Old Blood and Shadow of War - and general thoughts about game mechanics

[Steel_Rook]

On 2019-11-09 at 2:03 PM, Teridax68 said:

This I think is the crux of the problem: in a recent dev stream, DE talked about extrinsic vs. intrinsic rewards, and their conclusion was that they were so far gone on extrinsic rewards that they saw no way of shifting towards more intrinsic incentives to play. That both disappointed and worried me greatly, because it essentially revealed DE is afraid of giving players something to do without turning it into a grinding system, something we're seeing now with Kuva Liches

I remember hearing about that Dev Stream, though I never watched. Now I kind of wish I had, because it's turning out to be very important. Having seen DE's interpretation of "sustainable rewards," I really should have been a lot more worried than I was at the time. I worry about being too cynical and thinking too low of people who probably mean well, but all too often it turns out I wasn't cynical enough. Without wishing to be too melodramatic, The Old Blood has single-handedly destroyed any faith I had in the studio for this precise reason. I get that the developers might be worried about creating content people will genuinely want to play. It's disappointing and speaks to a certain amount of defitism, but it is a genuine issue worth discussing. I don't get the conclusion they drew from it, because it seems to amount to "Warframe is terrible, nobody wants to play it, the only way we can hold onto our players is by manipulating them through compulsion, addiction and fallacy. More FOMO, more time-gated mechanics, more crippling grinds, more Skinner boxes, more randomness - let's use ALL of the psychological warfare tools available against the players and MAKE them stick around, because Lord knows they'd leave if we gave them the option."

DE had the option of creating compelling gameplay. They showed off compelling gameplay in the fake TennoCon trailer. They talked about compelling gameplay. Yet what they delivered has almost no unique gameplay of its own, let alone compelling such. It's yet another hollow grind for hollow rewards and no reason to play it beyond compulsion. I chalked off this talk to a studio being justifiably worried. I should have recognised it as a studio laying down the path forward and straight-up telling me not to expect to enjoy Warframe, but instead buckle up for more grind. This right here is why I don't like to let people use the "Warframe is a grindy game" excuse - it's not an excuse, it's problem. The Old Blood is what happens when that statement loses its original meaning and becomes accepted status quo. Maybe this is just me over-reacting, but this update has been giving me never-ending culture shock, and making me reconsider if this really is what I want to do with my spare time, or my disposable income.

What worries me the most, though, is that DE will keep on doing this - exactly like they said. People will complain, people post angry on the forums, but I think we're demonstrating that we'll keep on playing. Even when we hate a system, even when we're burned out on the grind, we'll keep grinding anyway, keep buying stuff anyway. What incentive do DE really have to do anything else? With all due respect, The Old Blood feels like something they threw together in a few weeks either from projects they scrapped or in addition to something else they were working on. People have already killed multiple Liches and are farming for better weapons. What's their motivation to improve if this amount of low-effort dross will satisfy people? We're not exactly changing their mind, are we?

 

On 2019-11-09 at 2:03 PM, Teridax68 said:

By contrast, the Jovian Concord was my favorite update in recent times, maybe even of all time, precisely because it achieved the exact opposite: it brought permanent improvements to the game by giving us an updated tileset, a new (and enjoyable) mission type, and even a new gamut of enemies that may be the first ever to truly work well with Warframe's three-dimensional environments and movement system. In that respect, I still at least have faith in Empyrean's promised updates to ship tilesets, because Corpus ships especially are in the direst need of an overhaul. However, I hoped that the Lich system would similarly be a true systemic update to Warframe that would give us dynamic enemies and even mission types, yet that turned out differently, so I'm not sure if Archwing will truly be as well-integrated as promised.

Agreed completely. I absolutely love the new Jupiter tileset. Its addition had game-wide consequences, affecting Sorties, Kuva Siphons, Void Fissures, Nightmare missions, Nightwave and now indeed Kuva Liches, plus probably a bunch of other systems I don't remember. It's a redesign of an entire section of the game, permanently improving everything that routes through it. Disruption itself has been a major success in my opinion - a genuinely new game mode with unique mechanics which plays like nothing else we've had before AND adds a brand new mission type which can now also affect all of the above. I fought a Lich on a Jupiter Disruption node the other day! The Ropalolyst... I can take or leave, but the tileset and the mission type - especially now that it's spread to other planets - permanently improved the game in a way that we're going to keep experiencing for years to come.

