Encouraging words from Rebecca on Warframe's difficulty problem (GameSpot interview)

[Sigma-118]

On 2019-10-09 at 2:26 PM, Jarriaga said:

While I agree pleasing some players will mean losing others as it is impossible to make everyone happy, changes to difficulty scaling by themselves have no net worth of positive or negative results. Rather, it depends on how implementation is handled in order to accommodate veterans without shafting newer players. For example?

1) Make difficulty a toggle option instead of forcing a higher difficulty on everyone.

2) Make specific missions tiles with very high difficulty so you can choose to engage with them or let them be.

The only problem there is that some people will just think the increased difficulty is not worth their time and effort, so they'd return to play on easy. In any game, harder difficulties offer better rewards, but you'd then get the complaints that DE is locking people out of content based on skill. At that point, they'd have to make a decision.

Aight this sounds like a legitimately good idea. The only potential problem with it that I can think of would be if it would devide the playerbase so much that people can't find pugs.
Of course you would need to have a bunch of player statistics to know for certain but personally I wouldn't bet on it being a problem. So yeah im all aboard for this.

 

On 2019-10-09 at 2:26 PM, Jarriaga said:

I don't think being an MMO means anything in particular. What does MMO mean with regards to the combat or gameplay loop? Does it mean it's a shooter? Does it mean it's point and click? How does Warframe play?

Steve himself has said that WF's combat loop is more like Dynasty Warriors. Taking the game's creative director's words as a base, how does Dynasty Warriors handle higher difficulties?

1) Increase base enemy horde level. ( Enemies in WF do scale infinitely. The problem is pacing. I should not have to wait 1-2 hours to fight enemies appropriate to my gear).

2) Throw around elite enemy units that have a lot more HP than normal base enemies and deal a lot more damage. These elite enemies tend to have buffs your character may not be able to exploit. (That's what Eximus units are supposed to be, but they are not distinctive enough to feel like elite units. In DW, elite units tend to have your own abilities and are more than just cannon fodder enemies on steroids).

3) Rather than killing you, these elite unites often stall you and target your mission objective so you can fail the mission instead. (WF has nothing like this other than in Disruption, but that's the design of that game mode per se rather than a difficulty balancing mechanism).

As a base, the following things can be done to increase challenge:

1) Allow players to select missions with a high base enemy level (150-200 from the very beginning).

2) Throw in miniboses beyond Eximus units that feel meaningful and threatening. Enemies designed to counter Warframes by being immune to ability damage, having damage caps per player so you can't be the only one attacking it with your Riven Rubico while other players mind their own business like the enemy is not there, enemy buffs while they are close, and a health restore nullifyer aura so the enemy feels dangerous by making you take "permanent" damage while it lives. An enemy that feels like a threat you have deal with ASAP and make it a priority over trash mobs because of how dangerous it is. Some players would definitely hate enemies like this being thrown around even if sporadic, but it would make the mission a lot more engaging.

3) Add enemies designed to make you fail missions instead of killing you. For example, in Interception, add an enemy that can capture all 4 towers at once if you fail to stop it and/or or an enemy that prevents you from capturing any tower as long as it lives. In Survival, add an enemy that can destroy unused life support capsules if you fail to stop it and/or an enemy that decreases life support levels for as long as it lives. And so on. 

I am under no delusion WF can reach Dark Souls difficulty levels. It is not the same game design. Dark Souls, Devil May Cry and Monster hunter are focused enemy encounters. WF is a horde shooter that plays like Dynasty Warriors, which means any possible difficulty improvement would need to adapt to said core framework.

Well yes a game being an MMO doesn't directly mean anything in regards to its combat and/or gameplay loop. But it does mean that the game relies on and is expected to have social aspects to a degree that is on average greater than other types of games. But honestly I don't remember where I was going with that. Think it was something with the psychology of being challenged and responses to changes when applied to big groups or whatever. I can't recall the details of it now. But if it comes back to me i'll edit it in ASAP.

As for the points you went through i'll respond with the same setup.

1) I do agree with this, not having hour long wait times is an idea i'm 100% behind. Pointless waiting is indeed pointless.

