Xzorn Posted October 28, 2020 Share Posted October 28, 2020 Enemies use a pattern shooting method which tracks the player regardless of velocity. Originally there was no pattern and Grineer would land every shot on a stationary target. Now if you stand still; some shots miss no matter what. The tracking itself doesn't care how fast the player is moving though. It only has difficulty adjusting to sudden changes in vector. Moving quickly does help but not in a straight line. Back and forth up and down and all over will cause Hit-scan enemies to miss more. At any rate. Though I guess the mobility is a big theme of Warframe now it came at a cost in enemy design. There was a time Corpus were the most fair and fun to fight faction because all of their weapons were projectile based. They didn't have all the eye cancer they have now and they could be skillfully dodged. Infested used to be 100% melee and still managed to be threatening. Mobility is fine but DE gave players limitless mobility which was a mistake branching into a lot of cheap enemy designs not to mention enemies are not really the main obstacle of missions anymore. DE has thus resorted to lame time sink methods in order to slow players down. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steel_Rook Posted October 28, 2020 Share Posted October 28, 2020 15 hours ago, Loza03 said: TBH, having played Vanquish, I'm not even that certain that a limited turning radius is that necessary. At the very least, a decently fast sprint or ground speed would be miles better, and it'd certainly be better than the fish flopping. As I've said elsewhere, raw speed isn't the only thing I'm interested in, interesting maneuverability is too. I like to keep a limited turning radius in order to make this a deliberate straight-line sprint. To me, lack of instant manoeuvrability creates a slightly better sense of speed, plus unlimited turning radius might end up enabling some pretty silly things that I'd personally like to avoid. More on that under "skill ceiling," but the gist of it is this - I want Bullet Jumps to be used for verticality and manoeuvrability, while Sprint to be used to cover long distances. Personally, I feel the Necramech implementation of this would be a perfect benchmark, were it not for the pointless Stamina limit. Either way, though - the ability to run fast on flat ground is still substantially better than salmon-flopping, on this we seem to agree. 15 hours ago, Loza03 said: I want to focus on this because, because I never envisioned this being mandatory. It's pretty much impossible to make it that way without dramatically altering how the game's designed from the ground up - we have abilities, crowd control, tanking powers and so forth. I've not even suggested removing the bullet jump or copy-pasting the movement system from these games, if you've noticed - the actual core movement system is the same, albeit with more momentum if that part is addressed. Fair enough, then. I don't have anything specifically against the implementation you're proposing, so much as I'm extremely leery of changes to gameplay which put increased emphasis on parkour during combat. If that's not what you're proposing, then we have no quarrel. As a side note, though - I've often argued in favour of movement-based enemy design, specifically for Specials. Tusk Bombards are a great example of this - they telegraph their shot with a sound cue and a laser sight, then they fire a single fast-moving dumbfire rocket. Dodge to avoid it. I wish all Bombards worked this way. I wish Heavy Gunners worked the same way. Have them play a wind-up sound while they target the player with some visible indication on the player character, then open up with constant DPS until the player breaks sight. Alternately, have them spool up and sweep a cone of fire in front of them, similar to Dawn of War style Dreadnoughts. Napalms could fire large-scale AoE flame grenades (at a slower rate) by first marking their target area with a large holographic circle while they build up to the attack. Players would need to leave that circle. I've talked about this before, but I feel Division 2 enemies ought to be the high water mark for enemy design. They announce their intentions out loud, they mark the ground when they prep for an AoE and almost all of them have some bit on them that players can break to hurt the enemy, rob them of an ability or stun them temporarily. Yes, that's a different game entirely, but Warframe could only benefit from this design. Enemie with slower, telegraphed AoEs would do a MUCH better job keeping us on the move than those awful regular Bombards with the silent tiny homing missiles that hit you in the back of the head before you even know a Bombard is on the scene. 15 hours ago, Loza03 said: A high skill ceiling can therefore foster what's called the 'core' audience of a game. A core playerbase supports the casual playerbase by providing aspirational play - players can look at the core playerbase and think 'wow, I want to be that good', even if it's not in terms of direct competition. Even if they never are, it gives casual players a reason to play and some will inevitably cross the threshold of a 'core' audience, replacing any older players who drift away over time. I'm not convinced that's the case, honestly. Me personally, I tend to be turned off by said "core audience." Frankly, that Parkour video you showed of Titanfall 2 pissed me off quite a bit and made me a tiny bit less interested in playing it again. Speed Runs in general make me feel this way, as do e-sports. Yes, it's "impressive" from the perspective of pure mechanical skill, but to me it still feels like playing the game "wrong," and I worry that games tend to power-creep themselves towards the most potent players, leaving those of us who don't play them as sports in the dust. I could be better at Warframe if I tried. Thing is, I've found my own niche and my own difficulty and don't really have any interest in doing better, because that involves making choices I don't want to make. More broadly, I don't think Warframe HAS a core audience at this point, nor does it really benefit from having one. It certainly isn't speed-runners, I don't think. In a way, that's the key to this game's success - it has a little bit for everyone without singling anyone out as a "core" player. Almost whatever you like, Warframe has something for you. Combat? Plenty of that. Progression? Arguably too much of that. Costume design? Fashionframe has you covered. Boring MMO activities? There's plenty of fishing and mining and opening lockers to do. PvP? Well... You can't win 'em all. High-mobility speedrunning is AN aspect of Warframe, certainly. I don't think it's a core aspect enough to carry the entire game by making people like me wish I were cool like you. That sounds rude, I apologise. More prominently, though, I find the concept of high-skilled players serving as aspirational material for low-skill players fundamentally insulting. I know you don't mean it like that, so let me explain. Inherent in this argument is the idea that the way you're playing the game is "better" than the way I'm playing it, and that I should naturally aspire to be more like you. Wanting to be "better" at the game and having examples of what that looks like would somehow motivate me to care. I'm sure that'll work for some, but it's all too close to the mantra of the exploitative F2P monetisation. Remember when Activision patented their "microtransactions-based matchmaking?" That was the mentality behind it. Identify players who are willing to spend, deliberately match them with better players who've spent and attempt to peer-pressure them into spending. Once players have spent, deliberately match them with weaker players in order for them to feel like their expenditure was worth it. Or, less insidiously, pay "influencers" in in-game items so they can show the free players how cool it is to spend money, then hope players spend money in response. The entire notion that I should aspire to "core players" is thus offensive to me, because it's fundamentally built on envy. And again - I know that's now what you're trying to achieve. It's just I don't see how you can avoid it based on what you're proposing. I may be an outlier here, but I don't treat video games as a sport. I don't believe being "good" at a game is or should necessarily be a prerequisite for enjoying it. I'm not good at Warframe, yet I enjoy it greatly (from time to time, before the grind wears me down), just as an example. I treat my games as toys - as things I buy myself to amuse myself in my spare time. The moment games try to tell me what I'm supposed to want is the moment I start backing out, because to me that's inherently manipulative. If people want to be good at parkour then I'm obviously not going to try and stop them. If I'm supposed to look up to people who are good at parkour and aspire to be more like them, however? Yes, I'm going to complain. Especially if said people make claims to being more of a "core" audience to the game than I am. Warframe is not an eSport. I'd argue that a large part of its success comes down precisely to the game's disregard for a core audience or particularly high-skill content. As much as people complain about "lack of challenge" on the forums, we the Plebians still represent a majority of the population and I doubt that's going to change. Sure, I'd like more challenging content, but that doesn't necessarily mean more difficult such. See my thread on challenge and reductive combat if you'd like more context on that point. Long story short, I don't believe in the intrinsic merits of a high skill ceiling. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PhiThagRaid Posted October 28, 2020 Share Posted October 28, 2020 I don't understand how you believe that players should not strive to get better at games. I get that you don't want to feel forced to reach the highest levels of skill, since then the skills are more meta-skills or things that feel like forced strategies. I believe improving your skill in a game is the entire point of a game and I despise it when complain about difficulty when they are unwilling to do what the game requires of them and learn the mechanics. I'll give an analogy: If there were to be a person that only figured out how to accelerate and turn in a racing game, then decided that they have put in enough effort into the game. Do you believe that the game would have to only include tracks for which breaks are unneeded? This would have a low skill floor and skill ceiling as nothing would be gained from even trying to improve. This would bore most people as the challenge in the game would drop away very quickly. In comparison, if tracks were added where braking was needed, those who are unwilling to learn will be left behind. Whereas the rest of the players will have a lot more ways they can interact with the game. In this case, sure the skill floor has risen slightly, but the skill ceiling has increased far more. Since now it's not just steering that matters, but also good braking points, good breaking to acceleration control and such things the player has to consider. For any game it is better to have a large skill range, the lower end allowing players to easily pick up the game and the higher end to keep those who start to master the mechanics. As you go through a game the skill ceiling can be raised by including more mechanics, but it is crucial that the skill floor also raises. This obviously needs to be balanced, though. You don't want to shrink the skill range as you go, since that usually occurs when the skill ceiling is stagnating. My analogy is obviously for entry level gameplay, but I believe this scales up as a game gets older. The more time a game has existed the more time those who wish to master it has had to do so, so the place where the skill floor and ceiling will be adjusted will be in those places where the people are who are looking for improvement. In general my suggestion when adjusting enemies to allow them to interact more with player mobility is that: 1. The mobility is optional but never optimal.(think a bullet sponge unless you are able to use your mobility against it) 2. It would only start appearing in areas where players would have improved enough to take them out, but with some effort. 3.The first places they appear they should require less skill than in higher levels. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SnakeBadger Posted October 29, 2020 Share Posted October 29, 2020 Ok, Bullet jump needs to have major rework/and improvements, because it looks like a burnt cookie, its the most used move in the game to travel also. SETTINGS > GRAPHICS Toogle for bullet jump to revert, players can earn different improvements and upgrades could be related to MODS on melee weapons or perwarframe configuration that change how bullet jump performs or how wallgrabsticks. later it should have a "CLASSIC" way is to trigger different levels with stealth kills , criticals or elemental damage to change how the bulletjump LOOKS and its features. toggle for low graphics user. grineer can't bullet jump but they do have the jetpack or thruster system, could we see any archwing enemies who latch on to archwings would be good to get some of the environments to stick grass and snow on the graphics engine of my helicopter, i been watching alot of REDBULLRACING, and also alot of MONSTER energy drinks. AND also i bene wwatching alot of f1-nascar and tracmania racing games on tv, thers a few shows with dragracing so i noticed that our game requires a level of warming up which is based on the mechanics of driving and other naturally the new content has a skateboard thingy which i think its better than the glyder or k-drave rightnow, am not sure, cetus should have its own bird or feature, but this one's about the jumping, so lets get tricky. After taking damage, mods providing resilience and armor would make some coating and HP_markers appear different, so am letting you in some idea that the ephemeral and palettes that the player owns, glyphs, and syndicate alligience could come in handy during the warframe movements, reloading, or wall-latch, thus far, ephemeral is not hitting any marks because its complicated and only a few special mod users or chroma can use it, please give every warframe a reason to use ephemeral or more level up rewards. this can be any quick recovery or rewarding animations, sound effects have been tried with special jumpmods. ON/OFF after a patch, my idea is to make it more playful or useful, not just enhancing, because people doing parkour aren't all stuck on one movement, and there' is many warframes in the game but they all use the BASIC "BULLETJUMP" TECHNIQUE, so it makes the game feel really STUCK or fake in most as 2. Can we make it interesting in CETUS? cetus is a good place it would be fun to see some other variations for bullet jump and functions in the city, operators will also need resolve, i think eventually the players in different factions say, PVP will have their own original bulletjumps and cards based on their polarities and configurations, or syndicate standing, this can mean that doing regular bounties and the combo system can give players more satisfying jumps and abilities, the points that they EARN and the tricks that they perform "movemnets" can be rewarding with a new NPC such as the ones we got in fortuna and in the relays who are veterans, or less used NPC to make the further ENDO and openworld collectives seem more useful, rightnow we got the dog in the ship and eatingthingy, the dog is great but its not as rewarding as the helminth system, but it has a few interesting features, i would love more customization and unique palettes or accesories, honestly i havent been able to buy any of the tennogen for my pets or decorations / animals in cages really could be improved next. seing relics opened being improved in the future, as well as the loker contents, observation regarding eh moonphase, daytiame, and locations. the movements that the players make are great in some planets not, the natural ice and snow do little but are real, not gonna say perfectly realistic, but those things could affect bulletjumping and wall-latch, as well as each school or polar/syndcate with a bonus "points" yea, additional status effects could be like "gauss" and have othe rfeatures, which triggers on -recast- of some of gauses abilities, crouching and bulletjuimp could be different at night-or near trees, enemies dont have a goodtime but if they could occasionally run or dash it woudl look cool, then players would have a reason to hide or use the ponds and lakes, or to wall-latch because there is spikes on the lua and later levels for the advanced players, that would mean to recover mid-air combat, and archwing use. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Loza03 Posted October 29, 2020 Author Share Posted October 29, 2020 6 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: I'm not convinced that's the case, honestly. Me personally, I tend to be turned off by said "core audience." Frankly, that Parkour video you showed of Titanfall 2 pissed me off quite a bit and made me a tiny bit less interested in playing it again. Speed Runs in general make me feel this way, as do e-sports. Yes, it's "impressive" from the perspective of pure mechanical skill, but to me it still feels like playing the game "wrong," and I worry that games tend to power-creep themselves towards the most potent players, leaving those of us who don't play them as sports in the dust. I could be better at Warframe if I tried. Thing is, I've found my own niche and my own difficulty and don't really have any interest in doing better, because that involves making choices I don't want to make. More broadly, I don't think Warframe HAS a core audience at this point, nor does it really benefit from having one. It certainly isn't speed-runners, I don't think. In a way, that's the key to this game's success - it has a little bit for everyone without singling anyone out as a "core" player. Almost whatever you like, Warframe has something for you. Combat? Plenty of that. Progression? Arguably too much of that. Costume design? Fashionframe has you covered. Boring MMO activities? There's plenty of fishing and mining and opening lockers to do. PvP? Well... You can't win 'em all. High-mobility speedrunning is AN aspect of Warframe, certainly. I don't think it's a core aspect enough to carry the entire game by making people like me wish I were cool like you. That sounds rude, I apologise. More prominently, though, I find the concept of high-skilled players serving as aspirational material for low-skill players fundamentally insulting. I know you don't mean it like that, so let me explain. Inherent in this argument is the idea that the way you're playing the game is "better" than the way I'm playing it, and that I should naturally aspire to be more like you. Wanting to be "better" at the game and having examples of what that looks like would somehow motivate me to care. I'm sure that'll work for some, but it's all too close to the mantra of the exploitative F2P monetisation. Remember when Activision patented their "microtransactions-based matchmaking?" That was the mentality behind it. Identify players who are willing to spend, deliberately match them with better players who've spent and attempt to peer-pressure them into spending. Once players have spent, deliberately match them with weaker players in order for them to feel like their expenditure was worth it. Or, less insidiously, pay "influencers" in in-game items so they can show the free players how cool it is to spend money, then hope players spend money in response. The entire notion that I should aspire to "core players" is thus offensive to me, because it's fundamentally built on envy. And again - I know that's now what you're trying to achieve. It's just I don't see how you can avoid it based on what you're proposing. I may be an outlier here, but I don't treat video games as a sport. I don't believe being "good" at a game is or should necessarily be a prerequisite for enjoying it. I'm not good at Warframe, yet I enjoy it greatly (from time to time, before the grind wears me down), just as an example. I treat my games as toys - as things I buy myself to amuse myself in my spare time. The moment games try to tell me what I'm supposed to want is the moment I start backing out, because to me that's inherently manipulative. If people want to be good at parkour then I'm obviously not going to try and stop them. If I'm supposed to look up to people who are good at parkour and aspire to be more like them, however? Yes, I'm going to complain. Especially if said people make claims to being more of a "core" audience to the game than I am. You're again conflating two concepts here. 'Esports' and 'Core playerbase' Are you genuinely, honestly telling me that you have never once played a video game and thought 'I want to get better at this?' Because if you have, then you have begun the passage towards being a part of the 'Core' Audience for that game, and therefore experienced the benefit of a skill ceiling. After all, Casual and Core are not defined by the two arbitrary stereotypes that they are so often associated with. As with most every case of human behaviour, there is a spectrum. You can consider the people who buy a game and drop it less than an hour in on one end, and the hardcore speedrunners and the like on the other, and everyone else is in between. Claiming otherwise is like saying there's no difference between kicking a ball around and Premier League Football. It's demonstrably untrue. Core, therefore, could pretty much be boiled down to 'closer to the esport side than the quit the game in 15 minutes side'. And likewise, the value of a skill ceiling can also be simply boiled down. Do you remember when you first started playing the game, and there were all these mysteries and you were struggling to get stronger and just the process of getting better at the game was a joy in and of itself? That's the joy of improving at a game, and the higher the skill ceiling, the further that goes. And that can sustain a game far longer than the practical length of its content. There are people play Devil May Cry for hundreds, thousands of hours even. They are not competing, it is not an Esport. And whilst the number of those people is not large, it's proof of the efficacy of a high skill ceiling. And those people, I can guarantee you, played a role in interest in getting a new Devil May Cry game six years after the previous entry which was a failed reboot, so over a decade after the last in the original series. 7 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: Warframe is not an eSport. I'd argue that a large part of its success comes down precisely to the game's disregard for a core audience or particularly high-skill content. As much as people complain about "lack of challenge" on the forums, we the Plebians still represent a majority of the population and I doubt that's going to change. Sure, I'd like more challenging content, but that doesn't necessarily mean more difficult such. See my thread on challenge and reductive combat if you'd like more context on that point. More complex content would require more skill to play which would raise the skill floor and make the game less accessible. Of course, it could also press players to find new execution-based means of success which are better than the simple damage-trading options, which could raise the skill ceiling too, as these would not be mandatory to sucess but would be faster, more reliable or so forth. We are literally asking for the same thing, but calling it different names. