Exploration in Warframe is Bad and Needs Improvement

[MJ12]

43 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

Loot detection is 40-ish, yes. The Loot Detector aura and Animal Instinct are 30, Thief's Wit is 42, though you can stack them. Even 30 meters is quite a lot for indoors, though, as that's the majority of most rooms. Not so much for the "Free Roam" maps, but those have a host of issues of their own. The reason I keep bringing that up is I'm not a huge fan of quite as much signposting as you're proposing. While there's nothing fundamentally wrong with it, what you're describing is less "exploration" and more "an objective." Hive Sabotage, Grenier Caches on the plains, etc. I'd personally prefer the kind of exploration which requires players to pay attention throughout a mission, rather than for a minute or two every time the game says "OK, explore now."

That's why I proposed notifying players that an Ayatan Sculpture or Rare Container exists ON THE MAP, but then letting players find it themselves. Provided those show up in a different colour or with a different icon on the map (i.e., so they don't blend in with all the Ferrite and Rubedo crap), then I don't see it as too much bother for players to keep their eyes open as they go through the map. Hell, maybe even have them make a sound and flash the minimap when they pop up, like spotting an enemy tank does on World of Tanks, just to alert players that something happened. In general, though, I feel that loot detection itself works well enough for finding rare stuff, and that the most prominent issue there is telling the rare stuff apart from the common stuff. Well, and losing your Sentinel, if you rely on Animal Instinct like I do.

This is how sabotage caches work and I think I've already made it amply clear what I think about it.

The core problem is attention. Player attention is an extremely limited resource that depletes easily and takes time to recover, which is why good games pace themselves with high-attention events (fights, scouring an area for things) and low-attention events (walking around, driving, flying). Warframe's exploration, which requires attentive scouring of a map for signs of hidden items via hearing, is relatively high-attention, which means that it should be paced out rather than forcing you to pay attention for the entire map. Worse, because rooms aren't labeled as 'explored' once you've gone into them and gotten everything of value, you need to maintain a mental map in your head of where you have searched and where you haven't (and that map will necessarily be imperfect unless you've memorized the tiles) losing that attention can effectively reset your progress.

Requiring players to pay attention all the time is not always a good thing especially when minor lapses of attention can reset progress.

Quote

So I checked the Wiki. Rare Containers hold Mantis blueprints, Detonite/Fieldron/Forma, a meaningless amount of Endo/Credits, a blueprint or a Booster. For how rare those things are, that's frankly utter garbage. In that case, my reservations are withdrawn and I fully support making them more common. I mean, what's the harm? Worse come to worst a new player gets a temporary booster.

As to Ayatan Sculptures... I don't know. I don't actually use a terribly high amount of Endo and certainly haven't spent much time farming for it, so Ayatan Sculptures were legit my primary means of earning it. I explore maps pretty thoroughly, so I end up with a lot of Sculptures and Stars, which is why I was reluctant to propose just dropping more of them. If you're confident that it's not going to inflate the "endo economy" too much, though, then I'm willing to trust your judgement on the matter. Don't have too much of an opinion on the matter. I'd certainly want to find sculptures more often, since they're something of an exploration highlight.

In general, though - better or at least more consistent rewards for exploration are needed. Regardless of what changes we do to the activity itself, it does need to offer enough rewards to feel at least like I'm not wasting my time doing it.

Arbitrations and high-level excavations give a very sizable amount of endo and you can easily get something like 2k Endo a day on average from just doing the sortie on a daily basis.

Edited April 2, 2019 by MJ12

[Teridax68]

The typical way exploration is rewarded in games is using the following basic process:

1. Game features optional side path that either loops back or leads to a dead end.
2. Player goes down this side path.
3. The end of the side path rewards the player in some form, e.g. via hard-to-obtain health restores and ammunition, or a collectible.

This doesn't work in Warframe, because the near-totality of side paths give the player no meaningful rewards. Ammo is not a real concern in most cases, health restores are too small to care about, and resources quickly become irrelevant to players who have collected so many of them as to not need any more. All of this is compounded by the fact that it is often more efficient to just go down the main path to obtain all of these, both because regular combat, traversal, and objective completion showers the players in various rewards, and because exploring side paths is generally not very interesting, as mentioned in the OP. Sometimes there's a more interesting reward, like a rare cache, an Ayatan Sculpture, or the like, but those rewards are few and far between.

