The Game Doesn't Tell You What Abilities Actually Do.

[Hardwood]

When you go to Xaku's ability tab his 'The Lost' ability says, "Cycle through and cast one of three abilities originating from the Warframes that make up Xaku: Accuse, Gaze and Deny."

What is Accuse? What is Gaze and what is Deny? I know that Accuse has a radius, a duration and a max number of targets but nowhere in the game, as far as I can tell, does it tell me what it does.

At the very least you should put a link to the wiki if you aren't going to bother to explain anything, basically ever.

[(PSN)MYKK678]

13 minutes ago, Hardwood said:

When you go to Xaku's ability tab his 'The Lost' ability says, "Cycle through and cast one of three abilities originating from the Warframes that make up Xaku: Accuse, Gaze and Deny."

What is Accuse? What is Gaze and what is Deny? I know that Accuse has a radius, a duration and a max number of targets but nowhere in the game, as far as I can tell, does it tell me what it does.

At the very least you should put a link to the wiki if you aren't going to bother to explain anything, basically ever.

"if you aren't going to bother to explain anything, basically ever"

Was sort of with you until the above line. It denotes the idea that there are many things that are not explained. Can you give a few examples?

[Hardwood]

58 minutes ago, (PS4)MYKK678 said:

"if you aren't going to bother to explain anything, basically ever"

Was sort of with you until the above line. It denotes the idea that there are many things that are not explained. Can you give a few examples?

 

They are pretty notorious for not explaining anything...

Sometimes the patch notes will tell you what mode the new warframe drops in but often we only know where to go for what from the wiki. Everyone knows how mods work and interact because of the community, not anything DE ever explained. Guns have alternate fire modes that aren't explained anywhere in their description. The game is completely full of modes and systems that aren't explained anywhere in the game. A new player without the Wiki could play for hundreds of hours and not realize most of the Warframes even exist let alone where to get them.

People take for granted just how much of their knowledge comes from the community because the game doesn't tell you anything. There are dozens of modes, some of them fairly complex, that you just have to stumble your way through. Huge parts of the game like focus just exist untethered to anything else. Now that they have quests sometimes those point to specific systems to make you aware of them but the mechanics are never explained for anything.

I could go on for an hour.

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

Sounds like accuse is the mind control power

whatever has the defense lower stat is the armor strip one.

and the one that deals damage is the laser beam.

 

[(PSN)MYKK678]

1 hour ago, Hardwood said:

 

They are pretty notorious for not explaining anything...

Sometimes the patch notes will tell you what mode the new warframe drops in but often we only know where to go for what from the wiki. Everyone knows how mods work and interact because of the community, not anything DE ever explained. Guns have alternate fire modes that aren't explained anywhere in their description. The game is completely full of modes and systems that aren't explained anywhere in the game. A new player without the Wiki could play for hundreds of hours and not realize most of the Warframes even exist let alone where to get them.

People take for granted just how much of their knowledge comes from the community because the game doesn't tell you anything. There are dozens of modes, some of them fairly complex, that you just have to stumble your way through. Huge parts of the game like focus just exist untethered to anything else. Now that they have quests sometimes those point to specific systems to make you aware of them but the mechanics are never explained for anything.

I could go on for an hour.

Ok but lets go over what you just brought up:

- the "new warframe" parts you mentioned is an interesting one. I can slightly agree with it at least. Although theres no time limit to getting those frame parts. If you or I choose to try get it asap, thats Our Choice. Not a mandate by DE. We want it asap so We need to put in the work, everyone else can casually come across the parts and assemble them when ready. Its Cause and Effect in essence.

- personally i've never looked for mod info from the community. So unless i've somehow breached outside the walls of the "everyone" category the statement about how mods work and interact would be incorrect. I read the descriptions provided with the mods and tested things myself. As many others do.

- feel free to correct me on this but i cannot find 1 gun that doesn't explain the alt fire in the description. If im correct that example is incorrect too.

- the codex explains all modes if i remember correctly. And Lotus tells you your objective at the start of almost every mission. This also seems to be incorrect.

- suppose i can slightly agree with the last part about new players looking for frames. Their blueprints are dropped during the story missions and you're directed towards where to find the parts with most of them but i suppose it could be easier.

 

I suppose the question this all raises is why this would frustrate you? To give a bit of context, i'm a big fan of Final Fantasy and the Souls-Borne games, both of which you can play out the main story straight through and miss tons of stuff. I'm just not sure why games like that are allowed to be like that and Warframe isn't? Or whats so wrong with Discovery? Or Community Help too?

[Marcuspolomintus]

I agree that they really need to put in better explanations to not only what the abilities do, but HOW to work them.

