Thanks to DE & all Tennos for 2020 (what a year it was)!

[Graavarg]

Another year of Warframe, and what a year!

When I think back, for me 2020 actually started a couple of weeks early, with the "Empyrean" update (dropped in mid-december 2019). Not only did Empyrean introduce Railjacks, it did so by starting a long and varied "fix stuff" phase that went on until summer, and become part of the process of getting my Railjack built, upgraded and outfitted. We had about 15 hotfixes before the end of January and many more "fixes" before the Railjack mechanics stabilized in May with the "Railjack revisited Part 1"-update. I can understand not everyone liking Railjack (and the building requirements were initially pretty brutal, though I actually liked that) but overall it is an impressive add-on with huge (=enormous) potential for bringing Warframe forward. Still, like some other things in this wonderful "beta"-game, Railjack is also "undergoing development" and we are all waiting for "Part 2" and the fifth intrinsics tree, both of which might be included when the Corpus "*@##$es" arrive (hopefully sometime this spring).

The first big update of 2020 was actually the Kuva Lich changes, which gave us both "valence" (melting kuva weapons together to improve stats) and the Kuva Larvling showing which weapon the lich would have in advance. Both were very meaningful changes by themselves, but to me also seemed to indicate a far-reaching change in how DE was thinking about RNG overall. Being an "old-skool" gamer I can relate to a hardcore view of random drops, but with RNG such a central part of the game it is a very smart thing to introduce mechanisms that counter extreme statistical "unluckiness". The lich system changes were also well received by the community (that mostly, and rather correctly, griped about that it could have been introduced sooner/at the beginning). The same valence system was later applied to Railjack parts, and now the still ongoing "Operation: Orphix Venom" has a parallell mechanism allowing "unlucky" players to buy their missing parts with operation currency instead of having to farm hundreds and hundreds of drops in the desperate hope of a missing part. I think this "anti-bad luck" thinking is a truly great and "experience-changing" improvement to the game. The only ones not benefitting from it are the traders that exchange other player's statistical unluck into plat, but trading simply isn't good or stable in itself enough to fix things, and every player leaving Warframe burned out on hid or her bad luck is a shame. And now, maybe, an unecessary shame. As to the liches themselves, I had already given up on them, but the changes actually got me interested again, and I maxed (and changed the status of) a few favourite kuva weapons. And of course got the new Kuva weapons as well, all (once again) well designed and two of which were bound for fame & infamy (Kuva Nukor & Kuva Bramma).

In early March we got shield-gating and a lot of other changes in one of the longest "update"-posts ever seen (27.2 "Warframe Revised"). It also included damage type changes, +100% status & new status effects, improved Infested, 5-tier Warframe arcanes, significant armor changes, removed self-damage (replaced by the oh, so loved "stagger"),a new(er) UI, 100X blueprints, allowed using the same mod on different "parts" of your setup and changed to damage calculation of shotguns. And A LOT more. To me it is very, very clear that overall Warframe got a lot better, and that (most of) these changes were a long time coming. To name one example, the old shotgun status calculation model was beyond illogical. While at first it WAS irritating, re-programming not only my brainstem but how I was thinking about damage, I now find that I use a lot more different builds on weapons. And yes, even Gas has it's place (the most misunderstood damage of them all).

In late March we got the biggest clusterf*ck I have so far experienced in Warframe, "Operation Scarlet Spear". Me, my clan & friends were really looking forward to the event, and so we also hyped ourselves a little bit too much. When it arrived the "link" was not what we thought it would be (we had envisioned a "two squads working together towards one common goal"-mechanism). But even worse was that it was REALLY buggy, and that some of bugs made it impossible to play TOGETHER. The members of our pre-def squad were continuously getting thrown into different "instances", which continuously resulted in either total loss of rewards or unequal rewards. Now, we had expected some bugs (and we all think that is ok, with a game like Warframe), but we also expected the most serious ones to get fixed, quickly. They weren't. The ongoing frustration of not being able to play together burned out three of my Tenno buddies to such a level that they haven't really played since (I am still sore about that). DE tried to compensate, but end result was still that those participating at the start lost out (quite a lot) and those joining later got everything easier. I am not even sure if the event ever actually really worked. All of this was a total shame, since the general idea and new mechanics had the potential of huge improvements to the game (and still has). And a mechanism of two linked squads (8 players...) working together could even be imagined as a basis for a new "raid"-system... [sigh]

With the Scarlet Spear debacle going on and being extended (and with a raging pandemic in the background) other things slowed down, but then everything started to take a turn for the better. Titania had been reworked in the "Revised" update and Titania Prime arrived late March (during the Scarlet Spear extension). "Railjack Revisited" added valence for Railjack components in early May, and while not many might remember it Glassmaker (due to leave forever in a few days) showed up on May 11th. A month later we got a new warframe, Protea, together with her new quest ("The Deadlock Protocol") and the remaster of the Corpus Ship tileset. And a new Jackal, the Granum Void and the Granum coins, a new Moa, new kitgun parts and a welcome and long-awaited improvement for our beloved pets, who no longer had to be continuously thawed and refrozen and spend most of their time in stasis.

