Planned Melee Combo Bindings are a Mistake - Please Tweak Them

[MirageKnight]

On 2019-05-26 at 7:26 AM, TaylorsContraction said:

...spin win is not going to be the way of melee anymore. 

No longer is spin attacking and stacking melee multiplier going to generate red slash crits and beyond,  wiping an entire title set with 0 effort.

I really hope that's going to happen. Seeing a Volt spamming Speed while getting their Maiming Atterrax on is one of the more obnoxious things to have to put up with in pub games for me.

[Steel_Rook]

2 hours ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

And I would agree with this as we mentioned previously. However, I don't want to be stuck with 1 combo when there are 2 available. If DE wants to cut their workload down significantly and do one EEE combo per stance and scrap W+E entirely, I'm happy.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not entirely happy with this approach to triggering combos, either. I've brought this up in the past, but I have absolute nightmares about the 2000 game Rune, where I'd run forward briefly to trigger the "Forward" combo, then transition to moving sideways or even backwards while mashing the attack button. If movement were built into the combo, then it would make sense to tie its activation to the movement direction corresponding to that, but that's not going to work very well if we're going to be given freely-controlled movement. In that case, your concern of having to press arbitrary directions applies.

Unfortunately, there really aren't very many good ways to trigger different combos with just a single melee button, and DE are already running into that. I'm personally seriously considering just cutting combos down to a single one per weapon type or per stance. I bring up Space Marine often, but combat in that game all too often came down to just spamming attack. You had a few AoE stun combos, but those didn't really do a lot when you could just spam melee and kill people, instead. So maybe just cut it down to one or two combos tied solely to the Melee key would be fine. Maybe a tap-tap-tap and a hold-hold-hold combo would be fine, as long as the holds aren't very long (~0.25s would be fine).

Basically, if we can avoid complex button combinations, I'd be fine with cutting down on the number of combos we have available at any given time. Because frankly, I rarely use more than one per weapon, and I often can't even tell it apart from the others visually. I used the Vermillion Storm a while ago, and I'll be damned if I can tell which combo is running just by looking at it. The only one I can identify for sure is the one that dashes me off of ledges on accident... So I say keep them down to 1 or 2 combos per Stance and save the multi-button inputs.

 

3 hours ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

I disagree with this summation. The only reason ADS switches to guns is that players may need to aim before firing. However, by simply always applying the zoom it can function as a fully transitional state (with a use for both sides of the equation).  In fact, having the switching can actually cause problems. For example, if you unequip a secondary (e.g., to level a primary faster) then attempting to aim-glide will force you to drop any datamass or powercell you are carrying. Players also can't glide + block, which is why the auto-block currently triggers glide and causes control issues. 

Yeah, I didn't comment on that proposition as I'm trying to keep my response size down, but that's not a terrible idea. I could compromise that way, if it comes to that. I don't necessarily need my gun visually equipped as long as I can aim before firing it, and standardising zoom between guns and melee would do that. I kind of think we're addressing the wrong issue here, though.

As I said in another thread, the melee system as it stands now is badly incomplete and not something that should have been pushed Live in the state it was in. Amglide and blocking are, for the most part, casualties of its unfinished nature. There's a WHOLE lot of back-end infrastructure still designed around explicit melee equipping and switching that the new system is trying to kludge its way around, which is why you'll occasionally swap to the wrong weapon and lose your carry item, or else swap into a broken state entirely. Block forcing a glide is the same thing: Block is hard-coded to Aimglide the same way scope zooms are, so autoblock triggers a glide by association rather than design. A lot of this can be fixed by actually finishing the melee system, fully uncoupling Glide and Latch from Aim and probably swapping to back-end implementation which keeps both melee AND gun equipped at the same time without needing to swap states.

In short, I'm not opposed to using Aim the way you've described, I just feel it can be avoided entirely if the melee system actually worked properly. I suspect they're working on a proper, entirely new implementation for melee attacks which isn't going to try and hammer a square peg into a round hole, so to speak. At least I hope they will, because the current implementation is a house on the sand. At this point, I'm convinced that releasing partial melee system changes early was a mistake, because it's permanently tainted people's impressions based on temporary kludge.

[Teridax68]

19 hours ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

Not sure I understand what you mean by the "second bullet jump." Do you mean simply swapping out the midair hop with a second bullet jump spin? I'm not really seeing where the controversy would be coming out of that.

Indeed, it would be swapping out the double-jump for the bullet jump in view of removing crouching, and in so doing making the bullet jump more vertically-oriented, rather than a means of boosting forward. I feel there'd be controversy because this would be changing some pretty core movement abilities, which many would instinctively oppose simply because the current system is doing so well, even if the net result would potentially be an improvement.

19 hours ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

One thing I have to appreciate about the new Jupiter tiles is how many little "snags" DE has edited out to make moving around smoother. No more getting stuck on little lips above doorframes, huzzah! It would definitely be pretty neat to be able to build Ventkids standing by boarding through standard missions, and with newer more spacious tiles it would certainly be a viable method of getting from point A to point B.

However, I still can't get behind fully replacing sprint with something like this. Something just feels wrong about humanoid supersuits not having the potential to run fast. DE can't accelerate default movespeed too much, or else players will lose out on fine control (we see complaints about this already with Volt and Speed in team environments). How would the new Mach speed Warframe fit into this new sprint-less environment? Wouldn't K-Drives be a bit overkill for something like a Galleon or Cruiser? I think it would also drive me a little crazy to constantly leave my K-drive sitting around random tiles after dismounting.

Not that any of this would be entirely unsolvable; I just can't quite get comfortable with the concept.

This is a fair point, and I agree that K-Drives wouldn't work well in most current tilesets. However, looking at how the Gas City tileset was redone, I think that may set the direction of Warframe's future level design: among its many improvements, the new Gas City tiles are significantly bigger, to the point where a Tenno could be able to maneuver around many of its tiles on a K-Drive without much issue. Considering how Railjack is going to rework spaceships across factions, their internal areas may have a similarly enlarged scale, which would benefit Parkour 2.0 in addition to K-Driving.

As for removing Sprint:

• For the Mach warframe, I think the solution could just be to have its own special sprint override K-Drives, if the ability is a passive.
• In the case of Volt in particular, I think his issue mainly comes from Speed implementing a degree of drifting and turn lag, instead of allowing warframes to continue turning on a dime. Letting players turn proportionately quicker would likely help many of his problems, as would larger tilesets.
• "Fast" I feel is a fairly relative term: our warframes currently run fast in the sense that their base run is superhumanly quick by real-life standards, but in-game it feels sluggish mainly because there are better movement options out there. If the issue is that warframes feel like they should run faster, then their base movement speed should be increased. If we simply need warframes capable of running super-fast, that's a niche that this point is going to be filled out by two separate frames.

14 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

The problem with typing blocking to ADS is that it goes counter to the Melee 3.0 design goal of removing the separation between "melee mode" and "gun mode." We no longer have buttons which switch their function depending on whether you have a melee weapon equipped or not (not by default, anyway), and ADS is a "gun key." If I take a swing at a barrel, turn around and want to aim my gun at an enemy, I can currently just hold Right Click and my gun snaps to my hands. Were Right Click bound to block with a melee weapon equipped, I'd need to manually swap to my gun before being able to aim, requiring either the weapon swap key which takes me through the weapon swap animation or else firing my gun which wastes a shot and takes time. This conflict is one of the central reasons I dislike manual blocking - either it blocks my aim key, or it requires yet another keybind.

I didn't say ADS and blocking should be separate, though: what I'm suggesting is that while the player is aiming down sights, regardless of whether they just attacked with a gun or melee weapon, they should also ready their block, which shouldn't interfere with their aiming. ADS and block would therefore be one and the same, and there would be no distinction between "melee mode" and "gun mode", thereby staying true to the intent of the rework.

14 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I also have to disagree with blocking carrying no gameplay. Melee is currently in a transitional state where "mode" isn't supposed to matter yet it still does. To block with my melee weapon, I have to have drawn my melee weapon. With no way to manually switch to my melee weapon any more, I'm forced to take a swing, which can be pretty slow with some weapons. Changing melee autoblock to also work with a gun equipped but only if the player isn't taking an offensive or acrobatic action would solve this issue. As blocking only works against enemies you're facing, that right there is a not-insubstantial amount of gameplay. And just because we keep calling it "autoblock" doesn't mean there's no player input. Most actions players can take will break the autoblock, meaning that players have to consciously NOT act in order to benefit from it, which does allow for some more specific gameplay mechanics attached to it.

What you're describing isn't so much gameplay as it is a stated inconvenience: just because the player needs to melee attack before they can block (which isn't great) does not really counter the fact that autoblock in and of itself is just clunkier frontal damage reduction, which does not require much of the player's input if they're still in melee. By contrast, the manual block I'm suggesting would allow the player to block immediately regardless of equipped weapon, and would allow blocking to be much more reactive, while also enabling more active or even more time-sensitive blocking gameplay.

14 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

You can, for instance, easily have damage reflect via mod, ability, specific melee weapon or just in general with autoblock. Players would need to consciously elect to not shoot in order to take advantage of it, reflected damage would follow the player's targeting reticle and - in case we're using Genji reflect - enemy projectile behaviour would also have to be considered. Reflecting Corpus blaster shots, for instance, would still require leading target as those have travel time. Additionally, you could still have parry mechanics of a sort by simply triggering them whenever the player blocks a telegraphed wind-up attack from a boss. No, it wouldn't require precisely timed button inputs, but it would still require the player to not swing or shoot and not be bullet-jumping at the time, which IS an active consideration.

But I mentioned these effects, and the fact that autoblock does them a disservice: many players have lamented the current state of block mods like Guardian Derision, because losing control over their ability to actively block means those mods are no longer reliable. Mechanics like damage reflection and mod-related gameplay would work far better with a manual block.

14 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Again, I have to direct people to Bungie's Oni. Despite having autoblock, that game still gets a LOT of mileage out of its blocking mechanic, simply because so many of the things you do will override your ability to block. And while I'm going down memory lane, I'd also direct people to Space Marine, which does the whole "separate melee and fire buttons" thing quite well.

But Warframe isn't Oni, nor is it Space Marine: for sure, switching to guns will prevent the player from blocking, but blocking while in melee is entirely passive. Two wrongs don't make a right, and in this respect I think it would make for better gameplay overall if blocking were not only manual, but also instantly accessible from guns, rather than activated only by mode switching (which, as you pointed out, itself runs counter to the stated purposes of the melee rework).