Case in point - Ash's 4th Ability - Blade Storm (excellent ability btw). I've just mastered him and really didn't have a clue how it works. The ability marks enemies for your shadows to attack them. You are told in the 'Tips' section in abilities, to mark an enemy three times, for maximum damage but how? Do you cast the ability and press it three times? How do you send the shadows to attack? You eventually figure, through just trial and error that you mark enemies, after activating your 4th ability and keeping the enemy in your crosshairs. The longer they are the mark increases by one to a maximum of three. You then cast your 4th ability again, once you've marked all the enemies you want to, before the timer runs out, in order to send your shadows off to attack. It's a deadly ability, but a simple explanation of 'keep enemy in the crosshair to increase the number of marks on them' would have been a help.
There are more abilites that you do wonder how on earth do these things work. You'll get used to it after playing with them enough though. 

[Hardwood]

1 hour ago, (PS4)MYKK678 said:

Ok but lets go over what you just brought up:

 

If you have never looked up how mods work and interact then you are 100% doing something wrong with your mod setups. There are tons of interactions and non-intuitive things in there and without at least some explanation it is impossible to get it completely right.

I don't have to go further than the newest guns in the game to find two that have a secondary function that is not explained.

The codex has brief explanations that are about as useful as the ability explanations for the basic mission types but it has nothing for all of the weird one off missions they add (typically to house new warframe parts).

I don't really care about all of the stuff they don't explain because I can just use the wiki but as a matter of principal I find it annoying that they are so blase about it. They put ability descriptions in the game but they spend two minutes giving you a piece of the information but nowhere near enough to function without a trip to the wiki. Also, a lot of this information isn't there to be explored or uncovered, it just doesn't exist anywhere in the game an it is the basic way the game functions. We aren't talk about obscure Dark Souls quest lines or hidden swords, we are talking about basic information about how things in the game work.

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

Edit: I just realized I'm in feedback, sorry.

 

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

Mis-post.

[(PSN)drollive96]

For most abilities ,they actually have a description in the arsenal that gives you an in depth description of said ability as well as a little video showing ghe ability in action, hso yeah 9/10 times I usually never have trouble understanding what an ability does after a few minutes of testing, however in the case of xaku i will admit i did have trouble trying to figure out what the hek his 3rd ability does, it has a very vague description

[DrakeWurrum]

6 hours ago, (PS4)MYKK678 said:

It denotes the idea that there are many things that are not explained. Can you give a few examples?

Have you ever read the wiki?

Practically nothing in the game is actually properly explained. What abilities do. What mods do. Where to get Amps.

[(PSN)drollive96]

2 hours ago, Marcuspolomintus said:

I agree that they really need to put in better explanations to not only what the abilities do, but HOW to work them.

Case in point - Ash's 4th Ability - Blade Storm (excellent ability btw). I've just mastered him and really didn't have a clue how it works. The ability marks enemies for your shadows to attack them. You are told in the 'Tips' section in abilities, to mark an enemy three times, for maximum damage but how? Do you cast the ability and press it three times? How do you send the shadows to attack? You eventually figure, through just trial and error that you mark enemies, after activating your 4th ability and keeping the enemy in your crosshairs. The longer they are the mark increases by one to a maximum of three. You then cast your 4th ability again, once you've marked all the enemies you want to, before the timer runs out, in order to send your shadows off to attack. It's a deadly ability, but a simple explanation of 'keep enemy in the crosshair to increase the number of marks on them' would have been a help.
There are more abilites that you do wonder how on earth do these things work. You'll get used to it after playing with them enough though. 

Ash's bladestorm required very little thought for me to figure out, after a couple of minutes of getting ash to rank 10 i already understood it and was murdering things all over the place. What do you want? An in depth tutorial for room for each and every single ability that forces you out of the game and spoonfeeds you every single thing thing the ability does? There are so many ways that abilitys synergize and interact with each other, that such a tutorial could take half an hour every time you aquire a new warframe. Part of the fun is the experimentation, and that would ruin it for me, personally, i hate tutorials, there have been some games i have quit because the tutorials were too long. Gamers are not stupid, and some people enjoy  figuring it out on our own. 

[Borg1611]

A great many things in the game are very poorly explained or not explained at all in-game. That's why most people are constantly referring to the wiki. Although, the wiki gets things wrong sometimes. 

For example, Nourished Strike on Grendel's wiki page had claimed it worked for both weapons and abilities for a long time. Very few people used him so it probably just went unnoticed. Then when helminth came out and that was his subsumed ability people looked at it often for the first time and thought it was going to be good until they realized it in fact doesn't work on most abilities and effectively is just an extra toxin mod for weapons (which may work for some abilities that are affected by weapon mods?). After mentioning this in a thread someone edited out the part in the wiki that had claimed it worked on abilities. 

