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Warframe Needs a Big Mission Rework


TrashMelody
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I hate to be that girl, but Destiny hit it pretty well here and Warframe has a problem with it: content, particularly interesting content, content that can be repeated for daily and weekly challenges, and ENDGAME content. Rather than go on for ages and try to explain and compare, i'm going to just go ahead with the suggestions I have, i'd love to hear from a dev about whether this is even doable or if it will even be considered, but I assume it will go ignored, still, worth a try. 

I love Warframe, and I love it's structure, but it's flawed. The game needs a rework on certain areas regarding how missions are established and how players are supposed to progress. To this end I suggest several design changes to the base game that I assume would be doable given the big size of Digital Extremes and big amount of assets that could be repurposed to make this:

1 - Assassinations should be more fleshed out. There should be 3 missions for every boss, all 3 non-procedural. There should be a mission, probably spy or rescue or capture, designed to obtain information about the target, here the boss is presented to the player but we don't engage, it is a story mission with some dialogue and other forms of storytelling, it teaches us what the target is. Similar to this first one, a second mission gets us closer to the target, maybe, in the case of a Corpus boss like the Jackal, make it so we found the coordinates to an storage facility or an abandoned maintenance facility, we fight a damaged/depowered/prototype version of the enemy that is easier to destroy but teaches the player through gameplay how to fight the boss, and throughs tory gives information on where to actually find the boss and what its weakpoints are. Then comes the boss mission, which shouldn't be very different. The important thing is these sets of missions that are structured like quests, advancing a single plot with each mission being an specific thing, should be hand-crafted, they shouldn't be randomized, they'd be an opportunity to expose the player to the world a lot more, to introduce new players, to help with progression as they'd be the main progression lines through planets. It'd give a reason for the players to care about the bosses (or other targets if this questline setup was applied to, for example, the capture of some special target or retrieval of tech), it'd make the setting much more immersive, create tension, teach the player about the world of warframe, provide a more clear path to the game, and those more detailed missions would play a role in my other suggestions regarding endgame content and repetition. 

2 - Dailies, weeklies, monthlies... Warframe lacks missions with complexity. Taking Destiny as an example, there are simple story missions, assaults and raids, all with very different difficulty and complexity levels, used for dailies, and weeklies. Warframe right now can't have that, the best we have is a boring daily repetition of 3 normal procedural missions with some stat changes that provide no challenge and no interesting content, they're not even worth doing most of the time. That's why, even more important then the previous suggestion, I think Warframe needs missions with more complexity, more designed towards coop that involve more puzzles and parkour and bosses that aren't simply "slightly different enemy that has a bigger health bar", you recently brought into WF the Tusk Thumper, which looks like a very uninspired copy of the Destiny fallen tank (oh i'd have a whole post about changing the Tusk Thumper, I hate that thing). Why not more enemies like that, or others already in game like the Lephantis or the Ropalolyst, just a bit more work put into them and non-procedural missions that are a bit harder, and you'll have content that not only makes for special, harder than usual nodes that are played different, you also have content that can be played in weekly challenges, in which you could add some extra loot (that is, different loot from what you get anywhere else), the way destiny does, making it interesting, and the weekly, rather than daily repetition would definitely help keep it fresh. The weekly version of these missions would have modifiers, like the incursions do now, but the modifiers would be applied depending of which mission it is, rather than randomly. Note that, this would be perfect as the 3rd act mission for those quests I suggested earlier

Having explained those 2, I must note that I don't want every planet to have the same 3  mission questline ending in a big complex assassination mission, I used assassinations as an example but the same kind of complexity could be used to make other cool missions that could be used in the weeklies, special unique spy, capture, or rescue missions, where you had some more unique mechanics, maybe some puzzles, would help a lot. Warframe has a very cool parkour system, you could definitely make use of it to make these missions interesting. 

