Corpus's Grenades (Possibly Grineer's as well) , which deal absurd amount of damage, are invulnerable.

[SprinKah]

If you guys don't believe me on the "very dangerous" part, I tested in Simulacrum, Corpus Grenades deal 450 dmg at lvl 30 while Grineer at 150. With that kind of number, they scale quite alot as the level goes up, and they even cover a huge area of effect. I've seen my teammates die from them in Pluto Corpus defense just from one blast. And the fact that they are currently, can't be shot like Grineer grenades (Maybe Grineer grenades are the same ) is quite troublesome because you really gotta get away like really far to avoid the blast. 

Warframes with abilities that negate huge portion of damage dealt to them will probably be alright for the most part (Chroma, Rhino, etc...) but squishy frames like Loki are going to die no matter what in just one blast, when playing in high-level Corpus missions. 

Edited May 25, 2019 by SprinKah

[Steel_Rook]

Honestly, the Grenades mechanic in this game is severely lacking. For as much damage as grenades do, they're actually very hard to spot. Yes, they make a sound if you have your volume turned up and good directional audio, but they seem to have no visual indication of where the grenade is. If I didn't know any better, I'd swear they're invisible. Half-Life 2 did AI-thrown grenades damn near perfectly 15 years ago. They emit a chirping sound which pulses faster the closer they are to exploding, they have a blinking red light attached to them and they leave a red trail as they move through the air. The game WANTS you to know where these grenades are at all times so you could avoid them or Gravity Gun them back at the Combine. Hell, even Payday 2 does a better job signifying its Flashbang Grenades with an obvious blinking red light and the ability to shoot them (which myself and others insisted on for a few years before it happened).

Warframe goes as far as the chirping sound and that's it. And it's not even all that loud of a sound, either. It's easily covered by gunfire or random team-speak chatter. Please, give these grenades a flashing light and a contrail so that we know what we're responding to. Proper player feedback puts agency in players' hands even against otherwise pretty cheap game mechanics.

[atejas]

21 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

Honestly, the Grenades mechanic in this game is severely lacking. For as much damage as grenades do, they're actually very hard to spot. Yes, they make a sound if you have your volume turned up and good directional audio, but they seem to have no visual indication of where the grenade is. If I didn't know any better, I'd swear they're invisible. Half-Life 2 did AI-thrown grenades damn near perfectly 15 years ago. They emit a chirping sound which pulses faster the closer they are to exploding, they have a blinking red light attached to them and they leave a red trail as they move through the air. The game WANTS you to know where these grenades are at all times so you could avoid them or Gravity Gun them back at the Combine. Hell, even Payday 2 does a better job signifying its Flashbang Grenades with an obvious blinking red light and the ability to shoot them (which myself and others insisted on for a few years before it happened).

Warframe goes as far as the chirping sound and that's it. And it's not even all that loud of a sound, either. It's easily covered by gunfire or random team-speak chatter. Please, give these grenades a flashing light and a contrail so that we know what we're responding to. Proper player feedback puts agency in players' hands even against otherwise pretty cheap game mechanics.

I don't even think traditional grenades are a good fit for the game considering we have more visible area denial enemies like Mine Ospreys and Napalms. Really feels like a leftover from when Warframe was being developed with a tactical shooter mindset

[Steel_Rook]

6 minutes ago, atejas said:

I don't even think traditional grenades are a good fit for the game considering we have more visible area denial enemies like Mine Ospreys and Napalms. Really feels like a leftover from when Warframe was being developed with a tactical shooter mindset

Supposedly, they're there to discourage people from standing in one place for too long, but I agree. Warframe already has plenty of area denial abilities, and most of those are better-designed. From those weird Osprey pellets that deal AoE in an area to Hyeka Masters setting the ground on fire to Bombards with slow-moving guided missiles to now sprinting Nullifiers, the game has plenty of tools to keep players moving. Cheapshot Sentinel-killing grenades that I can't even see are unnecessary.

[CreamedSoda]

I can't even remember the last time I died to a grenade 😕

[SprinKah]

On 2019-05-25 at 7:43 PM, Whitestrake0 said:

I can't even remember the last time I died to a grenade 😕

haha, what warframe do you play, cause I'm pretty sure warframes that don't have abilities or stats to tank dmg, you're gonna die to a CORPUS grenade at like....lvl 60.

On 2019-05-25 at 7:32 PM, atejas said:

I don't even think traditional grenades are a good fit for the game considering we have more visible area denial enemies like Mine Ospreys and Napalms. Really feels like a leftover from when Warframe was being developed with a tactical shooter mindset

 

On 2019-05-25 at 7:41 PM, Steel_Rook said:

Supposedly, they're there to discourage people from standing in one place for too long, but I agree. Warframe already has plenty of area denial abilities, and most of those are better-designed. From those weird Osprey pellets that deal AoE in an area to Hyeka Masters setting the ground on fire to Bombards with slow-moving guided missiles to now sprinting Nullifiers, the game has plenty of tools to keep players moving. Cheapshot Sentinel-killing grenades that I can't even see are unnecessary.

Would really love for the grenades to deal something other than direct damage haha. It'd be nice for the Grineer to use flashbangs like the big Executioner with two Heks. 

Or the Corpus could you some of the mechanics from the traps and ordinances from brokers in the Index, like the Vortex thingy, or the tether thing. 

[kingvaldemir]

Did they buffed the grenades? I never found any problem with these until very recently, I got what I thought was 'random death', but after closer inspection, I think I died from these grenades. Never had this sort of problem before. I don't mind if they buff the grenades, but it felt like it came out of nowhere. There are some audio feedback, yes, but it was very quick and usually, by the time I dodged, it was already too late.

