How to make warframe harder?

[(XBOX)CordingMoon7789]

Been thinking about it, since people complain about steel path just being bullet sponges and either way with all the armor stripping and all that stuff it doesn't matter. 

I couldn't think anything about how to do it, so what do you propose to make the game harder?

[(NSW)Katsuro]

by nerfing obviously

[KnossosTNC]

How about giant robot dinosaurs you have to accurately shoot bits off in order to... ...damnit.

Apologies. It's been less than a week. I'm trying, but it's going to take me a while to move on from that game.

[(XBOX)C11H22O11]

Every enemy is invulnerable and have a tiny weakspot under their feet

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

Warframe, like many online games, are made weaker to appease their mainstream casual audience. 

From what people have said that have been here awhile, enemies actually were stronger, and their abilities and tactics were a bit more difficult. They were nerfed because some player that didn't even know what they were doing complained and over time things were made easier. 

 

[DreisterDino]

• Bosses with weakspots where it is about aiming and timing
• attacks from enemies with clear visibility and/or audio indicators which make us use the parcour system more
• more enemies which are immune to either Damage or CC abilites (but not like in Arbitrations where Drones make them completly immune to everything). The Disruption Bosses are a good example imo.

 

These would be my main 3 points, and if those things will ever make it into the game, i think these 2 things could also make sense:

• improvements to the AI
• nerfs to a certain extent

 

But currently, as long as we can either nuke or CC everything, improvements to the AI wont matter (i agree with DE Pablo in this case, although i think its a lazy excuse because they could design the game in a way that better AI would make a difference).

Same goes for Nerfs - they can and will never nerf everything that that "true" challenge would result from the nerfs... it has to be combined.

[DrivaMain]

18 minutes ago, (XB1)BRUHck Obama said:

How to make warframe harder?

You Don’t.

Stop turning a game with casuals as the main audience to something like dark souls.

[(PSN)Lollybomb]

Warframe does not lend itself particularly well to actual difficulty without severely limiting what players are allowed to do.  We have so many options to just stop enemies, or attack them from outside their ability to retaliate.  What does it matter if an enemy has advanced AI, tactics, and maneuvers if we've got a dozen different ways of just saying "no" and rendering all of that moot?  What does it matter if an enemy will try to ambush us when we have abilities that just annihilate everything around us?

So make enemies that are immune to them?  So we break out the pocket nukes and carpet bomb whole rooms.  Why not?  Self damage is gone, and there are ways for all frames to mitigate the self stagger.

Special mechanics for enemies?  Either people will just ignore them in lieu of killing other enemies, or they'll be too simple due to the fact that you'll have to deal with them in the middle of everything else.  Most of the bosses are terrible about this because they're just waiting games.  You wait until the boss randomly decides to open up their weak spot, and then dump as much damage as you can into it.  Very few bosses actually have reasonable mechanics because they have to fit into the rest of the game.  The invulnerability periods would be fine if there was some kind of player agency in ending them.  But there isn't.  So instead it's back to large health bars for most of em.

The problem with making Warframe harder is what Warframe has become.  You can either have a hard game, or you can have all of our powers and weapons and mods.  You can't have both.

[Anaktoria]

51 minutes ago, KnossosTNC said:

How about giant robot dinosaurs you have to accurately shoot bits off in order to... ...damnit.

Apologies. It's been less than a week. I'm trying, but it's going to take me a while to move on from that game.

Wait, which game? Thought you meant Eidolons at first, haha.

[(PSN)robotwars7]

1 hour ago, (XB1)BRUHck Obama said:

so what do you propose to make the game harder?

the answer is:

Spoiler

you don't.

Spoiler

seriously though, the community at large and DE are never going to agree on difficulty because it's a subjective concept. it's a discussion that always ends up going around in circles, just like Kick Systems and Auction houses (you rolled your eyes reading that, I know you did!), so there really isn't that much point in discussing it any more.

 

1 hour ago, (PS4)Lollybomb said:

You can either have a hard game, or you can have all of our powers and weapons and mods.  You can't have both.

^couldn't possibly say it better myself. 

