A better way to link the story together

[(PSN)shadowclasper]

So there definitely needs to be a better main story mission that threads you through the worlds, maybe gives you some more immediate information, in the game, about each world, a thing that threads the whole world together better, introduces the bosses and characters. It'd be a huge endeavor, but I think the payoff would be well worth it for helping players get more invested into the world.

 

What inspired me on this was watching this:

(Actually watch the video if you have the time, the series name is Worst MMO Ever? and he's actually spending a great deal of his time praising the hell out of Warframe, rating it at "NINJAS IN SPACE! out of 10")

And he's right, the game SUCKS YOU IN when actually playing, but makes it very difficult to care because of the opaque systems and the lack of a strong narrative draw until you're well into the game.

So here's my general ideas on how to handle the plot.

1. Rather than 'killing vor' have him very obviously ESCAPE from you at the end of Vor's Prize, and this leads you onto the MSQ that would lead you through each of the planets in turn, specifically, leading you to each assassination target in turn.  Blah Blah Blah, he's escaped to the Grineer Foundries on MERCURY.
2. A small tutorial better explaining how mods work, have Ordis give you a slightly horrified dialogue about how mods work, that they're cephalon fragments/baby cephalons that can optimize your powers, and how to improve them, and even render them down, or fuse them. Tell you what endo is in a very gamified way. (I feel that the mod system, in particular, needs to be better tutorialized as it is the single most important form of advancement in the game)
3. The Lotus tells you something something solar rail stations, something something 'ancient protocols, having to unlock them for yourself by proving yourself' blah-blah-blah, moving on.
4. Now it's off to Venus! First mission has you smacked right dab into Alad V's and Nef Anyo's pissing contests for the board, and you having to somehow break through the local blockade and that this inevitably meaning taking out the flagship at Fossa, which inevitably means killing the JACKAL, or could well be that you find info about the Jackal in the first mission where you run into aforementioned pissing match between Alad and Nef, and the Lotus saying we can't possibly continue until it has been disposed of for the sake of the colonists on Venus that the Corpus Board will oppress with the Jackal if not destroyed.
5. Now it's onto Mercury, and the quest "Once Awake" which can be integrated in, or left as a side option, either works, but the point is that you are tracking down Vor for REVENGE or whatever it is that he's planning to do. Could even weave in the whole 'messing with orokin tech' as a major plot point at this point, either way, it's time to nail Vor to the wall, but oh-no, he's escaped again, this time to CERES.
6. Now it's onto Mars, which means having completed Once Awake and having learned about the infested and all that good stuff, by now you've gotten a rep, it's high time you learned about Mars, how it's population was more or less eradicated by the Grineer, and trusted subordinate (perhaps torn between Vor and the Queens?) Lieutenant Lech Kril has a strangle hold on the plant. He's set his people on you, and now you gotta beat his ass, but oh no, he's broken the rail junction key you need to get access to Ceres, where Vor is hiding out, and the other half is with HIS subordinate, the Seargent, on Phobos, who you must also track down and slay (or maybe Kril is defecting to Vor against the queens and his seargent is still loyal either way, this is a perfect time to really introduce the queens and Vor's madness about obtaining and controlling orokin tech).
7. Finally onto Ceres, where Kril and Vor have teamed up to put a final end to you, again, a quest that helps introduce the planet, and then onward to killing the pair of them. Simple, fast, easy.

 

At this point, after beating them, I sorta feel like the quest system from the side missions is enough to keep the player interested BUT I do really feel like that it'd be really really good if the MSQ -kept up- at this point at least through the rest of the Origin System planets. Always keep it as a punchy, 1-2 thing, MAYBE three missions to a planet, but the IMPORTANT thing is that FIRST they introduce you to the new planet, the Lotus gives you some deets on what the #*!% is going on there, and then the second part of the mission is simply completing the assassination.

You could continue this trend practically all the way through the entire freaking map at this point, giving lore about each world, and why it's important for you to kill off the leader there, how these people form the lynch pins holding the great powers of the system together as you destabilize them, really underlining the point for when Ballas accuses us of having more or less made the system ripe for conquest by the Sentients.

I think doing this would really help pull the entire game together much better, and draw the players forward, it would also really help drive home the primary villain of Vor for the first half, the nut job grineer who has no idea what he's doing, and Alad V, who is possibly an ex-orokin himself, and thus far more cognizant of what's going on.

There's only two true wrinkles in this entire set up.

Firstly, there's the issue of Jupiter, with all of it's amalgams, which happen in the game well before the sentients turn up... this isn't an insurmountable issue IMO, and they can just be left as a weird 'what the #*!% is that' thing that the Lotus keeps mum on, since they don't matter for the Alad V assassination at Themisto, and it also makes it easier to introduce the Zanuka project as a whole.