3 - I'm sorry, but I have to say it. Actual raids. This game needs them desperately. You have a game with an absurd amount of mechanics, a ton of cool settings, space magic allowing you to do anything, really varied enemy factions, you can even have giant super cool bosses like the Profit Taker, abandoned superstructures, giant space ships... and, barring some one-time quest-only missions that are short and made for one player, the most complex mission is still just run to the enemy and shoot at it. Taking again from Destiny, an inferior game, just the first raid it had, the Vault of Glass, is already incredibly superior to almost any mission in warframe, how is that possible? You have the manpower, the setting, the art talent, the dev time, why aren't you adding raids to the game? A series of missions, made for a full squad, that required actual teamwork, had puzzles, hard parkour, several bosses, culminating in a big climax with a really cool boss that maybe even involves puzzles and parkour in the fight, you could go as far as making it so some raids had stages that only a particular Warframe could complete, you could do almost anything. These raids could be offered as biweekly or even monthly challenges once originally completed, and would provide with a challenge for endgame players that, given how long, complex and hard they'd be, could award unique loot that you wouldn't be able to get anywhere else, no primes or blueprints, just the actual weapons or even parts of frames you can only get from raids. Best thing is, however hard to make these are, you are a really big studio that now has the chance to spend some dev time adding something this complex and beautiful to the game.

 

As a final note, I think the most important out of these suggestions for Warframe on the stage that it is is the first and to a lesser extent the second, it needs a more guidelined progress line with missions that are actual story missions and present the characters and the world of Warframe, and the 2-3 mission setup with a lead up to the final mission of each planet would be a perfect way of slowly introducing players to the game, and a nice way of giving veterans something to go back to.

I apologize if it seems arrogant for me to give these kind of suggestions that seem more like i'm trying to tell your design lead how to make the game, but I play warframe every day, it's almost the only game I play, and with thousands of hours in many other games, experience in game development, and a deep love for the particular niche of looter game that warframe is part of, I just need to at least try to give what I can to make it a better game.

 

Either Way keep it up, y'all, I love your game.

 

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Raids were a thing in the past. They were reffered to as Trials and were pretty much exactly what you're asking for down to a t. They consisted of 3 non-procedural missions in a row that ended up with a bossfight. They had puzzles that required communication and cooperation. They had a long term reward system with a daily cooldown and they were high levelt missions. They felt like true endgame in every way.

They got removed for a couple of reasons.

Namely that the maintenance was high because the code was spaghetti, and that a relatively low percentage of the playerbase were engaging with them.

If you ask me they were great, and I really hope they make a return sooner rather than later.

Edited by Senguash
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2 minutes ago, Senguash said:

Raids were a thing in the past. They were pretty much exactly what you're asking for.

They got removed for a couple of reasons. 



Namely that the maintenance was high because the code was spaghetti, and that a relatively low percentage of the playerbase were engaging with them.

If you ask me they were great, and I really hope they make a return sooner rather than later.

That's interesting, I've only been playing since December last year so I didn't know of it. I guess I thought that by now they should be able to implement raids without much problem, I mean they have open worlds and (soon) space GTA, how hard can raids be?

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7 minutes ago, TrashMelody said:

That's interesting, I've only been playing since December last year so I didn't know of it. I guess I thought that by now they should be able to implement raids without much problem, I mean they have open worlds and (soon) space GTA, how hard can raids be?

They were a thing for about 3 years if I'm not mistaken and I played them a lot, like every day for 2 years.

There was a pretty tightly knit community around them, but they showed some numbers once and the overall engagement rate was similar to conclave, which is not great.

There's a number of reasons for why that was, most of which seem entirely fixable to me. I made a post on my thoughts looking back on that, but you might not get all that much out of it without the context of what the missions were like.

The hope is that raids make a return with a bunch of the issues they had originally gone.

 

Edited by Senguash
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Just now, Senguash said:

They were a thing for about 3 years if I'm not mistaken and I played them a lot, like every day for 2 years.

There was a pretty tightly knit community around them, but they showed some numbers once and the overall engagement rate was similar to conclave, which is not great.

There's a number of reasons for why that was. I made a post on my thoughts looking back on that, but you might not get all that much out of it without the context of what the missions were like.