With this in mind, what I'd like to see from exploration is the following:

• A multiplicity of main paths, rather than one long dressed-up corridor: not strictly exploration per se, but simply having more than just one means of traversing a level from one point to another could lessen the feeling of linearity that comes from repeatedly going through the game's procedurally-generated levels. It would be interesting to use this as a means of injecting different levels of traversal-related challenge as well (so faster paths could be made more dangerous to traverse, or could rely on more complex parkour). From what I understand, this may be technically impossible, at least not without redoing the game's level-building algorithm or even reworking all of its tiles, but in the long term I still think that should be the way to go.
• Secondary objectives down side paths: as mentioned in the OP, secondary objectives could help spice up exploration, while also making individual missions feel deeper and more layered than just "this is the place where this one objective happens".
• Environmental modifiers activated in side paths: this is probably light years ahead of what Warframe is capable of doing now, but it'd help both exploration and immersion if side paths led to rooms that could have an actual impact on the rest of the level, and the main mission. Disabling the power in a Corpus ship to turn off the electronic security of its Spy vaults, flooding a Grineer Sealab to drown its ground soldiers, or visiting some kind of Infested node to force-spawn a weakened Juggernaut could all be interesting and valid reasons to explore a tileset beyond just its main path, and adding these elements could make levels feel much less rigid and more alive.
• Inject repeatable challenge to exploration: the disadvantage to "hidden" rooms in levels procedurally made from static tiles is that once they're discovered, they're no longer hidden, and are thus challenging only once. The fact that these side paths generally just require the player to bullet-jump in a slightly different direction, rather than do anything interesting, is also what makes exploration generally not fun. Notable exceptions, however, are most of the Halls of Ascension on Lua, whose challenges offer a degree of repeatable gameplay in order to access nice rewards (or at the very least bragging rights and a feeling of reward). If side paths had genuinely interesting gameplay to them, e.g. more challenging encounters, parkour obstacles, and the like, they would at the very least feel more engaging to go through, which would justify having exploration in the first place. 

In an ideal world, I think it would help if much of our resource gains were shifted from the main path to side rooms, i.e. with nerfs to the resources/rewards gained from combat and main rooms, and buffs to the same in side rooms, but currently that would likely just make the game significantly more tedious, and so for no real reason, as exploration is currently not fun. As such, the priority should be to a) make exploration fun to do in the first place, and b) give players a genuine reason to explore. With both, perhaps missions in Warframe will also feel less linear, and the levels themselves even more than just the sum of their parts (or tiles, in this case).

Edited April 3, 2019 by Teridax68

[BlackRoseAngel]

The first thing that can be done to make exploration more rewarding in Warframe is to stop letting rushers have control of the mission.

For that to happen, hosting and kicking is needed.

Can we also make a hot/cold mechanic for caches instead of hiding them? No one can hear the noise they make unless you're right on top of them.

Edited April 3, 2019 by BlackRoseAngel

[NezuHimeSama]

2 hours ago, MJ12 said:

This is how sabotage caches work and I think I've already made it amply clear what I think about it.

The core problem is attention. Player attention is an extremely limited resource that depletes easily and takes time to recover, which is why good games pace themselves with high-attention events (fights, scouring an area for things) and low-attention events (walking around, driving, flying). Warframe's exploration, which requires attentive scouring of a map for signs of hidden items via hearing, is relatively high-attention, which means that it should be paced out rather than forcing you to pay attention for the entire map. Worse, because rooms aren't labeled as 'explored' once you've gone into them and gotten everything of value, you need to maintain a mental map in your head of where you have searched and where you haven't (and that map will necessarily be imperfect unless you've memorized the tiles) losing that attention can effectively reset your progress.

Requiring players to pay attention all the time is not always a good thing especially when minor lapses of attention can reset progress.

Arbitrations and high-level excavations give a very sizable amount of endo and you can easily get something like 2k Endo a day on average from just doing the sortie on a daily basis. 

Which is exactly why dropping a bit more endo or ayatan stars from out-of-the-way places isn't going to significantly impact the endo eco.

[Rawbeard]

On 2019-03-25 at 10:02 PM, MJ12 said:

search the entire Orb Vallis for hidden messages

no... that is only true if you despise the community aspect of this game.

