Horizontally Flipped (AKA Mirror Mode) Level Generation; Yay or Nay?

[(PSN)BloodyHell]

 

Once you put enough time into Warframe the levels can, naturally, begin to feel repetitive, even with the random tile generation trying to keep things fresh. I remembered back to something that games used to do which might be a way to alleviate this, and bring some small variety and challenge to all tilesets in the game at a minimal resource cost to DE.

In the past when developers wanted to round out bonus content sometimes you would see an unlockable feature dubbed Mirror Mode. Primarily appearing in racing games (Most notably the Mario Kart series), but also featured in other genres, the mode does exactly what it says; it horizontally flips courses and levels meaning what used to be left turn would now be a right turn. To be clear, this applies only to the level geometry, your controls and HUD would remain normal. You can click here for a side by side comparison of what this looks like.

So, what would be the outcome of implementing this? 

Pros 

• Adds a little bit of life to traversing and exploring old tilesets you’ve mastered
• Can be automatically applied to all tilesets
• Perspective change gives new visual look
• Makes the world of Warframe feel less artificially copy/pasted
• Development would be easier and quicker than building new tilesets from the ground up

Cons

• Can potentially alienate/frustrate players that have memorised tilesets and routes
• Negative reaction from fanbase seeing this as “lazy content”
• Potential new bugs and issues introduced in level generation or AI
• In-game text/languages would be in reverse (Arguably not as noticeable of an issue since it’s all fictional/abstract to begin with. Maybe possible to code around?)

Just want to preface that I’m in no way suggesting this is a replacement for fully developed levels and tilesets, and would still like to see DE carry on working on such content for the future. It’s merely a way of adding a small amount of diversity to what already exists in the Warframe. Ideally the way I’d want to see it handled is missions generating with a mix of both standard and mirrored tilesets, keeping you constantly aware of your surroundings, but I imagine that the technical hurdles of achieving that, while not impossible, might be a bit much. At the very least I could see it as a potential modifier for Nightmare/Sorties, or applied to missions with single tilesets like Defense, Interception, Hijack etc.

[krc473]

7 minutes ago, (PS4)BloodyHell said:

applied to missions with single tilesets like Defense, Interception, Hijack etc.

You know it would have a very minimal effect on these right? Take Hijack, the item follows a preset path, you just stand on it/near it. 

 

I would probably say no to this feature. It just seems totally pointless. I don’t think there are really any negative points to it, but it doesn’t really strike me as adding anything either.

[Gabbynaru]

I don't think it will have any effect if the tile rooms are mirrored, other than just more potential room variety. So, +1, I guess? Won't change anything though.