 

I'll check some video9s and check your post, it should help me give better feedback, tho tbh from what i'm seeing those raids seemed to be somewhere between the kind of quests I suggest the game needs for progression (which would be per planet, starting at Earth) and the actual raids that I think should be endgame

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Currently with how the game is, endgame can't really exist. Anytime DE tries to make something challenging, the community immediately finds out how to make it s complete joke. If we'd want actual challenge in the game and be able to have an endgame, everything about the game would need to be rebalanced. And i mean everything; enemy scaling, warframes, weapons, the mod system, shields, damage types, everything. I've thought about how the game could be rebalanced but i know it'll never happen because 1. It'll take a lot of work and 2. It would involve nerfing, changing, and/or removing stuff which is something you just CANNOT do with this community.

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Just now, Sacronian said:

Currently with how the game is, endgame can't really exist. Anytime DE tries to make something challenging, the community immediately finds out how to make it s complete joke. If we'd want actual challenge in the game and be able to have an endgame, everything about the game would need to be rebalanced. And i mean everything; enemy scaling, warframes, weapons, the mod system, shields, damage types, everything. I've thought about how the game could be rebalanced but i know it'll never happen because 1. It'll take a lot of work and 2. It would involve nerfing, changing, and/or removing stuff which is something you just CANNOT do with this community. 



That's why raids are important, they'd be designed in a very special way, if (for example) a raid involves 2 people solving a puzzle while 2 others have to fight a boss that can only be killed if some parts of the bossfight are synchronized with some part of the puzzle, there's no cheesing that, you have to do it the way it's designed. I'd say the best example is Destiny The Taken King, you could cheese through a lot of the content, you couldn't cheese through the content that was designed for you to not be able to cheese through it, there's more than enough tools in warframe to make it work, even challenges/fights that can only be completed using certain weapons or abilities synchronized, needing teamwork. There's so many layers of complexity you could add. Anyone with some knowledge of game design and a lot of experience playing and looking at the bts of games with raids could easily design an endgame raid for warframe, it's just that there's only a few people in change of designing stuff for warframe, so we gotta accept what they design.

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1 minute ago, TrashMelody said:

That's why raids are important, they'd be designed in a very special way, if (for example) a raid involves 2 people solving a puzzle while 2 others have to fight a boss that can only be killed if some parts of the bossfight are synchronized with some part of the puzzle, there's no cheesing that, you have to do it the way it's designed. I'd say the best example is Destiny The Taken King, you could cheese through a lot of the content, you couldn't cheese through the content that was designed for you to not be able to cheese through it, there's more than enough tools in warframe to make it work, even challenges/fights that can only be completed using certain weapons or abilities synchronized, needing teamwork. There's so many layers of complexity you could add. Anyone with some knowledge of game design and a lot of experience playing and looking at the bts of games with raids could easily design an endgame raid for warframe, it's just that there's only a few people in change of designing stuff for warframe, so we gotta accept what they design.

Raids coming back would be good. But currently i'm focusing on what the game currently has because i think one core way of balancing a game and giving it an actual endgame would be to balance the core of the game, not add stuff. Currently, Arbitrations are meant to be endgame content but a lot of veteran players go through it with no trouble at all. It's just tedious and boring to them and i think a big reason of that is because the game is extremely unbalanced. I know perfect balance won't ever happen, but there's a lot that could be changed to make the balance a lot tighter

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1 minute ago, Jax_Cavalera said:

Main issue a lot of us hit with raids were.. 1 per day. Minimum 4 squad.

I honestly would make them every 2 weeks or even monthtly, the other kind of harder, more detailed  missions (similar to destiny assaults) I suggested would fill the weekly spot and normal missions like the ones we have can fit the daily spot. 

 

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6 hours ago, TrashMelody said:

I honestly would make them every 2 weeks or even monthtly, the other kind of harder, more detailed  missions (similar to destiny assaults) I suggested would fill the weekly spot and normal missions like the ones we have can fit the daily spot. 

I'd be ok with them happening at any frequency provided they could be done solo as an option even if it meant they'd be extra difficult.