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SnakeBadger Posted October 29, 2020 Share Posted October 29, 2020 1 hour ago, Loza03 said: . If I'm supposed to look up to people who are good at parkour and aspire to be more like them, however? Yes my complain is that some stuff is repetitive and could be replaced with more dodging and non-ability things in the natural movements or per-warframe in the futaure, i know that aerial abilities and recast are being introduced soon, but am not sure whats next after nezha prime, theres more to do, it can be \\\donewell i dont know, maybe some weapons can change bullet jump and dodge to function like the matrix movie games, shooting a machinegun mid-air, upside-down is cool, its all like what if i use a machinegun with a different warframe like will that look different or based on the 2-3 basic warframes you get from the start, they all move alike, so players want to see more different movments that they can "adhere" to , not just to copy but what feels comfortable to them "VISUALLY APPEALING", not just spin forward or do a hadoken to win, we have like 50 different warframes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steel_Rook Posted October 29, 2020 Share Posted October 29, 2020 12 hours ago, Loza03 said: Do you remember when you first started playing the game, and there were all these mysteries and you were struggling to get stronger and just the process of getting better at the game was a joy in and of itself? That's the joy of improving at a game, and the higher the skill ceiling, the further that goes. I know I'm picking a random sentence off your post, but this I think is indicative of where we disagree. Because... No, I remember no such thing in pretty much any game. I can't stress this enough, but I don't care about being "good" at any specific video game for its own merit. I find no specific joy in it. Yes, being good at video games is an important aspect of the experience of playing them - no argument there. However, it's a means to an end, not an end in itself. For me, Warframe never really had "mysteries." It had "things the game was bad at explaining to me." The first time I posted on the forums (back on the old Steam forums) was asking how much of the game's collection of tedious grindy crap I could skip (PvP, beast pets and MR are the answers I think I got, at least initially). I did struggle to get good at Warframe, but not so much because I yearned to be better. Rather, I struggled to be better because low-level balance in Warframe is absolute dogS#&$ until you get baseline inventory, after which point the difficulty reverses and "getting better" becomes mostly immaterial. Perhaps the closest I can get to what you're talking about here is playing the Shawzin, but even there - I didn't sit down and practice We All Lift Together because "I wanted to get better." I practised it because I wanted to play that song and that's what it took. Now obviously, that's just me. Doesn't mean everyone else has to approach games with such a cynical, results-minded methodology. If you draw entertainment value from simply "gitting gud" at a video game then I'm certainly not going to criticise that. My argument is that I don't feel design needs to deliberately accommodate that. You have to remember a basic fact of Live Service video games - status quo is determined by efficiency. Introducing a deliberately higher skill ceiling will almost always shift the status quo to if not the skill ceiling then at the very least close to it. I mean... Maybe the skill in question is entirely superfluous and doesn't improve efficiency any in which case... I guess? But mobility IS important in Warframe. I crow about "Warframe is not a speedrunning game!" but look at how people play it. Everyone's always rushing through content just to get to the exit and cycle through missions faster. Raise the mobility skill ceiling and you raise the status quo. You could argue, of course, that it doesn't matter. I can just play slower and still get the same experience. Some players will just be faster but what do I care? And that's a fair point - I don't. Digital Extremes do, however. Warframe's grind is balanced around optimal farming. Look at Focus, for instance. That system is almost impossible to make any progress in unless you're farming ESO (or something equally dense with constant high-level enemies) because it's balanced around ESO gains. You do that, you can cap your daily standing in half an hour. You don't might not reach total daily standing in a week, if that. Now granted - ESO isn't necessarily a matter of skill ceiling so much as build, but it's the closest equivalent I could come up with because... Well, Warframe doesn't really take all that much mechanical skill. DE's chosen approach to balance means that build supersedes almost everything else. I'll get into this more in a bit but to sum up: I'm not necessarily opposed to raising the games skill floor OR skill ceiling, but I'm not convinced that raising either for its own sake is a good idea. SOME players might play Devil May Cry for thousands of hours, but are there enough of them to financially support Warframe? I'm looking for a more convincing reason. 12 hours ago, Loza03 said: More complex content would require more skill to play which would raise the skill floor and make the game less accessible. Of course, it could also press players to find new execution-based means of success which are better than the simple damage-trading options, which could raise the skill ceiling too, as these would not be mandatory to success but would be faster, more reliable or so forth. We are literally asking for the same thing, but calling it different names. Rather, we're asking for similar things but for radically different reasons, I think. Like I said - I'm not opposed to raising either the skill ceiling or the skill floor. My primary concern, however, is WHY? What are we gaining from doing so? Specifically, what tangible, measurable benefit are we getting? "People might aspire to get better" is all well an good, but it's too intangible for my tastes. If people are going to aspire to be better, we need to give them something to actually beat, some use for this improved skill beyond the ephemeral happiness of being good. This is why I'm in favour of increasing the complexity of enemy design. We already have all the tools necessary to fight more complex enemies, both in terms of avoiding their attacks and in terms of exploiting their weaknesses. The framework is there, but the content isn't. By contrast, improving the strength of Parkour is - as you've noted - largely wasted because Warframe singularly lacks content that benefits from that. We have one solitary tileset that benefits from Parkour to any significant degree (Jupiter Gas City), where even later additions kind of don't. Corpus Ship doesn't really require Parkour and has few places where that even helps and Deimos is actively hostile to parkour as most vertical surfaces are rough and thus can't really be climbed. Now, you did propose redoing tilesets to introduce more "jumping puzzles." That's actually not something I'm opposed to, even if I don't feel it would merit more powerful parkour either. Ignoring the cost of redoing old tilesets, however... I don't think DE want to. They made Gas City into a parkour playground, but haven't done that since in any of the subsequent environments they've made. I would love to have more tilesets that give you "parkour shortcuts" like the various bottomless rooms in Gas City (obviously with slow-walk fallback paths), but DE don't seem to want to do that. Ultimately, we have to go back to cost and willingness. In order for Parkour as a terrain navigation tool to even merit any amount of skill, DE would have to invest into terrain that requires it and they simply don't seem interested in doing that. By contrast, complex enemy design does seem like something they're interested in. Thumpers, Necramechs, Aerolysts, those big Infested enemies with the shoulder weak points (forget what they're called) - they're trying. Granted, most of these enemies suck ass on release because they don't seem to have been thought through all the way, but at least with some of them DE will go back and iterate. Aerolysts turned into a pretty good miniboss back during Scarlet Spear, as I recall. Whether they'll go back and fix old enemies, though? I'd like them to, but it doesn't seem likely. However, more complex enemies are a good way to inspire people to use more parkour in combat and rely less on standing stock still, trading damage. If Necramechs didn't rotate so quickly, I would absolutely be jumping all over the room trying to get behind them. Because they rotate instantly, however, I don't bother and just stand stock-still trading damage with the few pixels of their back I can shoot from the front. In short, I'm not opposed to your desire to make Warframe more skill-based. It is, after all, a shooter yet plays more like a turn-based RPG. I just want to be clear on the REASON why we want to accomplish this. Do we have some kind of specific goal we want to achieve by means of increasing skill floor and skill ceiling, or is the means a goal in itself? Because I would personally definitely want a specific goal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PhiThagRaid Posted October 29, 2020 Share Posted October 29, 2020 1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said: I would love to have more tilesets that give you "parkour shortcuts" like the various bottomless rooms in Gas City (obviously with slow-walk fallback paths), but DE don't seem to want to do that. Except the last 3 tilesets have actually increased the effect parkour has on them. As you mention Gas City is the most obvious one, but next there is the Sentient ships and the reworked corpus ships. The sentient ships almost always have 2 floors in the bigger sections, this might not be shortcuts, but they do encourage more mobile play to get to them. The Corpus ships do not have it in every section, but they also have tiles with more verticallity that allows you to skip the run around the tile. Examples being the room with the giant kill beam in the middle and the room with the foggy effect that seems to have fans on the side. 1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said: Do we have some kind of specific goal we want to achieve by means of increasing skill floor and skill ceiling, or is the means a goal in itself? Because I would personally definitely want a specific goal. I'm pretty sure the reasoning for increasing the skill ceiling would mainly be to increase the longevity of the game, since if you reach a skill ceiling that is set quite low things start to get boring. The reasoning for increasing the skill floor(which I'm not sure if anyone directly suggested this) would be to increase the feeling of challenge. Currently in the game you would struggle to find many players with mission clear rates below 90%(Especially if you add quits into it as those are not failure conditions). This just shows that the skill floor is quite low. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Loza03 Posted October 29, 2020 Author Share Posted October 29, 2020 4 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: I know I'm picking a random sentence off your post, but this I think is indicative of where we disagree. Because... No, I remember no such thing in pretty much any game. I can't stress this enough, but I don't care about being "good" at any specific video game for its own merit. I find no specific joy in it. Yes, being good at video games is an important aspect of the experience of playing them - no argument there. However, it's a means to an end, not an end in itself. For me, Warframe never really had "mysteries." It had "things the game was bad at explaining to me." The first time I posted on the forums (back on the old Steam forums) was asking how much of the game's collection of tedious grindy crap I could skip (PvP, beast pets and MR are the answers I think I got, at least initially). I did struggle to get good at Warframe, but not so much because I yearned to be better. Rather, I struggled to be better because low-level balance in Warframe is absolute dogS#&$ until you get baseline inventory, after which point the difficulty reverses and "getting better" becomes mostly immaterial. Perhaps the closest I can get to what you're talking about here is playing the Shawzin, but even there - I didn't sit down and practice We All Lift Together because "I wanted to get better." I practised it because I wanted to play that song and that's what it took. Even if it wasn't the primary motivator, you took the time to thoroughly learn and understand the game you were playing. That puts you more towards the 'core' side of the spectrum. You're certainly a lot closer to the casual side than some, but you're a lot more core than somebody who just brute forces the game and never tries to learn it. 4 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: You could argue, of course, that it doesn't matter. I can just play slower and still get the same experience. Some players will just be faster but what do I care? And that's a fair point - I don't. Digital Extremes do, however. Warframe's grind is balanced around optimal farming. Look at Focus, for instance. That system is almost impossible to make any progress in unless you're farming ESO (or something equally dense with constant high-level enemies) because it's balanced around ESO gains. You do that, you can cap your daily standing in half an hour. You don't might not reach total daily standing in a week, if that. Now granted - ESO isn't necessarily a matter of skill ceiling so much as build, but it's the closest equivalent I could come up with because... Well, Warframe doesn't really take all that much mechanical skill. DE's chosen approach to balance means that build supersedes almost everything else. There's a few ways to define efficiency. 