Pablo acknowledges why better AI alone will not be enough for good difficulty in WF: We need to be nerfed first

[Felsagger]

19 minutes ago, Loza03 said:

Yeah, that's my point. As far as I can tell, that use of Civilisation as an example isn't talking about it in terms of lessons, just the abstract concept.

Doesn't fit on the list. The concept is seen in every game but the materialization of it is way too complex for a discussion here. Take us way too far.

Quote

I mean, hell, large chunks of Metal Gear are dedicated to stealth fantasy, which is arguably distinct from power fantasy (since it's more about being smarter than everyone else, not stronger). Nobody's questioning it's inclusion on that list though. Granted, yes, you do also jump into a nuclear-enabled mech and beat the living daylights out another nuclear-enabled mech, so it's sure got plenty of power fantasy of its own, but point here - list isn't bringing up specific ways to make Warframe better, just other times the challenge/power fantasy dynamic has been handled.

The other games except civilization VI are easy examples that illustrate the concept of glorified player versus challenge balances. 

Edited May 24, 2020 by Felsagger

[Loza03]

46 minutes ago, Felsagger said:

Doesn't fit on the list. The concept is seen in every game but the materialization of it is way too complex for a discussion here. Take us way too far.

The other games except civilization VI are easy examples that illustrate the concept of glorified player versus challenge balances. 

Is it really worth getting so worked up over though?

[(XBOX)ShonOfDawn]

2 hours ago, (XB1)YoungGunn82 said:

Problem: hitscan SHOULD NOT exist

I can't tell if this is a sarcastic response or an actual concern, if it's the latter and you're talking about enemies, I'd agree. Imo the corpus are so much better to fight than the grineer because at the very least you can see their bullet trails and try to avoid firing lines with purpose. Against hitscan, the only thing you can do in Warframe is flop around like a spasmodic salmon in hope of passively reducing the units' accuracy through your speed. I would be very much in favor of making all enemy fire projectile based, with the exception of snipers and other telegraphed abilities (Sentra Turret or the Ambulas f*** you beam are great examples). That, or rework the parkour system in a way that allows us to keep momentum, Titanfall style. In that game, enemies have hitscan weaponry and the same accuracy penalty to enemies through speed applies, but the simple fact that you can chain movement without resetting your momentum in every step of the process (like in warframe) makes it sooo much more fluid and rewarding. In wf unfortunately almost every single movement action (bullet jumping and wall hopping are the greatest outliers, dodge roll does that to an extent as well) straight up resets your momentum, so instead of promoting smart chaining of movement to progressively increase your speed, the game incentivizes spamming the highest instant-velocity move, aka Bullet Jump, for both traversal and evasion, which devolves in a very inelegant experience for a supposed space ninja, and is just a bummer considering how expansive the parkour system can be. I truly hope they'll take a look at that.

[Felsagger]

35 minutes ago, Loza03 said:

Is it really worth getting so worked up over though?

I dropped my cup of coffee when I read that list. That's why. 

[Loza03]

Just now, Felsagger said:

I dropped my cup of coffee when I read that list. That's why. 

Your caffine will be remembered, but still.

[Felsagger]

I made more coffee. Had to get my cup, a War Frame half hour Kuva survival sent me to sleep.  

[(XBOX)YoungGunn82]

4 hours ago, Aldain said:

That's a good part of the issue in a nutshell.

The A.I. is so slow that even if they had the tools to react to the player they'd never get the chance, the A.I. also suffer from pathing issues depending on the tileset and don't have a good behavior priority setup, which can easily lead to units getting confused and jumping up and down ledges multiple times (something I've see far too often for my liking).

I gringe everytime when ENEMIES just run by me in a pub with not a care in the world that I'm right there next to them. It super gringy and sad. I stop playing smh and go play something  else. 

But nah lets just nerf a few WFs into the ground that will fix it /s

Edited May 25, 2020 by (XB1)YoungGunn82

[Goodwill]

17 hours ago, Felsagger said:

 

False. 

Doom Eternal is a strict power fantasy game that uses different difficulty settings on A.I and advanced enemies. 

 

False.

Doom Eternal is not Warframe. Doomguy does not have the ability to wipe an entire map with a single button press - every 5 seconds.

And Doom advance AI? Lol no. 

Edited May 25, 2020 by Goodwill

[(XBOX)YoungGunn82]

3 hours ago, (XB1)ShonFr0st said:

can't tell if this is a sarcastic response or an actual concern

It always been a concern of mine. Hitscan should not exist for frames or enemies. You can't balance anything around that because there is no avoiding it. 

(Sigh) WF is just so dated in many mamy diffrent fundamental ways. For example, the super hero landing? Has always been just a big why for me. There are so many more creative ways to design a WF to stop. But I digress. 

Edited May 25, 2020 by (XB1)YoungGunn82

[(NSW)ONVEBAL]

I will admit that I have NOT read this whole thread. I just don't have the time to read 47+ pages of suggestions and arguments. I'm sure if I'm saying something that is ridiculous/absurd that one of the people who frequent this thread will say something. Just as I am sure that if I say something that has already been said it will be brought to my/our attention.

