Approach to Challenge in Warframe

[MysticWubs]

As we all know the A.I. in Warframe is not very smart, yes it could use some work, but A.I. improvements will not make Warframe far more challenging. Why is it that the open world bosses in Warframe are fairly easy? Well, what I've come to realize is that challenge truly comes from the mechanics/environment. I've come to this conclusion by playing the game "Destiny". Love or hate it, I think most people can agree the raid activities in the Destiny franchise are top tier. What is it that makes these activities so challenging? The A.I.? The Boss' "tankyness"? No it's the mechanics of the encounters. The game is challenging when you have a group of players trying to dodge and weave through obstacles, platforming or trying to solve puzzles through communication. It's only through a sense of urgency something is challenging. I believe an activity that pairs complex mechanics with the slaughtering of enemies could be an essential part of future Warframe's identity. The game fails to bring in many new players, but with activities like raids, I believe a new player's time investment would be justified. Players simply aren't investing much time because they feel there is no end goal. Endgame should be at the core of any MMO. Yes, Warframe might not fit your definition of MMO, but Warframe falls closely into that category.

Many people claim Warframe's "endgame" is building a perfect frame, but the question I have for those people is: Do you enjoy sitting watching paint dry? Of course with the addition of a challenging "endgame", builds would still be just as effective. In my opinion, the current Warframe experience has the strongest foundation for an "end game" I've ever seen, yet is completely devoid of such. People like me play the game for the potential Warframe has. Warframe's future desperately needs an "endgame", for what really makes a game is the "endgame". I believe the team at "Bungie" has cracked the code to what the "endgame" experience is. "Bungie's" "Templar" from "The Vault of Glass" is a good example of how an activity can be challenging through the use of the environment/mechanics. The "Templar" (Boss) sits invulnerable shooting powerful shots at your team attempting to defend a series of 3 towers. The enemies prove to be a challenge, but your team is successful, taking down the boss' initial shielding. The boss then disappears and now your team has to take down a series of auras. The auras are set to wipe your team if you do not destroy them in the allotted time. Through good communication your team is barely successful. Now a shield spawns. All is peaceful until a member of your team picks it up. The boss spawns back in. The boss is still invulnerable, but now in addition to the bosses powerful shots, the boss brings a wipe mechanic. Your team realizes if they do not get "cleansed" by the shield wielder before the boss screeches, you all die, but the shield holder is also responsible for another task. The shield charges over time and can shoot a blast that takes down the boss' shielding for a short duration. The entirety of the team must clear enemies quickly, getting ready to damage the boss. The shield wielder counts down and shoots the boss. As the boss' shield goes down, the shield operator uses the shield's 2nd ability to protect the team from rapid fire boss shots. The team takes down only a fraction of the bosses health. The boss' shielding goes back up and it teleports to a new location. The team is forced to quickly move to a new position repeating the same process. I believe Warframe's approach to challenge should come from hectic encounters that prioritize on tasks, all while killing enemies. 

Edited July 11, 2019 by MysticWubs

[Volinus7]

The purpose of unfair difficulties in Warframe like a swarm of ohko bullet sponge is to try to push players into building meta cheese strategies like unlimited invisibility, invulnerability, constant CC, which require "grinding" it's not about "challenges".

Warframe is a gratification centric game, you shouldn't expect anything more than "how many times you have to click per reward".

[MysticWubs]

I didn't say remove anything. The two can coexist. Seems like cookie clicker is your type of "game".

Edited July 10, 2019 by MysticWubs

[Volinus7]

42 minutes ago, MysticWubs said:

I didn't say remove anything. The two can coexist. Seems like cookie clicker is your type of "game".

Warframe is the cookie clicker type of game.