'Input in to reward out' and 'time in to reward out' being two important ones here. Presently, the method for both is identical with most grinds in Warframe. But what if they weren't? What if there were faster optimal ways, but a slower, easier way to still accommodate less hardcore, sweaty players in a reasonable amount of time? Using focus as an example, what if it was actually reasonable to acquire it normally, but you could do it way faster (and uncapped) by hunting Eidolons? Focus would still be a reasonable system, but skilled players would still be rewarded. That maintains the benefits for those who enjoy pushing themselves, whilst still allowing other players to get in on the fun. 4 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: I'll get into this more in a bit but to sum up: I'm not necessarily opposed to raising the games skill floor OR skill ceiling, but I'm not convinced that raising either for its own sake is a good idea. SOME players might play Devil May Cry for thousands of hours, but are there enough of them to financially support Warframe? I'm looking for a more convincing reason. True, there's only a relatively small amount of people who play for thousands. But there's others who play for hundreds. Others for tens past it's regular amount going through all it's various difficulties. And others who only play the normal mode campaign. And others who only play on Easy Automatic. If the game was only made for the people at that lowest level, if the skill ceiling didn't accomodate for the others, then far fewer people would enjoy, play and subsequently pay for the game. Why would Warframe be any different? And that's where Warframe is, or at least only the Normal Mode. Warframe is currently not appealing to quite a bit of it's potential audience. The people who want something they can sink their teeth into, learn, and excel at, even if they aren't willing to sink eternity for doing so. Grind only keeps them so long. As long as the people nearer the skill floor are still accounted for, why should they not get a fun game? It's possible to have both. 5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: Rather, we're asking for similar things but for radically different reasons, I think. Like I said - I'm not opposed to raising either the skill ceiling or the skill floor. My primary concern, however, is WHY? What are we gaining from doing so? Specifically, what tangible, measurable benefit are we getting? "People might aspire to get better" is all well an good, but it's too intangible for my tastes. If people are going to aspire to be better, we need to give them something to actually beat, some use for this improved skill beyond the ephemeral happiness of being good. This is why I'm in favour of increasing the complexity of enemy design. We already have all the tools necessary to fight more complex enemies, both in terms of avoiding their attacks and in terms of exploiting their weaknesses. The framework is there, but the content isn't. By contrast, improving the strength of Parkour is - as you've noted - largely wasted because Warframe singularly lacks content that benefits from that. We have one solitary tileset that benefits from Parkour to any significant degree (Jupiter Gas City), where even later additions kind of don't. Corpus Ship doesn't really require Parkour and has few places where that even helps and Deimos is actively hostile to parkour as most vertical surfaces are rough and thus can't really be climbed. Like I said - more people, playing for longer, because you and your motivations are not the only motivations of people playing, and it is possible and better to appeal to a large portion of the spectrum, and indeed, more financially viable to do so. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steel_Rook Posted October 29, 2020 Share Posted October 29, 2020 1 hour ago, Loza03 said: There's a few ways to define efficiency. 'Input in to reward out' and 'time in to reward out' being two important ones here. Presently, the method for both is identical with most grinds in Warframe. But what if they weren't? What if there were faster optimal ways, but a slower, easier way to still accommodate less hardcore, sweaty players in a reasonable amount of time? Using focus as an example, what if it was actually reasonable to acquire it normally, but you could do it way faster (and uncapped) by hunting Eidolons? Focus would still be a reasonable system, but skilled players would still be rewarded. I disagree. For one thing, what you describe is already the case. Eidolon Shards already go above the daily cap, so you already have a system of unlimited daily progress. That's the problem - Focus is balanced around its skill ceiling. Everything else that isn't the skill ceiling is going to feel slow enough to be functionally pointless. I know - I tried it. All systems in a Live Service game are always balanced around optimal performance due to the primary importance of content gating. You can't balance a progression system around "casual" playstyles, because then the high-skilled/hardcore/core players will blow through it quickly and that's what DE fear the most. Their entire body of design decisions is built around us always having something to grind for. The moment we're "done" is when they themselves seem to believe we'll just leave. I don't agree with this, but that's evident in the design of every single bit of content in Warframe. It's easy to contextualise something like Focus as "reasonable for casual players, faster for hardcore players" but that's not a realistic assessment. Realistically, it's always going to be "horribly grindy for casual players, reasonable for hardcore players." Optimum efficiency is the status quo because optimum efficiency is the balance point. No system exists that's balanced for casual players unless it's ALSO heavily limited to hardcore players by daily cap or weekly cap or some other arbitrary appointment mechanic. If you want "skilled play" to earn more rewards than casual play, then you're penalising casual play rather than rewarding skilled play. There exist no other options in a modern Live Service game, and certainly not in Warframe. Whatever playstyle is the fastest and most efficient is the benchmark. All other playstyles are disincentivised by default. You cannot and will not see a situation where casual playstyles are the benchmark and skilled play is rewarded disproportionately more. I realise I'm harping on this, but I can't stress how important this point is. Live Services are grindy. Fastest is always the benchmark, everything else is (and crucially, feels like it is) suboptimal. Best case scenario, skilled players play with a handicap like a daily/weekly cap. I've not been with Warframe since the start so I don't know if that's how it's always been, but it has certainly been this way since I started playing seriously, and it's only getting to be that way more and more. Every new update brings more grind and more expectation of efficiency. I don't know if this is because DE's internal metrics say the community as a whole is getting more efficient or if they're just experimenting to see how much grind they can get away with, but I simply don't see what you're proposing as realistic at all. I mean... Maybe I'm missing something, but I honestly cannot imagine such an activity that's both reasonable for a casual player AND still rewarding for a skilled player which doesn't shaft one or the other. 1 hour ago, Loza03 said: Warframe is currently not appealing to quite a bit of it's potential audience. The people who want something they can sink their teeth into, learn, and excel at, even if they aren't willing to sink eternity for doing so. Grind only keeps them so long. As long as the people nearer the skill floor are still accounted for, why should they not get a fun game? It's possible to have both. A couple of points here. As cynical as this may make me come across... Warframe's lack of appeal to certain types of players doesn't really seem to be affecting its popularity much. Despite its age, this is still one of the most popular games on Steam and remains easily profitable. I'm not opposed to appealing to a broader demographic in principle, but I equally don't consider the "if you build it they will come" approach to game design to be very convincing. Will adding a more skilled movement system attract new players? Maybe. So will adding space ship combat, musical instruments, fashion elements and a dating sim minigame. I'd ask what makes skilled movement more important, but this belies a more important observation: Look at Railjack. What is the point of Railjack? Why did we need it, why does it exist? In reality, it's because DE are still fans and sometimes they just think certain things are cool even if they have no intrinsic merit, but pragmatically - who was Railjacka made for? It's a space shooter game mode in a third person ground shooter game which up to that point had next to no such content. Yes, it's likely to appeal to space shooter fans, but are you expecting anyone who didn't like Warframe before Railjack to start liking it now? Do you envision people who hated the game, but looked at Railjack and thought "Yes! I will play this and only this aspect of the game!" Because my guess - and fair point, this is just a guess - is that the people whom Railjack appealed to are those like me who already liked the underlying game anyway. To those of us who actually like Railjack for its own merits, it's "neat." I would have still played Warframe without it, but I like having it in the game anyway. But actually look at it, though - Railjack. Look at how expensive it was to make, how buggy it is, how unfinished it is and what it did to Warframe in 2019. Yes, it put a "space shooter" component into the game, but did that actually bring in any new people? Did it restart any old players? Maybe, for a while. But long-term? I don't think there's a great number of people out there who play Warframe FOR Railjack and wouldn't play it otherwise. If the goal of Railjack was to expand Warframe's playerbase, I don't think it succeeded because I don't think it possibly could have. Expanding the game's potential audience is a noble goal in isolation, but I'm not convinced that "skilled parkour" is going to do that. This is why I'm asking for a broader reason to expand it, something more concrete than the belief that it will lead to an expanded playerbase. If your primary reasoning here is that parkour needs to be improved for the sake of improving parkour and everything else will take care of itself, then I consider that reasoning tautological. It doesn't convince me. This could just be my background in software development and mathematics, but I choose to press people for solid reasoning behind their proposals. That doesn't make your proposal bad or wrong. However, if you're basing it on ephemeral reasoning like that, then what you'll get as a result is an unfocused, cluttered mess. DE have already shown themselves MORE than capable of delivering one unfocused, cluttered mess after another, pushing features with no clear idea of what role they're supposed to serve or who would want them, leaving us with vestigial features which COULD be good in some alternate universe but instead hang off the side of the game like limpets. Trust me, I WANT more extensive parkour features (though of a different sort). What I don't want is another instance of K-Drives. If we're going to improve parkour, then I'd rather do this by giving players more reason to use the existing system first, before we go on expanding a system which is already predominantly superfluous. 1 hour ago, Loza03 said: Like I said - more people, playing for longer, because you and your motivations are not the only motivations of people playing, and it is possible and better to appeal to a large portion of the spectrum, and indeed, more financially viable to do so. This is kind of a repeat of a previous argument so I'll use it as a write-up. Yes, it is theoretically possible to appeal to a broader audience by enacting your proposed changes. Will that be the case, though? I don't know, and neither do you. Find a better reason. Or failing that, find a more practical use for the changes you're presenting. You want more momentum in Parkour. OK, fair enough - but to what end? What use would momentum-possessing parkour have that current momentum-less parkour doesn't? What could we accomplish with that that we can't already? Because if your only answer boils down to what's in the Titanfall video - run armour an empty map with it - then I'm not convinced it's worth the effort. Yes, that might appeal to some people. So could literally any change done to the game. Allowing me to pet my Moa made Warframe more appealing to me, as a random stupid example. What do you actually see yourself doing with parkour under your proposed conditions that you don't see yourself doing now, and - crucially - how is that meaningful enough to merit system-wide changes? This is an honest question, because it gets at the heart of the issue. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PhiThagRaid Posted October 29, 2020 Share Posted October 29, 2020 1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said: Focus is balanced around its skill ceiling. If you just ran ESO to get the focus, you can unlock everything within 192 days assuming you are MR5... If you were to compare that to completing any other long term system in the game that is not very different, completing focus is supposed to be on par with getting every warframe or weapon or companion. 1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said: If you want "skilled play" to earn more rewards than casual play, then you're penalising casual play rather than rewarding skilled play. I think this might be a key issue, it basically assumes that you are entitled to all the rewards and anything less is a penalty. This would be similar to requesting caches get removed from missions, because it penalises those who do not look for them. 1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said: You cannot and will not see a situation where casual playstyles are the benchmark and skilled play is rewarded disproportionately more. I think the issue can lay more with lazy/uninteractive playstyles instead of casual playstyles, currently most of the meta solutions are those that require the least amount of skill to use. Eg. Mesa and Saryn. 1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said: What is the point of Railjack? Why did we need it, why does it exist? My cynical take would be: Marketing... Many of the recent updates(open worlds, liches and railjack) felt more like marketing ploys than actual features that were well thought out and designed, especially because what was shown was not what we got. I do still enjoy most of these additions, though. 1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said: Trust me, I WANT more extensive parkour features (though of a different sort). What I don't want is another instance of K-Drives. If we're going to improve parkour, then I'd rather do this by giving players more reason to use the existing system first, before we go on expanding a system which is already predominantly superfluous. I believe the changes that OP were suggesting were mainly focused around the increase in the benefit of using it and the fluidity thereof. So, yes having more uses is a major addition that can help the system reach its full potential, OP just believes that removing things he finds inconvenient would also help. Eg. sudden loss of momentum. Skill ceiling and skill floor has been thrown around a lot in this thread and the youtube channel GameMaker's ToolKit released a video talking about that exact topic, which I found to be a good explanation solutions to learning curve related issues. This is indeed a learning curve issue in relation to the implementation of either some changes to momentum or the addition of enemies or tiles that incentivize an increased skill at parkour. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Loza03 Posted October 30, 2020 Author Share Posted October 30, 2020 3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: I disagree. For one thing, what you describe is already the case. Eidolon Shards already go above the daily cap, so you already have a system of unlimited daily progress. That's the problem - Focus is balanced around its skill ceiling. Everything else that isn't the skill ceiling is going to feel slow enough to be functionally pointless. I know - I tried it. All systems in a Live Service game are always balanced around optimal performance due to the primary importance of content gating. You can't balance a progression system around "casual" playstyles, because then the high-skilled/hardcore/core players will blow through it quickly and that's what DE fear the most. Their entire body of design decisions is built around us always having something to grind for. The moment we're "done" is when they themselves seem to believe we'll just leave. I don't agree with this, but that's evident in the design of every single bit of content in Warframe. Is it though? I mean, the low skill option is not adequetely balanced, that's been one of the most pervasive complaints about the system since day 1. The 'high skill' option is there, but not the casual option. 3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: It's easy to contextualise something like Focus as "reasonable for casual players, faster for hardcore players" but that's not a realistic assessment. Realistically, it's always going to be "horribly grindy for casual players, reasonable for hardcore players." Optimum efficiency is the status quo because optimum efficiency is the balance point. No system exists that's balanced for casual players unless it's ALSO heavily limited to hardcore players by daily cap or weekly cap or some other arbitrary appointment mechanic. If you want "skilled play" to earn more rewards than casual play, then you're penalising casual play rather than rewarding skilled play. There exist no other options in a modern Live Service game, and certainly not in Warframe. Whatever playstyle is the fastest and most efficient is the benchmark. All other playstyles are disincentivised by default. You cannot and will not see a situation where casual playstyles are the benchmark and skilled play is rewarded disproportionately more. I realise I'm harping on this, but I can't stress how important this point is. Live Services are grindy. Fastest is always the benchmark, everything else is (and crucially, feels like it is) suboptimal. Best case scenario, skilled players play with a handicap like a daily/weekly cap. I've not been with Warframe since the start so I don't know if that's how it's always been, but it has certainly been this way since I started playing seriously, and it's only getting to be that way more and more. Every new update brings more grind and more expectation of efficiency. I don't know if this is because DE's internal metrics say the community as a whole is getting more efficient or if they're just experimenting to see how much grind they can get away with, but I simply don't see what you're proposing as realistic at all. All this is well and good, but it's rather getting away from the point, isn't it? I recognise I helped it do that, but... I fail to see how giving the movement system something more to master will affect all this. This is fairly high-concept stuff for what is distinctly not a high-concept suggestion. I'm not talking about loot acquisition in this thread, I'm not even talking about optimal playstyles (since mobility, regrettably, will not be more optimal with the changes I suggest, since Tanking would be more effective). I'm talking about something that would raise the skill ceiling whilst leaving the floor intact. 3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: A couple of points here. As cynical as this may make me come across... Warframe's lack of appeal to certain types of players doesn't really seem to be affecting its popularity much. Despite its age, this is still one of the most popular games on Steam and remains easily profitable. For now. If the Steam Charts are any indication, and I see no reason why not, Warframe's playerbase was dropping at fairly steady pace prior to Covid, and one of the biggest boosts to Gaming populations in years has only managed to stablise it's decline. By comparison, since the health crisis, Team Fortress 2, a game which hasn't seen a major update in years and is presently swarmed with experience-ruining aimbots has managed to re-overtake Warframe, which is still in active development. And quite consistently over the past six months - a six months which included both a massive advertising platform and a major content update, mind you. Not to mention the reverse had been true for a year and a half. That's hardly a sign that Warframe's healthy. 3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: A couple of points here. As cynical as this may make me come across... Warframe's lack of appeal to certain types of players doesn't really seem to be affecting its popularity much. Despite its age, this is still one of the most popular games on Steam and remains easily profitable. I'm not opposed to appealing to a broader demographic in principle, but I equally don't consider the "if you build it they will come" approach to game design to be very convincing. Will adding a more skilled movement system attract new players? Maybe. So will adding space ship combat, musical instruments, fashion elements and a dating sim minigame. I'd ask what makes skilled movement more important, but this belies a more important observation: This isn't 'if you build it they will come'. It's that the players have been asking for more 'endgame' content, which has repeatedly been proven impossible to achieve in Warframes low-skill-ceiling state for years, and they are no longer staying. As stated before, Warframe's player base is dwindling. Addressing this core problem is a concern, and I see that raising the skill ceiling is one solution to that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rubat Posted October 30, 2020 Share Posted October 30, 2020 One thing I absolutely despise is getting stuck on all the little tiny props and other geometry on tiles when bullet jumping. With Cambion Drift this is worse exponentially due to all the tiny streaks(?) of infested goo everywhere. You just want to get from A to B but end up getting stuck on the terrain. Another very infuriating part are door frames. I very often end up on top of them pixel walking for no good reason. Why do they have 1 px from the wall lips on top so you can stand on them? I wish Warframe level designers would take a page out of the CS:GO book and properly "clip" every tile, i.e. cover all smaller obstacles like doorframes with invisible brushes that direct/funnel the player towards open space. I don't want to pixel walk on a door frame. I want to be through the door 3 seconds ago. Another annoying issue with Warframe's movement is the sliding into walls, by which I mean if you slide into a corner, you will be in the slide animation (and be constrained by all its limitations) while not actually moving, meaning you cannot walk backwards and move away from the corner, you have to consciously untoggle your slide (and during this time your character could stop sliding when the internal fake velocity reaches 0 which would toggle your crouching state) and then you are allowed to move. If my actual velocity is 0, i don't want to be in the slide animation waiting for the internal slide velocity to reach 0. And there's also a longstanding bug when standing on moving objects, such as interception towers, void tileset retractable cover/elevators on any tileset. Essentially the game will do no collision checking when the character is being moved by such objects, which can result you in going through walls easily. This is fairly easy to reproduce on any fast elevator: When close to reaching the topmost position of the elevator, bullet jumping directly up will usually take you straight through the ceiling. This very bug can also happen with void tileset cover things, when you slide over it and bullet jump while looking up like you usually do, you can end up in the ceiling if the cover pushes you up at the instant you are bullet jumping. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PhiThagRaid Posted October 30, 2020 Share Posted October 30, 2020 On 2020-10-30 at 6:43 AM, Rubat said: And there's also a longstanding bug when standing on moving objects, such as interception towers, void tileset retractable cover/elevators on any tileset. Essentially the game will do no collision checking when the character is being moved by such objects, which can result you in going through walls easily. This is fairly easy to reproduce on any fast elevator: When close to reaching the topmost position of the elevator, bullet jumping directly up will usually take you straight through the ceiling. This very bug can also happen with void tileset cover things, when you slide over it and bullet jump while looking up like you usually do, you can end up in the ceiling if the cover pushes you up at the instant you are bullet jumping. Oh, is this still possible? I used to do this to exit my Dojo, but later thought they fixed it, since I was unable to do it for quite a while. Edit: Was able to confirm that this is still possible, just needed to bulletjump a bit earlier than I remembered. On 2020-10-30 at 6:43 AM, Rubat said: One thing I absolutely despise is getting stuck on all the little tiny props and other geometry on tiles when bullet jumping. With Cambion Drift this is worse exponentially due to all the tiny streaks(?) of infested goo everywhere. You just want to get from A to B but end up getting stuck on the terrain. Another very infuriating part are door frames. I very often end up on top of them pixel walking for no good reason. Why do they have 1 px from the wall lips on top so you can stand on them? Yeah, getting rid of tiny pixel bumps would be nice. With regards to Cambion, I think some different logic should apply to infested areas, the infestation is not a solid structure as a window or something similarly manmade would be. So I would think it would make sense to have all infested sections that are thread or weblike be without a hitbox. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steel_Rook Posted October 30, 2020 Share Posted October 30, 2020 10 hours ago, Loza03 said: This isn't 'if you build it they will come'. It's that the players have been asking for more 'endgame' content, which has repeatedly been proven impossible to achieve in Warframes low-skill-ceiling state for years, and they are no longer staying. As stated before, Warframe's player base is dwindling. Addressing this core problem is a concern, and I see that raising the skill ceiling is one solution to that. But the people asking for more end game content aren't new players, though. They're existing players, and usually players without a lot left to gain - or a left to spend money on. In my experience, there's no saving "veteran" players once they're disgruntled. Any "Hail Mary" solutions the game implements will only work short-term before veterans are right back talking about how burnt out they are. This has been my experience from coming on 20 years of MMOs/Live Services now. However, you did mention we're getting off-topic so fair enough. Let's leave that and look back to your original suggestions. On environment design: I agree, albeit partially. As old tilesets are redesigned into new ones, I do wish they'd go more the way of Jupiter over Corpus Ship. Corpus Ship maps certainly benefit from parkour in terms of verticality, but that mostly consists of individual bullet jumps. Jupiter, by contrast, has what amount to obstacle courses requiring multiple jumps and often wall runs. Jupiter also does a lot more with poles and wires, as well as offering more of a sense of vertigo, which I feel is important. More environment design like this is very much welcome, no argument there. My only caveat is that I don't want this to come to the exclusion of flat-ground environments. I firmly believe that Warframe needs some form of fast, non-vehicle-specific flat ground movement ability that's faster than chained bullet jumps. My proposal for this was adding Sprint as a generic take on Gauss' Mag Rush given to all Warframes, with Gauss' Mag Rush ability and Rhino's Charge ability turned into Passive modifications on their Sprint. I believe we agreed on this in principle, if not in specific. On enemy design: Again, I agree though possibly not for the same reasons as you. I feel that enemies need more telegraphed AoE attacks that we can use movement to get out of the way of. I do agree that enemies also need more dumbfire projectiles and less in the way of homing projectiles or hitscan. I'm not convinced that needs to apply to ALL enemies, but I don't see a design downside to it, potential performance hit notwithstanding. In particular, I feel that Special enemies should transition most if not all of their attacks to telegraphed charge-up abilities that they warn players of with visual and audio cues - marks on the ground, voice lines or unique sound effects, etc. If players are to dodge enemy fire, I want them to know what they're dodging and know they've dodged it. I'm not convince that giving all Commons projectile attacks would accomplish much since Common enemies as a mass are constantly shooting at the player. There's never a time when the player can stop and return fire unless the player does so WHILE dodging. I don't believe Warframe has the capacity for that kind of gameplay and I personally don't enjoy it. Then again, I also don't believe that Common enemies should provide a meaningful threat to the player, other than creating chaos and suppressing shield recharge. In my opinion, threat should come from Specials with windup telegraphed attacks which the player very much CAN dodge, then stop to return fire as those would not be able to be chained. As such, I'm ambivalent on the notion of giving all enemies projectile attacks. Finally and most importantly, I'm also of the opinion that more enemies need to have dedicated weak points. These don't need to necessarily be available from the front and they don't need to deal more damage to the individual enemy. I'm fine with backpakcs which debuff or stun the enemy when destroyed, or otherwise alter behaviour or remove abilities. Shooting the ammo backpack on a Heavy Gunner forcing her to switch to a pistol or a knife would be one example. Shooting the legs on a Nox causing him to stumble and be unable to rush would be another. These are just random examples. Crucially, Special units and other more remarkable enemies NEED to have a limited speed of rotation. They MUST NOT be able to spin around instantly to face us every time we're within line of sight. They need to have slow rotation such that we can use our superior mobility in order to get behind them and shoot at the weak points on their backs. And yes, this does apply to Shield enemies, Necramechs and Tusk Thumpers. Generally, my interest in enemy design as relates to parkour is focused on making Heavy units even heavier and more complex to fight, rather than dodging fire from masses of cannon fodder enemies. On momentum: As a set of personal preference beliefs, I'd personally rather avoid large amounts of momentum, and instead focus on keeping most of our Parkour manoeuvres at roughly the same general speed. I understand that your proposal is specific to manoeuvres in the direction a player is already moving in, but I'd still rather not. I prefer consistent movement controls regardless of my orientation and don't feel that Warframe currently calls for much faster parkour anyway. It lacks content to make use of it. We've already gone over the reasoning for this on both sides, so I'm willing to agree to disagree and drop the subject. It's not as important to me. My primary goal with this line of argument was to push for specific design goals of what players are expected to do with these systems, and I'm not sure if we accomplished that or not. If you want to pick the conversation back up then feel free, though I'll try to stop derailing. 13 hours ago, PhiThagRaid said: I believe the changes that OP were suggesting were mainly focused around the increase in the benefit of using it and the fluidity thereof. So, yes having more uses is a major addition that can help the system reach its full potential, OP just believes that removing things he finds inconvenient would also help. Eg. sudden loss of momentum. I'm posting in-between work issues here so I'll have a look at the video later. Game Maker's Toolkit usually have interesting insights, so thanks for the suggestion. To explain my reasoning here, though: I approach game design with a very specific set of beliefs. Obviously, we all propose things we want for personal reasons. However, if I'm making a proposal to a broad audience, I want that proposal to serve a narrowly specific purpose - to have a clearly defined goal. What issue have I identified, why is it an issue in need of fixing, what fix am I proposing, how does it address this specific issue? To my eyes, this is what gives a proposal weight beyond the proposing party's personal preference - beyond a vote of one. Ultimately, I don't believe suggestions should succeed or fail on a vote of popularity, but rather on an objective assessment of their intrinsic merits. If a suggestion can be shown to be objectively meritorious, then it gains far more weight than that of the individual making it. When it comes to Parkour, I feel that our Warframes already have far more mobility than the game actually requires, or indeed knows what to do with in most cases. Having more isn't necessarily a bad thing, but to what end? Even our existing Parkour system is more than sufficient for anything short of self-imposed speedrun challenges. In order for me to be convinced of the need for improved parkour mechanics, I'd first need to be given some objective need for it - some game activity which would require these, or at least benefit from them. Without that, we have yet another self-serving suggestion to be thrown on the pile of suggestions that would be "neat to have." And as I said - DE have a nasty habit of implementing these kinds of ideas into the game without connecting them to anything, leaving us with vestigial features waiting in a long queue for yet another redesign. Exactly like Railjack. I'm not opposed to the suggestion itself. I have some quibbles, but they're fairly minor. I do, however, feel it's putting the cart before the horse and addressing the wrong end of Warframe's "parkour problem." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PhiThagRaid Posted October 30, 2020 Share Posted October 30, 2020 59 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said: On environment design: I agree, albeit partially. As old tilesets are redesigned into new ones, I do wish they'd go more the way of Jupiter over Corpus Ship. Corpus Ship maps certainly benefit from parkour in terms of verticality, but that mostly consists of individual bullet jumps. Jupiter, by contrast, has what amount to obstacle courses requiring multiple jumps and often wall runs. Jupiter also does a lot more with poles and wires, as well as offering more of a sense of vertigo, which I feel is important. More environment design like this is very much welcome, no argument there. I'm all in for this. 59 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said: My only caveat is that I don't want this to come to the exclusion of flat-ground environments. I firmly believe that Warframe needs some form of fast, non-vehicle-specific flat ground movement ability that's faster than chained bullet jumps. My proposal for this was adding Sprint as a generic take on Gauss' Mag Rush given to all Warframes, with Gauss' Mag Rush ability and Rhino's Charge ability turned into Passive modifications on their Sprint. I believe we agreed on this in principle, if not in specific. There can indeed be a problem with flat ground traversal, I'm just not sure giving one of the key features of Gauss to all frames makes sense. This seems like a similar issue with Blink, where you wish to give everyone a feature one specific item already has, and that honestly didn't turn out well. Itzal's 1 is not basically worthless without really affecting the use of archwings. I've never seen someone use an archwing in an openworld for something other than travel and this ended up being a downgrade to the one thing that was used for. Given the similarities, I would expect something similar to happen here(adding a cooldown or stamina system). If traversing open areas is what you want to improve outside openworlds, I'd rather advocate for the inclusion of K-Drive in normal missions, since that will give them more use and not add an honestly boring movement addition. 