In July we got The Steel Path and Inaros Prime, and in early August quite a surprise in the form of the "Heart of Deimos" suddenly showing up on the horizon, with adherent changes first showing up on the starmap. Suddenly the outlying Orokin Derelicts were no more, or they rather became nodes in the new Deimos planetary system. Less than two weeks after the "Derelict Shift" starmap change "The Heart of Deimos" quite suddenly arrived with surprisingly little fanfare, on August 25th. At first it wasn't even clear (to me) how big a thing this was, but looking back I have been spending a lot of time in Cambion Drift, doing a lot of different things. And having a lot of fun. To me this is the proof that DE is both "back", and "back on track". Whatever dents and scratches a Covid-pandemic, "working from home" and the mess of Scarlet Spear had caused, diligent work had made DE's armor shiny again. Cambion Drift was different, it was fun and interesting, and once again there were a lot of important small changes evident from the start (like the possibility of farming and storing "standing" in the form of Tokens). I even liked that the "viral rulez"-crowd got their nose rubbed in the Cambion Drift slime. Sure there were some bugs, but relatively few. And some misguided design choices, like Isolation Vaults copying PoE with a Eidolon/night-like timer reset while allowing Isolation Vaults during both the "night" and the "day" cycle. What might possibly have been intended as an improvement (allowing Vaults during BOTH phases) ended up being mostly irritating (since there was no logical reason for the reset anymore). Cambion Drift actually got me back into "Warframe-mode" again. All the things to do, all the new stuff to get to know. There were new mods, new pets, new weapons, Necramechs and, last but not least, the Helminth. Having to gather all the original warframes for subsumation proved to be surprisingly fun (with one exception: &#¤#! Equinox, I never want to see Tyl Regor again). And the "23 hrs per subsumation" both added a rhytm and removed any stress (until DE allowed you to plat-speed the process).

The rest of the early autumn sort of rolled by, then it was October and a "Nights of Naberus" event, then Nezha Prime arrived and in mid-november we got another Deimos surprise in the form of "Deimos Arcana". While everything looked (really) good on paper and while the new weapons were fun, trying to access the new Arcana Vaults brought flashbacks to Scarlet Spear. Yes, there (probably) was some way of actually doing them, but no way of figuring out how (not in-game, anyway). Later we have figured out that the real culprit was probably tier progress being reset during Fass/Vome change, despite DE claiming that shouldn't happen (it still does, btw). But this time it was trying to do them in random squads that ended in disaster, every time. If you went in a pre-def team with friends, everthing went finer (when you finally had figured out how it worked). "Worked", well... altogether it was an unnecessary complicated design choice involving (among other things) multiple multi-personality Mothers, spread out in Cambion Drift (with one inside the Necralisk to start it off). However, the frustration with the new Vaults also blocked the greatness of the new design, with the possibility of endlessly starting bounties while in Cambion Drift. Not just endless bounties, but a plethora of bounties to endlessly select from. You could go in and stay in, and farm and farm for as long as you liked. With the Mothers now sorted out and Vault missions system clarified, all the good things are left to play out. This was a huge QoL change for me (and my friends), much bigger than we even understood at first, and the necessity of dropping a few Necramechs to kick-start such an endless session wasn't a too high a price to pay. And now you don't even have to re-kill the Necramechs every time you go in, once (per tier) is enough. 