The number of times I was in a trial run and someone wouldn't get how to do the puzzle or where to go next or their net would drop out and the mission would be impossible to complete due to minimum player requirements are around the same number of times the actual trial was completed successfully. Groups I'd run with would do these things every day so it was something close to once per day you'd do a run that'd fail because of any number of those reasons.. which all stem from it having a minimum number of players required to complete it.

Edited by Jax_Cavalera
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1 hour ago, Jax_Cavalera said:

I'd be ok with them happening at any frequency provided they could be done solo as an option even if it meant they'd be extra difficult.

The number of times I was in a trial run and someone wouldn't get how to do the puzzle or where to go next or their net would drop out and the mission would be impossible to complete due to minimum player requirements are around the same number of times the actual trial was completed successfully. Groups I'd run with would do these things every day so it was something close to once per day you'd do a run that'd fail because of any number of those reasons.. which all stem from it having a minimum number of players required to complete it.

On the contrary i think raids should only be available for coordinated squads, much how in the original destiny they didn't have matchmaking, it made them much better as the level designers don't have to design them for one person and then scale up the stuff to fit everyone else. The puzzles should be designed to only be completed with the right amount of players and in good coordination, sure it makes them only available to people who go through the trouble of using the recruit chat (or having friends) and learning how to complete them, but they are made much better because of that. At most i'd accept if they were designed for 4 people but with the Tenno it could be completed by 2 very skillful and coordinated players, but even accounting for that would limit the possibilities when designing them.

 

Edit: There's a reason the raids in Destiny are designed for 6 people but can be completed by a very skilled team of 3, and it's part of why they're (mostly) so good. Also i am aware some can be solo'd but that's through exploits and bugs

Edited by TrashMelody
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7 hours ago, TrashMelody said:

I honestly would make them every 2 weeks or even monthtly, the other kind of harder, more detailed  missions (similar to destiny assaults) I suggested would fill the weekly spot and normal missions like the ones we have can fit the daily spot. 

 

This is pretty much the mission style for raid based content, i enjoyed on Destiny because you were not FORCED to spam them daily. In current online games, i would say having big type of content on a daily basis can easily burn one out, where by having sizable loot on a weekly reset limit will allow people to only have to do it once then do other things. But as warframe currently is, loot is either neglible or content got cheesed so hard that it ruined many things.

  • Trials back in the past were at least on a 24 hour or so limit which helped in many ways, It kept Arcanes scarce enough to have high enough value, it prevented burn out, which eidolons now provide since people went from getting up to 4 arcanes a day to as much as 12 or even 15 arcanes in a single run which is roughly 3 hours due to day/night rotation. Ultimately, it resulted in people able to get as much as 50 or more arcanes a day if they were active.
  • Plenty of people already rambled it on other threads but since warframe does not really have a actual gathering material system in it that included actual tradable goods with an actual reason to circulate said tradable goods except extremely small finite demand. Plains may of introduced gems and fish, but those easily became even worst off then prime parts for the most part in a good deal of cases, but that can also be blamed on a lack of a effective market system to allow flow-some marketing without the frustration of bickering to get the attention of an online player to make a sale or to purchase something.
  • If D.E. actually never brought about rivens, then this massive cheese would of been more controlled, but they could of also put more emphasis on later game progression systems=ACTUAL benefits, operator itself was suppose to be that late game sort of things with all the abilities it could provide, but most of that became simple cheese(Namely eidolons & free energy gags, with some special bits being the slow void blast usually to deal with crap like thumpers & sometimes the pull in effect on zenurik void mode) and rest for ignoring(Honestly, outside of waybounds, you likely can`t name 3 abilities in any other school other then zenurik, that have general good use), plus any more permanent bonuses just to make the operator actually survive longer and be less garbage while your in op mode. Honestly when Plains of diviri arrives, i hope they rehaul the focus school to give a reason for people to strive for it, especially to include abilities that are more then just to make the operator feel less useless, but would also help the warframe more as a sign of actual development in the schools.
  • Following up on that later game progression bit, i kind of mean things you work for would end up with you being rewarded, not the usual goods you can really circumvent these days with a bunch of plat, arcanes & rare mods are basically meaningless at this point. Here is to hoping Railjack/Plains of Diviri/New War can push in a actual end for players to strive for, otherwise any player who has the minimum MR can get geared up and smack down the hardest bosses with ridiculous ease.
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the problem with raids was that jordas golem couldn't just stop mis-docking and there was this one guy who would always complain about this in every patch note threads, DE was unable to fix this problem despite them really wanting to. so they had to remove the raids completely.