I do have a suggestion on how to broach the challenge quandary without breaking too many of the underlying systems. This suggestion is specifically targeted towards 'hard mode' and as such should only be implemented there leaving the base game untouched for all the purist.

What if ... they introduce a new wrinkle that I am calling 'Antagonist' bots/spawns in hard mode. These antagonist bots will spawn, a few at a time, in hard mode levels, with innate immunity to your Warframes abilities. They can still be killed by weapons and spawn at a slightly higher level than stage enemies. However, they will not be affected by any of your particular warframe abilities. They can still be affected by other warframe abilities though but not by yours. These antagonist bots are gunning specifically for you and have 'special' AI to worm/work their way to trying to kill you. For instance, I'm playing Mesa. The antagonist bots can't be targeted by Peace-Maker, so even if they are in direct line of sight they won't be hit. Better yet, in this specific case make them snipers. They don't have to possess any special abilities. Just an 'new' AI routine, immunity towards the player/frame abilities, and weapons that contextually makes sense for trying to kill that specific frame.

Think about it for a second. In a New Game +, or Starchart + (if you will). We as the players are going through the Starchart again but the Grineer and Corpus leadership saw what we did the first time though their facilities and have put in mitigating factors so that "it won't happen again". They have scrounged through their database and have selected individuals who have shown immunity (for some reason) to the tenno powers. Now in addition to raising the level of personnel at these facilities they have also sent these Antagonist there with a plan should the Tenno show up again.

Basically, keep the regular AI, power scaling, weapons, and enemies as they are and add in these new 'wrinkles' on 'Hard Mode' missions. Only the new spawns will have the new AI and they will operate outside of normal parameters. Since only a few of these will spawn per level, or maybe only a few can be alive at any one time, that will mean that players can't "Press 4 and Shut the door". Players will have to engage in the content/missions. They will have to look at team composition. They will have to make sure they are aware of what is happening on the battlefield. Just bumping the enemy levels is a nice start. But what about using some of the same enemy models in new ways. Heck, give them an aura like an eximus if necessary.

Any thoughts? There are probably many holes but maybe something I missed that could be improved upon here.

I also have ideas for Ultra-Hard Mode (Or Starchart ++) but I won't talk about them here.

[Felsagger]

29 minutes ago, Goodwill said:

False.

Doom Eternal is not Warframe. Doomguy does not have the ability to wipe an entire map with a single button press - every 5 seconds.

And Doom advance AI? Lol no. 

True. 

That's exactly why Doom eternal combat gameplay is more satisfying than War Frame nuke game play. 

[Aldain]

44 minutes ago, (XB1)YoungGunn82 said:

But nah lets just nerf a few WFs into the ground that will fix it

All the good A.I. in the world won't solve a Limbo with a Kuva Bramma turning the A.I. off and/or killing things faster than they spawn.

A good A.I. is useless if they can be vaporized faster than they can calculate, as long as we're capable of being walking nuclear warheads it makes foot soldiers and tanks useless.

Edited May 25, 2020 by Aldain

[Felsagger]

Get rid of Limbo Cataclysm. Get rid of Bramma.  

 

Or

 

Make an enemy with Limbo Capabilities and a Bramma. See how it turns out for us. 

 

[Cloud]

On 2020-05-17 at 11:28 PM, Gabbynaru said:

Good. Let's drop this charade then and let this be the wonderful power fantasy that it is instead of trying to "balance" it and take all the fun out in the process.

Except the fact that without balance you don't play a game, you play a sandbox. 

[(XBOX)YoungGunn82]

32 minutes ago, Aldain said:

All the good A.I. in the world won't solve a Limbo with a Kuva Bramma turning the A.I. off and/or killing things faster than they spawn.

A good A.I. is useless if they can be vaporized faster than they can calculate, as long as we're capable of being walking nuclear warheads it makes foot soldiers and tanks useless.

Yes this is the problem.  Nerfing Warfames into the ground won't make enemies less dead or challenging. Enemies will still lemming each other and run past you, have terrible pathing, bewildering tactics, and dated reaction time. Enemies have never had a meaningful AI update. We need an enemy rework 2.0 before they finish the weapon rework and/or nerf another frame. 

Edited May 25, 2020 by (XB1)YoungGunn82

[Aldain]

1 minute ago, (XB1)YoungGunn82 said:

Yes this is the problem.  Nerfing Warfames into the ground won't make enemies less dead or challenging. Enemies will still lemming each other and run past you, have terrible bathing, bewildering tactics, and dated reaction time. 

Both need to change, one or the other won't solve the problem, fast A.I. won't stop the instant death radius and getting rid of the instant death radius won't help the potato level A.I.

[Kaotyke]

1 minute ago, (XB1)YoungGunn82 said:

Yes this is the problem.  Nerfing Warfames into the ground won't make enemies less dead or challenging. Enemies will still lemming each other and run past you, have terrible bathing, bewildering tactics, and dated reaction time. 