Second, there's Eris. I have no idea how to deal with Eris, like, at all. In any way, shape, or form. Alad V being a freaking weird hybrid comes out of left field, never made any sense, still doesn't. Where does it fit into the timeline? Is it a fork of the main Alad V? Whatever, it has it's own quest, and is a side planet, so it's not THAT big of a deal, so I think Eris can basically be left alone.

 

Thoughts? Opinions? Ideas on how to improve this further? All together I think doing this sort of thing, to really pull together the story in the same way that the new opening to the game and Vor's Prize did would be a winning strategy for making the entire game feel more whole and united.

[(PSN)max141064]

My only opinion is: That video is utter garbage. 

[(PSN)shadowclasper]

2 minutes ago, (PSN)max141064 said:

My only opinion is: That video is utter garbage. 

have you actually watched it? Because while the series is named "worst mmos ever" the actual thing is that he praises the HELL out of it for the most part and says he kept forgetting to actually take notes because he was too busy having fun. He rates it at "NINJAS IN SPACE Out Of Ten"

[(PSN)max141064]

> Someone doesn't think like you do.

> "You didn't even watched/read/listen it, uhu?" 

come on, let's not be twelve. 

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The fact that he "had fun" has NOTHING to do with the fact that it was an horrible video made with less than zero interest in the game and done with "people said" and "someone told me". 

utter. garbage. 

this doesn'r resolve anything, it's just a video of the personal experience of a guy going to a new game for a few hours. 

there was ZERO interest, SOME research done, LOADS of taking for granted everything that some idiot he talked with said.

Look at the "It seems that the lore it's something secondary that nobody cares about". 

the most useless, insulting, false and cheap line that a youtuber can say to just say "Ehy, i don't have time or will to go through it to give you a reason to be interested"

who cares that there is a WHOLE CODEX STATION. 

who cares that there are LOADS of quests with deep lore. (and the "you unlock it too late into the game" is just straight out false.) 

who cares that there is a sistem implemented in game to merge the fun of gameplay with finding lore literally in missions. 

but yeah, a guy told me that the lore is not existant so it must be true! let me put it in the video! 

[(PSN)shadowclasper]

Actually wasn't being 12, was reflecting on my own initial response when I saw the title the first time before I first watched, but fine. And I'm also speaking about it being 'too late in the game' because I took a running jump at this game 3 times before on the fourth time I had a friend guide me through it and play with me and that got me hooked finally.

A codex is a good extra, but it's something you gotta unlock by playing and playing repeatedly, further, it's not a patch on how good the first quest is and how good the whole thing linked together could be, it should be spice, not the whole. There is lore there, it's just not delivered well enough imo.

[(PSN)max141064]

Hell, the guy can't even take his own words seriously. 

How many times has he said "Like an MMO" when 5 minutes earlier he specifically said "it's not an MMO". 

COME ON. 

I stated my opinion on the video, if we want to talk about the lore being "not linked together" we can even talk about the difference between story and lore, that are two different things. 

most games have a "not linked together" lore. 

look at Dark souls for example. 

to get a good look at the whole picture of the lore of something you have to get several items, weapons and armors. 

because it keeps the player hooked and interested in finding more while not giving people a meat slab of lore all at once that will 99.9% of times make the player disinterested in actually reading it. 

Warframe is full of lore and the story is getting bigger and bigger every year it passes, we are going to get a quest that, apparently, is 30+ hours! 

there are youtubers have mede entire series that are so long that they have to cut the lore in different videos, let's take My name is Byf for example. 

12 videos of roughly 30 minutes EACH talking about the lore of this exact game that the guys said "it has no lore and people are not interested in it". yeah....

[(PSN)shadowclasper]

There's a ton of lore to the game, but it's incredibly opaque until relatively late in the game.

Codex entries: Finding out about them was something I didn't do until my second freaking week because nothing in the game told me they were there, even then, it took me 2 months consistently playing before I fully unlocked even one of them. And by consistently I mean 'logging in for an hour or two a day like the filthy casual I am'.

Buying a helios made it much much easier because now I knew what the heck a codex scanner was doing in that respect.

Nobody is saying the game doesn't have lore or story, but we -are- saying that it's amazing opaque and hard to get at for the casual user. It doesn't even really start to kick off until mercury, and to get to mercury you have to actually dig into the systems. The argument being made is the game could do more to onboard people and hold their hand for this part of the game and help feed them the lore of the world better, not that there is no lore at all.