 

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I am all for more mission complexity, diversity and a lot of unpredictability and I fully agree the game needs it. Partially because the simplicity versus grind issue, partially because DE keeps pumping out new warframes and weapons which are then crammed into this narrow balance corridor.

I mean, take Vauban as an example...the forgotten frame. The engineer. No one plays him cause he is not a nuker frame. But he should not have to be. If missions and levels had features which involved hacking turrets, redirecting power, accessing special areas etc etc etc - which every frame could do but Vauban had a huge advantage in when performing these specific tasks.......yeah...I don't have to say any more. But alas, no such thing exists. And no amount of reworking is going to help Vauban because in it's current form the concept that Vauban represents cannot fit into something that just does not exist.

Heck, even Empyrean is such an open goal for DE when it comes to Vauban specifically...but that is a different story...

 

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I am afraid that there is a possibility that huge part of warframe community doesn't want the game to be more complex (at least when it comes to actual gameplay), because that doesn't match with what warframe is and ever was till these days.
 
And I am also afraid that while the most of the community wouldnt mind endgame that is harder, more sophisticated, optional and separated from the main game loop, it will be hard if not impossible to do properly thanks to the core of the game.
 
The bright lights are newer boss fights within the game. I take them as experiments from DE trying to solve the issues with the power of players.
Eidolons? cool fight, plenty of mechanics. Designed to be as hard to cheese as possible within the constraints of the core design. That means that while I cant press K to Kill everything players are already bending the mechanics of fight to do it ridiculously fast, probably much faster than it was intended by designers.
Orbs are a similar story. U can do them solo with setup that make u unable to die.
So yes, you can do stuff in the way that makes it... Longer. You cant nuke it? one-shot it? Well then let's cheese it in another way.
Current frames, weapons +arcanes makes u ridiculously powerfull, the only option is to willingly use weaker stuff.
 
But hey empyrean is coming. If they will manage to deliver the promises maybe the solution for the problem of "things to do" will not be balance and proper endgame but more diversity and craziness.
Edited by Wakata
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7 minutes ago, Wakata said:
I am afraid that there is a possibility that huge part of warframe community doesn't want the game to be more complex (at least when it comes to actual gameplay), because that doesn't match with what warframe is and ever was till these days.
 
And I am also afraid that while the most of the community wouldnt mind endgame that is harder, more sophisticated, optional and separated from the main game loop, it will be hard if not impossible to do properly thanks to the core of the game.
 
The bright lights are newer boss fights within the game. I take them as experiments from DE trying to solve the issues with the power of players.
Eidolons? cool fight, plenty of mechanics. Designed to be as hard to cheese as possible within the constraints of the core design. That means that while I cant press K to Kill everything players are already bending the mechanics of fight to do it ridiculously fast, probably much faster than it was intended by designers.
Orbs are a similar story. U can do them solo with setup that make u unable to die.
So yes, you can do stuff in the way that makes it... Longer. You cant nuke it? one-shot it? Well then let's cheese it in another way.
Current frames, weapons +arcanes makes u ridiculously powerfull, the only option is to willingly use weaker stuff.
 
But hey empyrean is coming. If they will manage to deliver the promises maybe the solution for the problem of "things to do" will not be balance and proper endgame but more diversity and craziness.

Here is the irony though. If people don't want the game to become more complex then DE should stop adding new frames and weapons since there will be no point in having more frames and weapons anymore. Even now there are frankly way too many frames and weapons in the game that are constricted in a narrow gameplay spectrum.

Besides, adding new challenges and features does not necessarily mean that the fast gameplay must be killed off entirely.