But that's one thing. Just about everything else DE have added is pretty much what you describe later - a flash in the pants that we grind until we get all the rewards then never engage in it again. I started playing for real some time after Cetus, but in my time I've seen Fortuna, which turned out to be a bloated waste of resoruces. Nothing in the zone is bad on its own merits, but it's isolated from the rest of the world and gives me absolutely no reason to go back once I have the Fortuna-specific loot. Very few general-purpose activities ever send me there. Nightwave was the same thing. It added nothing to the game sans rewards. And sure - rewards might get me to engage with more of the game, but that's only going to matteruntil I have all the rewards I want. Now we have The Old Blood, which has added a standalone system which is almost purpose-designed to be NOT FUN to play that I don't see a reason to go back to... Really once I've first tried it out. It's too grindy and too boring, not to mention too hollow as compared to what was promised.

This is why the "extrinsic rewards" crap upsets me so much - you can't keep this up. You can't make rewards faster than people will consume them, or else faster than people will burn out on the BORING GRIND necessary to earn them. This is not a novel concept. MMO designers in 2004 were grappling with this exact issue. World of Warcraft, with its 16 million subscribers at one point and effectively infinite budget was still struggling with that. If the only way you're holding onto players is through the rewards you're offering, then you're going to burn out your playerbase. Not to put too fine a point on it, but #*!% "sustainable rewards." How about you think about sustainable development? How about you consider improving or adding to major game systems which affect all players doing all activities?

But who knows. I'm a recent player, maybe I'm just overreacting to the way Warframe's always been. I mean, it made it through 7 years somehow, so what do I know.

 

22 hours ago, Tyreaus said:

This is frank bullocks, though. The extrinsic rewards are almost always end-of-mission. That leaves everything from the start of a mission to its end open to the addition of intrinsic rewards. That's pretty much the entire fecking game. It's things like this where I wish I could sit down with them during a devstream and say, "look, guys, you're flat-out wrong, here's why, here's the potential you still have that you think is closed off, don't be discouraged, don't be lazy, go for it".

While I agree, DE brought this onto themselves. They're the ones who stopped gating Warframes behind story quests, they're the ones who decided to pile RNG on top of grind on top of RNG. When you make your game this oppressively grindy, you push your own players to optimise and play as little of it as possible. Doubly so when they seem either incapable or afraid of designing missions with more than one objective. It's a vicious circle, as far as I'm concerned. DE have the option to invest in improving the core gameplay loop. From simple things like ADDING MORE TILES TO TILESETS! to adding more objectives to missions, to doing more with existing systems (carryable items, scanners, Assault) to creating more mission types to creating procedurally-generated outdoor tilesets, etc.

Payday 2 came back to life recently, with a new heist cobbled together from pieces of old heists (the Firestarter hangars, the Election Day Warehouse, pieces of the Biker Heist clubhouse, etc.) and the same old mechanics (drill door to get explosives to blow up door, cut open cages to steal bags to load them on a plane, refuel to escape). But because the "feel" of that game is dictated by map layout and the precise combination of objectives, it still feels new. Warframe could do so much with all of the mechanics the game already has, yet all we get is "go to waypoint, kill the thing, run out of the map" over and over again. The more DE complain about "intrinsic vs. extrinsic rewards," the more I lose my patience with them. The problem here is THEM, not their players. THEY could have designed better encounters which would have kept us engaged even after we have all the rewards, but they chose not to. It's simply easier and more consistent to design for addiction than to design for inspiration.

The games I've stuck with are the games for which I enjoy the core gameplay loop. World of Tanks is a TERRIBLE game, but I fundamentally enjoy its core gameplay. Payday 2 has next to no progression, but I fundamentally enjoy the gunplay. Destiny 2 is an absolute grind, but I love the feel of the weapons and the movement system. Whenever I play Warframe for more an an hour, however, I come to realise that I fundamentally dislike the core gameplay loop. I like the gunplay when the game lets me have it. I like the movement system when it's warranted. I like the weapon variety when the game lets me choose. Yet NONE of these things give me progress. If I want progress, I have to grind out mission types I don't like, preferably with pubbies against my will, usually being carried because pubbies want to solo the game. Whenever I get to actually #*!%ing play the game... It's fun. It's all sorts of fun, when I can pick what I play. But I can never pick what I play. DE have pushed the game to be all about making progress, and all the ways to make progress are boring. I don't like Void Fissures, I don't like ESO, I don't like raids. Maybe I could deal with Kuva Siphons if they'd stop spawning over Survival and Capture nodes...