14 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Warframe as it stands right now actually has a very solid moveset. You have move, jump, double jump, super jump, glide, wall-run, ground slam. What we're missing is some kind of super sprint and some kind of ground dash / air dash for the complete platformer package.

I can agree that Warframe has a solid moveset; that is the premise I'm operating from. My point was simply that some of these moves are redundant, or make other moves redundant when they shouldn't, e.g. bullet jumping relative to regular movement. K-Drives I think could cover the "super sprint" option, and I'm not quite sure what a ground dash or air dash would imply for you if it's not covered by any existing move.

[Steel_Rook]

8 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

This is a fair point, and I agree that K-Drives wouldn't work well in most current tilesets. However, looking at how the Gas City tileset was redone, I think that may set the direction of Warframe's future level design: among its many improvements, the new Gas City tiles are significantly bigger, to the point where a Tenno could be able to maneuver around many of its tiles on a K-Drive without much issue. Considering how Railjack is going to rework spaceships across factions, their internal areas may have a similarly enlarged scale, which would benefit Parkour 2.0 in addition to K-Driving.

Implementation notwithstanding, I definitely agree that the Jupiter Remastered tileset hallways are more than large enough to ride a K-Drive through comfortably. However we end up summoning them, I remain of the opinion that we SHOULD be able to ride our K-Drives on all Tilesets, rather than just in Orb Vallis and the Plains of Eidolon. And if people end up summoning them in close quarters - well, that's on them and not the system. Even on a lot of older tiles, I'd argue that there are many places where a K-Drive can drive just fine for 50-100 meters.

 

8 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

What you're describing isn't so much gameplay as it is a stated inconvenience: just because the player needs to melee attack before they can block (which isn't great) does not really counter the fact that autoblock in and of itself is just clunkier frontal damage reduction, which does not require much of the player's input if they're still in melee. By contrast, the manual block I'm suggesting would allow the player to block immediately regardless of equipped weapon, and would allow blocking to be much more reactive, while also enabling more active or even more time-sensitive blocking gameplay.

What I was proposing was autoblock in "all modes," including with a gun equipped. And just because it's triggered automatically doesn't mean that autoblocking is passive. By suppressing it when performing any offensive or parkour action, autoblock becomes effectively manually triggered - it's just the trigger is "don't do these specific actions." Given Warframe's design and the way it's commonly played, NOT shooting, aiming, swinging or bullet-jumping is a deliberate choice that players have to make. If you don't like my other game comparisons, then consider Baruuk Evade. That ability is "autoblock" in everything but name. You run it passively and it negates damage as long as you're looking at enemies and not attacking. I personally find that mechanic to still be pretty active despite its passive implementation because it means I need to show restraint and NOT do the things I'm naturally doing all of the time otherwise. I need to sit still and NOT attack in order to get benefit from it.

I suspect "costless, always on Evade" is DE's vision for Blocking moving forward. It doesn't work like that because the current melee system is a house of cards of legacy mechanics upon legacy mechanics, but that seems to be the intent, at any rate. And having used it for a while now, that's my personal preference over active blocking and timed blocks. I don't see us agreeing on the matter, though, so moving on...

 

8 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

I can agree that Warframe has a solid moveset; that is the premise I'm operating from. My point was simply that some of these moves are redundant, or make other moves redundant when they shouldn't, e.g. bullet jumping relative to regular movement. K-Drives I think could cover the "super sprint" option, and I'm not quite sure what a ground dash or air dash would imply for you if it's not covered by any existing move.

Literally just a fast, linear move not affected by gravity until it's done. Think the dodge move from The Surge or the dash move from your average MegaMan X game. Or, if you want a specific in-universe example - think Operator Void Dash. Being able to a single slightly slower "void dash like" move in my Warframe on either some kind of cooldown or every time my double jump resets would cover my desire for a dash move. The reason I'm proposing that, by the way, is predominantly so we can get some kind of burst of lateral movement while air borne. Currently, if you lose your air speed or don't get any before becoming airborne, there's very little you can do to counter that. Double Jumps have very little lateral movement and "air slides" don't really do much, either.

And to be clear, I do agree with you - we have a lot of unnecessary, redundant mobility options which bloat our keybinds without offering much in the way of added utility. My comment was just also a bit off-the-cuff, hence why it's so broad and vague. I don't have a precise design proposal behind it, as I threw it out more as an aside.

[Teridax68]

44 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

What I was proposing was autoblock in "all modes," including with a gun equipped. And just because it's triggered automatically doesn't mean that autoblocking is passive. By suppressing it when performing any offensive or parkour action, autoblock becomes effectively manually triggered - it's just the trigger is "don't do these specific actions." Given Warframe's design and the way it's commonly played, NOT shooting, aiming, swinging or bullet-jumping is a deliberate choice that players have to make. If you don't like my other game comparisons, then consider Baruuk Evade. That ability is "autoblock" in everything but name. You run it passively and it negates damage as long as you're looking at enemies and not attacking. I personally find that mechanic to still be pretty active despite its passive implementation because it means I need to show restraint and NOT do the things I'm naturally doing all of the time otherwise. I need to sit still and NOT attack in order to get benefit from it.

I don't think Baruuk is a particularly good comparison, because Baruuk's Evade forces the player to choose between one of two combat-related benefits -- attacking, or evading. Meanwhile, for sure some parkour moves will momentarily disable blocking, but currently the player only needs to do what they do all the time for autoblock to kick in, i.e. move towards enemies with their melee weapon out. I agree that an automatically triggered block isn't inherently passive, but autoblock in its current state is passive precisely because it doesn't trigger in a manner that specifically requires the player to intend to block while in melee combat: if the player had to turn to an angle or show their back for some block to kick in, hypothetically speaking, that would have some gameplay because the player would have to specifically move to a blocking position (even if the result would obviously be super weird), but as it stands the player just needs to face the enemy and not even really mind their attacks.

I think that even if one were to conceded that autoblock had some amount of gameplay, i.e. by requiring the player to not parkour in combat (and why would one want that anyway?), I still also think there's a comparison to be made with manual block, whose active mode of blocking under the player's control is far more capable of interesting gameplay than autoblock: again, the fact that mods like Guardian Derision could once work, but no longer under the new model, I think is evidence of this, and in general I feel there's something to be said about trying to integrate current channeling into manual blocking by having the player block at just the right time to perform a perfect block over a duration and even reflect shots back, Jedi-style.

44 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

I suspect "costless, always on Evade" is DE's vision for Blocking moving forward. It doesn't work like that because the current melee system is a house of cards of legacy mechanics upon legacy mechanics, but that seems to be the intent, at any rate. And having used it for a while now, that's my personal preference over active blocking and timed blocks. I don't see us agreeing on the matter, though, so moving on...

From what I'm seeing, autoblock looks more like an experiment than anything else, an attempt at preserving blocking in some shape or form in an environment where melee is losing its own dedicated mode. As it stands, regardless of DE's intent, autoblock is notoriously unpopular, and a major reason why many players are currently not happy with Melee 2.9, so if that really is the direction moving forward, there needs to be a change in tack.

44 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

Literally just a fast, linear move not affected by gravity until it's done. Think the dodge move from The Surge or the dash move from your average MegaMan X game. Or, if you want a specific in-universe example - think Operator Void Dash. Being able to a single slightly slower "void dash like" move in my Warframe on either some kind of cooldown or every time my double jump resets would cover my desire for a dash move. The reason I'm proposing that, by the way, is predominantly so we can get some kind of burst of lateral movement while air borne. Currently, if you lose your air speed or don't get any before becoming airborne, there's very little you can do to counter that. Double Jumps have very little lateral movement and "air slides" don't really do much, either.

Personally, I think a relatively simple solution to that could be to alter Transference so that the player doesn't trigger a hard fall if their warframe falls into a pit while they're in Operator mode: with the new tileset, for example, there are times where I switch to Operator mode to cover some extra distance or perform a hard lateral dash while over a pit, but doing so is unreliable, because if my warframe hits the pit's boundary, my Operator gets warped to a prior position along with my frame. Continuing to have frames hard fall if they fall into a pit is fine, but I see no reason why that should affect the Operator as well, and removing that limitation would allow for exactly the move you described without even needing to add new animations, remap button inputs, etc.

[Dark_Horse89]

On 2019-05-24 at 10:37 PM, DiabolusUrsus said:

First and foremost, I am NOT saying that the planned combos themselves are bad. Having simple utilitarian functions like an area focus and gap closers will be fantastic to have.

I am specifically talking about the bindings:

• Stationary E = standard combo.
• W + E = crowd-clear combo.
• Aim + Stationary E = AOE combo.
• Aim + W + E = gap closer combo.

I'm editing the post to resolve some common misconceptions/confusions. Original post provided in the spoiler for record keeping.

  Reveal hidden contents

There are 2 main problems with these:

1. If you somehow hadn't noticed by now, Warframe is a very mobile game. There is rarely, if ever, good reason to make a sitting duck of yourself by not moving around while attacking. Incremental movement is not enough, and TTK is far too short for "standard" vs. "crowd clear" to be a useful distinction. The result of this will be that most players simply won't use the standard stationary combo much (if at all).

2. Aim-based melee bindings need refinement now that instant switching between guns/melee is in the game. The dilemma is fairly simple: players need to be able to aim if they want to before firing to switch back to a gun. That makes the melee "block" binding potentially obstructive to shooting. Yet relying on an input that switches to guns for MELEE input is just plain awkward.

However, there are straightforward solutions!

1. Change the W + E combo to Sprint + E.

CLARIFICATION: Sprint binding only. Players do not actually need to be sprinting to use the combo. So for the default keyboard binds, it would be Shift + E.

To accommodate console players and toggle-sprint users, make combo modifiers (the combo inputs added to the "melee" binding) fully rebindable.

2. Re-implement manual blocking bound to "Aim," and apply ADS zoom while blocking and simply handle the switch when the player fires. This will support deeper melee interactions in the future, restore things like melee aim-glide without requiring players to unequip all their guns, and support aiming before firing.

For snipers and other scoped weapons, just apply standard zoom without the scope overlay. This would be reasonable because:

a. Standard zoom is adequate for precise zoom in most tiles/situations, and

b. At the ranges where scopes make a noticeable difference players have plenty of time to switch manually.