Point is, if the game is to evolve AND tackle challenges like mindless grind boredom/lack of content and diversity then some compromises will have to be made. In this case, 1 minute mission runs - which are generally done by experienced players BECAUSE of the mindless grinding.

New features/challenges/random twists/bonus objectives in missions and whatnot which keeps players on the toes and slows down gameplay at certain points is not a bad thing if done correctly - if it means broadening the tunnel to allow room for frame variations to shine the way they should. There is also more than enough room for fast-paced mass nuking segments as well.

And by done correctly, if you currently get X amount of rewards for a 1 minute mission run then a slowed down, featured enriched version of the same mission which now takes at least 5 minutes to complete should give 5/6X + 2/3 amount of rewards. The + 2 or +3 being optional/perfect run/sudden twists or whatever bonus categories you can think of.

 

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My hypest wetdream for Warframe would definitely be a holistic damage and scaling rebalance. The game does not feel like its not made off of any real semblance of balance as opposed to the rule of cool. That's fine and all and got warframe to where it is today, but unless they truly make content that's interesting, challenging, replayable, and rewarding, DE will constantly be stuck making huge updates like plains, fortuna, new war etc instead of actually bringing up the base game to a higher standard.

 

I've always given DE an S+ for community management and a B- for actual game design. They just keep adding new stuff instead of making what they have amazing instead of good.

 

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I'm new player (about 3 weeks) and I see big problem with how the missions("dungeons") work compared to almost any other MMO.

There is no real need for ANY teamplay beyond: "Player is waiting for you to help open the door" (you know, the door with 2 people clicking the locks if not soloing).

 

My experience from some public games is:

1) I log into misisons, the other high level people are leaping forward knowing precisely which turns to take, where to go up or down the stairs etc..

2) When i get to 1/2 of the map, far beyond others, I'm informed that mission objective is done and I should head to exit.

3) since I do not know the tilesets (escpecially the infested shipwrecks seem very hard to navigate), I'm even struggling to get to exit before exfill-timer runs out. Most of the veteran player seem stoic about it, but I have been on occasion called "idiot" because I couldn't get to exit before auto-exfill timer. Great player experience!

 

 

What I feel is the minimum DE can do: look hard at the way ability/gear scaling for dungeons was done for games even so old as LoTRO or FFXIV.

By default, when you join low-level dungeon in these games as high-level player, you gear (it's stats) and you class abilities powers gets scalled down percentually (you migh even lose access to some of your higher-level abilities), so that you actually need to cooperate at least somewhat with those low-level players. You still have your stats on the uppermost border of what that mission allows, so you still are better then others, but not by large margin. You *might* still solo harder opponents, but it will take you long without firepower of others.

This is default mode, lets call it how FFXIV does: "synced" (you are synchronized for the difficulty of the mision)

Of course, you still have option to do the mission "unsynced" (at you actual high-level) by simple toogle, if you just want to do it fast, or want to solo it. Thats fine.

However, you cannot join PUBLIC missions unsynced - only if you either go SOLO or if you make whole party before starting mission (like for pulling friend through, or farming).

Note also, that generaly you can't complete special events and daily dungeon rewards as unsynced. This is by the way how FFXIV is making sure veteran players are strongly incentifized to do low-level dungeons/trials alongside new players.

 

I have nothing to say about raids at this point, but endgame teamplay is always welcomed.

Edited by Karzakeno
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I have missed out on raids completely as I was struggling with Uranus missions at the time they were taken out. Now that I am ranked up, I imagine they must have been a fun activity. I think they are planning good coordinated activities with things like the empyrean trailer. The idea of ship to ship combat along with infiltration is really interesting. More so when they want to tie it in to the supporting activities on the underlying planet mission in real-time. To me it seems a bit too ambitious but I hope to be pleasantly surprised.