Point being, I agree. DE have made a conscious choice to not even bother trying to make gameplay compelling. Instead, they've decided to make gameplay an afterthought and put all of their efforts into rewards. Well if I wanted a game with afterthought gameplay and focus on rewards, I can just go back to Cookie Clicker.

[Teridax68]

On 2019-11-09 at 6:24 PM, Tyreaus said:

This is frank bullocks, though. The extrinsic rewards are almost always end-of-mission. That leaves everything from the start of a mission to its end open to the addition of intrinsic rewards. That's pretty much the entire fecking game.

Believe me, I'm completely with you here. My favorite part of the game is still the parkour and flow of combat, and I'm willing to take any incentive to engage in more of it, which need not be the promise of a reward. More often than not, playing for a reward is precisely what makes me want to take a break when I don't obtain it, whereas something as basic as a Sortie gives me reliable daily fun regardless of what I actually obtain, simply because it's a recurring event that gives me something to do on a regular basis. I wish DE focused more on those kinds of events, perhaps by actually adding stakes and impact for a change, instead of framing everything as a grind wall, and designing a whole bunch of satellite systems that don't interact with each other, and get abandoned once the rewards are obtained. I thought the lesson was learned with ESO, Arbitrations, PoE, and Fortuna, but apparently not.

22 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I get that the developers might be worried about creating content people will genuinely want to play. It's disappointing and speaks to a certain amount of defitism, but it is a genuine issue worth discussing. I don't get the conclusion they drew from it, because it seems to amount to "Warframe is terrible, nobody wants to play it, the only way we can hold onto our players is by manipulating them through compulsion, addiction and fallacy.

This strikes a chord with me too, because I've been getting the same impression. On one hand, there does seem to be this degree of complacency, where DE doesn't really pay sufficient attention to criticism of Warframe's biggest and most urgent pain points (e.g. its balance, its new player experience, and the vast amount of disjointed content clutter accumulated over time), but on the other hand, there also seems to be this constant, deathly fear that the entire playerbase might suddenly get bored and walk away, where the only answer is to throw more toys our way and lock them behind grind walls, no matter the long-term cost. The irony of it all is that DE would likely have had much more long-lasting content on their hands if they had given us fewer extrinsic rewards, and instead looked to give us reasons to play content that weren't purely rewards-based. Currently the only contender I think is Sorties, yet there's so much more that could be done in that same vein.

22 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

The Old Blood is what happens when that statement loses its original meaning and becomes accepted status quo. Maybe this is just me over-reacting, but this update has been giving me never-ending culture shock, and making me reconsider if this really is what I want to do with my spare time, or my disposable income.

I may perhaps not feel quite the same strength of emotion, but I have to agree that we cannot simply keep making excuses for Warframe, certainly not when it's been released for nearly ten years and has established itself as a successful game. There's this weird double standard where Warframe is championed for breaking the mold of F2P games, for being this one-of-a-kind success story, yet the moment the less savory points of its gameplay design and monetization are brought up, there is always this wave of defense, including from DE themselves, that assumes that the grind, the daily login rewards, the purchaseable power boosts, the crafting timers, and so on are absolutely indispensable, much in the same way plenty of other game studios justify their own less-than-ethical monetization schemes under the excuse that it's somehow the only way they can survive. As much as I love Warframe, and am more than willing to put money into stuff I believe is actually worthy of monetary purchase, such as beautiful cosmetics, if I'm being made to bank on a promise, I'd rather the devs worked towards a truly good product, rather than one that constantly sacrifices durable quality in the name of short-term gains. Looking at the lavish art assets DE have afforded themselves, like the new cinematic trailer, it's also becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the pretense that the studio is somehow struggling financially to the point of needing to impose so much deliberate inconvenience upon players.

22 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

What's their motivation to improve if this amount of low-effort dross will satisfy people? We're not exactly changing their mind, are we?

Thankfully, it seems like this update has in fact generated a rather negative reception from players overall, while also failing to boost player numbers for more than a week, judging by the Steam charts. While I want this game to grow, clearly updates of this kind are liable to only generate days-long spikes before receding, when really the game should be looking to permanently increase its player count, even if the increases are comparatively smaller in the short-term.

22 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

This is why the "extrinsic rewards" crap upsets me so much - you can't keep this up. You can't make rewards faster than people will consume them, or else faster than people will burn out on the BORING GRIND necessary to earn them. This is not a novel concept.