Need more visual feedback I suppose. But seriously, did they buffed it, or is this a bug that came with recent patches?

[fr4gb4ll]

they should be indeed be destroyable like the rollers the grinner uses. the audio-effect alone is of little use to prevent getting hit by them when in a middle of a ѕhitstorm or, like in my case, playing the game muted to listen to music instead...

and no, the optical warning also don't help much - this is high-fx warframe we playing, not chess.

[SordidDreams]

On 2019-05-25 at 2:10 PM, Steel_Rook said:

Half-Life 2 did AI-thrown grenades damn near perfectly 15 years ago.

It's disheartening how many things the gaming industry has perfected decades ago that DE fumbles around trying to figure out the basics of. Grenades are just one example. Why they even exist in this game, I truly have no idea. They feel very out-of-place, as if they were added simply because other games were doing it. Same goes for some other gameplay mechanics (like, say, stamina, which thankfully got removed early on, and gun reloading, which unfortunately didn't).

Edited May 31, 2019 by SordidDreams

[Xzorn]

On 2019-05-25 at 8:10 AM, Steel_Rook said:

Honestly, the Grenades mechanic in this game is severely lacking. For as much damage as grenades do, they're actually very hard to spot.

 

You would have loved back when T4 Void came out and they did x3 damage but still hadn't been given any sound effect yet.

I think it was added around U16 and since the distance audio changes they've become harder to hear than previously.

At least back in the day you could see them easier since there wasn't as much eye cancer in the game.

 

[Steel_Rook]

10 hours ago, SordidDreams said:

It's disheartening how many things the gaming industry has perfected decades ago that DE fumbles around trying to figure out the basics of. Grenades are just one example. Why they even exist in this game, I truly have no idea. They feel very out-of-place, as if they were added simply because other games were doing it. Same goes for some other gameplay mechanics (like, say, stamina, which thankfully got removed early on, and gun reloading, which unfortunately didn't).

Believe me - as an old City of Heroes player, I get to see developers brag about having created systems that that game pioneered 15 years ago all the time. "Let's all laugh at an industry that never learns anything, tee-hee-hee." Like your average Grineer, the gaming industry as a whole is doomed to continuously rediscover lost Orokin technology, only to lose it all over again.

That said, I don't feel that weapon reloading is oudated in any way. It's a decent balance mechanic and a system which fundamentally alters how a weapon "feels" to use. When it comes to guns, far too many games (especially those with RPG aspirations) tend to get bogged down in tweaking behind-the-scenes stats like damage, criticals, damage types and so on. While those do affect the feel of a gun, they do so to a fairly minor degree for how drastically they need to be tweaked by the player. By contrast, actual weapon handling characteristics like bullet spread, aim recoil, magazine size, reload time, projectile flight speed, maximum ammo, ammo pick-up and more seem to be left by the wayside. Warframe has dozens if not hundreds of damage-boosting mods, but I can count the ones which affect aim spread on the fingers of one hand.

We don't even know what our accuracy stat even means. K, my weapon has 20 accuracy. 20 what? How does accuracy even work? Do we have progressive aim spread, and if so can I affect it in any way? You can do so much by tweaking weapon handling, yet we do nearly none of it. The Tenora, for instance, has regressive aim spread, meaning it grows more accurate the longer you fire it. That right there makes it feel like a "true LMG," because it has a larger magazine and two separate mechanics which ramp up the longer you fire it. But it's the only one with regressive aim like that, at least that I know of even though the likes of the Gorgon and the Supra could benefit from the same. Or take the Kohm, a rifle which grows less accurate but more powerful the longer you fire it, and waste progressively more ammo the longer you shoot... Except ammo pick-up in Warframe is fixed to the weapon TYPE and scaled to hard-hitting semi-auto weapons. Fast-firing bullet hoses, then, rarely stay ammo-positive and absolutely need either Ammo Mutation or a Carrier. Or both.

Payday 2 figured this out 5 years ago by baking ammo pick-up into the individual weapon and making all ammo boxes universal, then a few years ago by giving deliberately inaccurate weapons disproportionately high ammo pick-up. That way, extremely powerful weapons like shotguns, sniper rifles and explosives could have large stocks with limited pick-up, meaning you had to use them sparingly and rely on your other weapon - a use for the two weapon system. Instead, Warframe does the opposite. Semi-autos are positively swimming in ammo because boxes drop well in excess of what you need, while the often much weaker automatic weapons are additionally punished with low pick-up because they have to share the same values as DMRs despite using FAR more ammo.

There's plenty that Warframe could have done to differentiate weapons based on how they feel to fire and how they work mechanically. Instead, most weapons primarily differ by damage type, critical hit chance and status chance.

 

16 hours ago, SprinKah said:

Would really love for the grenades to deal something other than direct damage haha. It'd be nice for the Grineer to use flashbangs like the big Executioner with two Heks. 

Or the Corpus could you some of the mechanics from the traps and ordinances from brokers in the Index, like the Vortex thingy, or the tether thing. 

Agreed. Warframe already has quite a few different "grenade" types already, fired by a variety of enemies. Hand grenades could work as an area denial AoE damage patch ala Sapping Ospreys, or as a flashbang ala Denial Bursas, or a gravity pull grenade like those cubes in the Index, or a nullification field, etc. And yes, some of those would be annoying, but I learned something important about that from Payday 2. If you let players identify and shoot the grenade to disable it, the mechanic feels a LOT less punishing and cheap. The PD2 forums were awash in nearly daily "GOD DAMN FLASHBANGS!!!" threads until they were changed to beep, flash and be destructible within 3 seconds. Those threads dropped overnight, and eventually all but entirely disappeared. To me, the reason is clear. Systems which provide a wealth of player feedback and sufficient tools to react to and negate threats rarely feel cheap even if they're generally unforgiving.