In mid-December "Operation Orphix Venom" arrived. Again without much hype, but with a new Necramech, new Necramech mods and an overall focus on Necramechs. And without ANY of the mind-breaking problems of Scarlet Spear (though of course there were some bugs to fix as usual). While the operation still goes on for a a couple of weeks, it is already crystal clear that if DE's intention was to get Necramechs accepted and included in gameplay the "Operation" has been a resounding success. Even though many Tennos had a Necramech for quite some time, it was mostly just gathering dust in the arsenal. But now we are using them "everywhere" (where possible), yesterday one of umy friends had a restored Profit Taker Nightwave mission so we got a squad together, and believe it or not suddenly there were two of my friends slaughtering mobs and hammering away at the big spider in their Necramechs. It just felt natural, jumping into the 'mech. And the by now fully upgraded Necramechs worked great. Orphix Venom also re-introduces the drops from Scarlet Spear, which is a nice touch. And arriving at the same time was a new warframe, Lavos, with a design that once again (at least to me) showing that the DE R&D knows their sh*t. It can't be easy making a "new" warframe with 44 of them already in the game, but DE sure as h*ll did. If you can adapt to a more chill playstyle, Lavos is both a total killer and quite fun to use. The immutable cooldowns on his abilities (and yeah, you can and should affect them with his 3rd) forces you to adapt to an anti-spamming look at the game, and since the cooldowns are separate also to use all of them. With no limitation from energy and no way for the enemies to shut your abilities down, you have a lot of control if you can adapt. In order to use his abilities to full effect you also need to understand elemental damage, to know your enemies and to be able to deploy your abilities effectively from a tactical perspective. But if you can manage all that Lavos access to all and any elemental damage will start to shine. Actually Lavos has damage enough to wipe out lower level enemies with just about any damage type, so I'm talking "tougher enemies" here. A very nice addition to Warframe, for me anyway.

A lot has happened in one year, it seems. If you combined all the changes from all the updates and hotfixes from 2020 in a text-only format it is a heck of an impressive list. Actually it is close to unbelievable, how did DE achieve all this? And if you would go back in time ("do a Tenet") to the start of 2020 and make up a situation where the team leadership at DE would show this list to all the coders and designers at the start of 2020 and said: "hey guys, we have to do all this during 2020", you can see scores of DE employers throwing themselves out the closest window. 🙂 So... impressive work. Whatever metric you use. And Warframe is a better game today than it was a year ago. Thank you, you have every reason to be proud (the occasional mess included)!

There is some stuff I am looking forward to for 2021, but this is already a much (MUCH) longer post than I thought it would be, so scratch that. And anyway, we all have those hopes and wishes. And opinions (yeah, if you didn't know it, Tennos do have opinions, and lots of them). Actually, that is also something pretty unique with Warframe, that so many of us engage so much with the game. And that DE still manages to engage with us. Sure there is some superficiality in all of that (the "Tenno vs DE communication"), and quite a heavy dose of "entitlement", lots of egos, some lack of smarts and a sprinkle of insanity, but at the intangible core of it there is also something quite real. We really get some really-real info on where Warframe is going, and DE actually listens to "us". Not to every single one of us (luckily), so we are more of a choir. And come to think of it, a choir were everyone is singing their own tune in their own time, so you really have to admire DE for listening to that massively cacaphonic sound front. 

Finally, I truly and sincerely admire DE for choosing to continually improve and expand one single game, when so many others instead have chosen to go the "installment" route. I do get that selling us the same sh*t with new graphics packaged as "2.0", "3.0" and so forth makes sense from a money-making perspective, but it also makes us idiots and suckers, time after time. Actually double-suckers, since we buy their games while knowing that we are being "fooled". And the "monthly payment model", where they try to hook us into signing up by promising stuff & savings does the same, just a different way. DE has chosen a different route, based on trust in their ability to keep Warframe fresh and trust in their customers to voluntarily pay for extra stuff. I think it is actually a bit glorious that it actually works, and funnily I never feel that DE "takes my money" when I buy a little more plat or some current prime/vault stuff. It is my decision, 100%, and I actually feel that I am supporting Warframe of my own free will (which is a small miracle in itself considering my overall level of cynicism).

So, anyway, thanks to absolutely everyone for 2020, at DE for working their asses off and to all my fellow Tennos for helping in-game. Let's keep going strong, and keep our fingers crossed that we soon get to tackle some Corpus "b*tches", and that even the fabled Duviri will un-paradox themselves and join in the fray in 2021!

[(PSN)robotwars7]

Spoiler

here's to 2021 and how it can't possibly be any worse than this year was!

 

[ReddyDisco]

[o0Despair0o]

A wall of text to rule them all.

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

I'm on console so Scarlet spear wasnt that bad because PC fixed all the bugs.

I actually thought it was fun fighting level 200 sentients. Not to mention Scarlet spear got everyone a major boost to their intrinsic and arcanes.

[ZiggySt4rdust]

[(PSN)Gentleman_Raven_]

Wow, reading through that really put all of what DE did in a year into perspective. They put in a lot of work during difficult times, for our benefit.