Make the game CO-OP again...

[Colyeses]

8 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

The simple fact of the matter is that the sort of gameplay they tried to sell during TennoCon 2019 might work for Guns of Icarus, but it does not fit Warframe's existing playerbase. Very, very soon after release, the flaws of that design came to the forefront. Everyone wanted to fly the ship and shoot the guns, next to nobody wanted to play minigames while staring at the interior walls so that the pilot could actually play the game. There were some (myself among them, I played Engineer more than anything else), but most people would just jump out in their Archwings the moment they found the Helm occupied. They still do.

I usually agree with you, but I think this is overly pessimistic. While I do think that the enforced teamplay thing got the lone wolves' ire, I think that's more of an issue with DE not starting with the Command intrinsics. 

There IS room for team-oriented play in Warframe. People will pick up various roles in Eidolon hunts and they're desperate for raids to return. 

And from my personal experience? There was plenty of teamplay when Railjack launched. The reason everyone Archwinged it out was because launch Railjack had the durability of a soaked paper towel, and the gunplay was too slow and awkward for the high-speed fighters, which is why Amesha became the number 1 Railjack solution.

I think it could have worked, and I also think it still can work. Even if it doesn't fully, it may be the one time where being a content island can be a benefit.

[Steel_Rook]

7 hours ago, Colyeses said:

I usually agree with you, but I think this is overly pessimistic. While I do think that the enforced teamplay thing got the lone wolves' ire, I think that's more of an issue with DE not starting with the Command intrinsics. There IS room for team-oriented play in Warframe. People will pick up various roles in Eidolon hunts and they're desperate for raids to return. 

Well, it's more that I may have exaggerated somewhat. There's certainly room for team play in Warframe and Railjack, no doubt. The problem is that trying to enforce that team play by locking away solo and small team options isn't a great way to foster it. At one point, I had a fairly stable group of friends playing the game with me - 5-6 people all told. I basically couldn't talk any of them to play Railjack with me for any length of time because they simply found it boring. One outright ragequit because he disagreed with consigning one person to running around the ship plugging holes with their fingers. Wouldn't play Railjack content at all.

My argument was that I think team-play in Railjack works best when it extends outside the walls of the ship. Even right now as we speak, having multiple players on a mission helps tremendously for reasons other than enforced team play. We usually have one person piloting the ship and another assisting - fighting boarders, plugging holes, boarding Crew Ships. If we have other people, they typically peel off and attack the various Points of Interest, if any. When they're done with that, they either come back and pitch into the battle or else run around the map collecting resources. Railjack has a LOT of potentially useful tasks to do, and a single player can only do so many of them at a time. Having more players makes missions go a lot faster and smoother because tasks can be done concurrently, rather than in sequence.

As Railjack moves forward, I want to see more of that. I want to see more points of interest, more and more varied boardable ships, more ways for people in Archwings to contribute and generally more concurrent objectives. Warframe's problem right now is that most missions give only enough objectives for a single player to tackle, with the rest of the team sort of... Just tagging along, shooting stuff and twiddling their thumbs. As long as people have optional co-op objectives to engage in, you don't need to actually force them into that. Natural gameplay flow will breed cooperative play.

 

15 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

As for objectives, that's a discussion topic I didn't want to touch upon in too much detail without going into a whole other tangent, but I very much agree that our missions could do more to encourage (but not mandate) cooperation. I think that our mission structure in general is really archaic and ought to be updated, and even wrote a thread about it, though in this specific context I think parallel objectives would be a great way of allowing players to help one another. We already have a bit of this with caches in certain missions, and outside of the failure conditions, Spy missions can feel awesome when everyone succeeds and hacks the vaults independently of one another. Ideally, there should also be moments of interaction where players get to be around one another, and I wouldn't take Railjack as a model due to how it makes cooperation mandatory (missions feel really tedious when playing solo or with an uncoordinated team), but if nothing else, missions with several different objectives to complete in parallel would already allow players to help one another more.

Fair enough - it IS a far broader discussion. I do, however, agree that a majority of Warframe's missions have staggeringly outdated, archaic designs. Even something as relatively basic as Vermintide (which is what I've been doing lately) still gives you meaningful collectables and some in-mission inventory management, along with the occasional interactive element... And that's basically Warhammer Fantasy L4D. Warframe's mission design is so simplistic that it stifles cooperative play, in my opinion. As I said above - when there's nothing for players to actually do besides roam around and kill stuff while waiting for mission completion, no team play can occur. You can tie people to each other and force them to "synergise," but all this does is introduce a minigame to a fundamentally non-cooperative experience.

The absolute LEAST DE could do is add Hidden Caches to all missions, not just Sabotage. The slightly "less least" thing they could do is open some currently linear missions to concurrent play. Maybe let players obtain additional Datamasses and do multiple Mobile Defence objectives at once? Maybe spread the various Sabotage mission objectives around the map rather than having 90% dead space + reactor. And sure, this sort of design could make solo and small-team content feel tedious in comparison if it feels like simultaneous objectives are everywhere. As someone who played most of Railjack (since Revised) solo, though, I can honestly handle a lot of that without complaining. That's the thing with simultaneous objectives - they feel natural to do as a team, and they often end up feeling natural to do alone. Up to a point.

Really, the big thing I'd change on Railjack is the Radiator side missions. I'd either drop them entirely or just allow my Omnitool to teleport me back into the Point of Interest, to where I left. That's the majority of the aggressive busywork, in my opinion. For everything else? I have fallbacks. Can't board Crew Ships, but I can blow out their engines and take them out of the fight that way. Mop up after the Fighters are gone. I'm fine with some amount of clunkiness when running content understaffed, as long as I'm not literally locked out of it.

 

15 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Welcome back! It is good to see you on here again. :)

Thanks :) I had a pretty hard rage-quit after The Heart of Deimos and the... Everything that shipped with. Glad to see a lot has improved there in my absence. Would have ideally held off on Warframe until the Railjack changes because that's honestly by far my favourite part of Warframe, but... Well, Tenora Prime released, and I just had to.