I've come to love Warframe

[SombraHookier]

Hi! I wanted to share a little bit of story with you guys, about my experiences with Warframe, how I fell in love with the game and game design and a few things that interest me.

I've given Warframe a shot for the first time in early June 2018. I believe back then Plains of Eidolon was introduced. Back then, I was confronted with an extremely confusing tutorial - I've actually thought for five minutes in that Excalibur's 1 was the only way to fight until I stumbled over the first weapons and later found the melee button. 😄 If I remember correctly, I played mostly on my own back then because I thought I would slow down people in public games, and had no idea how relaxed everything was. This was my very first PvE game; before that I had only played League of Legends (and only played Co-Op matches against bots since, well, you probably know how PvP turns people into native saltdwellers). I was surprised about how helpful people were in public chats and a lot of my friends from another gaming community (Discovery Freelancer) were playing Warframe, too, so we started playing together, did all the grinds and such.

After a few months, I dropped Warframe again, because I believe, as much fun it can be, every game starts to get boring if you play it on a very frequent basis. So it went on a few times, over and over again. Uninstalled the game a few times, then reinstalled it later, after a bunch of months. I kept my eyes on Warframe's updates. One thing I really liked about the game was the fact the community was so big that it allowed entire shows to happen - TennoCon. The insight into what would come in the future was pretty nice every time, and I personally enjoy seeing the fancy dresses. Reb and Meg and the Dev-Stream team including Diglet working in representative for the development made DE and Warframe look pretty fun to stick to. But also the stuff the fans do, like... this....

A few weeks ago, I installed Warframe again, hyped by the Empyrean and Duviri Paradox announcements (and because after three years of playing Discovery Freelancer, I took my leave there). While I know Warframe is also lovely known as Bugframe, which is something I can often laugh about myself, I do think, for an entirely free game (since I'm a ninja), this is absolutely great and I can't really complain about the, in my personal perspective, downsides of the game or the many things people complain about on the forum/YouTube/reddit, etc. Although I miss the old overpowered Itzal. 😄

Now that I have a vacant place in terms of roleplay - Discovery Freelancer is all about roleplay ingame, on forum and on external platforms - I've read into the lore of Warframe, watched various videos and read up the wiki articles. Playing the game actively with an eye on the lore is actually pretty fun after having rushed through everything for the sake of gameplay and content-unlocking. I've also started to write an introductive story, trying to immerse myself even further into the lore, trying to fill some gaps. While factions like the Ostron, Myconians and Solaris exist, and there are jumpsuited guys hanging out in the relays, there is only so much information on other civilian groups and smaller parties out there. And given the lore doesn't actually forbid that much and is extremely open for creative worldbuilding, I think that's going to be something that will make me stay for even longer. Maybe someone even appreciates the writing. 🙂

I've always considered Warframe as a good example of game design, which is something I have to do with in RL quite often on an advisory level. One thing, for example, other games can learn from, is that having many different resources is the best way to make sure the players do different things to aquire them. That's something only modern MMOs do, and it is something they do right. Players usually minmax when it comes to grinding, and when there is much different stuff to grind, they need to do the minmax on every single different resource type that is required. The transparency provided on loot tables isn't even a bad thing here, as it provides a good insight over what needs to be done, while other games have NPCs drop entirely randomly selected stuff. *cough* Star Trek Online *cough*

I'm currently MR 19, my game has about 900 hours of active playing. Can't even complain about the support as they have always been rather understanding and nice whenever I had to contact them (not that it was many times). Currently working on modeling a variant of a Corpus frigate for the story I am writing, so far I only have a sketch on how I imagine it, based on an accidental amalgamation I created by altering my favourite battleship model from Discovery Freelancer. I only wish there were ways to extract the Corpus capital ship models for blender so I could get a better idea of the shapes used for them. The cutscenes only give so much insight on the actual designs and Empyrean doesn't feature Corpus ships yet (although there is already the Obelisk-class from the demo they showed at TennoCon).

Looking forward to see you ingame, and looking forward to see more stuff from the devs, can't wait for the next Devstream. And the next videos from BetterNamePending and Quite Shallow. 🙂