[kevoisvevo]

Better ai. Better enemy team combo. Sending a strike tram of nullifiers, skaterbois, bursa all at the same time. Exploding infested gas drones and ancients. Bombard, sorch, nox, hook ladies working together.

[Hierarch777]

From my experience, difficulty equates to fast-moving and highly mobile enemies

[Aesthier]

Remove all Rivens from the game would be a good start.

[SpiritTeA]

Only turn-based and RTS game can be difficult because it actually requires brain work. Everything else... Well all those Dark Souls, WoW , Elder Scrolls raids and other same crap... It’s not difficult - it’s 1) Gear check; and 2) Reflex\Knowledge. That’s all . It’s all involving actual 0 work of the brain, you don’t think, you just press X when Z happens, and the faster you do it the more “skill” you have. Even in old warframe there were no difficulty when you could just CC whole the map, don’t use duckling syndrome please, Warframe has never been REALLY hard, you’ve always could cheese anything.

[vegetosayajin]

make every enemy the wolf :D

[KnossosTNC]

10 hours ago, Anaktoria said:

Wait, which game? Thought you meant Eidolons at first, haha.

Damnit, I'm trying to stop banging on about it, and you're not helping. I've already written a 1,796-word anguished declaration of love to it. It's that game starring a tribal archer girl with a Bluetooth headset who hunts robot dinosaurs, and the only game to seriously tempt me to buy a console this generation.

But to draw a little closer to the topic of the thread, I made my first reply thinking in terms of fast, hard-hitting enemies that require a bit of precision and timing to fight. While that wouldn't necessarily make them hard, I thought they can at least make them feel threatening.

[DrivaMain]

44 minutes ago, KnossosTNC said:

Damnit, I'm trying to stop banging on about it, and you're not helping. I've already written a 1,796-word anguished declaration of love to it. It's that game starring a tribal archer girl with a Bluetooth headset who hunts robot dinosaurs, and the only game to seriously tempt me to buy a console this generation.

But to draw a little closer to the topic of the thread, I made my first reply thinking in terms of fast, hard-hitting enemies that require a bit of precision and timing to fight. While that wouldn't necessarily make them hard, I thought they can at least make them feel threatening.

Wow that’s the first time I am seeing someone who REALLLY hates Horizon Zero Dawn. 

[Aldain]

You'd need the enemies to at least behave less stupidly than "Run in straight line to target, shoot gun until dead" and have more distinctions between enemies than "Enemy with Machine Gun" and "Enemy with Machine Gun, and lots of Armor".

Seriously, one of the big issues we have is that heavy units are basically the same as grunts outside of obnoxious multiplier spam on their health/armor.

And can we talk about how just spamming multipliers on everything is pretty much the only way that has even been tried to actually increase enemy presence? Like nothing design wise, just somebody spamming the multiplication key on both spawn rates and DR options.

[KnossosTNC]

20 minutes ago, DrivaMain said:

Wow that’s the first time I am seeing someone who REALLLY hates Horizon Zero Dawn. 

Hehe. Thanks. I've done this before with a few other games, and found that humour and self-deprecation helps.

[-BA-NeoNexus5]

then let just make all corpus unit go to nullify globe for take cover?

let all nullify unit likely to rush to your area IF they seen u use ability?

all shield grinneer unit instead of just shot u from distance... let them keep bash u over and over at the floor until u scream for nerf?

Joke aside if enemy Ai become smarter we will harder to get loot or item we want from them ... and some smart ai can even hurt your gameplay directly.

Just look at how they fix on uranus survival AI path finder u already see how people react to it.

:)

[Noxifer]

12 hours ago, (XB1)BRUHck Obama said:

what do you propose to make the game harder?

Warframe is Diablo II in space with some shooter elements, essentially.

You build a character (well, a warframe) so you can farm, you farm and you trade.
The game is harder at the beginning, it's easy with high gear.
You build some more characters, some you can even customize in a manner, so that they are really good at farming a particular activity (say people farmed Ubers in D2 with Smiter or few other builds, they farm Tridolon with several frames). You can even make multiple characters of the same class, but customize them differently.
Farming usually involves running the same level many times, till the item finally drops… and if it doesn’t, you can trade for it.
The game is easy, lacks proper endgame.