Warframe grenades need a LOT more player feedback and SOME way to negate them beyond running away if we want them to feel like a legitimate gameplay mechanic, rather than the unnecessary annoyance they are now.

[Drasiel]

Grenades are annoying if I'm shooting my gun I can't hear them at all. They need way better visual indicators for them. 

[Showerwalker]

18 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

K, my weapon has 20 accuracy. 20 what? How does accuracy even work?

I like how I'm 2600hrs in and this is still what's in my mind every time. And by now I usually just ignore it. TBH the whole stat UI is stupid, if only they improved on the readability instead of the visuals. Here's an idea, colour code the stats, MOBAs like LOL does it, because they know stats are important. While they're at it, divide them with lines, so crit stats is in 1 section, status in another, basic by itself.

[Steel_Rook]

5 hours ago, Showerwalker said:

I like how I'm 2600hrs in and this is still what's in my mind every time. And by now I usually just ignore it.

You know what the best part is? I'm almost positive those numbers are actually a modifier to host of hidden, weapon-specific bullet spread stats and very likely not comparable from one gun to the next. Payday 2 was notorious for that. Used to be your "accuracy" would cap at 18, which was then run through a formula to become a multiplier (0 being *2, 18 being *0.1), which was then applied to a weapon's spread in degrees. And a weapon's spread in degrees varied from one to the next, and also varied based on whether you were moving, crouching or aiming down sights, and by a fair amount. They tweaked that system later on and mostly standardised spread... So now I can complain about how every other weapon has its own recoil profile but we only have a single "Stability" stat which works pretty much the same way...

I'm of the opinion that video games need to give players full disclosure on what stats mean and not automatically roll stats together. If need be, hide that behind an options toggle or move it to a separate menu, just... Please don't make me guess as to how my build actually works. And please try to design your systems to function in a sane fashion. No more nonsense like Shotgun Status Chance spiking from ~30% per pellet at 99% in the menu to 100% per pellet with 100% on the menu. It's not simpler for players, it's straight up misleading. Keep players informed, give us direct feedback. If we make mistakes, it should be our fault, rather than the game's fault for keeping us in the dark. And for crap's sake, not make me go to a Wiki to figure out basic mechanics of how my gun works!

[(PSN)jaggerwanderer]

I don't mind how grenades works in this game. My problem is how often my pet just likes to sit in the blast radius with disregard to it's own health. For that matter, shouldn't pet AI have cover mechanics when low health? The enemies have it. Hate seeing my pets tanking the fire.

[SordidDreams]

12 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I don't feel that weapon reloading is oudated in any way.

My point isn't that it's outdated, my point is that it's too modern. I want to go to the 'outdated' old-school system of never having to reload your gun, a system used in games like Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D. Those were amazingly fun fast-paced shooters with plenty of wacky guns that felt very unique and distinct from each other despite never needing a reload. Gun reloading was introduced by a later generation of games with slow-paced gameplay and pretentions to realism, like the old WW2-based Call of Duty and Medal of Honor. WF has far more in common with the old frantic doom-clones than it does with the modern slow 'realistic' shooters, so why it's borrowing mechanics from the latter is a mystery to me.

Edited May 31, 2019 by SordidDreams

[Demeraire]

Just got one shotted in today's Phobos mobile defense as I ran across a grenade too that was beyond weird.

[Steel_Rook]

18 hours ago, SordidDreams said:

My point isn't that it's outdated, my point is that it's too modern. I want to go to the 'outdated' old-school system of never having to reload your gun, a system used in games like Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D. Those were amazingly fun fast-paced shooters with plenty of wacky guns that felt very unique and distinct from each other despite never needing a reload. Gun reloading was introduced by a later generation of games with slow-paced gameplay and pretentions to realism, like the old WW2-based Call of Duty and Medal of Honor. WF has far more in common with the old frantic doom-clones than it does with the modern slow 'realistic' shooters, so why it's borrowing mechanics from the latter is a mystery to me.

Eh, not really. Reloading guns was present as far back as Half-Life and Sin, neither of which particularly claims to be realistic despite using some real guns. Hell, even the 1998 Unreal has weapon reloading. Plus you can make the same argument about alternate fire modes. Doom and Quake don't have them, older Unreal Tournament games do. Personal preference being what it is, I find games without a reload mechanic to be far too simplistic and prone to button-mashing spam-fire. I played my fair share of Quake 3 Arena, UT99, UT2004, etc. but I don't really miss those games. My reflexes ain't what they used to be, for one thing, so constant double-jumping and rocket-jumping no longer appeals to me. And besides, I just like the balance which can be had with magazine sizes and reload speeds.

Take the iconic Half-Life SPAS shotgun, for example. It's hokey and doesn't work like the real weapon does, but it combines both a manual pump mechanic and a per-shell reload mechanic to create a really powerful but also really fiddly weapon. Or take Half-Life: Opposing Forces and its M60. A tremendously powerful weapon with a large magazine which you could spam-fire for extended periods of time... But be ready for an abnormally long reload when you do. There's also the... I forget what it's called, but the "fish gun" from the same game. While generally unremarkable (it's a 5-shot grenade launcher), Gearbox got a lot of mileage out of creating unique animations for feeding the fish as a means of reloading it. Reload animations are a great way to give otherwise outlandish weapons a bit more verisimilitude, a feeling that these aren't just clown guns made from painted cardboard, but actual devices with some defined mechanics of operation even if we don't know exactly what they are.