I think they definitely should include more ability information in-game, including mechanics and interactions that players would care about. 

[Kefirno]

6 hours ago, (PS4)MYKK678 said:

It denotes the idea that there are many things that are not explained. Can you give a few examples?

ABC rotations
Where to acquire certain frames or weapons
"Hidden" weapons (not displayed in profile until you get them)
Damage bonuses being additive or multiplicative
Effects of mods you don't have (they have ????? in codex)
Specific cases of enemies being immune to certain abilities or status
Specific cases of mods' effects not applying to certain weapons
Resource boosters not applying to some resources
Accessing Tier 2 and 3 Isolation Vaults
Eidolons (kill vs capture, lures, summoning 2nd and 3rd Eidolon)
Deck 12 location
Weapon with infinite combo duration losing its combo due to certain abilities
Where to get Riven from Slivers
Where to extract Endo from Ayatan
/unstuck
warframe.market
Wiki
Chat ban for linking certain warframe + gear item

[Hobie-wan]

@Kefirno

Some of those fall under "play the game, look around and explore, and delight yourself with discovery". Playing along and getting a new quest to find it gives you a new to you frame is cool. Seeing "that other Fortuna looking building" that you can't reach and discovering the cave should be a neat thing to find. Checking out what Palladino has after the Harrow quest should be part of checking out NPCs and shops as much as looking through consoles in one's ship, which some people don't even seem to do.

WF market and wiki are external sites not controlled by DE. Certainly they are useful, but it's completely understandable why they wouldn't be mentioned or directly linked from within the game in case they became infected with malware or whatnot.

[(XBOX)JPCSBR]

Yeah... But always check the tips on the skills page, they are helpful and say what these "hidden" skills do.

[(PSN)MYKK678]

4 hours ago, Hardwood said:

 

If you have never looked up how mods work and interact then you are 100% doing something wrong with your mod setups. There are tons of interactions and non-intuitive things in there and without at least some explanation it is impossible to get it completely right.

I don't have to go further than the newest guns in the game to find two that have a secondary function that is not explained.

The codex has brief explanations that are about as useful as the ability explanations for the basic mission types but it has nothing for all of the weird one off missions they add (typically to house new warframe parts).

I don't really care about all of the stuff they don't explain because I can just use the wiki but as a matter of principal I find it annoying that they are so blase about it. They put ability descriptions in the game but they spend two minutes giving you a piece of the information but nowhere near enough to function without a trip to the wiki. Also, a lot of this information isn't there to be explored or uncovered, it just doesn't exist anywhere in the game an it is the basic way the game functions. We aren't talk about obscure Dark Souls quest lines or hidden swords, we are talking about basic information about how things in the game work.

Your first point doesnt make a lot of sense tbh. I'd almost classify it as a paradox. It gets completely overturned by 1 simple question; So then how did the first person do it? If its impossible to get it right without a Wiki, the first person to get it right, who didn't have a Wiki remember, couldn't exist. If they couldn't exist then the information couldn't be shared. If the information couldn't be shared then it wouldn't be available for a Wiki. And round and round the loop goes. Its definitely possible, its how we have the information now.

The game doesnt have any complex modes at all. The nearest it gets to it is the Lua Spy vaults. Why would there be detailed explanations for simple modes? And every mission still has Lotus telling you your objective. I dont get why the codex should have a Page-worth of a description for Exterminate, or Defense, or even Interception? You're told as soon as you land in the area.

That last part was very generic though. Can you explain what "basic information" is missing? You listed 5 things last time and i could honestly only very slightly agree with 2 of them. And that was more like 30% agree, 70% is "here's why its like this".  I'm just interested to find out what you'd class as basic with this is all?

[(PSN)MYKK678]

3 hours ago, DrakeWurrum said:

Have you ever read the wiki?

Practically nothing in the game is actually properly explained. What abilities do. What mods do. Where to get Amps.

I learned all 3 of those ingame.

 

Abilities have descriptions under them. If you hit R2 (PS4 obv) while you're over your frames name, which it tells you you can do, it brings you to the actual Abilities Screen. Each frame has about 10 tips and most are how each Ability can interact with another. Its all there.

Mods are kinda self explanatory. The descriptions are under the mod name. Its all there.

Amps were a chapter everyone keeps seeming to forget. Frozen Tundra, stuck as Operator, Golden Worms tunnelling through sand. And then Cetus. Its all there.

 

Maybe i just have a different idea about what "properly explained" means. Its possible. But i've known about those 3 and more since before i knew the Forums even existed. I got the info ingame with explanations and testing.