Agreed, and it surprises me that DE still tries even when they should have learned their lesson long ago. Even when the grind is so long that it causes most players to not even bother, it's still not long enough for the few players that remain to burn through everything until the next big content release. Warframe cannot run forever on short-term grind walls that get jettisoned and abandoned in some corner of the game once the rewards are obtained, as is currently the case for not just the majority, but the near-totality of its content. We need to stop the madness of making players laser-focus on some new island of content that they'll quickly grow to hate from the repetition, and instead look to give players reasons to play content that already exists, while trying to make all of the game fit into a coherent whole. This is what I expected from Kuva Liches, as I wanted them to play into many of our existing systems, not be yet another add-on that we can ignore once we're done with the relevant items.

[Steel_Rook]

18 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

The irony of it all is that DE would likely have had much more long-lasting content on their hands if they had given us fewer extrinsic rewards, and instead looked to give us reasons to play content that weren't purely rewards-based. Currently the only contender I think is Sorties, yet there's so much more that could be done in that same vein.

Absolutely agreed, and for a few reasons. Firstly, there's what I like to refer to as a "critical mass" of content. That is to say, enough different missions, locations, activities and items to play around that most players will be able to cycle through them without getting bored. By the time they're done with everything, the first few things they did will feel distant and fresh again, from the "Hey, I haven't done that in a while!" perspective. Warframe already has enough weapons and Frames for this (even if the game's balance does its level best to pigeonhole us into only using a few of them) but it has an absolute dearth of activities. Disruption aside, we're still doing most of the same activities we have been for years in most of the same locations against most of the same enemies... Except now there's a NEW reward stuck at the end of it! That's only going to last for so long until I get bored of the game itself to the point where no amount of rewards is going to matter.

Secondly, there's a certain critical mass of player good will which can turn a game from a success to a classic. The reason you keep hearing about City of Heroes almost a decade after it shut down is because for a lot of us, that game was our "home" more so than just our entertainment. We ended up with a community disproportionately made up of 7+ year veterans. We stuck with that game through thick and thin because even if particular updates or trends weren't to our liking, "the game" was. Excessive, soul-crushing grind is antithetical to this, because its entire goal is to keep people playing the even after they resent it. Yes, that does lead to long-term compulsion, but people who eventually break the habit rarely come back. Because there is no actual joy, no actual entertainment beneath all the grind. It's all self-sustaining compulsive behaviour. It's hard to break, but even harder to restart. I really wish DE would sit down and have a group think about whether they want to numb or inspire.

Also - I need to do more Sorties. Keep forgetting about those, and they're fun to do.

 

18 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

in the same way plenty of other game studios justify their own less-than-ethical monetization schemes under the excuse that it's somehow the only way they can survive. As much as I love Warframe, and am more than willing to put money into stuff I believe is actually worthy of monetary purchase, such as beautiful cosmetics, if I'm being made to bank on a promise, I'd rather the devs worked towards a truly good product, rather than one that constantly sacrifices durable quality in the name of short-term gains.

Part of this is my own failure as a person. I joke about being a whale, but there's a lot of truth to these words. You pay for exceptional content you enjoy. The majority of the money I spend is to make terrible design go away. I pay for my Catalysts, Reactors and Forma because the grind for them is unpleasant and detracts from the experience. I paid for my Arcanes because I'd rather eat my own beard than grind Eidolons. I paid for my Gravimags because I wanted Atmospheric Archguns and didn't feel like grinding the second Profit-Taker bounty. Most recently, I finally broke down and bought a Requiem mod that I knew I needed for my Kuva Lich which was stubbornly refusing to drop even on four-player Radshares. I know I shouldn't be paying for these things because it sends a bad message to DE... But it's not like they don't know that. I'm currently sitting on another 75% off and weighing my options, because this really is what it takes for me to enjoy Warframe.

In the past, I've accused Warframe of being a genuinely good game ruined by monetisation and grind. I'll probably make a separate thread about it, but the way my experience with fighting my Kuva Lich turned around the MOMENT I had all of the mods I knew I needed is entirely illustrative. While lacking the mods, playing Lich missions seemed pointless and yet at the same time grinding Kuva Relics felt so boring! I spent my time doing Nightwave instead. Now that I have what I think are all the necessary mods... The system feels fun. I'll gladly jump on my Lich's sword (or knee, as the case may be) because either it'll give me a lot of progress if I guessed my mods right, or it'll give me at least SOME progress towards the next Requiem mod. In fact, I could even go with a Kuva Lich system which told me the "number" of correct mods in the correct slots I was using, kind of like the Mastermind board game. I had that as a kid and enjoyed it greatly.