[Teridax68]

I can agree with what the OP is saying, with the caveat being that whichever mechanics Warframe expects to test us on need to be coherent with the rest of the game. The core problem with Trials prior to their removal was that most of their "challenges" required players to sit still on pressure pads, or navigate narrow, linear corridors while completing incredibly poorly-conveyed puzzles that usually required the aid of a raid veteran or a wiki page. They are a good example of how not to do challenge in Warframe, and I think once we get Trials back, or similar degrees of challenge, they should test our ability to act and think on the move, our mastery of the parkour system, and our ability to shoot accurately while in rapid motion, among other core Warframe skills.

[MysticWubs]

3 hours ago, Volinus7 said:

Warframe is the cookie clicker type of game.

You are completely missing the point. Warframe's foundation might be very grindy, but all the grinding needs purpose (AKA endgame activities like raids). You're obviously the type of player to be fine with DE only adding new weapons and frames. Let's not add meaningful content, because you know, that retracts from the core experience. You must hate new open worlds and the upcoming "Empyrean" expansion.

[Xzorn]

Challenge comes in countless forms.

Challenge can be dodging an attack, not standing in fire, using cover, keeping track of buff timers, proper DPS rotations, completing any number objectives, keeping another player alive, even demanding the player perform head-shots. All of these countless elements can combine together as well for further challenge.

Thing is Warframe lacks any Difficulty and without difficulty Challenge cannot exist because it can be ignored. I don't need to dodge something if I can take hits without remorse. I can stand in fire if it hardly hurts me, I don't need to head-shot if the enemy dies instantly either way. Difficulty in it's purest form is simply a numbers game.

Essentially any challenges presented in Warframe will feel at best like a chore and usually trivial beyond the need for attention from the player. This is all due to the game taking place in a kiddie pool of sorts. Nothing punishes players for doing something wrong and the numbers simply aren't there through difficulty if they did. Warframe has become a game where you can do everything wrong and still win because of it's complete lack of difficulty.

[DatDarkOne]

8 minutes ago, Xzorn said:

Nothing punishes players for doing something wrong and the numbers simply aren't there through difficulty if they did.

Which I feel should change.  Punish players for doing things that lack common sense.  Things like have a spy mission fail on the first unsuccessful hack or make the other vaults be timed after a hacking failure.  Or maybe respawn a downed player back at mission start if they don't get rez'd.  

Just ideas I'm throwing out there.  😀 

[Steel_Rook]

15 minutes ago, DatDarkOne said:

Which I feel should change.  Punish players for doing things that lack common sense.  Things like have a spy mission fail on the first unsuccessful hack or make the other vaults be timed after a hacking failure.  Or maybe respawn a downed player back at mission start if they don't get rez'd.  

Not successfully hacking a Spy Vault isn't "lacking common sense." It's a simple mistake. Failing the entire mission or putting it in a state which is effectively unwinnable anyway is neither difficulty nor challenge. It's a hair-trigger fail condition which the game absolutely does not need. Penalising players for making mistakes is one thing. Outright failing entire missions over simple mistakes is entirely unconstructive and produces a highly irritating experience long-term. Jupiter Remastered used to let enemies trigger Vault alarms before the player has even accessed the vault. While that caused me to fail a few missions, it also felt like the game randomly decided to #*!% me over, which ended up spoiling the experience entirely.

In general, viewing "challenge" as a system of penalties for not playing "correctly" is dead on arrival anyway. That's not challenge, that's just an optimisation problem which typically ends up having one "meta" solution which robs players of choice or variety. If you want challenge, look towards rebalancing combat such that all tools a player brings with them are if not necessary then at least useful. If I only ever use 1 of my 4 weapons and 0-1 of my 4 abilities, then that's an issue because the game's variety has no meaning.

[Volinus7]

1 hour ago, MysticWubs said:

You are completely missing the point. Warframe's foundation might be very grindy, but all the grinding needs purpose (AKA endgame activities like raids). You're obviously the type of player to be fine with DE only adding new weapons and frames. Let's not add meaningful content, because you know, that retracts from the core experience. You must hate new open worlds and the upcoming "Empyrean" expansion.

