New Gas City tileset, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways...

[Teridax68]

1. Vast, parkour-friendly tiles: More than any tileset before it, the new Corpus Gas City tileset lets the player launch themselves at the scenery and traverse it in interesting ways, with many different paths from one point to the next. This is due not only to the sheer size of the tiles, many of which can be directly compared to the older tileset, but also due to the added verticality to many of them.
2. Interactive environmental features: One one side, there are the new door lasers, which activate traps if tripped and encourage the player to react quickly in more interesting ways than simply rolling through laser doors, and on the other, there are a ton of tidbits in levels where activating panels draws up bridges, hacking other panels has the machinery in the tile detonate for a room-wide electric shock, and damaging certain bits of the environment throws out deadly gas clouds or jets of flame. Even the more standard barrel environmental hazards are far more diverse, thanks to the different elements they can release. All of this feels like a development upon older features such as secret hacking panels, explosive barrels, or even breakable glass in Corpus ships, except matured and made far more diverse and fun.
3. Secret puzzles with unique rewards: For those who don't know yet, not only does the new tileset have its own set of scannable fragments scattered across certain tiles, it also has environmental puzzles, where the player has to find and destroy a panel, then activate a number of secret switches in sequence to unlock a room that can give out Captura scenes, as well as special enemies that drop unique mods. This thread is one of the best resources I've seen for finding these secrets.
4. Truly diverse, three-dimensional combat: One of the advantages of the new tileset is not only its own verticality, but the new set of Vapos enemies, whose diverse abilities make for some of the most engaging combat I've had in a long time in Warframe. Many enemies have jetpacks that let them travel the spaced-out tiles with ease, Condors regularly drop in to attack the player from the air, and several of the nullifier enemies are melee, forcing the player to find a vantage point if they want to avoid getting disabled. The new Amalgam enemies themselves have an extremely diverse range of effects, all of which add new and interesting elements to gameplay that weren't really seen before in Warframe.
5. It just looks really good: In general, I believe Warframe is a really good-looking game, with the Plains and Vallis being prime showcases of pretty level design, and our own warframes being some of the most aesthetically-oriented characters in any videogame. Even with all this, the new Gas City tileset felt like a cut above: going back to some of the older tilesets, I noticed the difference in lighting and textures immediately, with the difference being especially jarring compared to, say, the Corpus Ship or Corpus Ice Planet tilesets. By comparison, it almost feels like running through plastic, and so because the new tileset has some of the most buttery smooth lighting, detail, and visual design I've seen in recent times. Congratulations to all the people who worked on the tech behind it.

In short, not only does the new tileset feel much more appropriate for Warframe's range of movement, it feels much more immersive thanks to the many different ways in which its tiles can be interacted with: despite still being made up of random blocks of mini-levels, the new levels on Jupiter feel far more dynamic and engaging. This is without even counting the enemies, whose specialized abilities and effects work incredibly well with the tileset to provide much deeper and more diverse combat than practically anywhere else in the game. On top of all this, the visuals are simply excellent. All of these are improvements that I feel should be the new standard for level design in Warframe, and the Jovian Concord I think has given us all the more of a sign that there are some older tilesets that could benefit immensely from some improvements. Railjack is coming up soon with reworks to Corpus and Grineer ships, and just imagine how mouth-wateringly good it would be if, say, the Grineer Forest or Corpus Infested Ship tilesets could be if a similar degree of scale and quality were applied to them.

Going forward, what I'd like to see from future tilesets, including tileset reworks, would be the following:

1. Huge tiles with lots of verticality: If we're going to be moving really fast and parkouring all over the place, we best be given levels that match our mobility.
2. Interactive environments: Even something as simple as a switch panel to draw a bridge is enough to make a tile feel far less static. My one criticism of the new tileset's features is that some of them are a bit slow to set up relative to their impact (few people are going to hack multiple panels just for a moderately-damaging electrical discharge in the heat of combat), and ultimately they're still tied to just one tile. It'd be interesting to find more ways of having actions on one tile affect the others through environmental interaction, e.g. by finding the control room on a ship and messing with its environmental regulators (e.g. gravity, temperature, etc.).
3. Secrets: Secret locations and puzzles are great for a number of reasons: they add depth to a tileset, by making us feel like there's more going on below the surface, they make us study the environments and appreciate them more, and in the right circumstances, they also prevent us from going too fast by giving us reason to explore. Embedding secrets into the environment has worked wonders each time, so I feel there's no reason not to make that a standard, even if each tileset should obviously have its own secrets and its own ways of unlocking them.
4. Updated enemies: The new Vapos enemies I think show that Warframe can and should evolve beyond its current enemy roster, most of which are just cookie-cutter goons with guns. Widening the variety of enemies, giving them more diverse tools, and letting them navigate tilesets in three dimensions I think would make combat in Warframe far more engaging, unique, and varied than ever before, and finally start unlocking the game's potential to deliver combat that no other game is equipped to provide. The fact that Vapos enemies feel far less irritating than the Terra units on Venus, and so due to a stark reduction in crowd control effects, I think also shows that DE has done a good job in learning from the mistakes made there.
5. Updated visuals: This should probably go without saying, but DE's current tech is lightyears ahead of what it used to be, and every time it is used the game I think truly feels like it has AAA-grade graphics. No reason not to apply it liberally to every upcoming tileset release and rework.

TL;DR: I think the updated Corpus Gas City tileset is by far the best in the game, and the gameplay it features is exactly the direction Warframe needs to take for its future level and enemy design, with emphasis on verticality, parkour, diverse and unique mechanics, and deeper interaction with the environment. If this standard were applied to every other tileset, Warframe could enter another revolution, as had happened with the release of the Plains of Eidolon. Congratulations on an excellent update!

Edited June 3, 2019 by Teridax68