2) Ye I could go for some minibosses, especially with the idea that they do things to sabotage your mission. That sounds awesome. The thing with ability damage immunity is not really a idea I support though. Maybe some resistance or other mechanic that changes things up but without taking away your toys/tools. I'm more on the camp of putting players in a situation where they have to adapt how they use their toys/tools instead of the game just going "no you can't have that now, use your other toys/tools instead. You'll have it back later".
Metaphorically speaking of course.

3) This is the best sounding idea i've heard in quite a while. If implemented well I can see it opening up so many possibilites for future additions to the game. While it is mathemaically impossible I support this idea with 500% of all my being!!!

 

On 2019-10-09 at 2:26 PM, Jarriaga said:

The movement system doesn't make you powerful. You don't get damage buffs or damage reduction buffs while wall latching or double-jumping unless you mod for it. And even then, it is neutralized at higher levels. You can not dodge hitscan. You can only dodge projectiles. Enemy accuracy increases with enemy level in WF. There's a point in which it is impossible to dodge hitscan unless you wish to present the argument that you are so fast in your input that you can get away faster than a computer calculates "Is X present in LoS hitscan cone Y/N? If Yes, damage¨.

Out of time so ill get back to this with an edit.

[Toran]

There's a simple solution without changing ANY game mechanics: challenge missions with predetermined loadout. You still can play demigod in the normal content, but in the challenge mission you would have to use whatever they'd give you. Of course, this would take a bit more dedication to mission design.

Do you know when I faced challenge the last time? 2013/2014 when we still were not maxed to the brim and actually had to talk over our team roles before heading into something dangerous like a 60min survival mission.

The only other way I see, is a Left for Dead clone-mission. 

Everything else is doomed to fail or piss off people worse than Riven nerfs.

[(XBOX)Knight Raime]

On 2019-10-07 at 6:50 PM, Jarriaga said:

What is "organic" challenge?

Encounter based that doesn't turn out to be just a dps check.  Think souls titles.

[Jarriaga]

25 minutes ago, (XB1)Knight Raime said:

Encounter based that doesn't turn out to be just a dps check.  Think souls titles.

That concept is incompatible with horde games. 

Let me rephrase my question considering Steve himself has said that the closest comparison to Warframe's combat is Dynasty Warriors. 

What is "organic" challenge in the context of Dynasty Warriors? 

Mind you, I'm an avid Devil May Cry, Monster Hunter, Bayonetta, and Bloodborne player, which are focused enemy encounters in low numbers and very, very far away from horde combat. 

Unless you wish to present the argument that it is impossible to have challenge in Dynasty Warrior games (Which is not true) then I'd argue your definition should be revised. 

Else, look at how DW handles difficulty:

- Minibosses that you can't just ignore because they are a counter to your abilities, and punish you hard for trying to attack them mindlessly. 

- Enemies that target your mission objective in order to make you fail the mission if they can't kill you. 

Those are things Warframe could implement. 

Edited October 10, 2019 by Jarriaga

[(PSN)Silverback73]

On 2019-10-07 at 8:39 PM, (PS4)Yes-Man-Kablaam said:

Honestly I don't think they'll be able to truly solve the challenge problem until they finally decide to push forward with two very important things.

Damage 3.0 where they talked about changing multishot and getting rid of some damage mods and stuff. and generally reworking damage in general cause as is it can get so out of hand even without warframe powers at play or powercreep rivens (which rivens in and of itself will be a huge problem for making challenging content since they can't feasibly balance around anyone having a riven but rivens can get stupidly powerful. and getting a new slot so people can more easily fit rivens isn't helping anything) they can't be paralyzed by the idea of player backlash and everyone throwing a fit over it all if it in the end is truly for the benefit of the game and for better balancing of future content.

The new system of Tau needs to have a lock behind it so they can start balancing around later game players and not new mr4 or something that got carried there. A lot of the things they've made still have had the considerations of newer players in mind which while not a bad thing itself definitely isn't going to come close to pushing the boundaries of difficulty. Or perhaps put an open world on a further planet like Eris for infested open world where you can push that. The original Corpus on Fortuna were pretty tough and hit hard and fast but it was on Venus so there was legitimate reason to cut the enemies back unfortunately.