There, I just described both Diablo 2 and Warframe.
The logical question is:

Does Warframe need to be harder, since it already ticks all those checkboxes?
A little more emphasis on the basic gameplay would be nice, but as you said yourself, turning every enemy into a bullet sponge is not the way to do it.
It would require many of the AoE frames to be reworked and the overall pace of the game to be slowed down... and whether the game will remain fun after that, I cannot say...

[Anaktoria]

18 hours ago, KnossosTNC said:

Damnit, I'm trying to stop banging on about it, and you're not helping. I've already written a 1,796-word anguished declaration of love to it. It's that game starring a tribal archer girl with a Bluetooth headset who hunts robot dinosaurs, and the only game to seriously tempt me to buy a console this generation.

But to draw a little closer to the topic of the thread, I made my first reply thinking in terms of fast, hard-hitting enemies that require a bit of precision and timing to fight. While that wouldn't necessarily make them hard, I thought they can at least make them feel threatening.

Ohoho! That's a very good game indeed, I like your taste.

But yes, you make a good point. Eidolons really come nowhere near to that level of gameplay in practice, even if on paper they technically hit a few of those notes. Maybe we could bring enemies of the sort you've got in mind into Warframe alongside a revival of sorts of the old raid systems, with multi-member hunting parties recommended for harder monsters? Then again, I know a lot of players (myself included) like having the option of being able to reasonably solo Warframe content... But I do think the enemy types you outline would be a welcome inclusion in Warframe's roster either way.

[(PSN)Yggranya]

On 2020-10-09 at 11:49 PM, (PS4)Madurai-Prime said:

Warframe, like many online games, are made weaker to appease their mainstream casual audience.

In most games, difficulty simply means pumping the enemies full of damage and/or health. This is true for most games, but especially popular in online games. Since it's so easy, and lets people with something to prove flaunt how they did it, it will be recycled until the gaming industry ends. Of course, warframe is no different.

The real problem isn't the good ol' "casuals" but the fact that game developers want to get as big of a playerbase as possible to milk as much money as quickly as possible, which means that the games aren't designed properly for anyone, Warframe is a perfect example of a game that just tries to get new players with updates to get some sweet sales. What is after "open world"? Only DE knows, but probably what ever is popular at the time, or what ever keeps DE_Steve up at night out of jealousy.

[Keiyadan]

Am 9.10.2020 um 22:40 schrieb (XB1)BRUHck Obama:

I couldn't think anything about how to do it, so what do you propose to make the game harder?

if you want more of a challange remove your mods and get the dragon keys in you can choose you difficulty right?

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

All the power you acquire in Warframe is all about freeing yourself from base game mechanics.

Early game, energy economy, health economy, ammo economy and position are important. You can't spam your abilities so you have to use them wisely. Your weapons are weak sauce, so you have to aim for heads and pay attention to enemy resistances. You can't heal and don't have access to a tank frame so you can't just barrel through missions while drunk. Positioning matters. You might hide behind cover and wait for your shields to regenerate only for a Butcher to try to shank you. You go out into the open to be met with gunfire with Lancers taking cover. If there is no cover, they'll drop down blunts. They advance onto your position using Shield Lancers as mobile cover in an attempt to overrun you and you got no Blood Rush. Trying to rez squadmates is actually risky. 

Late game, none of that stuff really matters because you got all the tools to circumvent them. Zenurik, Rage, pads, ammo mutation. Spam those explosives. Spam those powers. Tank those shots. Spoiler mode for risk free rez of squad members. 

A lot of people were salty about how hard the Grendel missions were (no mod modifier). 

It would be neat if Warframe added Weapon and Warframe mods that don't do anything but bump up drop rates and affinity gain. Maybe even go a step farther and have set of mods that lock you out of Spoiler mode in exchange for extra focus gain for the mod's specified school. You trade out a slot, gimping yourself a bit for greater rewards. It would make cracking Lith Fissures more engaging and give Vets a reason to squad up with new players which would be better than the Steel Path that we got where numbers are just inflated to the point where damage mechanics break.