[Steel_Rook]

3 hours ago, MJ12 said:

This is how sabotage caches work and I think I've already made it amply clear what I think about it.

Eh, fair enough. I think we'll just have to disagree on that part. Can't fault you for how you feel.

 

3 hours ago, MJ12 said:

Worse, because rooms aren't labeled as 'explored' once you've gone into them and gotten everything of value, you need to maintain a mental map in your head of where you have searched and where you haven't (and that map will necessarily be imperfect unless you've memorized the tiles) losing that attention can effectively reset your progress. 

That is a very good point and something worth addressing. The Resident Evil 2 remake had a good solution to this, highlighting rooms in red if they had items in them and blue once all items had been picked up. I can see a system like that in Warframe. Perhaps Loot Detection could mark rooms (tiles, rather) in some fashion (outline, crosshatch, colour) if they had "valuable" items in them. Quite what counts as "valuable" is obviously up for debate, but I'd say Caches, Sculptures, rare resource nodes, maybe Syndicate tokens. I probably wouldn't tell the player exactly WHAT valuable item is there, but rather let them find it themselves. Once once all "valuable" items have been picked up, the room would become un-marked so you know they're clear.

Would that be a decent compromise, do you think?

[MJ12]

3 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

That is a very good point and something worth addressing. The Resident Evil 2 remake had a good solution to this, highlighting rooms in red if they had items in them and blue once all items had been picked up. I can see a system like that in Warframe. Perhaps Loot Detection could mark rooms (tiles, rather) in some fashion (outline, crosshatch, colour) if they had "valuable" items in them. Quite what counts as "valuable" is obviously up for debate, but I'd say Caches, Sculptures, rare resource nodes, maybe Syndicate tokens. I probably wouldn't tell the player exactly WHAT valuable item is there, but rather let them find it themselves. Once once all "valuable" items have been picked up, the room would become un-marked so you know they're clear.

Would that be a decent compromise, do you think?

That would be a lot better because it means that you can have attention lapses without losing progress.

You'd still need to scour the level, but at least the initial scouring could be low-attention, with brief high-attention segments of searching individual rooms. That would work.

[Agamemnicon]

Good lord the bellyaching.  This molehill is not a mountain.

With just Animal Instinct, a mod that doesn't take up space on a warframe, I can easily find every single medallion in Syndicate missions in say.. 15 minutes or less. Usually more like 6-12 minutes. Oh, and my Animal Instinct is only level 3 (cuz I haven't forma'd any sentinels yet).

With only that Animal Instinct, choosing the lowest level sabotage (Ishtar, Venus) I found all three sabotage caches by myself several times.  In a group that knew the good spots, IT LITERALLY TOOK THE SAME AMOUNT OF TIME AS THE REGULAR SABOTAGE MISSION.

If you want to complain about things Nightwave pushes us into.....

Spoiler

 

...what about $&#@ fishing and mining in a space ninja game?  You know, activities which

1. are extremely slow
2. are isolated to 1 of 2 places on the starchart
3. have nothing to do with shooting, slashing, killing, and parkour'ing.
4. are gated behind standing, which is gated behind a daily standing limit
5. put you on a bloody hamster wheel, ie "catch this fish to make this bait to catch this fish to raise your standing to make this bait to make this thing you might eventually want after this godawful process"

 

I am completely fine with exploration in WF right now. I like medallion and cache hunting.. blasting all the pips on my radar with my ignis and see what's left over. See some blips above me and discover *oh wow* there's a secret room if you jump up the elevator shaft. Hunting medallions in a pub game and helping players without loot detection.  That "hell yeah" moment when you see an ayatan sculpture.  The absolute tons of ayatan stars that come along with breaking all the containers.