Take the Tetra, for instance. It's a weird gun with a cross-shaped barrel. Could be anything out of Zenoclash or Kin Dza Daz. However, you'll notice that each quadrant breaks off at 25% ammo and the entire barrel assembly is removed and replaced during reload. I don't know what that means for Corpus science, but that right there makes a silly cartoon physics gun feel ever so slightly more physical. A lot of the Corpus guns are like that, with major sections of them sliding out of position in order to extract one magazine and then snapping back into place in order to prime the weapon for subsequent shots. Then you have the likes of Unreal 2, where reload is used creatively. The assault rifle, for instance, doesn't run out of magazine but it builds up "a nasty dust" that has to be periodically vented with a short animation. Limitations and defined mechanics make bizarre alien technology believeable. By contrast, a lot of the old Doom and Quake weapons look positively silly - one step removed from your average Heretic magic wand.

And then there's the other side of this. You criticise weapons retaining reload mechanics due to realism, but not weapons retaining ammo for essentially the same reason? Why not remove the concept of ammo entirely and simply limit weapons by magazine capacity, instead? This removes the need to scavenge for drops and means you can use your most powerful weapon all of the time. Surely that would make for an even more "fun fast-paced shooter?" In fact, we don't have to speculate. Overwatch does exactly this. Everyone's guns have infinite ammo - a decision they made early on when they were still copying TF2. And the result is a shooter with an emphasis on mobility, positioning and ability use, rather than managing an ammo pool.

There's no one right way to do guns in video games, and reloading certainly isn't some kind of step backwards, sacrificing gameplay on the altar of realism. Ammo limitations do that far more than reloads. It depends on the game you're trying to create. Warframe is not a PvP Arena Shooter. It's a PvE Horde Shooter with aspirations of having a robust and extensive RPG system underpinning everything else. When you're doing RPG mechanics, it helps to have as many different mechanics both for the sake of weapon variety and for the sake of weapon modding. Remove reloading and you remove the concept of magazine size, reload speed and the various weapon abilities to dump an entire magazine in a single action. You slash a lot of the moddability, as well, further pushing players into just modding for damage. Having more aspects to a weapon, all of them player-mutable, makes for more compelling modding, especially if players can tweak actual in-game gun handling rather than just "over time" stats. RPGs benefit from more mechanics, not less.

[SordidDreams]

47 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

Eh, not really. Reloading guns was present as far back as Half-Life and Sin, neither of which particularly claims to be realistic despite using some real guns. Hell, even the 1998 Unreal has weapon reloading.

All of those games are later than the games I named, and if you don't see how HL and Sin are more realistic than Doom with its space demons, Quake with its knights, and DN3D with its pig cops, I don't know what to tell you. Medal of Honor came out in 1999, by the way.

If you want to argue about who came up with gun reloading, I have to point to the 1994 System Shock. And oh look, that's another slow-paced game with more emphasis on immersion than on action. Though I do have to say SS did reloads way better than any other game I've played, namely they're instant but not automatic. Coupled with the fact that each gun has two different types of ammo you can (and should) switch between, that adds a lot of depth and makes you pay attention to your ammo without interrupting the pace of combat too much.

47 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

My reflexes ain't what they used to be, for one thing, so constant double-jumping and rocket-jumping no longer appeals to me.

But constant bullet jumping does?

47 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

Take the iconic Half-Life SPAS shotgun, for example. It's hokey and doesn't work like the real weapon does, but it combines both a manual pump mechanic and a per-shell reload mechanic to create a really powerful but also really fiddly weapon.

The real SPAS does have a pump mode. There's not a lot of point to using it in pump mode with lethal ammo, but maybe Freeman's a nerd who doesn't know how to switch it to semi-auto or something.

47 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

Or take Half-Life: Opposing Forces and its M60. A tremendously powerful weapon with a large magazine which you could spam-fire for extended periods of time... But be ready for an abnormally long reload when you do.

And that's a good thing... why, exactly? Because to me that reads "you can have a ton of fun for a while shooting baddies, but then you have to take a break for no good reason". I can see the point of reloading in a PvP shooter, where you have to be conscious of where your opponents are and time your reloads in such a way that they can't take advantage of your momentary defenselessness. But in PvE games? AI enemies are universally braindead, they don't pay attention to how much you're shooting and they don't put pressure on you when they know you're running low. Stepping around a corner is enough to provide complete safety. It's not interesting and doesn't make the game more fun, it's just an abrupt mandatory pause.

47 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

Reload animations are a great way to give otherwise outlandish weapons a bit more verisimilitude, a feeling that these aren't just clown guns made from painted cardboard, but actual devices with some defined mechanics of operation even if we don't know exactly what they are.

You can have reload animations without a reload gameplay mechanic. They can be implemented as idle animations for when there are no enemies nearby, for example.

47 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

Why not remove the concept of ammo entirely and simply limit weapons by magazine capacity, instead? This removes the need to scavenge for drops and means you can use your most powerful weapon all of the time. Surely that would make for an even more "fun fast-paced shooter?" In fact, we don't have to speculate. Overwatch does exactly this. Everyone's guns have infinite ammo - a decision they made early on when they were still copying TF2. And the result is a shooter with an emphasis on mobility, positioning and ability use, rather than managing an ammo pool.

So, a lot like Warframe, then? I agree, removing ammo altogether wouldn't be a bad idea either. Especially since ammo pickups are so abundant in WF as to render ammo capacity meaningless on all but a handful of weapons anyway.

47 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

Remove reloading and you remove the concept of magazine size, reload speed and the various weapon abilities to dump an entire magazine in a single action. You slash a lot of the moddability, as well, further pushing players into just modding for damage. Having more aspects to a weapon, all of them player-mutable, makes for more compelling modding, especially if players can tweak actual in-game gun handling rather than just "over time" stats.

