Good difficulty is important

[Nailclipper]

I just want to clear some misconceptions that I've read several times on the forum:

Warframe is easy therefore casual

• A casual game is not always easy, the opposite could be very much true. Card games are casual games and they aren't easy if you think about it. The appeal of casual games is that they are accessible by the virtue of simple rules (Warframe is actually pretty complicated) and you can just play them without much fuss. Simple rules also don't necessarily mean that the game is shallow, just take a look at go, chess, or even card games. Now let's take a look at some of recent popular casual digital games: Fall Guys and Among Us, are they easy? I don't think that people would say that they are easy but I think they would say the the games are challenging and fun. As a side note, it's interesting that all of these games are PvP, from cards to Fall Guys. PvP games always provide challenge because you play against other human beings.

Warframe is a horde shooter and appeals to power play so it kind of needs to be easy

• I think various ARPGs, e.g. Diablo series, beg to disagree. On the highest Nightmare tiers on D3, you are constantly on the brink of death - at least that's what I felt when I was still playing the game.

 

What's important is that any game needs to be challenging because it makes people keep playing. That's what I mean by "good difficulty", that the challenge is always there for the players to experience and enjoy. It's by no means "hard", though some could actually be "hard" on disguise (Is Fall Guys actually hard? I don't know since I've never played it).

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

It's hard and easy: it's easy when I do survival on the starchart for a fissure and just have to walk around literally shooting 1 bullet to kill an enemy. 

It's hard when I'm carrying people in a tridolon. 

You can switch between different situations depending on what or how you wanna play. I like the freedom that warframe gives that I can play without paying attention or play so I have to pay attention.

[DeMonkey]

28 minutes ago, (PS4)Madurai-Prime said:

It's hard when I'm carrying people in a tridolon

That's got nothing to do with game difficulty though, that's due to players. You didn't choose to run a tridolon so that you could carry people and have a more frustrating experience, which is what your argument about "choice" would suggest. That doesn't make any logical sense.

[Loza03]

Agreed. Warframe doesn't need to be a hard game, but it does need to be hard enough to feel like there's an actual threat you're overcoming, and for the devs to not have to resort to cheese tactics to try make something seem important, or to just let the devs make interesting enemies in the first place

 

Deep Rock Galactic is a pretty recent example of a horde mode game I've recently gotten into that can provide a stiff challenge if you want it to. And there's no fewer bugs per encounter than there are Grineer either. Even some of the cheesiest strategies have enemies that counter them too and are niche-case anyway - Bunkers, for example, are the name given to having your driller mine into a wall, open up a room, and load most or all of your team into it, and having them focus fire on the entrance for big waves. However, in terms of objectives, this only works for Salvage missions, so it's otherwise only useful for withstanding the occasional swarms (big groups of enemies, including powerhouse units) and there is a unit type which is perfect for smoking you out of it, the Bulk Detonator. A huge, explosive enemy with a massive health pool and tons of damage, intended for players to have to kite. It can keep a game fresh and prevents it from getting too repetitive, despite only having seven mission types (albeit, very diverse and well-designed missions)

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

2 hours ago, DeMonkey said:

That's got nothing to do with game difficulty though, that's due to players. You didn't choose to run a tridolon so that you could carry people and have a more frustrating experience, which is what your argument about "choice" would suggest. That doesn't make any logical sense.

Yea definitely, bad example, although soloing is still a challenge (for me at least) and/or at least quite engaging.

[kevoisvevo]

5 hours ago, Nailclipper said:

I just want to clear some misconceptions that I've read several times on the forum:

Warframe is easy therefore casual

• A casual game is not always easy, the opposite could be very much true. Card games are casual games and they aren't easy if you think about it. The appeal of casual games is that they are accessible by the virtue of simple rules (Warframe is actually pretty complicated) and you can just play them without much fuss. Simple rules also don't necessarily mean that the game is shallow, just take a look at go, chess, or even card games. Now let's take a look at some of recent popular casual digital games: Fall Guys and Among Us, are they easy? I don't think that people would say that they are easy but I think they would say the the games are challenging and fun. As a side note, it's interesting that all of these games are PvP, from cards to Fall Guys. PvP games always provide challenge because you play against other human beings.

Warframe is a horde shooter and appeals to power play so it kind of needs to be easy

• I think various ARPGs, e.g. Diablo series, beg to disagree. On the highest Nightmare tiers on D3, you are constantly on the brink of death - at least that's what I felt when I was still playing the game.

