Why we need more missions like Assault and bounties

[Teridax68]

To start slightly off-topic, Warframe is known for having a pretty well-defined metagame, to the point of rigidity. In particular, the same missions tend to see the same warframes, and those warframes are known for being able to cheese those missions entirely, and make them trivial to complete (hence why they're picked). Now, a large part of that comes from warframe design and balance that lends itself to cheese, which I won't go into here, but the other part I think comes from missions themselves.

Simply put, most of our missions are one-note: they have exactly one objective, and that objective involves doing exactly one kind of thing, over and over, until the mission is complete. This simple design has served the game well since release, but arguably has also made its metagame very brittle and prone to cheese, mainly for two reasons:

• Because our missions test only for one condition at a time, any frame that can cheese that condition is guaranteed to cheese the mission. Case in point: Saryn and Sanctuary Onslaught. Her kit does exceedingly well in static kill arenas, which may not be too bad in your average Exterminate, but trivializes the game mode whose sole win condition is to kill as much stuff as possible in a static arena. Similar things can be said for, say, Limbo and any mission with a static defense objective, Wukong or Ivara in a Spy mission, and so on and so forth.
• Because our missions have the same win condition from start to finish, any frame that cheeses the condition will cheese the entire mission forever. This may sound the same as the above point, but the key additional meaning here is that not only are our missions really prone to cheese, the moment one can cheese them, one will be able to cheese them from start to finish. This undermines endless missions especially, as they're intended to test us against ramping enemy difficulty, but in practice test little more than one's patience when one brings in a frame capable of cheesing the mission type, which typically applies just as well at level 1 as it does at level 300.

Effectively, because our missions make us only do one thing the entire time, it's very easy to bring the frame that makes that one thing trivially easy to do, and thus make the entire mission trivial as a result, even in the case of endless missions. "The right tool for the job" is a play philosophy that sounds nice in theory, but when taken to such an extreme, means that taking the "right tool" to the mission eliminates most of its gameplay and ability to stimulate us. In an environment where there's pretty much at least one warframe capable of cheesing almost any given mission type, this basically means once we accumulate the right collection of frames, the game no longer becomes able to engage us, at least not as much through its mission loop.

Enter Kuva Fortress Assault.

Now, in practice, the mission mostly plays out like a Mobile Defense mission with extra steps, but it nonetheless gives us a few more things to do, such as disabling a cannon, then sabotaging its targeting system. Suddenly, that gives us a few more things to do, and sets a different pace from our regular missions. This isn't too dissimilar from bounties, whose mix-and-match objectives, plus bonus secondary objectives, give us multiple, constantly changing win conditions. This sort of structure I think carries multiple advantages:

• We get tested on multiple win conditions, so it's difficult for any one frame to cheese the entire mission. While some frames tend to fare better than others on Warframe's open levels (though for reasons that have more to do with the enemies there), there isn't really such a thing as a "bounty meta", or even an Assault meta, because there are generally too many factors at hand to make any one frame trivialize everything at once. Bringing Limbo to protect the drone in Vallis bounties, for example, means he might be able to trivialize the defense portion, but he'd still have to kill enemies to progress, which he isn't especially amazing at doing relative to most other frames.
• Win conditions change over time, and favor different frames. In both bounties and Assault, different frames tend to shine at different times. Frost will do well during the defense sections, but then Volt will be able to retrieve the telemetry keys faster. Mesa might be able to single-handedly cover the defense area in Deimos Arcana bounties, but then Nidus would get to bunch enemies together in that stage where you're supposed to throw that fluid sac at as many Infested as possible. There's still the sense of using the right tool for the job, but the spotlight shifts within the same mission, letting different frames (and players) shine, in addition to providing more variance in challenge.
• Missions feel more varied and tend to feel faster as a result. This may be more personal preference, and may not apply to bounties if one's been grinding the same open level ad nauseam, but when a mission throws lots of different things at the player, as is the case with Assault, that I think tends to feel a lot less monotone than a mission that asks only one thing from start to finish. Assault is arguably the longest-lasting non-endless mission around, aside from bounties, yet I've often felt like it didn't drag on as much as a high-level Exterminate, let alone an equivalent amount of time spent deep into an endless mission.