That sounds compelling at first, but I can't help but notice that the promised benefits don't seem to materialize in WF. Everyone mods for damage anyway, and all the weird and quirky weapons are generally considered useless. Not to mention that you could still have the "dump the mag" alt-fire modes even with infinite ammo and no reloads, being simply "dump X rounds, weapon becomes unable to fire for Y seconds after". You could even have a reload animation play during that time.

47 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

RPGs benefit from more mechanics, not less. 

It's a good thing Warframe is not an RPG, then.

Edited June 1, 2019 by SordidDreams

[Steel_Rook]

19 hours ago, SordidDreams said:

And that's a good thing... why, exactly? Because to me that reads "you can have a ton of fun for a while shooting baddies, but then you have to take a break for no good reason". I can see the point of reloading in a PvP shooter, where you have to be conscious of where your opponents are and time your reloads in such a way that they can't take advantage of your momentary defenselessness. But in PvE games? AI enemies are universally braindead, they don't pay attention to how much you're shooting and they don't put pressure on you when they know you're running low. Stepping around a corner is enough to provide complete safety. It's not interesting and doesn't make the game more fun, it's just an abrupt mandatory pause. 

Because it enforces pacing and tasks the player with keeping mental track of their ammo, if not in precise amount then at least in terms of how long they can shoot. While PvE enemies might not be as aggressive as PvP players, getting caught out by a long reload with enemies mag-dumping into you is still not a good thing. An important part of playing weapons like that - those with large magazines and long reloads - is budgeting your shots and either clearing a space or disengaging briefly to go through the reload. I personally enjoy that kind of gameplay and the extra consideration it provides. An ebb and flow is part of compelling gameplay, as far as I'm concerned. A game where I might as well tape down my left mouse button (your average Serious Sam game, say) is not something I find terribly compelling. A mechanic need not be complex in order to be compelling.

 

20 hours ago, SordidDreams said:

So, a lot like Warframe, then? I agree, removing ammo altogether wouldn't be a bad idea either. Especially since ammo pickups are so abundant in WF as to render ammo capacity meaningless on all but a handful of weapons anyway.

Removing reloading AND ammo is highly reductive and leads to a very bare-bones, simplistic experience. At that point, you may as well remove recoil and bullet spread since you're basically designing a third person version of a bullet hell shooter. I mean, if that's what you enjoy then more power to you, but I personally have no interest in games like that. To me, they end up feeling too basic and low-rent to hold attention long-term. Actually, I'll give you an example. I found the much-praised Doom 4 to be fairly tedious for this precise reason. All of the attempts made to mimic Brutal Doom and streamline combat ended up making it feel simplistic and repetitive. The only reason the game's combat had any sort of staying power WAS its ammo capacity system forcing me to not just use the Chaingun and the Gauss Rifle the entire way through, as ammo for those was limited.

And as a side thought - ammo pick-ups in Warframe are are far from "abundant." Because DE chose to have fixed ammo pick-up per box type, high-damage low-capacity weapons like the Lex do have a wealth of ammo as the drops are balanced around larger capacity weapons. By contrast, however, low-damage high-capacity weapons like the Kohm always struggle to stay ammo positive as the drops are balanced around much smaller capacity weapons. What you're criticising isn't a flaw of "ammo," it's a flaw of how DE handle ammo pick-up mechanics.

 

20 hours ago, SordidDreams said:

That sounds compelling at first, but I can't help but notice that the promised benefits don't seem to materialize in WF. Everyone mods for damage anyway, and all the weird and quirky weapons are generally considered useless. Not to mention that you could still have the "dump the mag" alt-fire modes even with infinite ammo and no reloads, being simply "dump X rounds, weapon becomes unable to fire for Y seconds after". You could even have a reload animation play during that time.

Again, that's an issue with DE's modding system rather than the concept of reloading. There are very few mods which alter reload speed or magazine size, one per weapon which alters ammo capacity which isn't even exposed to players in the Arsenal, a small handful of Corrputed mods which slightly tweak accuracy and stability (usually for the worse) despite neither of those mechanics being communicated or explained to players and that's about it. In contrast, we have literal hundreds of mods which alter damage up and down, mess with critical hits, critical damage, status chance, damage types and generally alter DPS in an unambiguously upward direction. If given the choice, players are almost always going to optimise for damage, especially when trivially simplistic damage modding can result in a 25-fold increase in weapon damage.

The current modding system vastly over-rewards DPS calculations to the exclusion of everything else. Ammo economy can be addressed with a Carrier or simply by exploiting the flaws in the fixed ammo pick-up system and weapon handling rarely even matters. Few weapons are inaccurate enough to be hard to use at long distance and fewer still have any meaningful amount of recoil. Contrast this against a game like Payday 2, where damage mods are excessively rare and their effects severely limited, while all weapons have significant base spread and offer a substantial amount of recoil. All of a sudden, finding a weapon you can actually shoot straight becomes more important than modding for the highest damage possible.

 

20 hours ago, SordidDreams said:

It's a good thing Warframe is not an RPG, then.

It is, though. If not a pure RPG, then at least an action game with a very heavy RPG element. There's a reason why the majority of challenges this game has can be solved in the Arsenal long before one even sets foot in a mission. You don't defeat the Profit-Taker Orb by playing really well, having great aim and amazing resources. You beat it by matching or exceeding the gear check, whereupon victory is a foregone conclusion and the only challenge is not taking too long. I'm not arguing that that's a good thing - I prefer games solved through gameplay rather than stats - but it's hard to argue that RPG mechanics are not of paramount importance in Warframe, to the point where designing around them is critical.