Please consider polishing your combo bindings a bit more, and at the very least supporting better player control customization for the new combo types. I firmly believe that the current inputs will work poorly.

I don't like the proposed melee bindings for the 2 main melee combos (EEE and W+E), because I rarely stop moving forward while attacking. This means that I will rarely (if ever) use the main EEE combo instead of W+E, which I find to be an awkward way of differentiating the two. I am also unhappy with the existing Aim+E combos, because the auto-switching between melee and guns while aiming occasionally gets in the way.

• First and foremost, please allow players to rebind combo inputs now that the inputs are universal across all weapons/stances. This prevents anyone from getting stuck with an input they hate and can't stand to use.
• Second, I believe that changing W+E to Shift

  On 2019-05-24 at 10:37 PM, DiabolusUrsus said:

  First and foremost, I am NOT saying that the planned combos themselves are bad. Having simple utilitarian functions like an area focus and gap closers will be fantastic to have.

  I am specifically talking about the bindings:

  • Stationary E = standard combo.
  • W + E = crowd-clear combo.
  • Aim + Stationary E = AOE combo.
  • Aim + W + E = gap closer combo.

  I'm editing the post to resolve some common misconceptions/confusions. Original post provided in the spoiler for record keeping.

    Reveal hidden contents

  There are 2 main problems with these:

  1. If you somehow hadn't noticed by now, Warframe is a very mobile game. There is rarely, if ever, good reason to make a sitting duck of yourself by not moving around while attacking. Incremental movement is not enough, and TTK is far too short for "standard" vs. "crowd clear" to be a useful distinction. The result of this will be that most players simply won't use the standard stationary combo much (if at all).

  2. Aim-based melee bindings need refinement now that instant switching between guns/melee is in the game. The dilemma is fairly simple: players need to be able to aim if they want to before firing to switch back to a gun. That makes the melee "block" binding potentially obstructive to shooting. Yet relying on an input that switches to guns for MELEE input is just plain awkward.

  However, there are straightforward solutions!

  1. Change the W + E combo to Sprint + E.

  CLARIFICATION: Sprint binding only. Players do not actually need to be sprinting to use the combo. So for the default keyboard binds, it would be Shift + E.

  To accommodate console players and toggle-sprint users, make combo modifiers (the combo inputs added to the "melee" binding) fully rebindable.

  2. Re-implement manual blocking bound to "Aim," and apply ADS zoom while blocking and simply handle the switch when the player fires. This will support deeper melee interactions in the future, restore things like melee aim-glide without requiring players to unequip all their guns, and support aiming before firing.

  For snipers and other scoped weapons, just apply standard zoom without the scope overlay. This would be reasonable because:

  a. Standard zoom is adequate for precise zoom in most tiles/situations, and

  b. At the ranges where scopes make a noticeable difference players have plenty of time to switch manually.

  Please consider polishing your combo bindings a bit more, and at the very least supporting better player control customization for the new combo types. I firmly believe that the current inputs will work poorly.

  I don't like the proposed melee bindings for the 2 main melee combos (EEE and W+E), because I rarely stop moving forward while attacking. This means that I will rarely (if ever) use the main EEE combo instead of W+E, which I find to be an awkward way of differentiating the two. I am also unhappy with the existing Aim+E combos, because the auto-switching between melee and guns while aiming occasionally gets in the way.

  • First and foremost, please allow players to rebind combo inputs now that the inputs are universal across all weapons/stances. This prevents anyone from getting stuck with an input they hate and can't stand to use.
  • Second, I believe that changing W+E to Shift+E (the sprint binding) would be a better setup. It allows players to execute either the standard combo or "crowd-clear" combo whether they are standing still or moving forward.
    • For players who use toggle sprint or controllers, the combo can be triggered based on whether sprint is toggled on/off.
    • Players who don't like either of the options can rebind it based on their preferences under the first point.
  • Lastly, I want for "Aim" to be restored as "block" while a melee weapon is equipped.
    • Add ADS zoom to "Block" without switching back to guns. This allows players to aim precisely and switch back to guns by firing.
    • While melee is equipped, pressing F should switch back to the most recently-equipped gun first. This allows players to switch WITHOUT firing if needed.
    • For scoped weapons, apply standard ADS zoom without the scope overlay while melee is equipped. Scope zoom isn't needed in most situations, and at the ranges where scopes make a difference the player has plenty of time to switch back with F.
    • This would also support some expansion and refinement to blocking:
      • Reflection of enemy projectiles aimed at the crosshair while blocking.
      • Implementation of timed parries to make boss enemies vulnerable to melee (not required, just as an optional method of fighting them).

  Basically, the official bindings will make it annoying to use the default combo and I'll probably only end up using the crowd-clear combo unless something changes.

  +E (the sprint binding) would be a better setup. It allows players to execute either the standard combo or "crowd-clear" combo whether they are standing still or moving forward.
  • For players who use toggle sprint or controllers, the combo can be triggered based on whether sprint is toggled on/off.
  • Players who don't like either of the options can rebind it based on their preferences under the first point.
• Lastly, I want for "Aim" to be restored as "block" while a melee weapon is equipped.
  • Add ADS zoom to "Block" without switching back to guns. This allows players to aim precisely and switch back to guns by firing.
  • While melee is equipped, pressing F should switch back to the most recently-equipped gun first. This allows players to switch WITHOUT firing if needed.
  • For scoped weapons, apply standard ADS zoom without the scope overlay while melee is equipped. Scope zoom isn't needed in most situations, and at the ranges where scopes make a difference the player has plenty of time to switch back with F.
  • This would also support some expansion and refinement to blocking:
    • Reflection of enemy projectiles aimed at the crosshair while blocking.
    • Implementation of timed parries to make boss enemies vulnerable to melee (not required, just as an optional method of fighting them).

Basically, the official bindings will make it annoying to use the default combo and I'll probably only end up using the crowd-clear combo unless something changes.

 

[Dark_Horse89]

On 2019-05-24 at 10:37 PM, DiabolusUrsus said:

First and foremost, I am NOT saying that the planned combos themselves are bad. Having simple utilitarian functions like an area focus and gap closers will be fantastic to have.

I am specifically talking about the bindings:

• Stationary E = standard combo.
• W + E = crowd-clear combo.
• Aim + Stationary E = AOE combo.
• Aim + W + E = gap closer combo.

I'm editing the post to resolve some common misconceptions/confusions. Original post provided in the spoiler for record keeping.

  Reveal hidden contents

There are 2 main problems with these:

1. If you somehow hadn't noticed by now, Warframe is a very mobile game. There is rarely, if ever, good reason to make a sitting duck of yourself by not moving around while attacking. Incremental movement is not enough, and TTK is far too short for "standard" vs. "crowd clear" to be a useful distinction. The result of this will be that most players simply won't use the standard stationary combo much (if at all).

2. Aim-based melee bindings need refinement now that instant switching between guns/melee is in the game. The dilemma is fairly simple: players need to be able to aim if they want to before firing to switch back to a gun. That makes the melee "block" binding potentially obstructive to shooting. Yet relying on an input that switches to guns for MELEE input is just plain awkward.

However, there are straightforward solutions!

1. Change the W + E combo to Sprint + E.

CLARIFICATION: Sprint binding only. Players do not actually need to be sprinting to use the combo. So for the default keyboard binds, it would be Shift + E.

To accommodate console players and toggle-sprint users, make combo modifiers (the combo inputs added to the "melee" binding) fully rebindable.

2. Re-implement manual blocking bound to "Aim," and apply ADS zoom while blocking and simply handle the switch when the player fires. This will support deeper melee interactions in the future, restore things like melee aim-glide without requiring players to unequip all their guns, and support aiming before firing.

For snipers and other scoped weapons, just apply standard zoom without the scope overlay. This would be reasonable because:

a. Standard zoom is adequate for precise zoom in most tiles/situations, and

b. At the ranges where scopes make a noticeable difference players have plenty of time to switch manually.

Please consider polishing your combo bindings a bit more, and at the very least supporting better player control customization for the new combo types. I firmly believe that the current inputs will work poorly.

I don't like the proposed melee bindings for the 2 main melee combos (EEE and W+E), because I rarely stop moving forward while attacking. This means that I will rarely (if ever) use the main EEE combo instead of W+E, which I find to be an awkward way of differentiating the two. I am also unhappy with the existing Aim+E combos, because the auto-switching between melee and guns while aiming occasionally gets in the way.

• First and foremost, please allow players to rebind combo inputs now that the inputs are universal across all weapons/stances. This prevents anyone from getting stuck with an input they hate and can't stand to use.
• Second, I believe that changing W+E to Shift+E (the sprint binding) would be a better setup. It allows players to execute either the standard combo or "crowd-clear" combo whether they are standing still or moving forward.
  • For players who use toggle sprint or controllers, the combo can be triggered based on whether sprint is toggled on/off.
  • Players who don't like either of the options can rebind it based on their preferences under the first point.
• Lastly, I want for "Aim" to be restored as "block" while a melee weapon is equipped.
  • Add ADS zoom to "Block" without switching back to guns. This allows players to aim precisely and switch back to guns by firing.
  • While melee is equipped, pressing F should switch back to the most recently-equipped gun first. This allows players to switch WITHOUT firing if needed.
  • For scoped weapons, apply standard ADS zoom without the scope overlay while melee is equipped. Scope zoom isn't needed in most situations, and at the ranges where scopes make a difference the player has plenty of time to switch back with F.
  • This would also support some expansion and refinement to blocking:
    • Reflection of enemy projectiles aimed at the crosshair while blocking.
    • Implementation of timed parries to make boss enemies vulnerable to melee (not required, just as an optional method of fighting them).

Basically, the official bindings will make it annoying to use the default combo and I'll probably only end up using the crowd-clear combo unless something changes.

 

[Dark_Horse89]

I agreed with you!!!!  This new melee system have many good things, but some key customization gone and this destroy and slow down your melee combo. Actually i wanna get back the old option change melee by holding F to use swords only  if you want, and do combo with your mouse. Also we can keep that as use quick melee with E but do combo with both sides. With this changes now melee is not one single weapon like before, but just is one  bad quick melee with the only difference you doing combo with that. this smash EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE all the time is really tiring to me. And this auto melee auto reflation auto everything is a lot of bugged many times in combat  

[Steel_Rook]

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

I don't think Baruuk is a particularly good comparison, because Baruuk's Evade forces the player to choose between one of two combat-related benefits -- attacking, or evading. Meanwhile, for sure some parkour moves will momentarily disable blocking, but currently the player only needs to do what they do all the time for autoblock to kick in, i.e. move towards enemies with their melee weapon out.

