Mission nodes as mini-open worlds, aka secondary objectives

[motorfirebox]

Right now, gameplay in Warframe is split really hard between two modes: open world versus mission. The mission structure, with its singular focus, means it's hard for most players to justify any approach other than gottagofast. 

While gottagofast should be an important part of Warframe, I feel like it's overemphasized in mission nodes. There's very little value to taking your time and exploring a bit, because for the most part—the occasional medallion, cephalon fragment, etc etc notwithstanding—there's no reward for it.

And at the same, the singular focus of missions makes missions nodes feel kinda contrived. They're not places, they're just a box of targets. In newer tilesets, there's lots of stuff going on, but it's still the same box with prettier decorations.

 

The solution: secondary objectives. Basically, each mission has the primary objective, same as now. But the tileset isn't limited to spawning just the tiles associated with that objective. Any tileset can spawn one or more secondary objectives—tiles from other missions, essentially. So you might be running an exterminate mission, and stumble across a spy vault. You might be doing a survival run and find an reactor room for a ship sabotage mission. If you find one of these tilesets, that tile's objective—get the data from the spy vault, set off the reactor—are added as secondary objectives.

Secondary objectives are optional. Rewards for completing them would be commensurate with the mission type and level (e.g. you could get Ivara parts from a spy vault that spawned in an exterminate mission). Maybe there'd be a bonus for completing all secondary objectives.

Point is, it would make mission nodes more interesting and reward (and make possible in the first place) tileset exploration. And since the secondary objectives would be optional, they wouldn't slow down someone who just wants to gottagofast the primary objective.

[JackMcRain]

That sound really interesting and I really love for something like that to become a thing in warframe, especially given I'm a player who prefers to play solo and taking my time exploring the tilesets, getting some loot and all, rather than just going like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7i6UurB8yA 

Technically speaking Warframe does have some cases akin to that but it could be very interesting seeing that to be expanded in the way you mentioned. Rather than just the already existing cases like looking for those caches in sabotage missions and whatnot.

Obviously it would have to be changed into something to prevent trolling, it just wouldn't be funny being in a survival mission and all of the sudden someone sabotaged a reactor forcing everyone to leave the mission before everything blows up.

[motorfirebox]

33 minutes ago, JackMcRain said:

That sound really interesting and I really love for something like that to become a thing in warframe, especially given I'm a player who prefers to play solo and taking my time exploring the tilesets, getting some loot and all, rather than just going like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7i6UurB8yA 

Technically speaking Warframe does have some cases akin to that but it could be very interesting seeing that to be expanded in the way you mentioned. Rather than just the already existing cases like looking for those caches in sabotage missions and whatnot.

Obviously it would have to be changed into something to prevent trolling, it just wouldn't be funny being in a survival mission and all of the sudden someone sabotaged a reactor forcing everyone to leave the mission before everything blows up.

Yeah adjustments would have to be made. Missions that create an end mission timer would have to be reworked—maybe instead of a mission timer, you just have to deal with the sabotage effect for [mission timer] minutes before the enemy gets a backup reactor online. You could rework survival and defense missions to fit this, too—coming across a defense tile could trigger a 5-round defense objective, coming across some other sort of tile could trigger a 5-minute survival objective.

The other thing a change like this could bring is non-linear maps. Instead of a map where each room has one entrance and one exit, rooms could connect with each other in multiple ways, so that there are multiple paths through the map. That would help map tiles feel more like a place, rather than just long twisty shooting gallery.