[SordidDreams]

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

it enforces pacing

Pacing is already determined by the distribution of enemies. If you enter a large room filled with enemies, it's the game saying "now you're going to have a huge fight". When your mag runs out halfway through that fight, it's the game saying "but you have to take a break from it". It's the game contradicting itself.

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

An important part of playing weapons like that is budgeting your shots and disengaging briefly to go through the reload.

Yes, that is an important part of it, my point is that it's not a good part. It's like pit stops. Why do you think Mario Kart, Wipeout, and various other arcadey racing games don't have them? Yes, they're an important part of a real race (and any game attempting to realistically simulate one), but at the end of the day they're an unfun and uninteresting break in the action. If you don't go for realism, a racing game is better without them. Same with reloads in shooters.

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

Removing reloading AND ammo is highly reductive and leads to a very bare-bones, simplistic experience. At that point, you may as well remove recoil and bullet spread since you're basically designing a third person version of a bullet hell shooter. I mean, if that's what you enjoy then more power to you, but I personally have no interest in games like that. To me, they end up feeling too basic and low-rent to hold attention long-term.

I don't think that's quite the same thing. If you gave guns infinite ammo, they'd handle exactly the same as they do now (because, again, ammo is abundant anyway). If you removed recoil and spread, you'd turn everything into a laser gun.

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

ammo pick-ups in Warframe are are far from "abundant."

It's been literally years since I last ran out of ammo on anything other than the Kohm. So yes, they are abundant.

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

The current modding system vastly over-rewards DPS calculations to the exclusion of everything else.

"Damage too strong" and "reload too weak" are two ways of looking at the same issue.

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

It is, though. If not a pure RPG, then at least an action game with a very heavy RPG element. There's a reason why the majority of challenges this game has can be solved in the Arsenal long before one even sets foot in a mission. You don't defeat the Profit-Taker Orb by playing really well, having great aim and amazing resources. You beat it by matching or exceeding the gear check, whereupon victory is a foregone conclusion and the only challenge is not taking too long. I'm not arguing that that's a good thing - I prefer games solved through gameplay rather than stats - but it's hard to argue that RPG mechanics are not of paramount importance in Warframe, to the point where designing around them is critical. 

Eh, I guess that kinda depends on how you define RPG, then. WF does have a ton of stats to tweak, yes. It's very light on any roleplaying.

Edited June 2, 2019 by SordidDreams

[Steel_Rook]

2 hours ago, SordidDreams said:

Yes, that is an important part of it, my point is that it's not a good part. It's like pit stops. Why do you think Mario Kart, Wipeout, and various other arcadey racing games don't have them? Yes, they're an important part of a real race (and any game attempting to realistically simulate one), but at the end of the day they're an unfun and uninteresting break in the action. If you don't go for realism, a racing game is better without them. Same with reloads in shooters.

Yes, I'd argue it's a good part. Crucial, in fact, so as to prevent the game's pace from feeling homogenous. The reason you won't see a lot of pit management in arcade racers is because they rarely feature enough laps to merit that mechanic. A three-lap race doesn't have enough room for a full pit stop to take place without effectively making it unwinnable for the person who took it, but a 20-lap race? That has a lot finer granularity, a lot more room for everyone to make mistakes and a lot more room to catch up. It's not a matter of realism so much as a matter of scale, and Warframe's horde shooter design offers it plenty of scale.

You seem to be arguing that weapon reloading is somehow inherently unfun. While I'm not going to deny your feelings on the matter, I strongly disagree. I avoid games without weapon reloading because they feel simplistic and uninvolved to me. The complexity and added consideration brought on by ammo management and reloading are aspects of shooters that I personally enjoy, and won't readily accept them being painted as objectively negative.

 

2 hours ago, SordidDreams said:

It's been literally years since I last ran out of ammo on anything other than the Kohm. So yes, they are abundant.

I use the Carrier pet and I run out of ammo routinely. Even ignoring Archgun ammo considerations, certain weapons simply don't have a positive ammo economy without building for it via Ammo Mutation, an Ammo Case or one of the Ammo Pick-up auras. That right there is a significant consideration since a single mod slot dedicated to not running out of ammo takes a significant chunk out of that weapon's potential performance. I'm currently using a Prisma Angstrum and consistently run out of ammo because the weapon's design means a majority of its damage is wasted. That very aspect has a heavy impact on its build, thus is meaningful.

Ammo management is also highly prevalent in underpowered weapons. If a gun is incapable of killing enemies with few shots, it's going to start spending ammo well in excess of what it's getting back. If all you have is max-level min-maxed guns and you kill the majority of enemies with abilities then you're not going to run out of ammo, naturally. If, however, you're fighting armour-boosted or elemental-boosted enemies on a Sortie with a Warframe which offers no offensive assistance, then ammo starts becoming an issue even with Ammo Mutation.

One can always rely on having multiple weapons and switch to a their secondary when their primary runs low, and vice versa. Doing that, however, is already evidence of a significant effect on the gaming experience. It's a consideration. Alternately, one could simply strive for better trigger discipline, not firing in long bursts and taking careful aim. That right there disqualifies quite a few weapons which are naturally inaccurate or gain improved performance during long bursts. The Tenora and the Convectrix are good examples of this - both weapons I ran out of ammo with routinely before I fit them with Ammo Mutation.

How often you run out of ammo is not useful information absent any context of what weapons you use, how they're built, how you shoot and what your Warframes are capable of. Because my experience runs entirely contrary to yours, simply because my playstyle tends to favour machineguns, volume of fire and generally inelegant aim in return for faster reaction times. Consequently, I use a lot of ammo to kill stuff and need to make numerous concessions in order to keep my guns firing the majority of the time. Whether or not these systems are a factor FOR YOU doesn't mean they don't exist.