I might be missing something here. I thought Autoblock similarly suppressed when the player is swinging or shooting or aiming, just as Baruuk's Evade does. That's certainly been my experience with it, but I may have simply missed it. If that's not how it works, though, then it would in my proposed Autoblock system. The player would be required to choose between offensive and defensive actions. Or rather - to choose between action which is inherently offensive and inaction which is inherently defensive. The reason I like auto-block is because it's so easy to accidentally interrupt by getting greedy and trying to get shots in when you really should be blocking.

Take blocking Flame Eximus blasts, for instance. In my proposed system, the player would need face the explosion and NOT shoot, swing or aim for the duration. Considering how active Warframe is and how much it trains us to always be shooting, always be aiming, always be jumping around, that's not entirely a no-brainer. It takes a certain amount of "trigger discipline" to hold your fire, hold your ground and wait for the explosion. And yes, a player can always just jump away from it, but that's often not a good option. These explosions have massive range and take quite a while to propagate, meaning a dodging player is forced to evade a considerable distance and spend a long time out of combat. Or hide behind an obstacle, obviously, but those don't always present themselves. Especially in newer, more open tilesets, I've been caught flat-footed eating blasts, stomps and other AoE because I had nowhere to hide.

Obviously, none of this addresses our core disagreement over the merit of manual blocking and I'm willing to just let it be. I see where you're coming from, hopefully you see where I'm coming from as well.

 

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

Personally, I think a relatively simple solution to that could be to alter Transference so that the player doesn't trigger a hard fall if their warframe falls into a pit while they're in Operator mode: with the new tileset, for example, there are times where I switch to Operator mode to cover some extra distance or perform a hard lateral dash while over a pit, but doing so is unreliable, because if my warframe hits the pit's boundary, my Operator gets warped to a prior position along with my frame. Continuing to have frames hard fall if they fall into a pit is fine, but I see no reason why that should affect the Operator as well, and removing that limitation would allow for exactly the move you described without even needing to add new animations, remap button inputs, etc.

Slight aside, but I kind of wish Operator mode were a lot more complex. At the very least, I'd like the ability to manually transfer back to my Warframe rather than teleporting it to me, as well as leaving my Operator on the map in some Invulnerable state to later swap back to it. Maybe even swap places between Operator and Warframe. Basically, let me be at two places at once and toggle freely between them for the purposes of solving puzzles and just getting a bit more of a distributed presence. That said...

I do like your core premise here. Being able to toggle between Operator and Warframe quickly during Parkour would be pretty nice. It rather reminds me of the 2008 Prince of Persia the way you've described it, where magical companion Elika would temporarily jump in to give the prince a boost during double jumps he couldn't perform himself. Being able to bullet jump straight up, warp to my Operator to dash across a wide chasm, then swap back to my Warframe to glide the rest of the way would actually be an awesome way to integrate Operators in a way that doesn't feel tacked-on. And yes, it would be a decent workaround to my desire for an air-dash.

How would you feel about a way to store our Warframe off-screen while our Operator is on the map? That way, you can abandon your Warframe mid-jump over a pit and not have to worry about it falling to its doom.

I still might look for simpler controls, though, as the Swap/Void Mode/Dash/Swap setup is a bit... Fiddly for what could alternately be a single action. I think Dracula from Lords of Shadow had a "dodge" which temporarily turned him into bats for the duration. Similarly having a dash where my Warframe were temporarily replaced with my Operator for the duration with a single keypress would be handy. But broadly speaking, I agree with your general approach, yes.

[Teridax68]

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

I might be missing something here. I thought Autoblock similarly suppressed when the player is swinging or shooting or aiming, just as Baruuk's Evade does. That's certainly been my experience with it, but I may have simply missed it. If that's not how it works, though, then it would in my proposed Autoblock system. The player would be required to choose between offensive and defensive actions. Or rather - to choose between action which is inherently offensive and inaction which is inherently defensive. The reason I like auto-block is because it's so easy to accidentally interrupt by getting greedy and trying to get shots in when you really should be blocking.

I do agree that there is merit to having deliberate inaction itself count as an action, in this case by having the player block specifically when standing still and not attacking or casting. However, I also think that also limits the potential of autoblock -- the player wouldn't be able to block in the middle of a parkour maneuver, and may not be able to cancel their attack into a block when they'd want to react quickly to, say, a Bombard rocket. It wouldn't be the end of the world, but it would still be a limited set of gameplay that would be attached to blocking compared to alternatives. Perhaps I'm too attached to the specifics of the idea, but I really would like to be able to deflect/reflect attacks back at my opponents like a Jedi, and thus produce cool gameplay from good timing, which is something manual block would achieve better.

 

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

How would you feel about a way to store our Warframe off-screen while our Operator is on the map? That way, you can abandon your Warframe mid-jump over a pit and not have to worry about it falling to its doom.

That I think would be a step further, yes, though that also raises a question: do we want Transference to allow us to alternate control between two separate entities at once, or do we just want it to be a pseudo-form swap where one half disappears when the other is out? Because whereas the latter would be a lot cleaner, the former would allow some more moves to happen. Personally, I'd lean towards the latter suggestion, because I think it's always been awkward for Transference to just park our warframe somewhere while our Operator runs about, and I'd rather our warframes disappeared completely when in Operator mode to avoid getting detected in certain situations as well.

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

I still might look for simpler controls, though, as the Swap/Void Mode/Dash/Swap setup is a bit... Fiddly for what could alternately be a single action. I think Dracula from Lords of Shadow had a "dodge" which temporarily turned him into bats for the duration. Similarly having a dash where my Warframe were temporarily replaced with my Operator for the duration with a single keypress would be handy. But broadly speaking, I agree with your general approach, yes.

I think that for our warframes to have Operator-specific moves, we'd have to have those moves missing prior to The War Within, or at the very least The Second Dream, which may not be easily achievable given our already crowded button input real estate. I do, however, agree that traversal in Operator mode could itself be simplified so that we wouldn't need to hold down two buttons to dash: going with the above model, where double-jumping performed a vertical bullet jump, crouching and rolling were replaced by a dodge dash, and sprinting shifted to another mode of movement, crouching in Operator mode could instantly perform a lateral Void Dash, sprinting could enable Void Mode, and any jump after the first would perform a vertical Void Dash.

[Chaemyerelis]

I don't like the proposed "E" key option since I'm left handed and dont use wasd plus all my easy access keybinds near the arrow keys are used up.

[Steel_Rook]

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

I do agree that there is merit to having deliberate inaction itself count as an action, in this case by having the player block specifically when standing still and not attacking or casting. However, I also think that also limits the potential of autoblock -- the player wouldn't be able to block in the middle of a parkour maneuver, and may not be able to cancel their attack into a block when they'd want to react quickly to, say, a Bombard rocket. It wouldn't be the end of the world, but it would still be a limited set of gameplay that would be attached to blocking compared to alternatives. Perhaps I'm too attached to the specifics of the idea, but I really would like to be able to deflect/reflect attacks back at my opponents like a Jedi, and thus produce cool gameplay from good timing, which is something manual block would achieve better.

Well, I would probably allow players to block when simply moving (run and jump) but definitely disallow it during a Bullet Jump. You are absolutely correct in that this does limit snap response capability, and would probably require "intended to be blocked" attacks to have quite a bit of telegraphing. That tends to suit me just fine, though. To be perfectly honest, I'm generally not a fan of very tight timing, and would generally err on the side of less interactivity for the sake of more lenient response times. It doesn't make it right, but it is where I'm coming from.

And to be honest, most of the telegraphed attacks in Warframe are already REALLY telegraphed as it is. A Shockwave Moa would raise it leg and hold that pose like it's waiting for someone to yell ACTION! all the while screaming loudly to warn the deafblind that a stomp is incoming. A Flame Eximus showckwave will play a loud sound and propagate at all the speed of a brisk walk. I've actually gotten hit by Ambulas stomps because there's so much telegraphing I end up jumping early and eating the stomp as I land. Bombard rockets are indeed an exception, though I believe those ought to have more telegraphing, as well.

I think my biggest gripe with blocking in general is actually encounter balance. I had the same issue with Titanfall's Vortex Shield. Sure, it blocks all incoming damage, but damage is constantly incoming, especially in PvE. When is it ever even worth shielding as opposed to firing? Because killing the enemy is the goal, and shielding just delays that while I still take damage from the sides. As a game mechanic, it mostly works well against telegraphed attacks which are otherwise difficult or inconvenient to dodge. And while it IS cool reflecting Grineer shots back at them, I don't really see myself using that over just firing back most of the time.

To sum up, I see your point and don't necessarily disagree. I just might not have anything else valuable to add on the subject.

 

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

That I think would be a step further, yes, though that also raises a question: do we want Transference to allow us to alternate control between two separate entities at once, or do we just want it to be a pseudo-form swap where one half disappears when the other is out? Because whereas the latter would be a lot cleaner, the former would allow some more moves to happen. Personally, I'd lean towards the latter suggestion, because I think it's always been awkward for Transference to just park our warframe somewhere while our Operator runs about, and I'd rather our warframes disappeared completely when in Operator mode to avoid getting detected in certain situations as well.

Yeah I did wonder about that as I was typing. I think we can have both on a single keybind for Transference. Let me explain. When swapping between Warframe and Operator, the player would have the choice of whether to "stow" them or "leave" them in place. A stowed Warframe or Operator is off the map entirely - they don't exist in 3D space. A left Warframe or Operator will crouch and be covered by an impenetrable dome shield. If a left Warframe or Operator falls out of bounds, they're simply teleported back to a solid surface without affecting the player.

While controlling their Warframe, a player would have the following options. Tap Transference to stow the Warframe and call the Operator in its exact point in space. Hold Transference to leave the Warframe and call the Operator next to it (this is the current behaviour). Point reticle vaguely at a left Operator at any distance and hold Transference in order to swap control - Warframe is left, Operator becomes active. The same would be true when controlling the Operator, just swap the terms "Warframe" and "Operator" around in the above description. One button, no other controls needed.