 

What's important is that any game needs to be challenging because it makes people keep playing. That's what I mean by "good difficulty", that the challenge is always there for the players to experience and enjoy. It's by no means "hard", though some could actually be "hard" on disguise (Is Fall Guys actually hard? I don't know since I've never played it).

challenge needs to be matched by the rewards and i find DE lacking on both ends tbh. currently i am playing risk of rain 2 more and more as it has become my main game. it balances the challenge with rewards here well. same goes for ghostrunner and the souls series. thought some are more difficult than others. if warframe does get harder it needs to decrease its grind, something that i fear DE will never do

[(PSN)robotwars7]

good difficulty is also subjective, the recent Glassmaker boss fight hit this point home once again; some people liked the fight and found it easy, others found it annoying and hard. unless the community comes to something resembling a consensus, we will forever be a in a stalemate where difficulty will only appear if DE feels like adding it because we can't agree on it.

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

Good difficulty will be impossible to achieve until DE finally reins in all the various multipliers in the game. All enemies feel like sponges when we are a multiplier below and feel like paper when we are a multiplier above. 

DE tried remedying this issue by using things like invincibility phases, damage caps, damage reduction formulas based on our DPS, status immunity or straight up taking away our gear, none of which players take kindly to.

Until we get player damage and enemy eHp on a linear line we can't have good boss fights that use normal mechanics.

Trying to fit player damage curve to the enemy eHP curve is an unproductive nightmare.

[SpringRocker]

8 hours ago, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

Good difficulty will be impossible to achieve until DE finally reins in all the various multipliers in the game. All enemies feel like sponges when we are a multiplier below and feel like paper when we are a multiplier above.

I seem to remember doing the math on generic secondaries, you could do something like magnify a pistol's output by 120x with mods... More for crit secondaries.

Definitely put in a gap between "doesn't do much of anything" to "hold a button, wave your hand, and everything there is now dead".

[Genitive]

12 hours ago, kevoisvevo said:

challenge needs to be matched by the rewards and i find DE lacking on both ends tbh.

Not necessarily. Many people would play just for the difficulty. However, DE still have problem with achieving that. The steel path had potential to introduce something interesting, but in the end it became an annoying slog.

[Nira]

The thing I find with Warframe is that it breeds an attitude of instant gratification. Nuking hordes of enemies in the blink of an eye and obtaining abilities and mods that just flat-out make the player stronger without any penalty is the standard to which we all become accustomed.

For me, some difficulty lies in learning new mechanics and strategies in niche game modes like Tridolon hunts, but that falls more in to the category of knowledge of game mechanics, which is necessary to progress through a game of any sort.

I would say that Warframe is quite shallow, but I do not say it as a criticism. The combat is slick, stylish, and leaves the player feeling empowered, and there is always more shiny loot to chase. Those are the main things that keep me playing :)

[kevoisvevo]

1 hour ago, Genitive said:

Not necessarily. Many people would play just for the difficulty. However, DE still have problem with achieving that. The steel path had potential to introduce something interesting, but in the end it became an annoying slog.

I doubt it, see how many play steel path now or run endurance runs. Warframe at its core is just a cheesy power fantasy. I think 90% of the community are casual gamers who get burned out by the grind  in a few months or with the eventual direction of DE. I can't remember the last time when I failed a mission in warframe while trying to grind monotonously and that speaks for the difficulty in itself.

[JackHargreav]

We have steel path isn't that enough difficulty? 

I mean for average/casual players that's pretty hard probably.

[Nailclipper]

2 minutes ago, JackHargreav said:

We steel path isn't that enough difficulty? 

I mean for average casual that's pretty hard probably.

Harder difficulty modes need to be integral to the overall game's design if you want people to consider playing them. I might be wrong but currently steel path doesn't offer much besides kuva. Not blaming DE either because I think it's working as intended.

[Loza03]

16 minutes ago, JackHargreav said:

We steel path isn't that enough difficulty? 

I mean for average casual that's pretty hard probably.

It's 'difficult' but only in respect that it's a gear check. Enemies take more hits and you die in fewer. Which would be fine enough if the core systems were strong enough to support that, but as-is, enemies have a ton of hitscan, players have way too much diversity in terms of health for the amount of damage enemies do to ever be reasonable (it's either tickling high-end health bars or it's a hitscan oneshot fest), and we've got no limiter on how often we can just switch off the AI or spread hundreds of thousands of damage per second across a huge area.

Warframe not having good difficulty is more of a systemic problem, and no amount of high levels or extra armour/shield scaling is going to change that.

[Dauggie]

only way to make anything hard in warframe now would be time gating missions. we do millions of dmg even on steel path enemies. or make enemies viral immune like zealot and you got your "stupid hard". with helminth system meta frames are now even more powerful so forget about enemy being hard damage wise since octavia chroma mirage(dmg buff) laughs at that. they could make time gated or one hit death attacks regardless of frame situation to make it hard. other than that i don't think there can be anything HARD(talking about difficulty.. nothing else)

[(PSN)grayhyh]

23 hours ago, Nailclipper said:

(Warframe is actually pretty complicated)

Ehh not really,The game barely explains anything or in some cases doesnt even bother to explain shiet to you and we have a mess 2 million differant systems but none of it is really complicated tbh.