So, with that in mind, I think the quality of play of our missions could stand to be significantly improved if their structure were made a little more complex, so that they'd include multiple different objectives, and possibly evolved over time. There are many possible ways one could go about this (which shouldn't be like Railjack, whose own repetitive mission structure ended up making every mission feel the same), and one possible outline I'd say could be the following:

• For any given mission, set a main objective, e.g. exterminate a number of enemies, defend one or more objectives, raid a secure vault, etc. Same as what we have now.
• Within that mission, randomly layer on a second objective to complete, picked from the same pool of objectives as above. For example, within the same mission, one could defend some extractors and capture a VIP along the way.
• Alternate the above objectives so that once one is completed, another unlocks. For example, after capturing that VIP in the above example, they cough up the location of a secure vault to hack into.
• Possibly also consistently introduce one or more bonus objectives for additional rewards, e.g. finding caches, hunting and killing a miniboss placed somewhere in the tileset, tapping into a conduit and killing the demo unit, or any of the above objectives.
• Scale these objectives so that missions take approximately the same amount of total time to complete. The intent here shouldn't be to elongate all of our missions, but instead to pack more varied content and still keep it bite-sized. The above structure should also be consistent, and shouldn't drastically extend mission times on a coinflip, as is the case with the much hated "change of plans" we get in Capture missions.

To give an example of a mission with this kind of structure: you select Oxomoco in the Void, an Exterminate mission. As you're dropped in, you're assigned 40 enemies to kill, but on this particular run, are also asked to dip through a Void Portal and shut down the torsion beam generator on the outside. You're also notified of an optional bonus objective: a fellow operative is searching through the tower for an item, and if you choose, you can intentionally activate the alarms to draw attention, sending in waves of enemies throughout the mission. If you survive for 90 seconds, the operative gives you the item. As you complete one or both main objectives, you're notified of a VIP that stayed within the Void that needs to be captured for interrogation. Within one mission, you're thus given:

• A mini-Exterminate, and the mission's main, consistent objective.
• A portion of Sabotage, and another, this time randomly-chosen primary objective.
• A Capture as a third, primary objective.
• A mini-Survival as an optional bonus objective.

Altogether, this should take about as much time as a full Exterminate (or should at least be balanced that way), but would give the player many more things to do.

TL;DR: Missions with a single, never-changing objective make the game far too easy to cheese and tend to feel samey. Varying missions by making us complete a greater variety of objectives along the main one, all in smaller amounts, would make it more difficult for any one frame to cheese the whole mission, and would make those missions feel faster even if they take the same amount of time to complete.

[(XBOX)Helverin]

I'm surprised this thread had no attention. To me, your idea sound very solid and enjoyable - different objectives make missions more entertaining and less tedious and I see the option to replace rotation rewards on sabotage or exterminate for finding caches with these optional objectives. 

But I'd say there should still be pure endurance nodes on the starch art, cause, let's face it, it is probably what most people play. 

My personal favorite would be something like an hour long multi-staged mission with varying objectives and no crap rewards. Back yesterday I thought "why do I have to do kuva survival for 30 min for 7k standing? The only difficulty is incoming boredom..." I really hope your suggestions get more attention. :) 

[Teridax68]

10 hours ago, (XBOX)Helverin said:

I'm surprised this thread had no attention. To me, your idea sound very solid and enjoyable - different objectives make missions more entertaining and less tedious and I see the option to replace rotation rewards on sabotage or exterminate for finding caches with these optional objectives. 

But I'd say there should still be pure endurance nodes on the starch art, cause, let's face it, it is probably what most people play. 

My personal favorite would be something like an hour long multi-staged mission with varying objectives and no crap rewards. Back yesterday I thought "why do I have to do kuva survival for 30 min for 7k standing? The only difficulty is incoming boredom..." I really hope your suggestions get more attention. :) 

Thank you very much for the kind words! I can agree with wanting to keep some degree of endurance running in the game, if only because that's something some people like for sure (not necessarily sure if that's what most people play, but it did use to have a strong community). Personally, I agree with a lot of other people here that there's a lot of untapped potential with the Unum Tower in Cetus for providing endless levels with varying objectives.

As for the kind of multi-staged mission you'd like to have, that's also what I'd like to see as part of a larger system to tie our missions together: I think it would be better not just for our individual missions to feel more varied, but for them to also tie into one another as part of a larger, procedurally-generated story. There's generally no rhyme or reason to the things we do other than rewards, and it'd be interesting to set stakes and characters they relate to, even if it's something as basic as randomly generating Kuva Liches or the like and having them try to take over the system in ways we'd have to counter. Really, there's a lot that could be done to make the entire world of Warframe feel a lot more dynamic and responsive to the players' actions, though that's likely worth its own entire discussion.