4 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: On enemy design: Again, I agree though possibly not for the same reasons as you. I feel that enemies need more telegraphed AoE attacks that we can use movement to get out of the way of. I do agree that enemies also need more dumbfire projectiles and less in the way of homing projectiles or hitscan. I'm not convinced that needs to apply to ALL enemies, but I don't see a design downside to it, potential performance hit notwithstanding. In particular, I feel that Special enemies should transition most if not all of their attacks to telegraphed charge-up abilities that they warn players of with visual and audio cues - marks on the ground, voice lines or unique sound effects, etc. If players are to dodge enemy fire, I want them to know what they're dodging and know they've dodged it. I'm not convince that giving all Commons projectile attacks would accomplish much since Common enemies as a mass are constantly shooting at the player. There's never a time when the player can stop and return fire unless the player does so WHILE dodging. I don't believe Warframe has the capacity for that kind of gameplay and I personally don't enjoy it. Then again, I also don't believe that Common enemies should provide a meaningful threat to the player, other than creating chaos and suppressing shield recharge. In my opinion, threat should come from Specials with windup telegraphed attacks which the player very much CAN dodge, then stop to return fire as those would not be able to be chained. As such, I'm ambivalent on the notion of giving all enemies projectile attacks. Finally and most importantly, I'm also of the opinion that more enemies need to have dedicated weak points. These don't need to necessarily be available from the front and they don't need to deal more damage to the individual enemy. I'm fine with backpakcs which debuff or stun the enemy when destroyed, or otherwise alter behaviour or remove abilities. Shooting the ammo backpack on a Heavy Gunner forcing her to switch to a pistol or a knife would be one example. Shooting the legs on a Nox causing him to stumble and be unable to rush would be another. These are just random examples. Crucially, Special units and other more remarkable enemies NEED to have a limited speed of rotation. They MUST NOT be able to spin around instantly to face us every time we're within line of sight. They need to have slow rotation such that we can use our superior mobility in order to get behind them and shoot at the weak points on their backs. And yes, this does apply to Shield enemies, Necramechs and Tusk Thumpers. Generally, my interest in enemy design as relates to parkour is focused on making Heavy units even heavier and more complex to fight, rather than dodging fire from masses of cannon fodder enemies. This sounds fine. 4 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: Having more isn't necessarily a bad thing, but to what end? Even our existing Parkour system is more than sufficient for anything short of self-imposed speedrun challenges. In order for me to be convinced of the need for improved parkour mechanics, Ironically, this is stating that you don't think the skill ceiling should rise, because the skill floor isn't rising. This refers back to the video, but as a player that is creeping closer to the skill ceiling, the skill ceiling would be something that matters more to me than the skill floor. If people still want to be able to cheese things, the skill floor can stagnate and not really affect me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neekk0 Posted October 30, 2020 Share Posted October 30, 2020 I haven't read every post on this thread, but I just wanted to drop by and say that the fluid movement is what got me into Warframe - but alas there is almost nowhere to apply the skills I picked up playing, but in the Conclave. Yep, I'm one of the few freaks that absolutely loves Conclave and it is only now that i realize it's because those level actually feel designed to be used with our full range of movement. Also human enemies kinda make you go full rubberball. Its a shame we will most likely never get tricky objectives inside "the floor is lava/non-existent mission types" or anything that requires a level of coordination beyond casual mindless farming... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xzorn Posted October 31, 2020 Share Posted October 31, 2020 10 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: But the people asking for more end game content aren't new players, though. They're existing players, and usually players without a lot left to gain - or a left to spend money on. In my experience, there's no saving "veteran" players once they're disgruntled. Any "Hail Mary" solutions the game implements will only work short-term before veterans are right back talking about how burnt out they are. This has been my experience from coming on 20 years of MMOs/Live Services now. However, you did mention we're getting off-topic so fair enough. Let's leave that and look back to your original suggestions. I haven't been reading this back and forth much but this part caught my eye. Veterans stuck with this game for years asking DE to fix things and add things but got tired of talking to a wall. DE has made it painfully clear their financial structure will be based on new players and thus no content will ever come for veterans. Most of us stuck around for a long time playing the game how we wanted to play it and just ignoring the new player bait but even that's not possible (least for me as a previous endurance runner). Since the changes in enemy scaling it's no longer possible to make builds and challenge them. The main issue is that DE never addressed the Core Design of the game which would allow for proper scaling, play style diversity, dynamic encounters and most importantly integrated content. These are pretty simple concepts that can add tons of play time. The key was for them to allow the game to multiply the play time of content they produce and thus they wouldn't have to spend as much time developing new content. A fairly easy comparison is Path of Exile where every new mechanic they add to the game is part of the game as a whole while DE makes modules that don't improve existing content thus making irrelevant one-and-done conditions. No I don't play Path every single League but I keep coming back to it and I started both games in 2013. Even looking at the streamer influence is night and day. Math1l has more viewers most the time than any of the DE staff streaming outside Prime Time or Devstream. There's simply no reason to be a Warframe streamer when the staff can't even beat a PoE streamer. This is player loyalty manifested. This relates to every aspect of the game including Movement. DE staff aren't very good at the game (no offense) and they have few veterans left to parse their content with or take example by on what could be fixed or shouldn't be added. When DE added an auto-crouch to movement. No one asked for that and no one wanted it. When they added a massive AoE Ragdoll to Melee Slam attacks on a short range weapon. No one was there to say that's probably counter productive to gap closing. They still insist Warframes are a pill shape objects and thus should not get stuck on small terrain objects and yet we all know it still happens. They're completely out of touch with their community and how the game was / is played because there are no more content leaders to watch. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cuchullin Posted October 31, 2020 Share Posted October 31, 2020 My thinking on the movement mechanics is that yes they are great but the tile-sets and by extension mission types haven't really been updated to reflect this. Now I know it's kinda stupid to redesign the entire game around one mechanic but consider this the general play-style of every warframe player after a certain point is to rush to whatever the objective is in whatever mission your in blasting everything in sight away with whatever god tier setup you run as fast as possible and you don't really take the environment into account at all. However as a wannabe space ninja I wouldn't mind having strategic options in the terrain/ tile-sets both for the players and the enemies. For example having sniper points or bunker areas to work around or infiltrate and use ourselves along with more consistent spawn rates so that areas like that could reasonably be used. For example players would generally rock into a room massacre everything within a couple of seconds and move on whereas if a player/s were to go up to a room where the enemy had set up an ambush of some sort then having strategies to deal with that could be interesting. Now don't get me wrong I love being able to mindlessly massacre my way through missions as much as the next guy but it can and does get boring pretty quick. So having a tile-set and enemies where positioning actually matters could bring a whole new angle to the game. Of course the less said about conclave the better. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steel_Rook Posted October 31, 2020 Share Posted October 31, 2020 19 hours ago, PhiThagRaid said: There can indeed be a problem with flat ground traversal, I'm just not sure giving one of the key features of Gauss to all frames makes sense. This seems like a similar issue with Blink, where you wish to give everyone a feature one specific item already has, and that honestly didn't turn out well. Itzal's 1 is not basically worthless without really affecting the use of archwings. I've never seen someone use an archwing in an openworld for something other than travel and this ended up being a downgrade to the one thing that was used for. Given the similarities, I would expect something similar to happen here(adding a cooldown or stamina system). If traversing open areas is what you want to improve outside openworlds, I'd rather advocate for the inclusion of K-Drive in normal missions, since that will give them more use and not add an honestly boring movement addition. I'm not sure why what you're highlighting here is a problem, though. I personally consider Blink to be a success story overall, in that it opened up roughly equal long-range transportation capability to all Archwings. Yes, Archwings are predominantly used for travel in Free Roam maps, but that didn't really change with Blink. All that changed is which Archwings people used, from "just Itzal" to "whatever Archwing they like." That seems like a positive change to me. If you're looking for reasons why people don't use Archwings for MORE than combat in Free Roam maps, the reason for that is entirely unrelated - it's homing missiles. In other words, people don't use Archwings for combat in Free Roam maps because DE don't want us using Archwings for combat in Free Roam maps, thus they give half the ground enemies homing missiles that can't be spoofed or blocked by abilities and instantly disable our Archwings. I don't see the reason why the addition of such a Sprint would need Stamina at all. That's a bit of a broader topic, however, so please refer to Why do really we need Stamina? for a more in-depth discussion. Long story short, I feel that Mag Rush is sufficiently self-limiting by blocking our weapons and abilities while having a limited turning radius that it doesn't need additional limitations. Yes, it would be good for running across Free Roam maps, but nowhere near as good as Archwings or even K-Drives and it wouldn't be nearly as good at running through indoor missions as those rarely have long stretches of straight unbroken hallways. Having played a substantial amount of Gauss myself, I've not found myself able to cover much ground in a single run, often having to stop and resort to either parkour or just traditional walking to navigate smaller spaces. Yes, a combination of Mag Rush, walking and bullet jumps is faster than just bullet jumps, but that's the point. The reason Blink needed a cooldown is because it's a teleportation ability. Chaining that with no cooldown is WAAAY too powerful. The same doesn't apply to running, because that has a travel time. And to be perfectly honest - I kind of wish DE hadn't gone with Blink, but instead increased the movement speed of Boost. Archwings already have a "move faster" mode that they could have used. However, the changes surrounding Blink were as much "political" as they were a matter of game design. Removing Blink from the game and increasing Boost speed would have gone across much, MUCH worse to the community, even though that's ostensibly what we got anyway. At the end of the day, I'd argue the issue here is the fault of DE's approach to game design. Often they'll come up with really good ideas for general game-wide redesigns, but they'll implement them in a very narrow context, instead. Look at Hyldrin and shield-gating. They could have put that in the game altogether, but they implemented it as the passive for a single Warframe. Thus, when Warframe Revised came out, DE had to give out a stripped-down version of Hildryn's passive to everyone, thus making her weaker in comparison (however slightly). The same applies to pet self-resurrection on a timer. Could have given that to all pets, gave it to just Vulpaphylas instead. Or giving all pets a "weapons" item. Could have done that to all pets, did it to Moa pets only. The new thing in question, whatever that is at the time, gets the new tech, even if said tech would benefit the game as a whole. Call me socialist if you will, but I'm of the opinion that mechanics which could improve core game mechanics should be available to everyone, not just to "one specific item." 