16 hours ago, (PS4)robotwars7 said:

good difficulty is also subjective, the recent Glassmaker boss fight hit this point home once again; some people liked the fight and found it easy, others found it annoying and hard. unless the community comes to something resembling a consensus, we will forever be a in a stalemate where difficulty will only appear if DE feels like adding it because we can't agree on it.

The more grasp you have on platforming the easier it is,it doesnt really demand much of the player other than that and everything else is pretty obvious,for new players he can be almost guaranteed hard becuase they might still not gotten used to the movement system,How many new players even care to try him out? lol. If the other players that complained about it being hard and have like hundreds to thousands hours in game then im sorry to say but they just suck lol

2 hours ago, JackHargreav said:

We steel path isn't that enough difficulty? 

I mean for average casual that's pretty hard probably.

What kind of average casual player will want to even do or try star chart all over again but with higher level and no rewards much? i cleared almost all of steel path solo and none of my frames are formad,heck some are unpotatoed on this sec acc,it just takes longer with less optimal gear but its still possible,just a boring slug tho.

[ReddyDisco]

difficulty in warframe kek

anytime there is a remotely challenging content there will be endless whining threads about it untill DE succumbs and makes it a cakewalk

[RazerXPrime]

It's true Diablo 3 had some challenge for new players. In fact I played it for quite a bit and even though I could oneshot everything at rift whatever number I don't even remember, but I did billions of damage. It's true that a lot of the things could one shot you. but it remains a horde rpg instakill everything game. There is litterally no challenge if you know how to play. It also gave me RSI so I will never be able to play anything remotely similar and I'm forced to use a controller now.

 

I think the main difference is that Warframe is extremely forgiving. You can be revived, you don't die instantly, nor lose anything if you do other than a bit of affinity. You can fall of a cliff with no loss of life. Maybe if they make Warframe a single life game? Hahahaha. I'm sure people would hate it.

I'm kind of expecting that the new war expansion will include higher level content and different enemies.

 

Oh remember when HoD came out and people came to the forums to cry about the Jugulus one shotting them? Haha. funny. I also remember the cries about the infested MOA bug that dealt crazy damage with it's pools. Or the bug with the heavy gunner on the plains. Ring any bells? For every person that wants a higher difficulty there will be 10 crying about it being too hard. And these are no noobs mind you.

[Swagernator22663]

Why bother with difficulty, when we can add 10 new tennogen and 5 new deluxe skins ? 

[JackHargreav]

47 minutes ago, (PS4)grayhyh said:

What kind of average casual player will want to even do or try star chart all over again but with higher level and no rewards much? i cleared almost all of steel path solo and none of my frames are formad,heck some are unpotatoed on this sec acc,it just takes longer with less optimal gear but its still possible,just a boring slug tho.

Well there you go. The entire problem with difficulty in warframe.

If the enemies take "too long" to kill that's bad if they are easy to kill that's bad.

In this game we either have bullet sponges or paper enemies. Or I guess DE could turn every enemy into a Jugulus. Those guys adapt to the dps dealt to them. But probably then everyone would still say that the enemies are dumb bullet sponges. And why get better gear if I can't oneshot the enemy?

The entire difficulty argument is #*!%ing dumb.

[Nailclipper]

50 minutes ago, (PS4)grayhyh said:

...2 million differant systems...

That's what I meant by complicated. Simple would be like Go (or Komi in Warframe, the one you as Umbra play with Ballas).

[Goosmo]

Imo difficulty in a game if done right gives it so much more replayability. Because if skill is involved, that means you always have something to improve on, and that makes it more engaging. That's the reason games like dark souls, monster hunter world, or any other pvp game is still being played today. I've recently been playing deep rock galactic and even though alot of the missions are the same, it's still alot of fun and less repetetive because i can actually feel like i'm improving.

[mrEkli]

DE has done many modifiers and challenges before. They could do them again. Puzzles included with Spy and the old Raids/ Trials.... There would be reasons to do it though. Nightmare mode and stalker acolytes being more common would be nice too.

[Genitive]

5 hours ago, kevoisvevo said:

I doubt it, see how many play steel path now or run endurance runs. Warframe at its core is just a cheesy power fantasy. I think 90% of the community are casual gamers who get burned out by the grind  in a few months or with the eventual direction of DE. I can't remember the last time when I failed a mission in warframe while trying to grind monotonously and that speaks for the difficulty in itself.

It would be easier to tell if steel path was a good game mode. Right now it isn't, so not many people play it, or just play it once to complete all the nodes and never come back.