My point is that Warframe becomes a ton of fun once you're able to in some way circumvent all of the grind and all of the repetition and all of the pushing to play content you don't like. It's a genuinely good, genuinely entertaining game. I might not be able to play it for 8 hours a day, 7 days a week but I don't HAVE to. I can easily play it for a couple of hours a day a few days a week and still have fun, and still feel invested enough to pay for it. That's essentially what I do now - play it once every couple of weeks when a friend of mine is on before he has to go walk the dog. And yet Warframe's design doesn't seem to consider that enough. It wants me back every day, it wants me back every week, it wants me playing for hours, it wants me engaging in all of the events, and that's just so draining... Up to a point, I'm willing to pay to make the nuisances go away, largely because I accept it as the cost of doing business in a F2P game. Some people grind for parts to sell for Plat, I sit on the other side - I'm the lazy bum who buys the plat that these people earn for their effort.

But there's a limit to this. I'm not going to pay $80 for Atlas Prime, no way. I'm not going to pay 300 Plat for Grendel, ESPECIALLY when I strongly suspect that he his acquisition method was made deliberately painful as a means of pushing people into the Market. I might buy another Requiem mod or two, but I don't know if I'm going to want to bother fighting another Lich if I have to earn or buy more of them. There's a certain critical mass of inconvenience past which I start to feel like I'm being taken advantage of. I'll overpay for useless items - it's a personality flaw. I'm not going to pay for a scam. And no, Warframe isn't a scam... But it does give me that same familiar, unpleasant feeling. DE have a wonderful game on their hands, that they increasingly seem to not know what to do with, and that's not good.

 

19 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Thankfully, it seems like this update has in fact generated a rather negative reception from players overall, while also failing to boost player numbers for more than a week, judging by the Steam charts. While I want this game to grow, clearly updates of this kind are liable to only generate days-long spikes before receding, when really the game should be looking to permanently increase its player count, even if the increases are comparatively smaller in the short-term.

Yeah, fair point. The Old Blood's reaction does seem to have mattered. Not only was it almost entirely negative from what I can see, but it seems to have lit a fire under DE's asses. Usually they'll sit on bad design for a few weeks to "gather data" until they start making minor changes. Not this time. Five days of overwhelmingly negative feedback was enough "data" to push quite a few major changes through production. Merging Kuva guns, gaining Murmur progress from Lich deaths, gaining Relics from Lich Thralls and more. I mean, it's pretty clear they rushed The Old Blood out the door undercooked and underdone so some of this was "the rest of the update" masquerading as hotfixes, but a lot of this does seem like the studio getting hit with a culture shock. Honestly, I'm proud of the community for standing their ground and not descending into excuses...

But I worry exactly what DE might be taking away from this. Are they realising that the system was too grindy with too little content and that people expect better? Or are they learning the limits by which they can push grind and monetisation before people's patience boils over? I want to think they're trying to perfect their game, a part of me now heavily suspects that they're trying to perfect their monetisation. Will the next update focus on delivering more content with less grind... Or will it focus on delivering more grind with less backlash? As you can tell, I'm currently very uncertain about how I feel towards Warframe and its developers any more and I suspect a fair number of others are, as well. Fingers crossed that DE learn the right lessons from this experience.

[BloodRavenCap]

I created another thread to describe my thoughts how can everything in the game should work - this one feels a little bit not realistic to me. In the other thread I tried to realize how things can be patched more easily and faster.

[(XBOX)ZenithLord 42]

It would be a great addition if when the Lich appears in mission, that we could kill them temporarily, within the confines of that specific mission. Giving players the option of whether or not to let the Lich die or using your Parazon would still cause the Lich to level up, but at least he could be treated more akin to the Stalker in that the Lich would not remain the artificially forced nuisance that it is currently. 
 

The added bonus would be the return of most of the rare resources he acquired on the given planet during your previous missions. It might even be possible to have three Liches functioning at any given time with their influence only appearing on nodes immediately surrounding the node where they were created. They would also be capable of appearing on any node within three planets of that influence while only taking resources from nodes under its influence. 
 

The changes would allow multiple Liches to spawn in one mission. They could even drop new and old Arcanes that could be guaranteed drops when you kill a Lich in mission, giving incentives to keep them alive longer. The Liches could even host their own invasion missions into other planets or adjacent nodes and siding with them could change their status towards the player. Liches could even have the potential to fight one another in missions. 
 

Frankly, the Lich system is underwhelming and poorly implemented and these changes would go a long way in actually making the Liches a part of the game as opposed to a separate but forced addition.