19 hours ago, PhiThagRaid said: Ironically, this is stating that you don't think the skill ceiling should rise, because the skill floor isn't rising. This refers back to the video, but as a player that is creeping closer to the skill ceiling, the skill ceiling would be something that matters more to me than the skill floor. If people still want to be able to cheese things, the skill floor can stagnate and not really affect me. Work prevented me from watching the video yesterday. Sorry about that. It's not a question of raising the skill floor at all, however. It's more a question of giving parkour "a point" beyond the tautological reason of improving it for the sake of improving it. I think a comparison is in order here. Let's say I proposed increasing Inaros Prime's base health to 1000. That would certainly make Inaros more powerful and more difficult to kill, but to what end? A well-built Inaros is already basically unkillable by pretty much anything as it is. Giving him more health won't change anything, other than maybe letting players throw out a few health and armour mods for something else. Inaros' design certainly has issues, but "lack of health" isn't one of them. On the list of things to change about him or add to him, more health sits very low. I would much rather give him a Frost-style "barrier" of some sort, or more reliable team heals, or maybe even damage since any of these things would serve a purpose. Giving him more health doesn't do anything. Inaros Prime plays identical to Inaros, after all. I see improving the speed and power of our existing parkour system as akin to giving Inaros more health. Sure, it makes us even better at terrain navigation, but to what end? We're already better at terrain navigation than we almost ever actually need to be. Giving us faster parkour might let some people be a second or two faster in specific situations, but no situations exist that actually call for that - not even optional ones. I see no point in giving players more powerful tools when the tools they already have are too powerful as it is. Parkour certainly has issues, but not being skilled enough or fast enough are pretty low on that list as far as I'm concerned. It's not just that low-skilled gameplay is more efficient than high-skilled gameplay. It's that high-skilled gameplay currently doesn't even have a use, beyond self-imposed challenges. Jupiter is pretty much the only place that isn't the case, given how many out-of-the-way loot areas are only accessible via fairly tricky parkour. But that's literally the only example. Neither Deimos nor Corpus Ship really have any of that. On the list of things to do to parkour, I would personally look at giving it actual use both in combat and out of combat before I worry about making it more powerful. Give me reason to push parkour to its limits, then I'll consider expanding those limits. Did you know that you can Bullet Jump in the air if you haven't expended your double jump yet? I'm sure you do, of course, but... Where exactly is that ever useful? What piece of terrain benefits from jumping AND THEN bullet jumping? Because only a single instance comes to mind, and that's navigating badly-designed maps with lumpy walls that prevent us from climbing them, and that's only a "use" in an academic sense. Properly-designed maps would give us climbable walls without requiring us to fudge the rules of the game. Beyond that, what else? Because I've looked, and I've found fairly few places that's useful where a simple double jump wouldn't be. I mean think about it. A mechanic like that could help us navigate overhangs, but very few of those exist. It could help us jump "underneath" hanging walls, but very few of THOSE exist. Old maps aren't made with parkour in mind, which is understandable. They're from before that time... Well, some of them. Kuva Fortress has no excuse. But new maps? Corpus Ship basically ignored Parkour altogether, other than allowing for some verticality. It has secrets, but most of those are holes in the floor. Deimos literally ignored Parkour, because we're back to the Earth Forest map design where cliffs are lumpy to the point where they can't be climbed. I would focus on giving Parkour an actual purpose in the game before I put much work into making it more powerful. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steel_Rook Posted October 31, 2020 Share Posted October 31, 2020 Putting this in a separate post because it's off topic, but... On 2020-10-30 at 1:20 AM, PhiThagRaid said: Skill ceiling and skill floor has been thrown around a lot in this thread and the youtube channel GameMaker's ToolKit released a video talking about that exact topic, which I found to be a good explanation solutions to learning curve related issues. This is indeed a learning curve issue in relation to the implementation of either some changes to momentum or the addition of enemies or tiles that incentivize an increased skill at parkour. Having seen the video, I find myself strongly disagreeing with it on ideological grounds. While I generally find Game Maker's Toolkit videos insightful, this one seems to have bought into a fallacy without stopping to question it. "Mastery is more satisfying when it's earned." No, it isn't. It may be FOR YOU, but that's not the case for everybody. I've said this many times before, but it bears repeating: Not everyone plays their games like a sport. Not everyone plays games with the intent or even desire to master them, to learn new skills. Some players, myself among them, buy and play games as toys. They're fun things we buy for ourselves to distract ourselves from everyday life and fuel a fun hobby. That doesn't necessarily mean that difficulty is a BAD thing, but rather that it's not necessarily a GOOD thing, either. It's value-neutral, and games work just fine without it. I wrote quite a bit On challenge and reductive combat if you're interested in the broader context of my take on the matter. While the video does have decent ideas of how to manage complexity and difficulty, it starts from the assumption that HAVING high complexity and difficulty is superior, and that the only problem is how to ease players into it. The video is directly critical of the Batman: Arkham games and similar titles for being too easy, and I couldn't disagree more. Yes, their combat systems are simplistic but there's still enough complexity in them to be fun. They don't need to be any more difficult, they don't need to require specific mastery to be fun. The basic premise of the video is flawed and - as I've mentioned a few times in this thread - tautological. High-skill-ceiling games are good because high-skill-ceiling games are good. Now let's look at how to make them fun for everyone. Are they, though? Because no effort was made to actually justify that assertion. It's accepted as self-evident and not even addressed. *edit* I think the video encapsulates my disagreement neatly in one succinct sentence. "Encourage players to always be pushing themselves to be better." Why? The video states this as a positive without ever giving a justification. Video games are not sports. Being "good" at them is not an intrinsic aspect of the genre. No other genre of entertainment requires this. You don't need to be good at reading books to enjoy books. You don't need to be good at watching movies to enjoy movies. You don't need to be good at eating food to enjoy food. Sometimes? Sure, some specific examples in all these categories do require a higher degree of experience and competence in their respective media, but ALL of them? To assert that encouraging players to get better at a game is always an intrinsic positive in a video game is incredibly one-sided and demonstrates a view lacking context. It's viewing the experience through only a specific set of video games, only a specific set of experiences which don't even begin to cover the full spectrum. I'm of the opinion that our REASONS for proposing changes are as important as our propositions themselves, if not even far more so. Our reasons and ideology shape the world-view we're trying to achieve. If we don't stop to question them, then what we're pushing for is a narrow worldview that excludes a great deal of others. Which is ironic, in a video about inclusivity. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PhiThagRaid Posted November 1, 2020 Share Posted November 1, 2020 12 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: I find myself strongly disagreeing with it on ideological grounds In that case, I will be unable to convince you of anything regarding this topic. I'm guessing I've just reached the skill ceiling and think that adding a payoff for more skillful play would be nice. And I was running off the assumption that given the game's lifespan there would be many more who have reached this ceiling. I would like this feature, but if it took resources from sections of the game that need it, I can live without it. Goodbye. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xzorn Posted November 1, 2020 Share Posted November 1, 2020 This pretty much sums up how I feel Warframe movement and game play could have been. It was between these points an various times but while I think it's too late by this point I feel like this is what we could have had and deserved to have. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Loza03 Posted November 1, 2020 Author Share Posted November 1, 2020 8 hours ago, Xzorn said: This pretty much sums up how I feel Warframe movement and game play could have been. It was between these points an various times but while I think it's too late by this point I feel like this is what we could have had and deserved to have. I've played Ghostrunner right through (it's out now), and whilst it's a great game with extremely fun movement... it's definitely not something Warframe should try emulate. Ghostrunner describes itself as a 'First Person Platformer' and that's definitely an accurate assessment. Its combat setpieces tend to be more about puzzles - it throws a number of its interactables, power ups and environments at you, sets up some enemies which need fairly specific approaches to beat (shielded, teleport, explode when you get in melee range...) and challenges you to defeat them with an intentionally-limited toolkit. Great for an action platformer, since it basically requires that you figure out how to move around the environment to defeat your opponents, which is an excellent platforming challenge. But I don' think it's a great fit for a game that's action-first like Warframe. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xzorn Posted November 1, 2020 Share Posted November 1, 2020 12 minutes ago, Loza03 said: I've played Ghostrunner right through (it's out now), and whilst it's a great game with extremely fun movement... it's definitely not something Warframe should try emulate. Ghostrunner describes itself as a 'First Person Platformer' and that's definitely an accurate assessment. Its combat setpieces tend to be more about puzzles - it throws a number of its interactables, power ups and environments at you, sets up some enemies which need fairly specific approaches to beat (shielded, teleport, explode when you get in melee range...) and challenges you to defeat them with an intentionally-limited toolkit. Great for an action platformer, since it basically requires that you figure out how to move around the environment to defeat your opponents, which is an excellent platforming challenge. But I don' think it's a great fit for a game that's action-first like Warframe. The thing is these elements where or are still in Warframe. Everything seen in that video. Wall running instead of wall hopping was in the game. It was just track based and stiff. The grapple is Valkyr's Ripline fully realized. Even the slowdown quick movements mid air is in Warframe. It's just all done in an inferior manner for Warframe. It doesn't have to be a platformer. It's the smooth flow of the movements I'm pointing out. Even grabbing ledges and pulling themselves up is quick and smooth. The entire thing is far more ninja-like. Personally I think Bulletjump was one of the worst additions they made to Warframe movement. It removes a lot of environmental awareness. Why jump off walls, scale cliffs or even make use of teleports if you can just jump spam through a mission. Coptering wasn't any better but... That was the wrong direction. Even more importantly IMO is there are less enemies making the player's movement, taking cover and other actions matter much more. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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