This would allow us to do a few things. A player could call their Operator in for only a few seconds either to do a Void Dash, an Energising Dash, a Void Blast or just to jump into Void Mode as a means of tanking a big hit. I decided to put this on button tap because it's the most common way I've seen Operators used, at least. Since this is also the most practical use in combat and during parkour, it makes sense that it would be the fastest, most convenient way to do it. At the same time, this approach also allows a player to be effectively in two places at once, although in limited capacity. Not only does this make hitting multiple consoles easier, it also allows the game to introduce a lot more two-player puzzles without entirely locking single players out of them. Best of all, this could allow for the creation of environmental hazards which hurt either only the Warframe or the Operator. DMC: Devil May Cry - for all the S#&$ people talked about it - had an interesting mechanic of swapping between Angel and Devil mode for jumping puzzles, as they both had different terrain navigation mechanics.

Basically, I feel we can have both approaches at the same time. The instant "swap in place" that's useful in combat and during high-intensity jumping puzzles would be the simplest and easiest to pull off, while the "being in two places at once" mechanic would would take some amount of button holding and aiming at things.

 

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

I think that for our warframes to have Operator-specific moves, we'd have to have those moves missing prior to The War Within, or at the very least The Second Dream, which may not be easily achievable given our already crowded button input real estate. I do, however, agree that traversal in Operator mode could itself be simplified so that we wouldn't need to hold down two buttons to dash: going with the above model, where double-jumping performed a vertical bullet jump, crouching and rolling were replaced by a dodge dash, and sprinting shifted to another mode of movement, crouching in Operator mode could instantly perform a lateral Void Dash, sprinting could enable Void Mode, and any jump after the first would perform a vertical Void Dash.

Honestly, I'm perfectly fine with just barring players from using Operator-assisted mobility until after the War Within. In fact, if we wanted to be coy about it, we could design entire tiles for some tilesets designed around having those mechanics, and simply exclude them from the map generation pool if some players on the team don't have access to them. I actually feel that Warframe ought to do more of that in general. That is to say, have tiles which are blatantly not designed for use or navigation without certain late-game quest abilities, which only start spawning once you HAVE those abilities. After all, you don't get hit with the Sentient Stalker until you do the Second Dream and have a Void Beam of some sort capable of stripping his resistances.

As to your take on Operator movement - I agree in spirit. Their current movement system is slow, clumsy and cumbersome to pull off. I'd probably just put their void dash directly on top of their Dodge key since that's kind of what it already is. And using Void Dash as Sprint is actually a pretty cool idea. Rather than making us slower, I'd have it make us FASTER. I mean, it constantly drains our energy, right? Why not let it make us run at anything faster than a slow waddle? Slowing us down while we're invisible is a very outdate stealth mechanic which doesn't really fit the pace of Warframe. But yes, I generally have no real qualms with streamlining Operator movement and reducing their reliance on Void Mode. In fact, if at all possible, I'd like to limit Void Dash by charges on a cooldown (think Tracer Blink) rather than putting it on the same energy meter as my self-defence and my melee. Give me three dashes (by default), recover one dash 1-2 seconds or so.

[DiabolusUrsus]

8 hours ago, Semblant89 said:

Actually i wanna get back the old option change melee by holding F to use swords only  if you want, and do combo with your mouse. 

Thanks for the support. Isn't there already an option available to support binding melee to LMB? I use E, so I haven't checked it, but I could have sworn it was there.

In any case, while I would support a manual cosmetic option for "drawing" a melee weapon (people paid plat for some of those animations) I don't think that a return to full "melee mode" would be appropriate. One thing I really disliked about Melee 2.0 was that it required players to commit entirely to melee to get proper performance out of it (due to the combo meter and related mods).

4 hours ago, Chaemyerelis said:

I don't like the proposed "E" key option since I'm left handed and dont use wasd plus all my easy access keybinds near the arrow keys are used up.

Keep in mind that I am referring to the default keys only; these would not be the only options. I'm not entirely sure what kind of southpaw support the game has, but that sounds like something that would have to be handled through customizable bindings.

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

And to be honest, most of the telegraphed attacks in Warframe are already REALLY telegraphed as it is.  A Ahockwave Moa would raise it leg and hold that pose like it's waiting for someone to yell ACTION! all the while screaming loudly to warn the deafblind that a stomp is incoming. A Flame Eximus showckwave will play a loud sound and propagate at all the speed of a brisk walk. I've actually gotten hit by Ambulas stomps because there's so much telegraphing I end up jumping early and eating the stomp as I land.

Yep, I firmly believe that many attacks are over-telegraphed to the point of being counter-productive. Shockwave stomps take about a half-second too long to trigger, and eximus fire blasts are just plain off relative to the cast animation.

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Bombard rockets are indeed an exception, though I believe those ought to have more telegraphing, as well.

Bombards need about 10% of the fire rate they have now, and something resembling a plausible magazine capacity. I would prefer faster missiles with significantly reduced tracking, but I'd settle for better projectile visibility to start.

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I think my biggest gripe with blocking in general is actually encounter balance. I had the same issue with Titanfall's Vortex Shield. Sure, it blocks all incoming damage, but damage is constantly incoming, especially in PvE. When is it ever even worth shielding as opposed to firing? Because killing the enemy is the goal, and shielding just delays that while I still take damage from the sides. As a game mechanic, it mostly works well against telegraphed attacks which are otherwise difficult or inconvenient to dodge. And while it IS cool reflecting Grineer shots back at them, I don't really see myself using that over just firing back most of the time.

This is honestly where parries come in, as well as the mentioned "blocked shots build combo meter."

If every reflected bullet stored a "hit" of combo, spending the time to redirect that Grakata volley could actually be fairly useful if your goal is smashing that nearby Heavy Gunner with a heavy attack.

Parrying would be more niche, but it could be very useful against bosses that would otherwise be effectively melee immune, like Lephantis. Rest assured that these would be one of several options, and there's no need for particularly hardcore timings in a game like Warframe.

As a reference point, Dark Souls uses ~0.1s as its standard parry window with "extended" windows up to 0.13s on specialized parry gear. The difference is easily palpable. Something a lot more relaxed, like 0.3 to 0.5s depending on mods would work just fine in WF's case IMO.

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Traversal stuffs

Largely agreed, though I really don't like the thought of leaving the operator idle on the battlefield. I recognize that they would be invulnerable for all intents and purposes, but it bugs me enough that they physically step onto the battlefield at all. Here they are introduced as potentially our biggest weakness and used to create dramatic tension (oh noez, you might die for realz!) and yet they are immediately functionally immortal with even less consequence for dying than their Warframes.

I'm okay with leaving an empty Warframe sitting around, but having an operator turtling indefinitely would just be a bit on-the-nose IMO. Simpler more efficient movement? Great. 2-piece puzzles between the operator and frame? Great. Leaving the Tenno around like a discarded K-drive? HISSSSSSS.

While we're at it, I'd really like to see some spoiler-masking features for transference. Make operators invisible or unrecognizable to players who haven't finished TSD; it's really awkward and annoying to need to hide tools I've earned to avoid spoiling newer friends I play with.

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

DMC: Devil May Cry - for all the S#&$ people talked about it - had an interesting mechanic of swapping between Angel and Devil mode for jumping puzzles, as they both had different terrain navigation mechanics.

*Devil Triggered*

To be perfectly honest the game probably would have been fine and given a good critical reception if they hadn't tried to shoehorn it into the DMC franchise.

Mechanically it was reasonably sound; most of the hate it got was for its bastardization of beloved characters and complete disrespect for critical fans (the infamous 'not in a million years').

[Steel_Rook]

27 minutes ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

Bombards need about 10% of the fire rate they have now, and something resembling a plausible magazine capacity. I would prefer faster missiles with significantly reduced tracking, but I'd settle for better projectile visibility to start.

Bombards also need a lot more player feedback. The only way I know I'm even fighting a Bombard most of the time is when my Warframe starts getting knocked on its ass, or when I end up mag-dumping into what looks like a Lancer but is much much tougher. We've discussed this before, but I believe that units like Bombards and Heavy Gunners should be considered "specials" with their own distinct model, sound package and telegraphed attacks. Few things are more frustrating than eating Bombard rockets or Heavy Gunner full auto fire out of a messy crowd. Give players an a good second or two of warning that they're being targetted by one of these before they open fire, and make it obvious. It could be something as simple as a targeting reticle over your Warframe that tells you "A big and nasty thing is trying to lock onto you. Do something!"

I'm honestly fine with overly-drawn-out telegraphs for big or annoying attacks. Yeah, they feel patronising if you're actively looking at the enemy, but the significant leeway they give me is still appreciated in case I'm looking the other way or I'm scoped in. I like having enough time to hear the warning, look around, identify the target and respond before eating a big attack. The long duration means I can respond logically, rather than having to react instinctively.

 

32 minutes ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

Largely agreed, though I really don't like the thought of leaving the operator idle on the battlefield. I recognize that they would be invulnerable for all intents and purposes, but it bugs me enough that they physically step onto the battlefield at all. Here they are introduced as potentially our biggest weakness and used to create dramatic tension (oh noez, you might die for realz!) and yet they are immediately functionally immortal with even less consequence for dying than their Warframes.

I think that mostly goes away with The War Within, though. In The Second Dream, your Operator is basically a crippled little child barely held together by their chair who can just about manage to pilot a machine. The point of War Within - at least how I read it - was that Operator finally growing up and beginning to unlock their full potential. The conclusion to that quest revolves around your Operator showing up in person to not just kick ass but also make a statement. "I'm not the weak link any more." As far as I'm aware, Operators are supposed to be monstrously powerful in the lore, seemingly well in excess of what their Warframes can do, but their abilities are being held back in some fashion. Rell himself is so powerful as to start eroding the fabric of reality, and there's every indication that our player character is going the same way. Between the Man in the Wall story and "Hey, kiddo!" and such. Plus, I strongly suspect that The New War will end up featuring a lot of "on foot" combat leveraging our Operator's anti-Sentinet Void energy.

Gameplay-wise, there's already precedent for this. Void Mode makes us both invulnerable and invisible. I don't think our Operator going into the "Meditate" emote while dropping into an effectively endless Void Mode would feel all that out-of-place. Not any more than we can already turtle in Void Mode and just face-tank attacks that even the toughest of Warframes would struggle to adequately absorb. I spoke about this a bit with weapon draw animations (or rather, the lack thereof), but I feel that proper visual presentation can alleviate a lot of the lore issues that concern you. Hell, something as simple as making our weapons "appear to teleport" when we have them hidden, rather than just popping into our hands between render frames is a huge deal for me, because it implies a practical means of storing and retrieving weapons we don't have on our person without needing written or spoken lore explaining it.