At one point, I literally wondered if Tau would be this Bizarro version of our Solar System where everything, enemy units...nodes...was a Sentient-improved Clone with the equation:

Sentient Version = [(level of regular unit) + 100] + damage adaptation. 

And the “atalysts” were just fragments of a specific Sentient Leader that acted as foot soldiers.

Edited October 10, 2019 by (PS4)Silverback73

[Ephemiel]

You guys do know we've been saying this for years and DE never cared, right? I wonder why they care now.

Oh right, Destiny 2 F2P on Steam and Partners leaving the game in droves.

[Loza03]

1 hour ago, Ephemiel said:

You guys do know we've been saying this for years and DE never cared, right? I wonder why they care now.

Oh right, Destiny 2 F2P on Steam and Partners leaving the game in droves.

TSD came out one year after Destiny 1, a game that, whilst the plot sucked, had a lot of lore and narrative there if you were willing to/able to look for it properly. And what do you know, DE made a big leap for Warframe Narratively very soon after that.

DE have been galvanised by Destiny for a long time.

[taiiat]

On 2019-10-08 at 1:42 AM, Zilchy said:

How's that karma system going after the choice in War Within lol.

still waiting to see where that goes.
(ye i know late AF but most of what's being said in this Thread is w/e)

come to think of it, still waiting for the artifacting Bug with Temporal AA & SMAA used together to be fixed so that i can go back to using both at once. i'll keep waiting patiently, Steve, though i do kinda expect that to actually happen, like, sometime

 

 

22 minutes ago, Loza03 said:

DE have been galvanised by Destiny for a long time.

i doubt that Destinys' Lore drove much of anything, anywhere. since it is all contained outside of the game in hundreds of Text Logs and Et Cetera. inside the game is pretty sparse.

Edited October 10, 2019 by taiiat

[Cubewano]

1 hour ago, Ephemiel said:

You guys do know we've been saying this for years and DE never cared, right? I wonder why they care now.

Oh right, Destiny 2 F2P on Steam and Partners leaving the game in droves.

They don't care now, as shown by the upcoming weapon exilus mod slot.

DE say they recognize the balance issues in the game all the time, they never actually act on it, quite often they act to the contrary even. Maybe Destiny will force them to act on balance eventually, but that's yet to be seen, and the dozenth acknowledgement of this games obvious balance issues doesn't really change that. 

Edited October 10, 2019 by Cubewano

[Emolition]

1 hour ago, Ephemiel said:

You guys do know we've been saying this for years and DE never cared, right? I wonder why they care now.

Oh right, Destiny 2 F2P on Steam and Partners leaving the game in droves.

I tried Destiny 2 few days ago they ruined that game for me. The new player starts put you at lvl 50 with 750 power and far into the story. No option to opt out of it and start from lvl 1 so I got a few hours out of the game before i got bored as I can't level the character. To me it feels like they saying 90% of our content sucks so we just gonna put you at the end raids enjoy. But I hate raids and pvp so thx for that. Until they add an option to start at lvl 1 and get the story from the start I just don't think i will return to that game any time soon.

[Loza03]

30 minutes ago, taiiat said:

i doubt that Destinys' Lore drove much of anything, anywhere. since it is all contained outside of the game in hundreds of Text Logs and Et Cetera. inside the game is pretty sparse.

Warframe did that for a number main plot points, sooooooo...

Seriously, 'Natah', a major quest and a significant story beat does nothing to introduce Tyl Regor, who's a significant secondary character, the one who undoes Hunhow's seal. It acts like we know him but no. This is true of Teshin as well (since there's no guarantee a new player will meet him) but they have no way of meeting Tyl prior to this point because his characterisation happened in an event that doesn't exist anymore. Parts of Warframe's main story are locked behind unofficial fan sites and youtube. At least the Grimoire is official.

Pot and kettle, is all I'm saying.

[844448]

41 minutes ago, Loza03 said:

Warframe did that for a number main plot points, sooooooo...