Things I'd like to see:

1. Medallions should be worth more syndicate standing. Or at least dramatically increase the spawn chance for the more valuable versions. They're fun to find, and they help somewhat, but honestly they're not worth the time in the big picture.
2. As Steel Rook mentioned, the minimap will be marked somehow if a player has passes through but leaves something important behind
3. Differentiate minimap icons for dropped items vs containers (and sculptures, medallions, and caches). In other words, a container still shows the same loot icon, but when the container is broken, and say.. rubedo is now on the floor, the rubedo stops showing up as the same loot icon.  This way players who break containers in a room can show other players it's already been searched. 
4. They may already do this, but DE should continually, periodically, release new rooms for their tilesets that are designed to hide items. Helps keep the item hunting fresh:)

[Thanzilla]

https://forums.warframe.com/topic/1053291-make-me-want-to-break-your-pots-and-open-your-containers/

 

Sorry for copy pasting this but in there are my thoughts on the matter. I really like exploring and even though it was encouraged during the star chart playthrough when I was a new player, there is really no reason to when you are done with that. (Which is done very quickly imo)

I think that another problem is that DE is trying to force players into exploration play when they obviously don't like it like the OP of this thread. Exploration should be a valid alternative to rushing missions not a forced hoop you have to jump through on nightwave missions.

[Steel_Rook]

11 hours ago, MJ12 said:

That would be a lot better because it means that you can have attention lapses without losing progress.

You'd still need to scour the level, but at least the initial scouring could be low-attention, with brief high-attention segments of searching individual rooms. That would work.

Actually, you know what else would help? Marking "doors" on the map. Let me back up a little bit... We know by this point that Warframe's instance maps (the indoor ones, anyway) are put together by arranging a series of tiles from the current tileset, similar to how we build our Dojos. Each tile has a number of "doors" or "exits" where it can attach to other tiles, and not all of these doors are active every time. On some tilesets, these doors - the links between tiles - are fairly obvious. The Orokin Tileset consists of predominantly rectangular rooms with doors either in the corners or in the middle of the sides. In a lot of tilesets, however, the doors are a lot harder to find. Tilesets like Infested Corpus, Orokin Derelict and Kuva Fortress, the chaotic multi-storey design can make some doors hard to find and definitely hard to spot on the map.

What I'm getting at is it's often hard to tell from looking at the "big map" whether I've explored all exits from a room, or whether there are doors I haven't been to. The room's image on the map often doesn't make it clear where all the doors are, whether I've visited them and whether some of them have turned out to be inoperable. Well, remember how Silent Hill marked its map? Open doors marked with a line, blocked doors marked with a crossed-out squiggle. I'd like to see that in Warframe, as well. Even without loot detection, mark all intra-tile links (the doors) with a green line if they can open and a red zig-zag (think Word spelling error warning) if they're inoperable with no tile linked to them.

This way, I can look at the big map and tell at a glance which doors open and which doors I've been explored past. This would cut down on a lot of backtracking and a lot of re-checking locked doors. It would also save me from having to keep track of which doors open and which don't in my head, preventing exactly the kind of added stress you're talking about.

 

4 hours ago, Agamemnicon said:

With just Animal Instinct, a mod that doesn't take up space on a warframe, I can easily find every single medallion in Syndicate missions in say.. 15 minutes or less. Usually more like 6-12 minutes. Oh, and my Animal Instinct is only level 3 (cuz I haven't forma'd any sentinels yet).

While I agree in spirit, Loot Detection still has shorcomings. We've discussed them in the thread already so I don't want to go over them, but one I didn't mention is vertical range. In my experience, loot detection works in a cylinder around the player. You might be able to spot loot 40+ meters away, but it won't show up if it's as little as 10 meters above you. I just came out of a Hive Sabotage mission where I had to backtrack through the entire map looking for a cache I'd missed. Turns out it's in a room that I'd NEVER explored thus far, because it's accessible through a vent near the ceiling of an otherwise cramped, infested hallway. The Cache itself wasn't shwoing up on Loot Detection because the room was set so high above the floor of the surrounding area. Only spotted it by accident because I took to bullet-jumping straight up looking for loot above. That mission took me 24 minutes (still have the post-mission results), but it would have taken me closer to 15 had that Cache showed up on loot detection from the ground.

On the Plains of Eidolon and Orb Vallis, loot detection seems to have infinite height. I'm able to easily track, for instance, Cetus Wisps while flying 100 meters above them in my Archwing. I'd like to see the same infinite detection height in standard missions, as well. The game already has a pretty clear notation for loot above and below the player, it makes no sense to cull loot this way. It undermines the whole point of having loot detection and offers no way to improve it. Longer lateral detection radius doesn't seem to improve vertical detection height.

[Celthric317]

In most games you are rewarded for going the opposite direction of the objective, in this game you are not.