"end game", rewards, sustainable content, and my thoughts

[NovusKnight]

I have been thinking a bit about how DE goes about in including new content. New missions, tilesets, frames, mechanics, etcetera.

I have been playing for 3 years, and leisurely reached MR 23. I tried out most of everything by now. 

over time, as things were added, I see a pattern repeat itself.

let's imagine a new feature called X. X can be anything. A tileset, a mission, a warframe. 

DE needs to invest development time to implement X, which means paying specialized professionals to, for instance, model and texture the warframes, or program mechanics behind new weapons, or spend hours in a studio going over sound files. While I am not a videogame developer, I study animation - I visited several studios, and believe me, this kind of work can be deceptively expensive to fund.

naturaly, upon implementing X, DE needs to get their investment back. That's, for instance, why while also offering the option of acquiring things for free, they offer to just sell them outright, for money. This is pure business strategy, and in my opinion, fairly respectful towards customers in how it is implemented.

so, DE has to come up with a balance where if X is too easy to get, no one buys them, thus their profits start to drop off; and if X is too hema- I mean, hard to get, people start being unhappy with them. Good will can be easily lost by repeatedly coming across as greedy, just ask Activision or EA or Bethesda. They'd know.

usually DE makes X grind to get, and tends to do so in a way that pulls people into a desired game mode or time sink. Here are a few examples.

-redesign of the corpus gas city, which meant a ton of new assets, effects, units, map design, spy vaults, etcetera, was made obligatory due to introducing Hexenon, a new resource present in all content since, which drops exclusively in Jupiter.

-create Disruptions, which meant programming, voicelines, balancing, etcetera, had Gauss and his weapons exclusively acquirable from there, and at rather low chances, to make damn.sure people play Disruption quite a bit.

-War Within was an immense mainline update with a new tileset, immense work in assets and designs, etcetera. Rivens and their requirement for massive amounts of kuva mean kuva fortress is extremely desireable due to survival, and now, disruption too. Still secondary to floods, tho.

see what I am getting at? Every time X is introduced, Warframe tries to pull people into playing exclusively with and around X.

here's where this doesn't work:

the moment you get X........... You lose the goal of acquiring X, and thus, the need to deal with this game mode or location.

I don't roll rivens. I despise the idea of grinding for arbitrary RNG that I have no control over. I like grinding with a clear goal, like getting traces for a prime part, or selling things to buy a prime part, etcetera. Not rivens. So, I don't dabble much in kuva floods or similar.

I don't particularly like disruption. I don't mind it, but I don't see myself playing it once I get gauss and his gear.

I loathe hexenon and the fact I must suffer through early game that I beat years ago for hours on end to get it. In fact, I hate the grind for it so much, that I literaly quit. My last two hexenon-based crafts were entirely done via titan extractor spam. Meaning, it literaly failed to get me to spend time in Jupiter, or shell out plat. All it achieved was frustrate and delay me, but I am a patient man.

this is the part where endgame and content sustainability comes to mind.

in most activities one does in Warframe, there's a balance / ratio of time-effort to reward.

sadly, to me, very few things repeatedly give me motive to return to them.

-ESO is great because of the XP it offers, while having high enemy density, hilariously high spawns, and plenty of variety. So i both take satisfaction from it, as I am rewarded. I even use it to quickly test builds, sometimes, and I can't fathom a better way to quickly forma my gear. 

- fissures are helpful due to all the plat and gear I can get from them.

-sorties offer rivens, which I easily sell in an hour or so unveiled, with zero effort on my part.its literaly a net positive. Anasas are great, because slitted are actualy easy to sell for reasonable prices - again, with minimal effort or boredom-inducing grind involved.

Arbitrations, I love.the pressure of not dying, the high levels, and the rewards are all good. Particularly, I like crafting amber ayatan stars, a cost effective way to easily slot all my ayatans for plat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To me, Warframe needs to revisit a good chunk of its content. We have plenty of it already, just... Not worth playing, most of the time. End game is kind of a broad subject, but in my opinion, end game consists of playing at levels, or towards objectives (or both) that demand you to understand and use every single option at your disposal to succeed. 

endgame must also be worth it. currently it really isn't. For instance, we have survival missions. there is nothing at all to be gained by doing more than a 15-20 minute cycle of ABC. Going further does no more than increasing the effort needed to literally get the same reward. It has no purpose.

along with this, it is our nature as players to try and cheese the game in some capacity.

a few ideas I have, on how to address this, would be...