I feel that simply sending our Operators into Void Mode when we want to keep them on the field as an anchor point to switch to later would make sense from both a narrative and gameplay aspect without necessarily having to address it directly.

[DiabolusUrsus]

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Bombards also need a lot more player feedback. The only way I know I'm even fighting a Bombard most of the time is when my Warframe starts getting knocked on its ass, or when I end up mag-dumping into what looks like a Lancer but is much much tougher. We've discussed this before, but I believe that units like Bombards and Heavy Gunners should be considered "specials" with their own distinct model, sound package and telegraphed attacks. Few things are more frustrating than eating Bombard rockets or Heavy Gunner full auto fire out of a messy crowd. Give players an a good second or two of warning that they're being targetted by one of these before they open fire, and make it obvious. It could be something as simple as a targeting reticle over your Warframe that tells you "A big and nasty thing is trying to lock onto you. Do something!"

Sounds good to me, and we definitely need to move away from "every telegraph looks like a Ballista."

Quote

I'm honestly fine with overly-drawn-out telegraphs for big or annoying attacks. Yeah, they feel patronising if you're actively looking at the enemy, but the significant leeway they give me is still appreciated in case I'm looking the other way or I'm scoped in. I like having enough time to hear the warning, look around, identify the target and respond before eating a big attack. The long duration means I can respond logically, rather than having to react instinctively.

Rather than feeling patronized they just plain throw me off. It's really awkward to get the timing down.

I think a better approach would be for CC-capable enemies to be relatively rare and limited to those the player are explicitly made aware of. Dime-a-dozen cannon fodder really has no reason to be capable of knocking players around to such an extreme degree.

Quote

I think that mostly goes away with The War Within, though. In The Second Dream, your Operator is basically a crippled little child barely held together by their chair who can just about manage to pilot a machine. The point of War Within - at least how I read it - was that Operator finally growing up and beginning to unlock their full potential. The conclusion to that quest revolves around your Operator showing up in person to not just kick ass but also make a statement. "I'm not the weak link any more." As far as I'm aware, Operators are supposed to be monstrously powerful in the lore, seemingly well in excess of what their Warframes can do, but their abilities are being held back in some fashion. Rell himself is so powerful as to start eroding the fabric of reality, and there's every indication that our player character is going the same way. Between the Man in the Wall story and "Hey, kiddo!" and such. Plus, I strongly suspect that The New War will end up featuring a lot of "on foot" combat leveraging our Operator's anti-Sentinet Void energy.

Gameplay-wise, there's already precedent for this. Void Mode makes us both invulnerable and invisible. I don't think our Operator going into the "Meditate" emote while dropping into an effectively endless Void Mode would feel all that out-of-place. Not any more than we can already turtle in Void Mode and just face-tank attacks that even the toughest of Warframes would struggle to adequately absorb. I spoke about this a bit with weapon draw animations (or rather, the lack thereof), but I feel that proper visual presentation can alleviate a lot of the lore issues that concern you. Hell, something as simple as making our weapons "appear to teleport" when we have them hidden, rather than just popping into our hands between render frames is a huge deal for me, because it implies a practical means of storing and retrieving weapons we don't have on our person without needing written or spoken lore explaining it.

I feel that simply sending our Operators into Void Mode when we want to keep them on the field as an anchor point to switch to later would make sense from both a narrative and gameplay aspect without necessarily having to address it directly.

I understand the rationalizations for it, but it still bugs me. It's not that it couldn't make some degree of sense; it's that I find the new direction for operators to be a lot less compelling story and gameplay-wise.

Their amps and movesets bring nothing especially interesting or unique to the table, and operators are a stark aesthetic downgrade from any Warframe. Now that we are functionally immortal, I doubt that the New War will be able to plausibly create any sense of urgency or suspense (unless the Sentient get some way to cancel out our plot armor, at which point the developments in TWW are fairly redundant and it would have been better to keep our vulnerability while enhancing our Void powers further).

Therefore, given the choice I would much prefer to keep the operator's presence on the battlefield to a minimum and even work toward reducing it.

I recognize that your suggestion is mechanically sound, so take this as me griping over the handling of the lore and setting rather than a direct criticism of the "stowed" vs. "left" concept. It would work fine; I would just resent it on principle.

[Steel_Rook]

10 hours ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

Rather than feeling patronized they just plain throw me off. It's really awkward to get the timing down. I think a better approach would be for CC-capable enemies to be relatively rare and limited to those the player are explicitly made aware of. Dime-a-dozen cannon fodder really has no reason to be capable of knocking players around to such an extreme degree.

I find that to be just part of the learning curve. I came to Warframe from he likes of The Surge and Payday 2 where reactions need to be pretty fast under pressure, so I was jumping WAAAY early against Moas and the Ambulas. I've gotten decent at keeping mental track of how long they've posed by this point. And that's not to brag, but more so to argue that it's just something to get used to. With as much leeway as we have, incidentally, I tend to try and shoot Shockwave Moas before they stomp. Between the yell and the actual stomp, I have enough time to identify the offending Moa and unload onto it. It doesn't always work, but that's typically my fault.

 

10 hours ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

Their amps and movesets bring nothing especially interesting or unique to the table, and operators are a stark aesthetic downgrade from any Warframe. Now that we are functionally immortal, I doubt that the New War will be able to plausibly create any sense of urgency or suspense (unless the Sentient get some way to cancel out our plot armor, at which point the developments in TWW are fairly redundant and it would have been better to keep our vulnerability while enhancing our Void powers further).

Fair enough. Aesthetics come down to individual preference, and I honestly prefer my Operator to my Warframe. I'm not a huge fan of the "organic" design for them, which has cost me a fortune in skins...

Narratively, though, I don't feel the issue is as major as you fear. Good storytelling doesn't necessarily need to involve personal danger. Our protagonists don't necessarily need to be the underdogs. Indeed, Warframe's contemporary gameplay design kind of seems to assume we're not going to die a lot, so failure states are shifted to other things. We run out of air and have to evac, we lose our defence objective, we fail to protect our escorts, we fail to retrieve the data before it's destroyed, etc. Granted, that depends on your gear of choice, but I play Inaros. Even when I die, I don't actually die.

I've personally always been fascinated with non-standard story structures, especially the ones that deliberately defy Joseph Campbell's "Hero's Journey." When I still played City of Heroes, I ended up designing what can only be described as a "cosmic horror hero." Without derailing into needless details, the plot hook for me was a character who's so stupidly overpowered that her mere presence creates local socio-political issues. The narrative hooks, then, aren't about beating the bad guys or surviving, but rather about not causing destruction on continental scale while doing it and actually FINDING the bad guys who generally know better than to pick an open fight.

If you want a less "me me me" example, look at something like One Punch Man. Saitama isn't going to lose. He probably isn't even going to try very hard. There's no suspense or trepidation there because the result is predetermined. Saitama is so broken-overpowered that there really isn't ever going to be much of a "fight." But it's still fun to watch because there's a large cast of support characters who CAN die or get hurt, each with their own compelling story (even the naked prisoner guy). It's also fun to watch these eldritch abominations which scare the pants off of even the world's mightiest heroes brought low and made to fear for their own existence. That's kind of what I mean by "cosmic horror hero" above. It's the kind of hero who is to otherwise powerful, arrogant and self-important villains what your average Lovecraftian horror is to the common man - an existential threat which brings their own worldview crashing down, forcing them to reexamine their own place in the universe.

I did quite a bit of amateur writing in my youth. One of my favourite topics was taking traditionally omnipotent entities like gods, monsters and perfect beings, then beating their asses until they become just part of the central cast. Still powerful, mind you, but not to a cosmic degree. Actually, a good example of this is Beerus, the Dragon Ball Super God of Destruction. The series starts with him being essentially a cosmic horror villain whose mere presence brings all other events to a halt as everyone cowers in fear. Throughout the show, however, the main cast grow ever stronger and become better friends with Beerus, to the point where he feels neither as disproportionately powerful (not after Vegeta Falcon-punched another God of Destruction) nor that alien. Nobody's afraid of him any more, even when he tries to act tough and careless, and he's starting to become more of a real person.

What I'm getting at with all of this is that I like the direction the Warframe story is headed and the way it's being told... For the most part. Hunhow is introduced as an existential threat which sends the Lotus into an absolute panic, and things only get worse from there. However, as events unfold, Hunhow is shown to have limitations, to make mistakes and to be... Well, mostly human. He's still a dangerous villain, but he no longer feels like a god. In general, that seems to be where we're headed with the Sentients and the New War. We're about to face a threat like we've never seen before, but we ourselves have never been stronger. And as we clash in those initial battles, I expect the scale to shrink back down again. The Sentients, initially introduced as the threat to end all threats, would eventually be beaten back and made into just another in the line of threats we have to deal with on a daily basis. Still powerful, still likely more significant than all of the others, but nowhere near as out-of-scale as where they were when we started.

And then we'll wonder what exactly the Orokin - this supposed space-faring empire - did to fail so hard against this enemy. Them being the right bastards that they are, the answer will likely be that they betrayed the Sentients, then betrayed each other and brought about their own destruction, with everyone else in both Sol and Tau left as the victims of their decadent machinations. All of us puffing our chests, yelling slogans and presuming to fight for our freedom, our dominance and our right to exist, when we're all just children going through the motions of a fight that we don't believe in but copied from our abusive, uncaring parents. There's a lot of pathos to be had in a story where the protagonists can't really die, is my point 🙂

Sorry, narrative devices are one of my personal passions. I'll try to not derail the thread any further.

[DiabolusUrsus]

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

I find that to be just part of the learning curve. 

Don't me wrong; it's simple enough to just shoot things or jump away. But when things have such extended tells it always compels me to see what I can "get away with" so to speak, and it's always kind of jarring to switch between things like Shockwave MOAS and things like Scorpions where their tells are so short they can often still trigger their grapple while stunned or staggered.

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Narratively, though, I don't feel the issue is as major as you fear. Good storytelling doesn't necessarily need to involve personal danger. 

I understand how storytelling works, and I am aware not every story needs to involve danger. However, that's literally what the concept pitch was for the game, and DE explicitly said that they were going to try to go back toward that direction starting with TSD.

