A Few Changes To Map Design To Make Loot Hunting More Fun

[Notso]

A major part of this game is farming for resources, which is, at the moment, a chore. Find locker, open locker, collect loot, move to next locker. Find canister, smash canister, collect loot, move on. Over the past week and a bit since I started playing Warframe, I've been thinking of a few ways we could make looting more exciting. Personally, I love exploring the entire level that's been generated for me. It also means I usually have to play in Solo mode, because everybody wants to rush through the level, as there is no incentive to open all the lockers, as you end up with a higher "resource acquisition per hour" from rushing through levels as fast as possible and simply opening all the obvious loot rooms.

"Hidden" Loot Rooms (Video)

Basically, change the proceedural generator to add loads more "secret" rooms like this one. You can "see" that they're on the minimap, but you have to explore to find them. Because the rooms are pulled from a set, it chould be changed so these "hidden" rooms do not show up on the minimap, and you have explore the nooks of a room to find them. The one in the video is a good example as the room is obvious to the well knowledged, but only the ones who actually go down and explore it will see that it is there.

The "Asteroid" tileset is leaps and bounds ahead of the "Corpus Ship" tileset, in terms of "hidden" loot rooms [i've seen two types, one where you wallrun along some rocks through into an open window in true space ninja style (I'll add a video tomorrow), and another where you run up a thin ledge (or super jump if you're Excalibur)]. However, hidden loot rooms should be stuffed to the brim with "active" lockers. It's a bit of a dissapointment when you find one of the few "hidden" rooms and there is only one locker to open.

"Locked" Loot Rooms (Picture)

I see all these "red locked" rooms when I run around. Now, I know they're there because the map generator decided it didn't want any rooms there, or any paths to new rooms, but wouldn't it be great if we could hack the terminals next to all those "red locked" doors to access some more loot?

"Challenge" Loot Routes

Let's add a type that's comepletely new. How about a "side-mission" that's not announced as existing by Lotus when you start the mission, but if you accidentally discover it, she'd say something like this:

"Interesting. I didn't pick this up in my initial scan, but it looks like there's storage cache to find if you keep heading in this direction. Be careful though - enemy defences look heavily fortified in this direction."

These routes would not be particularly long, but they would have lots of difficult enemies, maybe even toned-down versions of some of the current bosses at the end, and the routes would lead to a dead end, with a room stuffed full of loot at the the end. They would also be very rare, maybe 1/10 missions would have a "Challenge Route".

Clearly Display Which Direction Extraction is on the Minimap

This is a more mundane change, but absolutely necessary to avoid running in a certain direction away from the objective, but ends up being extraction. Sometimes the doors to the path to extraction are under a "yellow lock", but not always. Showing the player which direction the extraction room is in would streamline the missions, as he or she would think "No point exploring in this direction now; it's on the way to extraction."

Edited February 27, 2013 by Notso

[zikkim]

+1

[Notso]

Glad somebody liked it. Probably posted too late in the day for it to be noticed a lot :P

[zikkim]

add me to frıends ıf u lıke. :) u got some nıce ıdeas

[Notso]

Will do tomorrow. On my laptop in bed at the moment lol. Where do you live by the way? I'm in EU so the lag might be large if you're across the pond...

[zikkim]

ım also ın the EU from the netherlands. lıttle country next to germany

[Notso]

Lol I know where the Netherlands is :P

Now, I propose, back on topic :P