 

3 hours ago, SordidDreams said:

"Damage too strong" and "reload too weak" are two ways of looking at the same issue.

That distinction changes nothing. Most people slot for damage predominantly because the current implementation of modding gives it substantially greater returns and substantially greater flexibility in available mods in relation to modding weapons for handling. The reason I brought up Payday 2 was to highlight that this dynamic is a result of Warframe's unique balance paradigm, not an inherent aspect of reloading as a game system. Payday 2 offers fairly limited ability to mod weapons for damage, thus the majority of people tend to build for accuracy, reload and stability, usually in that order.

This is a bit like asking why more people don't use Projectile Flight Speed, then concluding it's because projectile weapons are a pointless mechanic and everything should be hitscan... Even though the actual reason is we literally have a single Projectile Flight Speed mod per weapon category, none of them offer particularly high percentages and the bulk of weapons are hitscan anyway. It's a factor of game design, not core game mechanics.

[SordidDreams]

4 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I'd argue it's a good part. Crucial, in fact, so as to prevent the game's pace from feeling homogenous.

See, I'd argue that reloading makes the pace feel fragmented. As I said before, the presence or absence of enemies is enough to control pacing. If the game puts enemies in front of me for me to kill but at the same time says "you can't shoot them", that's contradictory and unfun.

4 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

The reason you won't see a lot of pit management in arcade racers is because they rarely feature enough laps to merit that mechanic. A three-lap race doesn't have enough room for a full pit stop to take place without effectively making it unwinnable for the person who took it, but a 20-lap race? That has a lot finer granularity, a lot more room for everyone to make mistakes and a lot more room to catch up. It's not a matter of realism so much as a matter of scale, and Warframe's horde shooter design offers it plenty of scale. 

You seem to have a serious lack of understanding of how pit stops work. Everyone makes a pit stop during a race, there's no disadvantage to taking it, because all your opponents will too. Unless you're playing a serious sim where you can decide how many pit stops you take and what you do during them, but again, we're talking arcadey games. Though even in the context of realistic sims, you don't need pit stops. Remember Grand Prix Legends, one of the greatest F1 games of all time, simulating the '67 F1 season? No pit stops, no tire changes, no refuelling. Just like in real life at the time. Was the game any worse for it? Nope!

4 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

You seem to be arguing that weapon reloading is somehow inherently unfun. While I'm not going to deny your feelings on the matter, I strongly disagree. I avoid games without weapon reloading because they feel simplistic and uninvolved to me. The complexity and added consideration brought on by ammo management and reloading are aspects of shooters that I personally enjoy, and won't readily accept them being painted as objectively negative. 

Again, I agree in principle, but again, I find that the promised benefits do not materialize. There is no added consideration because, again, AI enemies are braindead and you can just reload whenever you want to with no consequences. A game is a series of interesting decisions. If a player's decision has no consequences, there's no point requiring the player to make it.

We seem to have very different ideas of what good design is. IMO a design is not good when there's nothing left to add, IMO a design is good when there's nothing left to remove.

4 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I use the Carrier pet and I run out of ammo routinely.

I would recommend working on your trigger discipline and your gun builds, then.

4 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

That distinction changes nothing. Most people slot for damage predominantly because the current implementation of modding gives it substantially greater returns and substantially greater flexibility in available mods in relation to modding weapons for handling. The reason I brought up Payday 2 was to highlight that this dynamic is a result of Warframe's unique balance paradigm, not an inherent aspect of reloading as a game system. Payday 2 offers fairly limited ability to mod weapons for damage, thus the majority of people tend to build for accuracy, reload and stability, usually in that order.

This is a bit like asking why more people don't use Projectile Flight Speed, then concluding it's because projectile weapons are a pointless mechanic and everything should be hitscan... Even though the actual reason is we literally have a single Projectile Flight Speed mod per weapon category, none of them offer particularly high percentages and the bulk of weapons are hitscan anyway. It's a factor of game design, not core game mechanics.

In general terms yes, you're right. However in specific WF terms, you're not. The projectile flight speed stat is indeed almost pointless in the context of WF precisely because there's almost no way to mod it. The fact that there's almost no way to mod it is what makes it pointless in the context of this one game that we're talking about. Same with reload.

Edited June 3, 2019 by SordidDreams

[Steel_Rook]

2 hours ago, SordidDreams said:

In general terms yes, you're right. However in specific WF terms, you're not. The projectile flight speed stat is indeed almost pointless in the context of WF precisely because there's almost no way to mod it. The fact that there's almost no way to mod it is what makes it pointless in the context of this one game that we're talking about. Same with reload. 

You're kind of moving the goal posts here, though, causing us to go full circle. We started from talking about how weapon reload is this obsolete mechanic which only serves to break the game's pacing and is only fit for simulator games, to I think arguing that it's still a legitimate game mechanic that Warframe does badly, and I see no reason to believe that even that's true. I disagree that reloading breaks the pace of combat. On the contrary - magazine capacity and reload speed set the pace of combat, differently depending on your weapon of choice. Just because you can, in theory, elect to reload at any time doesn't mean that you should. Reloading takes you out of the fight, often removing suppressing fire which keeps the enemy from shooting back and commits you to an interruptible action which may need to be repeated if you're not careful. Just because it might not be a meaningful mechanic TO YOU doesn't make it meaningless in general, especially since you've so far provided no real context on your in-game circumstances.

Even if you're using some kind of overpowered build which allows you to idle while being shot by enemies of all level and kill all of them at all levels in fewer shots than you get back out of boxes, the mere fact that you had to do that in the first place makes the mechanic meaningful. Throw all the snide comments about how I need to aim better and build better you want - they're simply proving my point. If reloading were a pointless mechanic, it would not affect gameplay and certainly wouldn't need me to build stronger guns and line up more headshots. And that's being generous and quietly ignoring weapons which are deliberately designed to be inaccurate and ammo inefficient. If you're viewing Warframe through all the ways one can break it, then literally every single aspect of its core gameplay loop is pointless.