In hindsight, it would have been really nice to have all the missions on a planet affect the assassination node making it more coherent. The assassination nodes themselves, would have been nice with certain sortie conditions + nightmare conditions if you try it without any of the planet nodes done. Have you finished all 3 spy vaults successfully for this planet? Then the magnetic anomalies in the boss fight are negated. Of course we can think of this now with a player base in millions so that you can match players with others with the same level of completeness prior to the assassination node but I guess in the early days that would have been difficult. I just would have liked for the assassination missions to be more than just quick killing missions of bosses. Currently there is no reason for dong the other missions on the planet except to unlock the assassination node and getting out of that planet.

Also, in the beginning, it was really immersion breaking for me for the boss I just killed to be back in the land of the living with no backstory as to how. With Vor at least it is kind of explained with corrupted Vor, and for the corpus proxy bosses, it could be explained away with the fact that some piece of software survived the destruction and was rebuilt. With Vay Hek, you never kill him as he flies away. But the other grineer bosses disintegrate in front of you. How are they suddenly back at the same location node?

The other problem I can see right now is the one of planet irrelevance. Once you reach a certain level, the low level planets of mercury and venus will not interest you for missions. It would have been great if the planets had still remained relevant by raising the difficulty level based on how many times you have completed the assassination node of the planet in question. I am guessing something like 10 runs of the assassination node should update the planet difficulty to the next tier resetting the completion level of the above mentioned spy etc. nodes. So you have to do them again perfectly to make the assassination node lose the modifiers again. Over time, this would have meant that all planets can have the same level of enemy difficulty as Sedna but still remaining relevant for missions. This would also solve the problem of veterans cheesing the lower level maps in void fissures leaving newer players with nothing to do except run to extraction.

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34 minutes ago, Karzakeno said:

I'm new player (about 3 weeks) and I see big problem with how the missions("dungeons") work compared to almost any other MMO.

There is no real need for ANY teamplay beyond: "Player is waiting for you to help open the door" (you know, the door with 2 people clicking the locks if not soloing).

 

My experience from some public games is:

1) I log into misisons, the other high level preople are leaping forward knowing precisely which turns to take, where to go up or down the stairs etc..

2) When i get to 1/2 of the map, far beyond others, I'm informed that mission objective is done and I should head to exit.

3) since I do not know the tilesets (escpecially the infested shipwrecks seem very hard to navigate), I'm even struggling to get to exit before exfill-timer runs out. Most of the veteran player seem stoic about it, but I have been on occasion called "idiot" because I couldn't get to exit before auto-exfill timer. Great player experience!

 

 

What I feel is the minimum DE can do: look hard at the way ability/gear scaling for dungeons was done for games even so old as LoTRO or FFXIV.

By default, when you join low-level dungeon in these games as high-level player, you gear (it's stats) and you class abilities powers gets scalled down percentually (you migh even lose access to some of your higher-level abilities), so that you actually need to cooperate at least somewhat with those low-level players. You still have your stats on the uppermost border of what that mission allows, so you still are better then others, but not by large margin. You *might* still solo harder opponents, but it will take you long without firepower of others.

This is default mode, lets call it how FFXIV does: "synced" (you are synchronized for the difficulty of the mision)

Of course, you still have option to do the mission "unsynced" (at you actual high-level) by simple toogle, if you just want to do it fast, or want to solo it. Thats fine.

However, you cannot join PUBLIC missions unsynced - only if you either go SOLO or if you make whole party before starting mission (like for pulling friend through, or farming).

Note also, that generaly you can't complete special events and daily dungeon rewards as unsynced. This is by the way how FFXIV is making sure veteran players are strongly incentifized to do low-level dungeons/trials alongside new players.

 

I have nothing to say about raids at this point, but endgame teamplay is always welcomed.

I think it will infuriate veterans if they have to play with low level gear after all the effort they have made to rank up items. That being said, I understand your frustration at not being able to enjoy your new player experience because of players breezing through. I think there is merit in your opinion of the difficulty syncing, but I think it should be done the other way, instead of lowering the level of the player in missions, you should only get synced even publicly to players of your difficulty level unless you go with pre-made teams. That way if new players find a mission too difficult, they can recruit in recruit chat and higher level players will still feel inclined to help, which they might not if forced to use low level weapons. I also agree with your opinion of having the missions also having a difficulty level which scales.