One Punch Man works because it is a deconstruction of a genre and its tropes. Saitama is definitely the protagonist, but his powers aren't the focus. His personal motivations, beliefs, and effects on the people around him are.

Warframe is not exactly in a good spot to mirror that type of storytelling, and while I mean no offense to Dragon Ball fans I'm really not interested in that kind of reliance on 11th-hour superpowers and 1-upmanship.

Point being, it's possible to tell good stories without putting the protagonists at-risk but Warframe does not have the foundations needed to tell such a story IMO. Our Operators are too shallow and their relationships with other characters in the setting are too ambiguous to set up an effective narrative.

Remember that this is a game, and not a book or manga; DE needs to account for the player's choices and the fact that they may not have interfaced with the narrative the same way. Take, for example, some players not even knowing who Teshin was while their player character apparently trusted him enough to ignore common-sense hostile cues deep in enemy territory.

These things accumulatively lead me to see Hunhow's fall as more clumsiness in the writing rather than insight into his character. I mean, seriously. Show of hands who even realized that breaking War was so damaging to Hunhow that he needed to recover?

I, for one, thought all we did was break his link with the Stalker. Yet the next time we see him we're effectively finishing him off in a weakened state. DE spent time building up a villain, decided "whelp, that didn't work out" and threw him in the trash bin through a side quest. I don't really see that as humanizing or particularly interesting.

[Teridax68]

19 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I think my biggest gripe with blocking in general is actually encounter balance. I had the same issue with Titanfall's Vortex Shield. Sure, it blocks all incoming damage, but damage is constantly incoming, especially in PvE. When is it ever even worth shielding as opposed to firing? Because killing the enemy is the goal, and shielding just delays that while I still take damage from the sides. As a game mechanic, it mostly works well against telegraphed attacks which are otherwise difficult or inconvenient to dodge. And while it IS cool reflecting Grineer shots back at them, I don't really see myself using that over just firing back most of the time.

I think there are three main factors for this:

• Even if there's damage coming at the player from all sides, sometimes the player will find themselves low on health, and will want a means of delaying or stopping death before they bleed out. Manual blocking could satisfy that without devolving into blanket damage mitigation.
• While it's not as pronounced as it could be, some enemy attacks are in fact rather powerful and more spaced out, and thus worth blocking: shots from Ballistas or rockets from Bombards or Napalms, for example, are practically begging to be blocked, or even reflected back at the source.
• In an environment where one could be able to reflect shots back at enemies and actually deal good damage, blocking could be one way for melee to develop ranged capabilities, so even if the player wouldn't be blocking any one specific shot, it would be one more tool in the arsenal to kill enemies, especially if one favors melee or even wants to go melee-only. This isn't something autoblock allows quite as much, because being able to reflect damage all the time at enemies and deal enough damage to kill them just by facing them would add a lot of passive power, which the new Amalgam mod demonstrates.

19 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

While controlling their Warframe, a player would have the following options. Tap Transference to stow the Warframe and call the Operator in its exact point in space. Hold Transference to leave the Warframe and call the Operator next to it (this is the current behaviour). Point reticle vaguely at a left Operator at any distance and hold Transference in order to swap control - Warframe is left, Operator becomes active. The same would be true when controlling the Operator, just swap the terms "Warframe" and "Operator" around in the above description. One button, no other controls needed.

This is fair, yes. I'd be cautious about resuming hold-cast to "one button", because hold-casting tends to be worth about two taps in terms of time spent giving inputs, but in this particular case leaving behind a warframe would be a deliberate move anyway, Meanwhile, tapping to stow would satisfy everything the player would want from Transference in any situation requiring faster inputs, so there likely wouldn't be a problem.

19 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Honestly, I'm perfectly fine with just barring players from using Operator-assisted mobility until after the War Within. In fact, if we wanted to be coy about it, we could design entire tiles for some tilesets designed around having those mechanics, and simply exclude them from the map generation pool if some players on the team don't have access to them. I actually feel that Warframe ought to do more of that in general. That is to say, have tiles which are blatantly not designed for use or navigation without certain late-game quest abilities, which only start spawning once you HAVE those abilities. After all, you don't get hit with the Sentient Stalker until you do the Second Dream and have a Void Beam of some sort capable of stripping his resistances.

I'd be wary of splitting the game, or in this case tilesets, in two just for the sake of certain players who haven't progressed completely yet, and in this respect I think the Jovian Concord has shown us a way of accommodating all levels of progression in one go with the new tileset. In many of the new Gas City tilesets, there are these vast tiles with massive gaps in-between sections, along with cables, walls, and platforms scattered throughout. This accommodates three levels of players:

• Players who only know the basic run-and-jump moves, and haven't yet mastered the more advanced parkour maneuvers, will have platforms to hop onto, and cables to climb safely. They won't be able to traverse as fast as everyone else, but even the most intimidating tile in the Gas City can still be scaled in this manner.
• Players who have a good grasp of maneuvers such as wall running, bullet jumping, aim-gliding and so on will be able to use certain walls and platforms to cover greater distances in one go, without having to hop onto intermediary platforms or use as many cables. With a good enough familiarity of the tiles, this can be used to rapidly go through any part of the Gas City tileset.
• Players who have completed The War Within can simply go into Operator Mode and Void dash from one side of the tile to the other, crossing gaps that few warframes can go over on their own, and so within seconds. If used in the right tiles, this lets players go into speedrun territory.

And, in-between, there are also hidden rooms and puzzles that only more experienced players will know to navigate, meaning the new tileset caters fully to Warframe's entire suite of movement options, without having to split itself across players. In this respect, I think future tiles should have a similar scale, but should also similarly have our more advanced options unlock shortcuts and advanced optional content (e.g. unreachable rooms), rather than be necessary to go through a tile.

19 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

As to your take on Operator movement - I agree in spirit. Their current movement system is slow, clumsy and cumbersome to pull off. I'd probably just put their void dash directly on top of their Dodge key since that's kind of what it already is. And using Void Dash as Sprint is actually a pretty cool idea. Rather than making us slower, I'd have it make us FASTER. I mean, it constantly drains our energy, right? Why not let it make us run at anything faster than a slow waddle? Slowing us down while we're invisible is a very outdate stealth mechanic which doesn't really fit the pace of Warframe. But yes, I generally have no real qualms with streamlining Operator movement and reducing their reliance on Void Mode. In fact, if at all possible, I'd like to limit Void Dash by charges on a cooldown (think Tracer Blink) rather than putting it on the same energy meter as my self-defence and my melee. Give me three dashes (by default), recover one dash 1-2 seconds or so.

I can very much agree to putting Void Dash on its own Energy reserve, though to be honest I think many, if not all of our current Operator limitations can be scrapped: there is no reason for our amps to have ammo, because our amps generally perform worse than normal weapons, and the only time where ammo becomes an issue is against certain very specific enemies, where it need not be an issue anyway (Void Mode also means the only payment for expending our ammo is a few seconds of waiting, rather than any real window of vulnerability). Similarly, Void Mode is balanced by the fact that the player cannot go into stealth and attack at the same time, and even our Void Dashes with our current Energy levels are more than enough to go through even the biggest tiles without a problem, with the exception of the Plains and Vallis. Simply letting us do our thing without slapping on some unnecessary downtime would likely feel a lot better, and would be unlikely to create any serious balance issues relative to where we are now.

[Steel_Rook]

1 hour ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

Don't me wrong; it's simple enough to just shoot things or jump away. But when things have such extended tells it always compels me to see what I can "get away with" so to speak, and it's always kind of jarring to switch between things like Shockwave MOAS and things like Scorpions where their tells are so short they can often still trigger their grapple while stunned or staggered.

Scorpions have tells? That's genuine news to me. The first time I know a Scorpion is trying to hook me is usually when the hook attaches to my Warframe. I know there's a sound they make when they fire the hook, but I haven't noticed much if any gap in time between firing the hook and me getting it in the back. Maybe if I were looking at the Scorpion at the time? I forget who suggested it (likely you), but I'd personally rather put all of the enemy control abilities on fairly telegraphed attacks so players can block or dodge them. I like Shockwave Moas, for instance, because getting hit by one of them genuinely feels like my own fault. Getting dragged on my back by an Ancient, in contrast, feels like a cheapshot.

 

2 hours ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

Point being, it's possible to tell good stories without putting the protagonists at-risk but Warframe does not have the foundations needed to tell such a story IMO. Our Operators are too shallow and their relationships with other characters in the setting are too ambiguous to set up an effective narrative.

Fair enough. I don't necessarily agree, but I can respect your take on the matter. Narrative aside, by goal with leaving the Operator in the field was to retain a "second playable character" for the player to occasionally toggle to, for the purpose of solving two-character puzzles alone. If the narrative representation of an invulnerable Operator bothers you, the same can be achieved with some kind of placeholder visual effect, like the "time portals" in Lua Spy Vaults. Rather than leaving the Operator in place, a fissure/portal/tear/anchor of some sort is left behind that the Operator can later jump back to, instead. Mostly, I just want to allow players to alternate control between two independent characters in different places on the map.

Actually, this is where Teridax's idea of using both Operator and Warframe mobility at the same time by hot-swapping during parkour segments could offer additional balance. Together, Operator and Warframe could be tremendously mobile when mixing and matching each other's abilities. If the player chooses to split them up, however, then each actor can only use their own mobility options and thus potentially not have access to all locations. This means that "splitting up" has a cost, and could be balanced based on that.

 

2 hours ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

These things accumulatively lead me to see Hunhow's fall as more clumsiness in the writing rather than insight into his character. I mean, seriously. Show of hands who even realized that breaking War was so damaging to Hunhow that he needed to recover? I, for one, thought all we did was break his link with the Stalker. Yet the next time we see him we're effectively finishing him off in a weakened state.

Wait, what? I thought breaking War just meant that Hunhow's plan was scrapped, not that he himself was harmed. When do we see him at all after The Second Dream? I must have missed that bit. I thought he'd just been pushed to the background and still kicking about?

 

23 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

In an environment where one could be able to reflect shots back at enemies and actually deal good damage, blocking could be one way for melee to develop ranged capabilities, so even if the player wouldn't be blocking any one specific shot, it would be one more tool in the arsenal to kill enemies, especially if one favors melee or even wants to go melee-only. This isn't something autoblock allows quite as much, because being able to reflect damage all the time at enemies and deal enough damage to kill them just by facing them would add a lot of passive power, which the new Amalgam mod demonstrates.