[Felsagger]

6 minutes ago, Kaotyke said:

 

Sorry but War Frame A.I. sucks duodenum hard. 

 

Besides when I want a good sleep, I play one Kuva Survival. This provides me a good night sleep for 8 hours. I think that DE did something great up to this point. The game is a good sleeping pill for insomnia. 

 

[Loza03]

49 minutes ago, Felsagger said:

Get rid of Limbo Cataclysm. Get rid of Bramma.  

 

Or

 

Make an enemy with Limbo Capabilities and a Bramma. See how it turns out for us. 

 

It interests me that you identify Cataclysm as the problem, not the hypothetically infinite-range absolute crowd control that is stasis...

[Felsagger]

For stasis DE can make troops immune to it. Or simply give that ability a cool down and a short period for the duration. 

[Cubewano]

29 minutes ago, (XB1)YoungGunn82 said:

Yes this is the problem.  Nerfing Warfames into the ground won't make enemies less dead or challenging. Enemies will still lemming each other and run past you, have terrible pathing, bewildering tactics, and dated reaction time. Enemies have never had a meaningful AI update. We need an enemy rework 2.0 before they finish the weapon rework and/or nerf another frame. 

It arguably would since the most effective means of making enemies dead is overtuned Warframe abilities, not being able to nuke a tristate area with a Saryn will definitely make enemies less dead in generalized context, which in turns means more direct engagements with enemies which then translates to some level of enhanced difficulty even if it is a very bare level of it. Nerfing frames won't completely redefine the games combat no, but it does shift how our combat encounters pan out all the same. Dial this game back a couple years of power creep and just on frame and weapon balance values alone this game used to have a far less corrosive and divisive community views on the games difficulty and combat structure.  

As for reworking enemies before reworking us, that sounds like a not great plan when player power is more or less the base of this games combat, it's the center stone for influencing what kind of enemy design would be necessary to combat us, if you work on enemies first the redefine the entire power structure of players they're just going to have to go back and revise enemies again to match the new structure anywho. It's more important to set the base range of player performance first and then modify enemies to match our new boundaries which smoothens out the process immensely. 

[(PSN)Shadow_Of_Hunhow]

Honestly I'd love for a little shift in pace overall, make enemies stronger but fewer, make them smarter, and have them "adapt" to strategies (if you just spam cc they'll dodge it or whatever, if you spam melee they'll block or parry, etc) so that instead of mowing down hordes of fodder enemies have more presence and can have really strong, really cool things like they do more often because you'll be able to give it your attention vs being split between 30 enemies at once. Grapples, big explosives, air strikes, and more could all be made super dangerous and deadly if we have to stop and focus on stuff like that.

 

Its not even the fact that we're too powerful, it's we're too efficient at minmaxing content now, we need a big shift to shake things up or the game will keep suffering this problem...

[844448]

35 minutes ago, (PS4)Shadow_Of_Hunhow said:

Honestly I'd love for a little shift in pace overall, make enemies stronger but fewer, make them smarter, and have them "adapt" to strategies (if you just spam cc they'll dodge it or whatever, if you spam melee they'll block or parry, etc) so that instead of mowing down hordes of fodder enemies have more presence and can have really strong, really cool things like they do more often because you'll be able to give it your attention vs being split between 30 enemies at once. Grapples, big explosives, air strikes, and more could all be made super dangerous and deadly if we have to stop and focus on stuff like that.

 

Its not even the fact that we're too powerful, it's we're too efficient at minmaxing content now, we need a big shift to shake things up or the game will keep suffering this problem...

When you have 50 meters radius of CC? Does that mean enemies won't go any closer than 50 meters from you, so you hardly can see them on normal tileset? And we have enemies that able to parry you, guardsman and bailiff, see if you like fighting them where guardsman can block your shots using their melee

You want a big shift? How about we make minmaxing actually having drawbacks instead of covering drawbacks with more mods so you can only mod a stat once and no duplicate stat in the mod allowed wether it's positive or negative?

[Goodwill]

4 hours ago, Felsagger said:

True. 

That's exactly why Doom eternal combat gameplay is more satisfying than War Frame nuke game play. 

True.

I agree with you on that point.

[alenkiss]

I am perfectly fine with the current level of difficulty. I am doing a split screen and watching something meanwhile i farm. And i like it, nice and chill most of the time. But if lich shows up I gotta pause my video and devote my attention to it or he kills me. But I also occasionally like some challenge, as there needs to be a point for all this goodies we grind for to be useful somewhere. Still i like the way it is: about 70% ez content 30% hard (i am gonna classify hard as in it needs my full screen attention or i die), the "we need 100% super hard content all the time" group can gtfo. Buffing levels of enemies is enough imo, stupid gimmicks like arbitration drones are OK sometimes to change the meta, but I do not want them everywhere, the meta shifts on its own given the mission type anyway. The gimmicks I do not enjoy though are the ones out of my control: radiation procced allies/void laser killing me/objective, the reqiuem sequence/lich spawn rng, capture target rng following the idiot teammates who lets it die, being forcefully shoven into a mission even though I didn't check "ready" and the likes.