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14 minutes ago, S1lent3cho said:

I think it should be done the other way, instead of lowering the level of the player in missions, you should only get synced even publicly to players of your difficulty level unless you go with pre-made teams. That way if new players find a mission too difficult, they can recruit in recruit chat and higher level players will still feel inclined to help, which they might not if forced to use low level weapons.

It would not work like this. It is against human nature - against the path of less resistance. For two reasons:

If not incetifized by meaningful rewards, vast majority would not be willing to "waste time" on slow run through low lvl content. Yes, you always have couple of people that will actively seek to help new players, but they will never be majority. Mostly, they do it for some change of pace. They too invest time into game, so why would they spend it on something not meaningful for them?

Secondly, most new players do not engage very actively in chat, and even if they do, they would rather ask veterans to boost them through content on easymode (unsynced) 2-min run, therefore not wasting much of their time. Asking other people to go with them in low level 20-minute run, would be very unconfortable for pretty much everyone.

 

PS:

I should clarify that the syncing would only make sense for "normal "missions, not "endless" missions (unless its capped "endless" misison for quest, that is not rly endless).

Also syncing only affects older story content - like low level planets perhaps for example Earth to Pluto. More advanced stuff like Sedna, Lua, Derelicts, Nightmares, Rifts etc, would obviously not sync anything.

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1 minute ago, Karzakeno said:

It would not work like this. It is against human nature - against the path of less resistance. For two reasons:

If not incetifized by meaningful rewards, vast majority would not be willing to "waste time" on slow run through low lvl content. Yes, you always have couple of people that will actively seek to help new players, but they will never be majority. Mostly, they do it for some change of pace. They too invest time into game, so why would they spend it on something not meaningful for them?

Secondly, most new players do not engage very actively in chat, and even if they do, they would rather ask veterans to boost them through content on easymode (unsynced) 2-min run, therefore not wasting much of their time. Asking other people to go with them in low level 20-minute run, would be very unconfortable for pretty much everyone.

 

PS:

I should clarify that the syncing would only make sense for "normal "missions, not "endless" missions (unless its capped "endless" misison for quest, that is not rly endless).

Also syncing only affects older story content - like low level planets perhaps for example Earth to Pluto. More advanced stuff like Sedna, Lua, Derelicts, Nightmares, Rifts etc, would obviously not sync anything.

I think I was unclear on what I meant in my reply. I meant that veterans can help the lower level players in their lower level missions but with their own gear. So the run would be a speedrun. If you go public, it would matchmake you with people at your level of difficulty, if you use pre-made teams, it would be at the lowest level player in the team's difficulty and everyone would carry their normal gear as they do now.

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here's the thing that made destiny raids click is the amazing memory's I had like when we first went into Vault of Glass and in the oracle maze we're bloody scared to the point we were barely talking,or when we first killed Oryx that was unforgettable we felt like that 8 hours of figuring out how to do Oryx and the 20 hours of king's fall all paid off. We felt on top of the world. When we figure out that Wrath of the Machine had a secret aka monitors the 6 of us spent the day trying to think what it was about. In Destiny 2 when we first saw Riven we were in awe. Or in Scourge of The Past I will never forget the fun of the sparrow race. The most recent raid Crown of Sorrow made us feel like treasure hunters the raid made us question everything about the lore. These memory's is because of Bungies amazing encounter design when you figure out the puzzle it just feels right and the sound of the game and the sound of the players gun's and ability's creates this satisfying melody. and the music of the encounters just flows so well with the game play. then to finish that off the most important factor of the raid the players mastery it feels good overcoming a challenge and it also fells good to master said challenge and preform it perfectly. the biggest challenge for DE is the power creep of the players and dealing with it, while not feeling cheap. they are dealing with players able to deal a near infinite amount of dps, hyper mobility, stuff being pretty much invincible I think DE can pull the environment design off I mean just look at The Sacrifice. but dealing with the power creep with out nerfs or cheap mechanics is gonna be real hard for DE.

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