Fair point. Being able to passively reflect damage might be a bit too much power creep. It might depend on how much damage is reflected vs. how much damage is taken, though. In this case I'd have to actually try these mechanics out in practice because I can't quite picture the design in theory.

 

25 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

And, in-between, there are also hidden rooms and puzzles that only more experienced players will know to navigate, meaning the new tileset caters fully to Warframe's entire suite of movement options, without having to split itself across players. In this respect, I think future tiles should have a similar scale, but should also similarly have our more advanced options unlock shortcuts and advanced optional content (e.g. unreachable rooms), rather than be necessary to go through a tile. 

That's probably a better way of handling it, actually. In fact, Jupiter Remastered has at least one type of hidden room which is always present, but can only be accessed after The War Within. Those locked yellow doors which require pressing multiple consoles in sequence have a second door on the inside that only people with access to an Operator Amp can open, while players who don't can only peer in through the window. Since War Within requires the Sedna junction, people are always going to be exposed to those rooms before they have a way to open them... Except those of us who were here when they were first added.

So fair enough. Rather than designing entire tiles which may or may not spawn, it might be better to design tiles with shortcuts and hidden areas only accessible through abilities available later in the game. Might add a slight Metroidvania feel to it 🙂 I don't know how many tilesets DE intend to remaster (fingers crossed for a redesign of the ice planet tileset, that's SO JANKY!!!), but the New War could potentially allow for similar Sentient doors to pop up in a lot of places. We know the Sentients are capable of producing shapeshifting infiltrators already, and that's reason enough to explain why the Corpus and Grineer structures have those spaces - they're little cubby holes for infiltrators!

Mostly, though, I was looking to introduce environment puzzles which require Operators to solve. Specifically, the ability to control an Operator and a Warframe separately. Since not all players have access to their Operator for... Realistically speaking, the majority of the Star Chart, those would have to be in some way optional. Whether they're optional loot areas in existing tiles or separate tiles which don't always spawn isn't as important to me, as long as those puzzles and obstacle courses exist optionally. As you pointed out, the Jupiter Remastered tileset is a good example of how this might be done.

 

33 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

I can very much agree to putting Void Dash on its own Energy reserve, though to be honest I think many, if not all of our current Operator limitations can be scrapped: there is no reason for our amps to have ammo, because our amps generally perform worse than normal weapons, and the only time where ammo becomes an issue is against certain very specific enemies, where it need not be an issue anyway (Void Mode also means the only payment for expending our ammo is a few seconds of waiting, rather than any real window of vulnerability). Similarly, Void Mode is balanced by the fact that the player cannot go into stealth and attack at the same time, and even our Void Dashes with our current Energy levels are more than enough to go through even the biggest tiles without a problem, with the exception of the Plains and Vallis. Simply letting us do our thing without slapping on some unnecessary downtime would likely feel a lot better, and would be unlikely to create any serious balance issues relative to where we are now.

Yeah, I feel that Operators are far too limited by resources. Quite literally anything interesting that we do is bound by some kind of severely limited resource and most of them are limited by the SAME resource. Personally, I'd move Void Dash to the "charges" system I described before (it does need SOME limitations else it's just flight), I'd simply remove the energy cost of Void Blast altogether (and think about introducing some kind of void projection melee weapons in the future) and probably leave Void Mode where it is, but have it INCREASE movement speed rather than decreasing it. Maybe also enable higher jumps and a double jump. Without Dash and Blast draining from it, I feel that Operators ought to have enough energy to make decent use of Void Mode without having to grab Void Siphon and Void Flow.

Amp energy I can take or leave. On the one hand, you're right in that this limitation is rarely meaningful. On the other hand, it's a stat to tweak when building your Amps, since some of the parts give you greater Amp energy and regeneration. Plus, making the Operator/Warframe swaps seamless by stowing the other by default, an Operator could jump into their Warframe for a few seconds while the Amp recovered and make up for lost time that way. Alternately, I could go with a standard weapon reload mechanic, just with infinite ammo. Amp ran out of juice? Grab it with your other hand, juice it, it's back to full. That would similarly give us an ammo/magazine/reload style stat to tweak during Amp Assembly and Arcane selection.

Overall, though, playing my Operator right now is a miserable experience because all of my fun stuff is on the same energy bar and I get to do so little of it.

[DiabolusUrsus]

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Scorpions have tells? That's genuine news to me. 

Well, tells in the sense that they have behavior leading up to the use of an attack. They normally play a little wind-up animation before extending their arm to throw the hook, but

a) the animation is so short it isn't really a fair "tell," and

b) they can trigger it regardless half the time when stunned, staggered, etc.

It's a tell the same way a Heavy Gunner raising its arm to ground-pound is a tell, and Gunners/Bombards appear to have the same inconsistency where they can still pull off the attack if interrupted. It's an odd setup. I was really just trying to say that things like Shockwave MOAs are a bit too long whereas Scorpions, etc. are ridiculously short. You can see it coming if you look for it, but it's too fast to be of any real use to you.

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Fair enough. I don't necessarily agree, but I can respect your take on the matter. Narrative aside, by goal with leaving the Operator in the field was to retain a "second playable character" for the player to occasionally toggle to, for the purpose of solving two-character puzzles alone. If the narrative representation of an invulnerable Operator bothers you, the same can be achieved with some kind of placeholder visual effect, like the "time portals" in Lua Spy Vaults. Rather than leaving the Operator in place, a fissure/portal/tear/anchor of some sort is left behind that the Operator can later jump back to, instead. Mostly, I just want to allow players to alternate control between two independent characters in different places on the map.

Actually, this is where Teridax's idea of using both Operator and Warframe mobility at the same time by hot-swapping during parkour segments could offer additional balance. Together, Operator and Warframe could be tremendously mobile when mixing and matching each other's abilities. If the player chooses to split them up, however, then each actor can only use their own mobility options and thus potentially not have access to all locations. This means that "splitting up" has a cost, and could be balanced based on that.

I'm all for letting players split up control; I was just saying that I would prefer to require them to be controlling the operator to field both at the same time.

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Wait, what? I thought breaking War just meant that Hunhow's plan was scrapped, not that he himself was harmed. When do we see him at all after The Second Dream? I must have missed that bit. I thought he'd just been pushed to the background and still kicking about?

I... Am suddenly not 100% sure. He shows up again in Octavia's Anthem, and I remember through a combination of discussion and reading I ended up with that unexpected conclusion, but I had originally made the exact assumption you did:

Link broken, plan over, that's it.

But reading through the transcripts and wiki profiles again I can't seem to find the material that got me there. Maybe I was just figuratively smoking something.

[Steel_Rook]

15 hours ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

It's a tell the same way a Heavy Gunner raising its arm to ground-pound is a tell, and Gunners/Bombards appear to have the same inconsistency where they can still pull off the attack if interrupted. It's an odd setup. I was really just trying to say that things like Shockwave MOAs are a bit too long whereas Scorpions, etc. are ridiculously short. You can see it coming if you look for it, but it's too fast to be of any real use to you.

I remember absolutely hating the Heavy Gunner ground slam when I was first starting out. It comes out too fast to react to it, you can't jump it and the Heavy Gunner is typically too resilient to kill quickly. I resolved to just stop fighting them in melee range, eventually. I didn't know about blocking AoEs at the time, and I wouldn't have been able to anyway because I had to equip my melee weapon to do it. I'm of the opinion that knockback attacks, heavy control attacks, large-scale AoE attacks and just generally "weird" attacks ought to be telegraphed and give at least a couple of seconds' worth of time to react.

Something Payday 2 taught me is that individual enemies don't need to be particularly tough or require particularly fast reaction times for a large group of them to still be challenging and unpredictable. Compelling gameplay comes not from duelling a single enemy, but from the way all of them stack together and split the player's attention between a dozen different priorities. That's why I prefer the really slow Moa stomps. On their own they're trivial. In a throng of 20 other people and happening somewhere behind me, not so much. That's part of why I want enemies split into Commons, Specials and Elites for the randomly-spawning ones. But that's a bit off-topic.

 

15 hours ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

I'm all for letting players split up control; I was just saying that I would prefer to require them to be controlling the operator to field both at the same time. 

Well, I'm looking less at controlling both Warframe and Operator at the same time, and more alternating between them. Remember the Lost Vikings? While I'm not trying to go quite that far, being able to control multiple characters with unique abilities who retain their position when not directly controlled has the potential to create some pretty damn good puzzles. In fact, remember the Cooperation Drift? Aside from the last gate which requires pressing down four buttons, everything else in there is doable by a single player using their Warframe and their Operator. And even that's a very Basic puzzle where one player could as well be replaced with a Companion Cube.

I actually feel that Warframe has the potential and the mechanics for some REALLY nice puzzles, but I should probably save that for another thread. I've already derailed yours enough with extant discussions.

 

15 hours ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

I... Am suddenly not 100% sure. He shows up again in Octavia's Anthem, and I remember through a combination of discussion and reading I ended up with that unexpected conclusion, but I had originally made the exact assumption you did: Link broken, plan over, that's it. But reading through the transcripts and wiki profiles again I can't seem to find the material that got me there. Maybe I was just figuratively smoking something.

Well, let me know if you find anything on the subject. I'd be interested to know what became of him. My reading of The Second Dream was that we foiled Hunhow, he went "I'll get you next time, Gadget!" and we just haven't heard from him since. He does show up in Octavia's Anthem, but we know from a few different places that Sentients can have a distributed presence so that feels like re-run. An aspect of Hunhow infects Suda, we foil it, "You'll pay for this, Captain Planet!" I have to imagine that he's off hiding somewhere, plotting his next move. Hunhow is a really cool character. Just killing him off would be a serious mistake. I'd really like to see him make a return and serve as a foil to whatever Natah is planning with the Amalgams. DE's storytelling tends to do a good job of humanising its characters, from Simaris proving he's a good guy then sheepishly denying it to the New Loka hippie lady maybe reconsidering the extremity of her faith to a few others I can't name off the top of my head.

In general, I like seeing characters initially introduced veritable gods eventually brought low and transitioned into the main cast. It's easy for a villain to act like a cosmic horror when they're vastly more powerful than the heroes. Once they've met their match, though, and have to start worrying and improvising and crafting desperate alliances is when they become real characters. Hunhow, I think, was just on the cusp of doing that... And then he stopped showing up. Hopefully we didn't just kill him...