Seriously, 'Natah', a major quest and a significant story beat does nothing to introduce Tyl Regor, who's a significant secondary character, the one who undoes Hunhow's seal. It acts like we know him but no. This is true of Teshin as well (since there's no guarantee a new player will meet him) but they have no way of meeting Tyl prior to this point because his characterisation happened in an event that doesn't exist anymore. Parts of Warframe's main story are locked behind unofficial fan sites and youtube. At least the Grimoire is official.

Pot and kettle, is all I'm saying.

Does nothing? I found out that teshin is a pseudo-tenno, lotus was natah, a sentient who is sterile from the jump and wants to have children on her own so she adopted the tenno as her children and it's just from the transmission on each of them if you paid attention to it and you would know him from fighting the boss as the oculyst has higher chance to spawn the more mission you clear so higher chance they will fight him before the quest

Then, what part of warframe main story being locked behind unofficial fan sites and youtube?

[Loza03]

35 minutes ago, 844448 said:

Does nothing? I found out that teshin is a pseudo-tenno, lotus was natah, a sentient who is sterile from the jump and wants to have children on her own so she adopted the tenno as her children and it's just from the transmission on each of them if you paid attention to it and you would know him from fighting the boss as the oculyst has higher chance to spawn the more mission you clear so higher chance they will fight him before the quest

Then, what part of warframe main story being locked behind unofficial fan sites and youtube?

This is some serious cherry-picking. Highlighting the main point, being that the quest Natah does not establish Tyl Regor as a character, instead assuming familiarity despite that familiarity being impossible if you missed the Tubemen of Regor event, requiring outside sources to fill in the blanks.

1 hour ago, Loza03 said:

Warframe did that for a number main plot points, sooooooo...

Seriously, 'Natah', a major quest and a significant story beat does nothing to introduce Tyl Regor, who's a significant secondary character, the one who undoes Hunhow's seal. It acts like we know him but no. This is true of Teshin as well (since there's no guarantee a new player will meet him) but they have no way of meeting Tyl prior to this point because his characterisation happened in an event that doesn't exist anymore. Parts of Warframe's main story are locked behind unofficial fan sites and youtube. At least the Grimoire is official.

Pot and kettle, is all I'm saying.

 

[000l000]

Il y a 5 heures, Cubewano a dit :

They don't care now, as shown by the upcoming weapon exilus mod slot.

DE say they recognize the balance issues in the game all the time, they never actually act on it, quite often they act to the contrary even. Maybe Destiny will force them to act on balance eventually, but that's yet to be seen, and the dozenth acknowledgement of this games obvious balance issues doesn't really change that. 

Weapon exilus slot is for conveniency, i don't see how convenient mods no one were using anyway would make power creep worse except from a few niche weapons.

Power creep is a thing only because people who come here complaining about it didn't even understand no one forced them to use a Catchmoon or whatever with godroll rivens in any kind of content. It's just as immature as most lament threads one can read here and tbh you don't need much experience in games to know that games are boring the day you become too powerful (or even start cheating).

There's no balance issues cause i'm pretty sure DE doesn't want to separate two distinct playerbase, playing with new players can be fun if you aren't killing everything with an upteenth boring build. But this game definitely needs higher level starchart missions at least to add some challenge to vets. Rarest mods, fully forma'd gear and fully geared/level operator can make most content quite trivial. Tbh i don't even get why lvl 100+ missions isn't still a thing, even to achieve such a simple thing as a few Silmaris scans we should be able to scan them in more tedious content than lvl 6-10 missions...

[taiiat]

6 hours ago, Loza03 said:

Warframe did that for a number main plot points, sooooooo...

and did that over the entire course of its existence. from the start.
though the Text log stuff is atleast actually inside of the game.

Edited October 11, 2019 by taiiat

[-Kittens-]

The real simple answer is having the current start chart move up by 15-20 per planet and scale from 3 to 150, and have the Tau system (including any home system colonies) scale from 100-200.

That cut and dried, that simple. The arbitrary NO changes introduced by Fortuna are pretty much the opposite of motivating your player base to opt in. People that like actions games like difficulty.

As long as the rewards are commensurate to the level of difficulty (something DE currently seems allergic to), players will happily play.

Real Simple.