Its purpose is to keep you playing the same thing over and over? 

It's efficient because making many contents is harder than making few contents and tell players to repeat them X times. 

[Volinus7]

1 hour ago, Xzorn said:

snip

I think OP hasn't reached your level of trivialization yet.

Perhaps you should show him this...

For better understanding...

 

Stats discrepancies in Warframe is huge and because DE really really don't want to split meta maxed out players from the rest, levels tuning frequently ended up normalized at the middle of the hill(of course the hill is not symmetric) which gives players two different tastes "steamrolling" or "OHKO".

Edited July 10, 2019 by Volinus7

[Xzorn]

11 hours ago, Volinus7 said:

I think OP hasn't reached your level of trivialization yet.

Perhaps you should show him this...

For better understanding...

 

Honestly I think even that's not fully exploring the massive spectrum. They left an hour in and sadly it takes 2-3h+ for Solo.

Groups are pretty much impossible to challenge these days with all the crazy things we can stack together.

OP spoke of a boss doing Powerful shots but what's that translate to in Warframe? The only way to make such a thing is the boss doing True damage and DE seems to avoid anything similar to that so one frame's powerful shot is another frame's afk. I made a trash post video a while ago making fun of this situation on Profit-Taker.

Spoiler

 

DE's attempts to create "Challenging" bosses does nothing but exacerbate faults in the game and remove play options.

Boss power attacks need to hurt every frame regardless of eHP and they also need to respect abilities of frames that rely on them to survive.

...and that's just the surface layer of problems on how they approach bosses and content Challenge / Difficulty.

Edited July 11, 2019 by Xzorn

[Autongnosis]

Il y a 2 heures, moostar95 a dit :

I've talked about this before. But if DE were to get any proper challenge to the game. The community needs to accept it and stop whining. The talk of warframe being a cookie clicker is true. I sometimes sleep walk my self playing a elite alert. 

Back in the day i used to joke about self damaging guns being more dangerous than enemies. 

I stopped making that joke. Cause it's no longer one. 

[DatDarkOne]

6 minutes ago, Autongnosis said:

Back in the day i used to joke about self damaging guns being more dangerous than enemies. 

I stopped making that joke. Cause it's no longer one. 

And then we have topics like the following...

 

[MJ12]

8 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

I can agree with what the OP is saying, with the caveat being that whichever mechanics Warframe expects to test us on need to be coherent with the rest of the game. The core problem with Trials prior to their removal was that most of their "challenges" required players to sit still on pressure pads, or navigate narrow, linear corridors while completing incredibly poorly-conveyed puzzles that usually required the aid of a raid veteran or a wiki page. They are a good example of how not to do challenge in Warframe, and I think once we get Trials back, or similar degrees of challenge, they should test our ability to act and think on the move, our mastery of the parkour system, and our ability to shoot accurately while in rapid motion, among other core Warframe skills.

I agree with your comment on how raids should emphasize core Warframe skills over memorizing puzzle mechanics but I have some bad news about Destiny raids...

I've played a lot of Destiny 2, and I ended up drifting away from it when I realized that I was spending hours and hours of grinding to effectively stay still in an aggravating Red Queen's Race. But in my experience literally every Destiny 2 Raid gets their difficulty entirely from the fact that you need to figure out poorly explained mechanics by either trial and error or by someone who is familiar with them telling you how things work, and you get the occasional DPS check in between these mechanics that's actually pretty trivial so long as you've ground your way to the difficulty level of the Raid and have access to some useful raw-DPS power weapons for bosses. Bosses are just DPS checks that have puzzle phases in between, with big weakspots that take away most if not all need for proficiency with the core combat mechanics. Finally, because raids generally require every player to execute their part correctly and make it very hard for a handful of skilled players to carry players through content (via limited revives, death timers, and commonly having mechanics that require every team member to be an active participant) they're tailor-made to create salt because your raid progression is often limited by the least proficient player in the team. It's a recipe tailor-made to create salt.