[(PSN)MYKK678]

2 hours ago, Kefirno said:

I'll answer in the quote as it'll be faster and easier, may need to expand quote:

ABC rotations- cant name a game with an ingame system that tells you which rotations up

Where to acquire certain frames or weapons- too generic to respond to properly, would need examples

"Hidden" weapons (not displayed in profile until you get them)- Keyword there being hidden. Games with hidden weapons dont tell you where the hidden weapons are. Otherwise they're not hidden weapons.

Damage bonuses being additive or multiplicative- from my experience with games and MMOs, thats usually left to the players anyway.

Effects of mods you don't have (they have ????? in codex)- Not sure where to begin with that. I've a library of games with menues full of "???" screens or Lock Symbols that don't unlock until you discover it. As a recent example Ghost of Tsushima springs to mind.

Specific cases of enemies being immune to certain abilities or status- a well known, and tbh overused, system that has always been left to players to discover. Enemy Weakness its usually referred to.

Specific cases of mods' effects not applying to certain weapons- Cant say ive ever noticed that at all.

Resource boosters not applying to some resources- could be wrong but im sure ive seen the resource booster list ingame. Either its description or codex or something. As its a booster though, it doesnt really qualify as a core part of the game. Its an add-on. An extra.

Accessing Tier 2 and 3 Isolation Vaults- been too busy with work to get that far into Deimos so honestly cant comment on that yet.

Eidolons (kill vs capture, lures, summoning 2nd and 3rd Eidolon)- kill/capture is 100% explained. Listen to your comms. Might have something with Tridolon though. Cant remember anything ingame saying where to deposit the shards.

Deck 12 location- You might have been bugged? 

Weapon with infinite combo duration losing its combo due to certain abilities- this could only possibly be about the Xorxis. Ingame patch note fix.

Where to get Riven from Slivers- Comms

Where to extract Endo from Ayatan- Comms the very 1st time you reach Maroo's Bazaar Relay

/unstuck- That cant be a serious suggestion

warframe.market- a game should advertise an unofficial website?

Wiki- see above

Chat ban for linking certain warframe + gear item- genuinely have no idea what this is about. However i wont ask to name the 2 items in case it somehow lands you in trouble on here. As such i cant agree nor disagree with it.

18 examples and just 1 i could agree with. I cant really agree with a stance with those odds.

[SweetAnubis]

you know... i remember when you had to figure it out through trial and error or go buy a guide book at gamestop.... honestly gamers are spoiled now days. while i agree they could be more detailed on basic stuff, for the most part i think we are lucky to have wikis and forums now.

[GEN-Son_17]

Originally, DE had a really good habit of getting the community involved in discovering some of the game's features. Players would find something cool and alert everyone of its existence and potential location. Five+ years ago, I was relying on the codex to learn about enemy weaknesses but i never ever thought the game was going to reveal everything in detail. Just like using trading as a balance to rng, I actually like how DE tries to limit full info. To me, it just means they haven't given up on the magic of discovery.

[Colyeses]

8 hours ago, Hardwood said:

I don't have to go further than the newest guns in the game to find two that have a secondary function that is not explained.

That's not true. The descriptions for both the Trumna and the Sepulchrum refer to their bouncing bombs and homing missiles respectively, the Zymos description mentions exploding headshots, and the Quassus mentions thrown daggers. All the new Tenno reinforcements are pretty clear about their functions.

[JeranTek]

Sorry. 21 replies (22 with this one) and no one has answered the original question which was "What the heck does Gaze/Accuse/Deny actually do??"

[NinjaZeku]

27 minutes ago, JeranTek said:

Sorry. 21 replies (22 with this one) and no one has answered the original question which was "What the heck does Gaze/Accuse/Deny actually do??"

Because that really wasn't the point of the topic.

Everyone here knows that you can get information about Warframe's mechanics from outside sources,
it's about that same information, or at least a much bigger portion of it, being in the game itself.

For the record, I'm ~okay with the Wiki being pretty much mandatory.

I'd certainly welcome that resource being officially supported and mentioned in-game,
but I can also see how, it being not DE-created / maintained, that could cause (legal etc) issues.

[JeranTek]

And we're up to 24 now.

I'm sorry. Let me quote the wiki about Xaku's 3rd ability: "Cycle through and cast one of the three abilities originating from the Warframes that make up Xaku: Accuse, Gaze, and Deny."

That's the extent of what it says. The original post asked this question, then the final comment was about that behaviour being typical. Personally I don't care about having to use the wiki to find stuff out. That's a good thing and has been useful on so many occasions. In this case, however, the wiki is as useful as the in-game text and I can't figure out what those skills are supposed to do.

I know one of them ties up an enemy and makes it invulnerable, but ... then what? What does the aura around that enemy do?