishing, mining and wisps to farm... they are not going to enjoy it though.

With Fortuna being even bigger map with a lot more features devs have an opportunity to fill it up with all kinds of quests, events, lore and make them in a way that adds replay value. It would already seem that three Orb fights are going to be fundamentally different rather then just bigger tankier boss. In my opinion they need to work a bit harder in the whole missions/quests department... I mean in comparison to work required to build such a map making quests/missions that take place on it and contain lore really doesn't seem like that big of a job.

[LightZodiac]

10 minutes ago, Stillent said:

See that is the problem, they only look back on something when they have something new to add to the game.

It is like having an old car, it gets you from A to B but breaks down once in a while. But instead of just doing the bare minimum of work to bring it to a usable state if it does break, you go all out and add some new over the top modification. Although it is nice to have to have a functioning car with an upgrade, you are still driving a jalopy.

Considering that melee rework is taking them like one year now I do not have high hopes.

Also I'm not going to mindlessly chase after some carrot, I already play less and less of warframe (pretty much down to dailies right now) and there are other games out there.

If enemies had flat amount of armor that doesn't scale with levels you would already fix the problem with enemy scaling.

Edited January 20, 2019 by LightZodiac

[Urlan]

6 minutes ago, Stillent said:

I am saying that they do not need too much new content right now, veterans will just blow through it, while new players will just be confused as more will be put on their plate. Trying to make a case that Warframe will always make money even maybe not all the money like Activision or EA, but that is why DE is a much better developer and them taking more time to polish Warframe overall will serve them better in the long run.

More recently it has to be Fortuna, when I tried to play it in the week of launch I gave up. There were major performance issues and it was laggy as anything, my computer is 4 years old and runs the game just fine, but I just don't understand why this part of the game ran so poorly, combined with the poor waypoint system(a problem that is universal to the game) it was so unenjoyable to play I just left it and do not see myself coming back for at least another couple of months. I recently picked up playing POE (MR21) and despite the eyesore that is the eidolon fights, I noticed that fish spawn in the ground and they can't leave that terrain because they spawn on the underside, also I can just make the Cetus main entrance door disappear allowing me to just walk off the edge of the map and walk underneath. 

Or how about having to choose when to extract in endless missions (excavation, survival)? I play with newbies sometimes and need to explain to them how this works, that if they want to leave they need to ask us all to leave. Is that option not possible to easily implement because of some spaghetti code?

Sometimes you really need to handle the game with kid gloves or just live with what you have to work with.

I can absolutely feel you on the performance issues of the Plains and Vallis areas of the game, sadly aside from small tweaks and fixing some memory leaks, I don't think that is going away anytime soon what with the moving away from Dx9 and 32 bit OS going forward soon. When Plains came out, it couldn't even run on 32 bit OS without crashing every other mission due to how the memory usage would build above the 2 GB - 3GB limit of 32 bit OSes. Having a GPU with less than 2GB would cause you to get an out of video memory error usually just trying to go through the Cetus Gate (after a long wait). Best I could suggest for folk getting into the game was to make sure one had 4 GB of Video Ram and a Skylake or better CPU with a 64 bit OS version (not even Win10 32 bit). Some of those bugs, like the falling out; Dargyn jumping causing the player to control other players; or just crashing to desktop; even bounties being impossible to complete are just elements of those bugs being reinserted deal spoken about earlier. The more input DE does, content addressing and revisits, the more these things eventually get pushed out of the other Dev-team branches. The fish spawning in the ground is annoying for sure, and still happens in both the Plains and Vallis; but isn't usually as frustrating as the more game-breaking bugs. It wasn't as crash inducing as the Chains of Harrow update on Earth and the Kuva Fortress, but it was pretty frustrating considering.

As to explaining the missions, I think this is something that could absolutely use a small team to work on. Many aspects of runs are not explained in detail or any best practices involving mission success. There is a reason that many first time players get stone-walled by survival or interception runs and its because not everyone knows to hold off on air while trying to get air drops primarily from spawns in a given area during survival or the nature of point holding and enemy recapture in Interceptions! For endless missions particularly, that is why several of us in the community have recommended an idea DE was floating a bit ago, during a devstream; individual extractions as long as the bare minimum rounds, or minutes have been completed. There are hurdles in that approach but some of us feel it allows for better flexibility and that Plains/Vallis extraction work could lead to this being a more solid reality.

 

[Stillent]

1 minute ago, LightZodiac said:

But not just mindlessly churning out new content. 

Just take a look at PoE, it's a big good looking map which doesn't really have enough content. It has generic sorties which players quickly grew tired of and just fastrun them, Tridolons which are basically three versions of the same boss, 2 quests, 2 events and it's really poor on lore. Basically a content which gives really low gameplay value... but hey you could always make players play more by giving them fishing, mining and wisps to farm... they are not going to enjoy it though.

With Fortuna being even bigger map with a lot more features devs have an opportunity to fill it up with all kinds of quests, events, lore and make them in a way that adds replay value. It would already seem that three Orb fights are going to be fundamentally different rather then just bigger tankier boss. In my opinion they need to work a bit harder in the whole missions/quests department... I mean in comparison to work required to build such a map making quests/missions that take place on it and contain lore really doesn't seem like that big of a job.

Exactly, they had PoE they did some stuff here and there and just left it in that state, nowhere do I see them mention: "Oh, we will also see if we can do to improve this implemented content further". Just: "New", "Hype", Release" then silence.

[(PSN)Spider_Enigma]

they need to cap level scaling to 100, armor scaling isnt the fking issue u guys make it out to be, the damage scaling is 

then they can go balance and or remove mods as they see fit and just give everyone that played for the last 4 months 500k endo or something and a bunch of mod packs

 

[Stillent]

 

52 minutes ago, (PS4)Spider_Enigma said:

they need to cap level scaling to 100, armor scaling isnt the fking issue u guys make it out to be, the damage scaling is 

then they can go balance and or remove mods as they see fit and just give everyone that played for the last 4 months 500k endo or something and a bunch of mod packs

 

I hope you see that this problem is much deeper than just tweaking the level cap, armor or damage scaling or levelling out the playing field

Changing those is good, but there it would not magically fix the game as a whole. I probably do not see the power problem because of my MR standing in the game, but for new players, I see how this would seem discouraging. Introducing new players to proper content and then having them gradually move harder and more challenging is the progression that currently is lacking. How does the player know that Lunaro or Conclave is not even important to progression? How do they find out PoE is just additional content? 

To put it into perspective there was an occasion where I had to explain to a new player how to get bounties for PoE, we all know that person is Konzu and here is near the gate, then there are more randoms scattered around town, how do we figure out who does what, well the veterans can just hit escape and go to "Fast travel" to read the fine print but how would a new player just know this? 

In whole Warframe needs to address the long-standing issues on the game's overall polish and slow down on sparkly new content or useless content (Conclave, Lunaro, Frame Fighter), changing one thing here and there is not gonna cut it going forwards (considering the current trend).