Abilities could be so much better

[Teridax68]

TL;DR: We've been casting abilities at-will for so long that we might as well drop the pretense and get rid of Energy, which would make ability usage far smoother and a better fit for a game like Warframe. In exchange, our abilities need to have at least some minimum amount of interaction baked in if they don't already, so that we can't just win every time at the press of a button.

1. Introduction

As most of us know, our ability casting in Warframe almost invariably has the following two key traits:

• We can cast abilities pretty much anytime we want, because Energy constraints mean very little when we have the tools at higher levels to generate lots of Energy and spend very little on each cast.
• Most of our abilities are "I win" buttons: for an Energy cost, most abilities either make us invincible in some way (e.g. through heavy damage reduction, invulnerability, invisibility, etc.), or neutralize enemies through massive, area-of-effect crowd control or damage. Typically, all it takes to apply these powerful effects is to just press the ability button and pay the Energy cost, hence them generally making us win automatically when used.

In isolation, these traits are not inherently bad, and can in fact be the basis to very good casting systems. In combination, however, the net result is a situation in which we can use "I win" buttons all the time, meaning we can make ourselves essentially permanently invulnerable, or permanently defeat most enemies without much interaction. This, in turn, has led to a few rather obvious problems:

2. What's wrong with our abilities?

Put simply: a game in which we can use abilities that remove interaction from the game without restriction is a game that will always struggle to give us interactive, and thus engaging and potentially challenging gameplay. More specifically, our current state of ability usage has the following widely-known problems:

Spoiler

• It is generally impossible for the game to challenge us, because the moment an enemy is vulnerable to our abilities, we can trivialize interacting with that enemy, even at high levels.
• Because the game cannot challenge us adequately, and because our method of winning ends up being the same basic sequence of button presses, gameplay often becomes trivial and repetitive to the point of becoming a chore to experienced players, even in modes intended to be more difficult, such as Steel Path.
• When the game does try to challenge us, it can only try to do so by taking away our agency, such as by making enemies immune to our abilities, or having them prevent us from using them, such as with Nullifiers and Energy-draining units. This works particularly poorly for a game like Warframe, which makes a point of championing player agency.
• Newer players, on the flipside, struggle heavily in this kind of environment designed against fully-geared players, because these newer players don't yet have the tools to cast abilities at-will, and so are genuinely constrained by Energy, which drops inconsistently on its own. This creates an unpleasantly limited and heavily misleading initial experience where newer players struggle to cast anything at all, and frequently don't get much out of their abilities either due to their lack of mods.

Effectively, a huge part of Warframe's current balance issues, as well as its design problems surrounding its inability to provide us with a real challenge, comes down to the state of our ability casting. Despite the power that comes with being able to win on-demand, it's not actually good for us to have it, because it ends up making the game less fun, and also outright punishes us by having DE throw genuinely unpleasant and restrictive mechanics our way in an unsuccessful attempt to challenge us. The developers have realized this long ago, and so have most players, which is why many have proposed to reintroduce Energy constraints to our warframes. I disagree with this approach: on the contrary, I think we should be able to cast our abilities whenever we like, and it is good to be able to do so in Warframe. Here's why:

3. Why unlimited ability casting is good for Warframe, actually

Warframe I think offers several reasons for having an ability system that, by default, should let us cast abilities on-demand:

Spoiler

• Casting at-will meaningfully contributes to the freedom and smoothness of playing Warframe. Being able to move, attack, and cast fluidly all generates this flow that is unique to the game, and that I think is one of its greatest strengths. No game gives us as much agency as Warframe in this respect.
• Restricting how often we can use something typically does not go down well in Warframe. Stamina for parkour was unpopular for this reason, as are cooldowns whenever they're implemented. Even for Energy, it's simply not fun to struggle to cast, as happens when one's just starting out or having to deal with excessive Energy drains, and the end result is casting that feels janky and inconsistent.
• Combat is unpredictable enough that restricting how often we can use our abilities makes little sense. Sometimes, the perfect opportunity to use a certain ability may happen twice or ten times in quick succession, and sometimes it may only happen once every five minutes. Traditional means of gating our ability usage, such as through costs or cooldowns, do not work in this environment.
• Abilities are a key component to the identity of any warframe, and are just as essential to their expression as shooting or moving. Abilities should therefore be a tool as readily available as our weapons or parkour, and should similarly be unrestricted so that each frame can readily express themselves in their own unique way.
• Having a box of tools that we can use anytime, besides just attack and move, I think adds diversity to our moment-to-moment play, especially when every frame has a different toolset. In an ideal world, being able to cast interesting abilities at will could add significant replay value to a game that needs all of the replayability it can get.