I personally think that the problem is because of how Bungie wanted to design the raids, which is basically "the first time you do them they're going to take hours and hours, but when you get used to how they work you should be able to farm one in thirty minutes." This means that the only sort of difficulty that you can actually have is one-off and poorly conveyed puzzle mechanics. But the problem is that this is what people often want from raids-they want that sort of bragging rights reward where they can talk about how they're clearing something that normally takes two hours in thirty minutes. IMO, you can have either farmable raids, raids that take a ton of time to beat in the first run, or raids without poorly-explained puzzle mechanics, choose two.

6 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Not successfully hacking a Spy Vault isn't "lacking common sense." It's a simple mistake. Failing the entire mission or putting it in a state which is effectively unwinnable anyway is neither difficulty nor challenge. It's a hair-trigger fail condition which the game absolutely does not need. Penalising players for making mistakes is one thing. Outright failing entire missions over simple mistakes is entirely unconstructive and produces a highly irritating experience long-term. Jupiter Remastered used to let enemies trigger Vault alarms before the player has even accessed the vault. While that caused me to fail a few missions, it also felt like the game randomly decided to #*!% me over, which ended up spoiling the experience entirely.

In general, viewing "challenge" as a system of penalties for not playing "correctly" is dead on arrival anyway. That's not challenge, that's just an optimisation problem which typically ends up having one "meta" solution which robs players of choice or variety. If you want challenge, look towards rebalancing combat such that all tools a player brings with them are if not necessary then at least useful. If I only ever use 1 of my 4 weapons and 0-1 of my 4 abilities, then that's an issue because the game's variety has no meaning.

I do amateur RPG design and I think the most important lessons PvE game designers should take away from pen and paper RPGs are these:

1. The opponent in a PvE game is meant to lose. The assumption should explicitly be that the opponent puts up enough of a fight to make the player excited and add tension, but that the opponent is going to lose. "Challenge" exists primarily to obfuscate the fact that the player is going to win. It's like a movie-you know that the main character is probably going to beat the bad guy at the end, the question is how that's going to happen. When you get swarmed by 50 super hardcore enemies, the main thing that keeps you going is that underneath the challenge, you know you're going to win, so the question is how you get from the current state to the conclusion, which is 'you beat the enemies, good job.'

2. As a corollary to (1), for maximum enjoyment, fail-forward mechanics are a good thing. Each failure should help you advance, somehow. This can be as direct as giving you partial progress if you fail (like how Warframe keeps your affinity gains when you fail a mission), or as indirect as racing games where failure gives you additional knowledge of the track or Fromsoft's games giving you tools to hard counter enemies and letting you learn which tools hard counter which enemy actions over time. But either way, failure should always be an experience which equips you to better win next time. The problem that happens a lot in video game design is that people often make failure a result of lack of execution skill, rather than lack of knowledge of specific circumstances, which goes against the fail-forward philosophy. Execution skill develops a lot slower, which is why professional athletes (including pro gamers) practice so much, and one of the reasons fighting games are pretty niche is because of the ridiculously high levels of execution skill that can be reached and can give you an advantage.

3. The more often a punishment happens, the less dangerous it should be. The more dangerous a punishment, the less often it should happen. If getting hit once is instant death, your game needs to make it relatively easy to avoid being hit at all. If you can take a ton of hits, the game can make it impossible to avoid being shot. So if you want to make failing a single hack instant failure, you are almost certainly going to end up balancing the mission around the understanding that failing a hack will basically never happen. Ironically, by making a game mechanic more punishing, you have actually ended up made the game easier.

[MysticWubs]

7 hours ago, Volinus7 said:

Its purpose is to keep you playing the same thing over and over? 

It's efficient because making many contents is harder than making few contents and tell players to repeat them X times. 

