Suggestion: Tiles X.0? aka Lanes

[Densoro]

The current tile system causes you to adapt from one room to the next, but there's nothing for adaptation within a single room or tile. As soon as you figure out which room layout you're in, navigation becomes trivial. For the sake of greater variety, WF could take a hint from great action platformers such as Mario 64/Sunshine and Jet Set Radio Future to step up the game's emergent level design.

Currently, most tiles have linear, clearly-defined 'lanes.' These include staircases leading up to catwalks, trenches and ventilation shafts, bridges, and other main thoroughfares which serve a pretty singular path between room entrances, or funneling toward key objectives. However, the aforementioned Mario/JSRF games have a compelling way of intersecting lanes constantly. Part of this is to do with their mission structures: you have one path to the Ferris wheel, running through another path to the pendulum swing, and because of this intersection you can weave through both paths (and more!) to sequence break challenges on the way to either mission. Thus, you have the option of playing the intended linear path, or of showcasing greater mastery of the game's movement tech by jumping the tracks.

By spawning a randomly-generated web of crisscrossing, sometimes-broken lanes, I believe each room could take advantage of this kind of mastery, reduce tile monotony, and take advantage of the only other feature of many tiles: empty, unused space. These wide open spaces have little mechanical hook; mostly players just mash low-angle bullet jump slides the same way Ocarina of Time players spam-roll across Hyrule Field. Crucially, Mario and Jet Set force you to commit: each platform represents a hard step, rather than inching one's way amorphously across flat terrain.

This kind of variety could be particularly appreciated in the Gas City rework: the outdoor platforming segments are expansive to accommodate for the bullet jump, which trivializes earlier tilesets -- but the lanes are so linear and restrictive that they tend to grind the action to a halt as you follow the exact same set of instructions every time. My attempts to sequence break this with Valkyr's ripline have even caused me to respawn outside the level, or in a previous room. By varying the state of the catwalks and even spawning different floating platforms, I believe WF can integrate these as exciting setpieces instead of momentum-killing chores. Meanwhile, expansive indoor tiles such as the Hexenon factory could be repurposed entirely, perhaps by despawning the Hexenon tanks and setting up multiple rooms' worth of new challenges.

Dare I say it -- these could even breathe much-needed life into the Plains, which have almost no structure for parkour or K-drive stunts. This could be used to create key strategic points such as sniper towers, makeshift arenas and fortifications, or even aerial obstacle courses to keep Archwing play from devolving into Shift+W-until-objective-reached. While the scale of the Plains is refreshing, I've never felt that it captures the core of Warframe's mobility; instead, it demonstrates that too much freedom and too little structure can feel more barren than liberating.

tl;dr we'd have a more interesting time pathfinding if levels were refurnished in ways that encouraged more committed choices every time we revisited them