TL;DR: Using abilities as readily as our weapons and movement contributes positively to the game's flow, diversity of play, and sense of agency. Warframe is a game whose strength comes from letting us express our power freely, whether it comes from moving, shooting, or casting. This is why I think that instead of changing our established trait of being able to cast on-demand, it might be worth changing the other: we should think about completely unrestricting our ability casting by default, while making sure our abilities follow good design:

4. What is good ability design?

In an environment where abilities can be used at-will, the long and short of good ability design comes down to interactivity: a well-designed ability should exist to enhance interaction with the game, by letting the player do new things or providing a twist to existing gameplay. These abilities should add a new dimension to our play and make us feel good about opting into our frame's gameplay fantasy. By contrast, if an ability does not contribute positively to our interaction with the game or, worse yet, takes away from it, that is bad design.

For greater detail, here's a helpful flow chart:

Spoiler

TL;DR: it's not actually difficult for an ability to be well-designed, it mainly just needs to reward something besides simply pressing a button. Unfortunately, though, this low bar is still not met by most abilities in Warframe, which are designed purely to output power without much gameplay involved, which is troublesome when there is no meaningful tradeoff to using them (Energy costs don't really matter most of the time). If Warframe is to benefit from an Energy-free casting system, it's going to have to alter the design of many abilities so that they have some minimum amount of gameplay baked in:

5. Examples of well-designed abilities

There is no One True Way of making any one ability healthy, and this thread doesn't claim otherwise. There are, however, many examples of healthy ability designs and mechanics that could be applied to what we have:

Spoiler

• If an ability is meant to be used without much deliberation, one can require the player to exercise some degree of mechanical skill to make the most out of an ability, whether it be aiming (especially for offensive abilities) or timing (especially for defensive abilities). Bear in mind that exercising mechanical skill need not require a high level of skill, it simply means tapping into that skill, on the same level as shooting a gun or moving out of a grenade's explosion range.
  • Examples of aimed abilities: Nezha's Blazing Chakram, Harrow's Condemn, Nidus's Virulence.
  • Examples of timed abilities: Wukong's Defy, Rhino's Iron Skin, Nezha's Warding Halo
• If the ability is meant to be easily deployed without having to aim or time it right, one can make it require a bit of tactical thinking: perhaps the ability needs a bit of setup in order to work to full effect, or perhaps it's the one helping set up other plays. Abilities like these are often part of combos that help characters in any game feel powerful.
  • Examples of setup abilities: Titania's Lantern, Nova's Molecular Prime, Sevagoth's Sow
  • Examples of follow-up abilities: Lavos's Catalyst, Equinox's Maim explosion (but not the aura), Saryn's Miasma
• If the ability really is just there to output instant power, without having to do much else to benefit from it, one can make it healthy by making it incur some sort of tradeoff. Perhaps the ability incurs some meaningful cost when used (health, for example, or some sort of debuff), or if it's an effect one deploys on the battlefield, perhaps one can only have a limited amount of that ability out at any time. This is perhaps the closest one gets to the current ability gating model in Warframe.
  • Examples of abilities with a meaningful cost: Garuda's Bloodletting, Harrow's Penance, Baruuk's Serene Storm
  • Examples of abilities with deployment limits: Garuda's Blood Altar, Wisp's Reservoirs, Vauban's Tesla Nervos
• If the ability is entirely passive in nature, it can be healthy if it lets the player do something new, or rewards them for doing something they wouldn't normally do, or at least not to the same extent. Passives should help shape playstyles, and don't need to be too complex or difficult to achieve that goal.
  • Examples of abilities that let the player do something new: Ivara's enemy radar, Khora's unique pet, Sevagoth's self-revive
  • Examples of abilities that reward the player for doing something different: Wisp's airborne invisibility, Inaros's self-heal on finishers, Nidus's stacks

Worth noting is that these abilities are chosen as examples because they have some amount of good design in them, not because they are necessarily well-designed entirely: Iron Skin, for example, can be cast without having to care about timing and still provide lots of protection, and Molecular Prime does not need follow-up to be strong, as it's a button one can just press to slow or speed up enemies around in a huge radius at-will. Thus, even the abilities mentioned above would probably need some tweaking.