Do you even english bro? I literally can't understand you. I can't fathom why people like you want Warframe to stay the same. Look at the "Destiny" franchise. It has activities, like Warfarme, where you grind, and then it has activities where all your grinding has a purpose; end game. The two can coexist, I don't understand your argument. I think a more apprioprate game for you would be "Anthem". It's very bare bones and void of content.

[Volinus7]

12 hours ago, MysticWubs said:

Do you even english bro? I literally can't understand you. I can't fathom why people like you want Warframe to stay the same. Look at the "Destiny" franchise. It has activities, like Warfarme, where you grind, and then it has activities where all your grinding has a purpose; end game. The two can coexist, I don't understand your argument. I think a more apprioprate game for you would be "Anthem". It's very bare bones and void of content.

No, I didn't argue with you. Just to clarify that Warframe might not be what you want. 

You aren't the first and only person posting about the lack of challenge in WF forum. This kind of threads started way back in 2014 talking about the same thing. You might want to present DE the whole data sheets about how to overhaul their game at this point. 

 

Don't mix grinding with adding new contents, DE could just create a tiny amount of new contents, procedurally shuffle them and ask you to play it up to 100000 times for a single reward, since you want the reward you has the purpose to do it 100000 times right?, also new contents duh.

Have you ever wondered how do devs decide how many times players have to repeat the same mission, the number of materials required, how long XP bars should be? Or you simply justify grinding because it yields something? 

 

If you read other comments, you might have some clues about how long have people who can pinpoint problems of WF been waiting for it to get better.  

Also don't forget some usual people who often rush into threads with the words "Challenge" and/or "Nerf" and post the same sentence "you're turning Warframe into a genetic shooter by your challenge/nerf". Be informed that some people really want Warframe to be "cookie clicker ish".

Edited July 11, 2019 by Volinus7

[Xzorn]

1 hour ago, MJ12 said:

1. The opponent in a PvE game is meant to lose. The assumption should explicitly be that the opponent puts up enough of a fight to make the player excited and add tension, but that the opponent is going to lose. "Challenge" exists primarily to obfuscate the fact that the player is going to win. It's like a movie-you know that the main character is probably going to beat the bad guy at the end, the question is how that's going to happen. When you get swarmed by 50 super hardcore enemies, the main thing that keeps you going is that underneath the challenge, you know you're going to win, so the question is how you get from the current state to the conclusion, which is 'you beat the enemies, good job.'

 

I feel there are exceptions to this concept. Thought admittedly most of them are in more RP types games over something like Warframe.

One major exception is a villain. One who the players hear about, come into brief contact with or get foiled by numerous times giving them an alternate purpose to what they've been doing. Players are intended to be the Heroes and of course should stand out among the rest but it's important to also give them that awed experience as they play. Skyrim does this with Alduin at the start of the game. Symphony of the Night does this by showing your true power only to take it away. Even something simple as town guards are essentially a fight players cannot always win until later on in the game. Realizing when it's best to fight and when not to is part of the punishment of players.

Not every fight needs to be a certain win. Some can be 50/50 but it's important to allow the player a means of escape, avoiding that fight or external means of improving their odds. Even then players are suborn and manage to surprise and you have to give them credit when it's due. Warframe fails at this tremendously. A point of concept would be something like low level players coming across a small human fort taken by a band of Ogres. There are still guard towers, some of the wooden walls intact and Ogres are notoriously stupid. If players went head on they'd lose but there are things in this situation which can improve their odds or they could take obvious advantage of Ogre stupidity and distract them to reach their goal inside the fort completely avoiding combat. The objective is often more important than the kill. Again something Warframe fails at esp when it comes to affinity gains.

When the objective is the kill. Then the fight must be made in the respect that a player should always win. Dungeon crawling and progression bosses being two obvious points to this. Still though adding elements of strategy to change the odds is always important. I still remember years ago I almost killed a group of lvl 5 players with Kobolds just because the circumstance of combat. The kobolds had elevation and cover making the fight considerably more difficult for an otherwise trivial enemy. The players went head on, thinking "meh Kobolds" and got wrecked because they didn't consider the circumstances of combat.