1 - change the reward system of infinite missions. A,B,C,C+,C++,C+++, C++++... Imagine if, on every subsequent cycle, there was a cumulative 5% chance of getting a second roll for C reward tables, or having grunt units gradualy replaced by stronger heavies, or unique units that have desireable loot. This would give people reason to actualy try to maximize their effectiveness in these mission types. Let me give you a really, really direct example: Grineer scorpions drop defiled snapdragon, an essential mod for any blade and whip user. Imagine if, after the 30 minute mark, all lancers were replaced by scorpions. The game would be a lot more challenging with all the CC, but also, the likelihood of getting a valuable mod would increase substantially. Vastly increasing resource drop, or progressively increasing the odds of rare materials to drop, even materials from other planets, would be interesting. Much higher drop rates for mods, and increased credit gain, would also be a strong incentive, since you could efficiently transmute these for possibly very valuable new mods.

2 - find a way to reward skill, technique, etcetera. There's a lot of ways to do this, but I have an idea. Imagine at the start of a mission, being given new challenges - challenges tailored or even specific to your Warframe, that required pretty serious setup to pull off. If the rewards were good enough, this could be an incredible change to the game. I will just get 3 warframes as examples.

Ivara: Kill 10 enemies with a single navigator projectile; score 50 headshots without misses or body shots; successfully line up an Artemis shot that kills seven targets or more; manage to put 30 or more enemies to sleep in less than  5 seconds.

Banshee: deal over 9.000.000 damage in one hit; kill 30 enemies without detection; mark an enemy with one hundred Sonar spots; kill 20 enemies in one mission by blasting them off of the map.

Excalibur: Reach a combo counter of 5x; negate 10.000 damage via slash-dash i-frames; blind and execute twenty targets without any of them recovering from the blind; maintain exalted blade active for ten minutes straight, never disabling the ability.

 

these challenges could have interesting rewards, and promote exploring the uses of their abilities, or some aspects of them. It's something you could do at any time.its just an idea.

 

3 - give players a difficulty slider, unlockable at X mastery rank, that increases spawn rate, sets a minimum spawn level (higher than base, of course), sortie modifiers, and similar parameters for solo.. This would greatly assist in keeping the game interesting. you could challenge yourself, revisit your favorite tileset with a challenge that matches your skill, instead of pressing 4 and auto winning by taking a nap. You could do so many cool things.

 

for now, these are just some thoughts and ideas. Thoughts?

 

[Uhkretor]

22 minutes ago, NovusKnight said:

Thoughts?

Only your own. You can, however, make a topic on General Discussion to gather other people thoughts and put its link here, while keeping this one clean and free from the eventual flame war.

 

Edit, And, if possible, lock this one after posting the General Discussion topic link here.

Edited September 5, 2019 by Uhkretor

[CatboyPrincess]

I'd like a combination of ideas 1 and 3.

I think Warframe is on the cusp of having really playable end game.

I would also like to see a World of Warcraft-like option that allows us to carry a special item deeper and deeper into an endless mission that saves our ongoing progress/enemy level within that key. And at certain thresholds of mission level, the key would start amping up the difficulty with random Sortie and Nightmare mode modifiers.

[FenrisHowls]

I think that the 1st change should have been implemented in this game long time ago, so we can actually feel rewarded(or have an actual reason) for taking part in endurance runs, also the difficulty slider sounds great.

[InDueTime-EN-]

45 minutes ago, NovusKnight said:

change the reward system of infinite missions. A,B,C,C+,C++,C+++, C++++

I don't agree with this one. The good thing about Disruption is that they give the players the option to get lower rotation rewards even at higher waves. Why is this good? Because if you only get C rewards, you either lose out on A and B rewards or you make those rewards tables crap in comparison. Spreading the rewards between three tiers is better than pooling all of them in one tier. The other reason why Disruption is good is because of the Amalgams. They are relatively difficult enemies that has a critical role in the success of the mission. They affect your rewards, which means players are not just mindlessly mowing through enemies. They are actively looking for and killing something. 

I think a similar system could be added to the other endless missions to give players control of the reward. An example would be for defense mission to spawn a tough enemy (preferably new enemies that require specific strategies and stuff) every wave. Killing on would adjust the pool in a similar way as Disruption. They have to be killed before the round ends, otherwise a new one won't spawn. They do not need to be killed to end rounds. 

45 minutes ago, NovusKnight said:

find a way to reward skill, technique, etcetera

More enemies like Nox or Bursas, instead of random challenges would be better. Yes we can eventually figure out how to properly take them out, but if the weaknesses are implemented properly, they should still require some sort of skill. 

 

[NovusKnight]

I agree. New, more complex enemies would help. Noxes are quite good there, I like bursas too. Honestly the flood- I mean, the infested, they need more interesting enemies...

runners and exploders: Zerg enemies with low hp. Boring.

toxic ancients: deadly, but super slow. Blame no one but yourself if as a space ninja you couldn't outmaneuver a plodding zombie. Boring enemy.

boilers: Utterly a non issue. Seriously. I can't come up with a scenario where these would be a menace.

broodmothers: Read above.

moas: They jump good and vomit harmless goo. ... a minor annoyance at best.

toxic drones: ... They have ONE attack that can cause a ton of damage. Can also be 100% resisted with operators and is easily avoided. Meh enemy.