TL;DR: there are tons of ways of making abilities more fun to use, many of which already exist in Warframe. Improving our abilities as a whole would be a matter of applying those principles across all of our stuff, and making sure we can't just spam abilities mindlessly and still reap the benefits. This would, obviously, be a huge undertaking, but the end product would be well worth it.

6. Conclusion

The big conclusion to all this is: lack of Energy constraints has broken our ability casting, but being able to cast abilities on-demand has turned out to be a really fun thing to do in and of itself, and should stay in Warframe. Rather than reintroduce Energy constraints, DE ought to ditch Energy as a limitation altogether, and alter the design of our abilities so that they're inherently interactive to use, and thus have a positive impact on our play. The real problem with our abilities isn't that we can use them all the time, but that when we do, they make the game less interesting, and that's what needs to change. It shouldn't really be about buffing or nerfing us (though, admittedly, not being able to godmode every mission would certainly be a net nerf), it should be about maximizing our agency in a manner that's also engaging. We should be able to enjoy unlimited ability casting, and still play a game where DE can challenge and entertain us without having to resort to taking away our toys each time.

[Awazx]

hace 6 horas, Teridax68 dijo:

This would, obviously, be a huge undertaking, but the end product would be well worth it.

... and this is exactly the problem with this thread and other similar ones: it a huge undertaking.
DE no longer does "huge undertaking". Just see everything about The Arsenal Divide. DE implemented cheap and superficial mechanics to "fix" deep core gameplay problems, with the only excuse that "polishing all firearms would be a huge undertaking."

In contrast to that, compare the work it would take to do some of what you propose in your thread and draw your own conclusions.

Editl: the first like for you is mine.

[Teridax68]

9 hours ago, Awazx said:

... and this is exactly the problem with this thread and other similar ones: it a huge undertaking.
DE no longer does "huge undertaking". Just see everything about The Arsenal Divide. DE implemented cheap and superficial mechanics to "fix" deep core gameplay problems, with the only excuse that "polishing all firearms would be a huge undertaking."

In contrast to that, compare the work it would take to do some of what you propose in your thread and draw your own conclusions.

Editl: the first like for you is mine.

Thank you for the response! I don't agree with the conclusion, though, because Warframe's history itself is full of huge undertakings: we've received massive overhauls to our parkour, damage, melee, Focus, and entire tilesets, on top of sweeping balance passes and vast swathes of new content. The game we're playing now looks almost nothing like the game that existed in 2013, and that's because of huge undertakings DE has taken over and over again to improve this game. For sure, sometimes they try to cut corners and address systemic problems with band-aids, but that does not prevent the fact that they have shown themselves capable of doing things right when they give themselves the resources. 

[--END--Rikutatis]

Honestly I'd rather abilities have cooldowns like Lavos. I started playing Lavos recently and I love his mechanics, he's so fun and satisfying to play. You can't just mindlessly spam his ult, you need to weave your gameplay around his CDs, but everything has synergy and there's active ways to reduce the CDs, so when you do cast the ultimate it feels very satisfying (and powerful as well, when you get several million damage after a fat stats stacking).

I think CDs would solve the ability spam issue, while still allowing Warframe to have these insane powerful ablities and power fantasy moments. But this is something for Warframe 2, most likely 😅

 

[Teridax68]

4 minutes ago, --END--Rikutatis said:

Honestly I'd rather abilities have cooldowns like Lavos. I started playing Lavos recently and I love his mechanics, he's so fun and satisfying to play. You can't just mindlessly spam his ult, you need to weave your gameplay around his CDs, but everything has synergy and there's active ways to reduce the CDs, so when you do cast the ultimate it feels very satisfying (and powerful as well, when you get several million damage after a fat stats stacking).

I think CDs would solve the ability spam issue, while still allowing Warframe to have these insane powerful ablities and power fantasy moments. But this is something for Warframe 2, most likely 😅

 

I'm personally of the exact opposite opinion: Lavos felt incredibly clunky to play for me on a number of levels, and his cooldowns were a big part of this. The waiting times between his abilities felt forced, especially when his 1, 2, and 3 didn't really feel powerful enough to warrant that kind of downtime. If it weren't for the frame's deceptively high base durability and bonkers damage multipliers on his 4, I don't think he'd really feel playable.