[Aldain]

I dunno, after looking at the Empyrean footage and the mechanical difference in scale for those missions I think DE is getting the right idea, or at least going in the right general direction.

The biggest thing Warframe lacks is MECHANICAL depth not so much skill based depth, I mean good players can dodge every bullet like they are Neo and once the enemies can't hit you there's nothing standing in the way of you turning them into potted ham. This is primarily because up until this point Warframe has been running on a numbers game, you can take one look at the Wolf of Saturn Six and see where that winds up going, a Billion Health Sandbag with a weapon glued to it and unkillable adds with the damage knob cranked to eleven, torn off and shot into the sun with a bazooka.

Missions also function in a similar fashion of zero mechanical depth; Spy missions are simple once you know how to do them (also Ivara) and other missions also have similar simplicity, which isn't inherently a bad thing, but has caused this feeling of perpetual unchanging grind which has left players hungry for...something more, even if nobody can agree on exactly what.

This is why I am hyped beyond belief for Empyrean because its something different, something that almost looks nothing like Warframe has up until this point, while still having several factors of the older systems present, showing not just progress, but EVOLUTION.

[DatDarkOne]

1 hour ago, Xzorn said:

 

I feel there are exceptions to this concept. Thought admittedly most of them are in more RP types games over something like Warframe.

One major exception is a villain. One who the players hear about, come into brief contact with or get foiled by numerous times giving them an alternate purpose to what they've been doing. Players are intended to be the Heroes and of course should stand out among the rest but it's important to also give them that awed experience as they play. Skyrim does this with Alduin at the start of the game. Symphony of the Night does this by showing your true power only to take it away. Even something simple as town guards are essentially a fight players cannot always win until later on in the game. Realizing when it's best to fight and when not to is part of the punishment of players.

Not every fight needs to be a certain win. Some can be 50/50 but it's important to allow the player a means of escape, avoiding that fight or external means of improving their odds. Even then players are suborn and manage to surprise and you have to give them credit when it's due. Warframe fails at this tremendously. A point of concept would be something like low level players coming across a small human fort taken by a band of Ogres. There are still guard towers, some of the wooden walls intact and Ogres are notoriously stupid. If players went head on they'd lose but there are things in this situation which can improve their odds or they could take obvious advantage of Ogre stupidity and distract them to reach their goal inside the fort completely avoiding combat. The objective is often more important than the kill. Again something Warframe fails at esp when it comes to affinity gains.

When the objective is the kill. Then the fight must be made in the respect that a player should always win. Dungeon crawling and progression bosses being two obvious points to this. Still though adding elements of strategy to change the odds is always important. I still remember years ago I almost killed a group of lvl 5 players with Kobolds just because the circumstance of combat. The kobolds had elevation and cover making the fight considerably more difficult for an otherwise trivial enemy. The players went head on, thinking "meh Kobolds" and got wrecked because they didn't consider the circumstances of combat.

That last part is the type of thing that I was referring to earlier.  There is almost nothing in Warframe that makes players consider the circumstances or combat or their actions.  

The only time the circumstances of of combat are really considered is during solo play is certain missions and/or types.  This is one of the main reasons I like playing solo and using a tactical frame like Ivara.  I have to THINK about things and how to utilize the tools I have to achieve my goal.  😀 

[Xzorn]

19 minutes ago, DatDarkOne said:

That last part is the type of thing that I was referring to earlier.  There is almost nothing in Warframe that makes players consider the circumstances or combat or their actions.  