[Nakti]

On the one hand, complex missions would be really more engaging than the "mono" ones. When there was a sortie on assault node, I was thinking that that mission is a small sortie itself) With story and alternating objectives.

On the other hand, having long complex missions can be boring or inconvenient. Even if main goal of the player is not the reward, he might want to have pauses mid-game. I think sorties are better in combining missions. I'd like to see more of them (much more than 1 a day) and with some story, even if it's generated like bounties. I'm often distracted IRL, so I'd have difficulties playing long mission (like I have with long bounties). The only downside of that approach is that people with weak PCs or, for example, PS4 will have long loading times and thus will suffer too much. But I'd appreciate a possibility to stop the "story" and resume it (unless it expires) at my own will.

12 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

responsive to the players' actions, though that's likely worth its own

Feeling responsiveness is less impactful than the responsiveness itself, and I think that with these stories we will feel it)

[Teridax68]

20 hours ago, Nakti said:

On the other hand, having long complex missions can be boring or inconvenient. Even if main goal of the player is not the reward, he might want to have pauses mid-game. I think sorties are better in combining missions. I'd like to see more of them (much more than 1 a day) and with some story, even if it's generated like bounties. I'm often distracted IRL, so I'd have difficulties playing long mission (like I have with long bounties). The only downside of that approach is that people with weak PCs or, for example, PS4 will have long loading times and thus will suffer too much. But I'd appreciate a possibility to stop the "story" and resume it (unless it expires) at my own will.

I agree with this, I think the point to splitting any sort of meta-mission, such as a quest, a sortie, etc., into discrete missions is that the missions provide endpoints the player can use to pause and pick up later. If the player is expected to do the entire thing in one go, the thing may as well just be a single mission, and I don't generally think it's a good idea to make the player stay in the same mission for too long in most circumstances: not only does it work against players who may need to get away from the game for various IRL reasons, the game is also simply not technically stable enough to be trusted to run for too long without risking a progress-negating crash. Spontaneous disconnects and botched host migrations are quite common still, and the longer a mission goes on, the more likely those become, plus the more the player has to lose by the end of it. Thus, while I do think missions should be able to tell a larger story by fitting into one another, that larger story shouldn't be something the player should be expected to resolve immediately, and the player should instead be able to pause and resume in-between any two missions.

20 hours ago, Nakti said:

Feeling responsiveness is less impactful than the responsiveness itself, and I think that with these stories we will feel it)

That's kind of the point. At the end of the day, it's likely unfeasible to demand that the entire Warframe universe change both permanently and constantly from our every action. However, I do think it is possible to disrupt the status quo in the ways the player can respond to, and dynamically generate events that have some procedural narrative baked into them. The ultimate objective here I think should be to generate the illusion of a constantly shifting world that the player can influence, while in reality having a stable framework that manages to be as evergreen as possible, with the developers only needing to intervene to add, improve, or fix content.

[MonsterOfMyOwn]

I want real "missions" like The Division had. I really miss "legendary missions" or "heroic incursions", i.e. from 20min to 40min with a good team, objective based, hard to complete, and rewarding (with additionnal reward once per week), and that ends with a boss fight.

To me warframe open world missions are much a chore to me because it's either long without risks or bugged as hell, or with randomly failed secondary objectif without warning.

[Teridax68]

22 hours ago, MonsterOfMyOwn said:

I want real "missions" like The Division had. I really miss "legendary missions" or "heroic incursions", i.e. from 20min to 40min with a good team, objective based, hard to complete, and rewarding (with additionnal reward once per week), and that ends with a boss fight.

To me warframe open world missions are much a chore to me because it's either long without risks or bugged as hell, or with randomly failed secondary objectif without warning.

Technical inconsistency and lack of real challenge I very much agree are both issues with missions in Warframe. I don't necessarily feel missions need to be hard, personally, but I do think missions should be stimulating in some way, and currently far too many of our missions can be basically just run on autopilot. When we do fail, as you said, it's usually because the game bugged out in one of its many possible ways, and the low standard of technical competence that has set in from years' worth of issues, many of which still have yet to be address, I think sets Warframe apart from many competitors in the wrong way. Often, it feels like the real challenge isn't actually the mission objective or the enemies, but systems like the game's spawning algorithm and netcode, such that we have to engage in all of these weird rituals in mission types like Survival or Excavation just to have a smooth experience. We shouldn't have to do that, and if we are to have longer-spanning and more challenging adventures (which I'd want to), the game needs to be technically robust enough to not collapse on us midway through half the time.