And the core argument here isn't even true. There are very few ways to mod around Projectile Flight Speed, this true. This underpinning issue cannot be transposed over weapon reload, however. So no - not "same with reload." There are multiple weapon aspects which affect reload, from magazine size to reload speed to rate of fire to, yes, even DPS. Even ignoring DPS, there are multiple mods per weapon type for each of the other stats, most of which also interact with ammo capacity and and ammo pick-up. There are plenty of ways to mod for "reload," not to mention plenty of ways the result affects gameplay. As I said above, you've already argued the opposite by chiding me for needing "better trigger discipline and gun builds." Needing to both play better and build better or else suffer negative consequences is the exact opposite of "pointless."

Like I said - I can't really criticise you for your preferences. You prefer minimalistic design and simple gameplay mechanics. Fair enough. I see the designs you've cited in support of that preference as reductive and simplistic, however, and have no real interest in engaging with them. I'm not arguing that games like Doom are necessarily bad. They have their fans, as the frankly exceedingly reductive Doom 4 proved, so that's fair enough. But again, to argue that they're the only legitimate way to design video games and that everything else is "pointless" is not a stance I'm willing to tolerate, I'm sorry to say.

Yes, Warframe has issues making weapon modding for handling worth the cost of investment, that much is true. The solution, however, isn't throwing the baby out with the bathwater and ripping out core gameplay mechanics. Warframe's RPG mechanics benefit from having more complexity to weapon handling, not less.

[SordidDreams]

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

We started from talking about how weapon reload is this obsolete mechanic which only serves to break the game's pacing and is only fit for simulator games

No, that's a misrepresentation that you brought up and that I corrected once already. Please don't do it again, I have no interest in going in circles.

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I disagree that reloading breaks the pace of combat.

And yet....

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Reloading takes you out of the fight

So does it set the pace of combat or interrupt the combat? Because it can't do both.

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

often removing suppressing fire which keeps the enemy from shooting back

Say what? What game are you playing? Because it can't be WF, suppressing fire just isn't a thing that exists in WF due to, you guessed it, braindead AI.

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

commits you to an interruptible action which may need to be repeated if you're not careful

Again, what game are you playing? Because in WF you can totally interrupt your reload with a weapon swap, roll, or melee attack.

I pointed out several times already that the benefits you claimed reloading brings do not exist in Warframe. Instead of acknowledging that, you're just making up even more non-existent benefits.

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Even if you're using some kind of overpowered build which allows you to idle while being shot by enemies of all level and kill all of them at all levels in fewer shots than you get back out of boxes, the mere fact that you had to do that in the first place makes the mechanic meaningful. Throw all the snide comments about how I need to aim better and build better you want - they're simply proving my point. If reloading were a pointless mechanic, it would not affect gameplay and certainly wouldn't need me to build stronger guns and line up more headshots.

You're conflating max ammo capacity and gun reloading. Max ammo capacity is what does that, not gun reloading.

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

If you're viewing Warframe through all the ways one can break it, then literally every single aspect of its core gameplay loop is pointless.

It's a good thing I'm not doing that, then, isn't it?

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

And the core argument here isn't even true. There are very few ways to mod around Projectile Flight Speed, this true. This underpinning issue cannot be transposed over weapon reload, however. So no - not "same with reload." There are multiple weapon aspects which affect reload, from magazine size to reload speed to rate of fire to, yes, even DPS. Even ignoring DPS, there are multiple mods per weapon type for each of the other stats, most of which also interact with ammo capacity and and ammo pick-up. There are plenty of ways to mod for "reload," not to mention plenty of ways the result affects gameplay.

Hang on, so is flight speed like reload or isn't it? Because just one post ago you said "this is like asking why people don't use flight speed", implying that you see a similarity. When I said that yes, there is indeed a similarity, you've now done a 180 and claim there isn't one. So which is it? Was that last post supposed to be a "gotcha" moment or something, and since it turned out you played yourself, you're now arguing the opposite all of a sudden? Or what? I don't understand why you'd switch your stance so radically and so quickly.

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

As I said above, you've already argued the opposite by chiding me for needing "better trigger discipline and gun builds." Needing to both play better and build better or else suffer negative consequences is the exact opposite of "pointless." 

As I said above, that's a result of max ammo capacity, not of the need to reload.

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I see the designs you've cited in support of that preference as reductive and simplistic, however, and have no real interest in engaging with them. I'm not arguing that games like Doom are necessarily bad. They have their fans, as the frankly exceedingly reductive Doom 4 proved, so that's fair enough. But again, to argue that they're the only legitimate way to design video games and that everything else is "pointless" is not a stance I'm willing to tolerate, I'm sorry to say.

Then it's a good thing I'm not arguing that, isn't it? Once more for clarity: Realism-oriented mechanics belong in realistic games, and arcadey mechanics belong in arcadey games. Gun reloading is a realism-oriented mechanic. Warframe is not a realistic game. So, reloading does not belong in Warframe.

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Yes, Warframe has issues making weapon modding for handling worth the cost of investment, that much is true. The solution, however, isn't throwing the baby out with the bathwater and ripping out core gameplay mechanics. Warframe's RPG mechanics benefit from having more complexity to weapon handling, not less.

You've said that already, what you haven't explained is how and why this complexity that nobody really uses is beneficial. Simply saying that it isn't doesn't cut it, I'm afraid.

Edited June 3, 2019 by SordidDreams