 

 

 

 

[TioMegaManX]

On 2019-10-09 at 12:45 PM, Diavoros said:

Sadly cannot add DIFFICULTY to anything that is relevant to game progression, because the community will cry their eyes out and force DE to dumb down whatever was difficult. Last example of that was NW challenge of 60 mins Taveuni without life support or 40 waves defense that had to be cut to half because was "impossible". For Arbitrations they added revival mechanic. It's a hopeful thought that Empyrean will bring any sort of rewarding challenge and difficulty because I can already see threads of people complaining just about possible "extensive resource requirements" for just making the dry dock and later, making the ship's parts and upgrading them. 
Also about the one-shooting anything depends on faction and level because past a certain threshold Grineer armor becomes a pain to deal with, thus people complain about armor scaling.
Main reason because the game lacks "endgame" is not on DE's fault, but is on the playerbase.

Because DE can't do anything other than bullet sponges and add immunities.

[(PSN)caffinated_flame]

I feel like the new enemy's and new/rework warframe designs are building to a relatively more balance the game needs and hopeful would add some difficult

[Aldain]

2 hours ago, 000l000 said:

I don't see how convenient mods no one were using anyway would make power creep worse except from a few niche weapons.

The current narrative on that is that things like Reload Speed (which is one I think they showed off) increase DPS by cutting down on time spent reloading or something like that.

Honestly as long as they don't have things like how they put Power Drift in the Warframe Exilus pool I don't see it as power creep...honestly with the forma requirements that weapons have to fit the "mandatory" mods like Multishot and Base Damage I don't see anyone investing in the slot for a 2% damage increase from reloading 0.2 seconds faster.

I really wish Multishot wasn't such a big increase (or in the game at all), the cost of them is just such a stranglehold on mod capacity and variety.

[Monolake]

DE cant balance anything so nothing will come out of it.

[844448]

2 hours ago, VanFanel1980mx said:

Because DE can't do anything other than bullet sponges and add immunities.

Really? Last time they add something that isn't bullet sponges and immunities people cry "it's broken" like terra corpus and melee nullifier

[844448]

8 hours ago, Loza03 said:

This is some serious cherry-picking. Highlighting the main point, being that the quest Natah does not establish Tyl Regor as a character, instead assuming familiarity despite that familiarity being impossible if you missed the Tubemen of Regor event, requiring outside sources to fill in the blanks.

 

You sabotage his lab, with lotus explaining the lab is the birthplace of some of the most dangerous grineer to date so you have to put it out of commission. I think it's not too hard to connect the dots from here

[GPrime96]

13 minutes ago, 844448 said:

Really? Last time they add something that isn't bullet sponges and immunities people cry "it's broken" like terra corpus and melee nullifier

At least DE balanced out the nerf by adding Elite versions of the Terra Corpus which hits as hard as the ones at Launch + more Durability. But not sure why they had to nerf the Melee Nullifier.

[844448]

23 minutes ago, GPrime96 said:

At least DE balanced out the nerf by adding Elite versions of the Terra Corpus which hits as hard as the ones at Launch + more Durability. But not sure why they had to nerf the Melee Nullifier.

Because apparently a nullifier that can run fast is broken even for tenno that can outrun it so it caused massive crying

[Loza03]

4 hours ago, taiiat said:

and did that over the entire course of its existence. from the start.
though the Text log stuff is atleast actually inside of the game.

Doing it from the start doesn't make it better.

If it's a problem for Destiny doing it, it's a problem for Warframe, and far more so if they're doing it for major plot points.

1 hour ago, 844448 said:

You sabotage his lab, with lotus explaining the lab is the birthplace of some of the most dangerous grineer to date so you have to put it out of commission. I think it's not too hard to connect the dots from here

And that substitutes an actual character introduction, and forgives assumption of not only familiarity with the character but also involvement of past activities? No, not particularly. Also, the Sabotage mission is, like with Teshin, completely optional. Not only are there three possible routes through Uranus, of which the Sabotage mission is about halfway through one of them, it's pretty likely that, due to how the quest starts, the player will not have reached it.

 

Either way, this is off-topic, and derailing the thread. I'm stopping this.