The only time the circumstances of of combat are really considered is during solo play is certain missions and/or types.  This is one of the main reasons I like playing solo and using a tactical frame like Ivara.  I have to THINK about things and how to utilize the tools I have to achieve my goal.  😀 

 

Yea, it's important to get players to pay attention to the situation in front of them and not just hold left click and run through tilesets. I get that situation in Warframe but it's much higher in levels and as you said. Solo. Pretty much has to be Solo. Even something simple as when you're using a Viral + Blast Lenz and Notice an Ancient Healer isn't taking any damage. Why? Pay attention for a fraction of a second and you notice it's a Venomous Eximus and there's an Arson Eximus nearby sharing each others Aura.

At much high difficulty aka Level that situation will quickly kill you if you don't resolve it quickly.

I might be crazy but I've actually really enjoyed when a new Spy mission is released. Lua took me time to figure out and Jupiter, well less time since I think there's only 3 vault types but those first few attempts you're watching everything because unlike the older spy missions you can't just trip a laser and run to the console. It's why I make jokes about Rhino being the best Spy frame because you could just run through and ignore everything, purposely setting off alarms but still get the console data.

[Basalto]

16 hours ago, Volinus7 said:

The purpose of unfair difficulties in Warframe like a swarm of ohko bullet sponge is to try to push players into building meta cheese strategies like unlimited invisibility, invulnerability, constant CC, which require "grinding" it's not about "challenges".

Warframe is a gratification centric game, you shouldn't expect anything more than "how many times you have to click per reward".

You almost sound like the way I like talking about this game, just a bit more shameless. Can I consider you my spirit animal for a while?

[DatDarkOne]

37 minutes ago, Xzorn said:

It's why I make jokes about Rhino being the best Spy frame because you could just run through and ignore everything, purposely setting off alarms but still get the console data.

Exactly.  No consequences at all for doing something like that in a mission where you are suppose to be stealing something.  

[Xzorn]

3 hours ago, Aldain said:

The biggest thing Warframe lacks is MECHANICAL depth not so much skill based depth, I mean good players can dodge every bullet like they are Neo and once the enemies can't hit you there's nothing standing in the way of you turning them into potted ham. This is primarily because up until this point Warframe has been running on a numbers game.

 

I'm not sure about this. I feel Warframe has a lot of mechanical depth. We have tons of layers to weave into combat and so many options but less reason than ever to use those options. Back in the day we had to push all the mechanics in the game to get where we wanted when now those mechanics are still in place and there's a ton more but nothing opposes us enough to justify them. Warframe lack mechanical skill specifically but all the depth is there.

I feel DE has turned Warframe into a numbers game. Well RPG-style games are always a little bit of a numbers game but they've been removing our options and giving us no choice but to smash our stats against a problem. Stats which are far beyond anything that can oppose us. This is why we've needed Damage 3.0. The level and time invested into an endless mission is just a means to an end. A byproduct of trying to get that part of the game where Difficulty and Challenge show their face in a semi-fair situation.

I feel Warframe is less Evolving but more just being forced into a completely different game because they don't want to fix the old one.

[Basalto]

51 minutes ago, Xzorn said:

I'm not sure about this. I feel Warframe has a lot of mechanical depth. We have tons of layers to weave into combat and so many options but less reason than ever to use those options. Back in the day we had to push all the mechanics in the game to get where we wanted when now those mechanics are still in place and there's a ton more but nothing opposes us enough to justify them. Warframe lack mechanical skill specifically but all the depth is there.

I feel DE has turned Warframe into a numbers game. Well RPG-style games are always a little bit of a numbers game but they've been removing our options and giving us no choice but to smash our stats against a problem. Stats which are far beyond anything that can oppose us. This is why we've needed Damage 3.0. The level and time invested into an endless mission is just a means to an end. A byproduct of trying to get that part of the game where Difficulty and Challenge show their face in a semi-fair situation.

I feel Warframe is less Evolving but more just being forced into a completely different game because they don't want to fix the old one.

I'll add that as long as Warframe's "end-game", or maybe meta, is optimizing your builds to play the game the smallest amount necessary, the issue won't be considered fixed to me.