Sanctuary Variation : low effort, high payoff?

[voidctrl]

My impression is that Sanctuary might be one of the top three modes of play across (almost) all mastery ranks. You'll see single digit MR as well as L2 ranked players. Not getting a full squad together (at least in the first two stages) is the exception rather than the rule. It's persistently useful. There are few other things that are useful for both an MR10 and an MR30. For levelling up frames and weapons, it's quick and accessible. Everyone avoids some mission types or individual open worlds and such, but everyone, it seems to me, uses Sanctuary to some degree. And yet, it's stuck.

The mechanical principles of Sanctuary of the constant flow of enemies, increasing efficiency demand and changing stages are optimal. I don't think anybody sees a strong need to mess with it. It just works. What makes the repetition bearable is the constant switching up of enemies and stages (limited in ESO).

Why then, I ask, does this very prominent game-mode not showcase a "best-of"?

There are fantastic looking tiles already in the game, which must have taken tremendous effort to built, but one rarely gets to see them, because they are exclusive to missions that don't get as heavy a rotation, or are bound to unique quests. Orokin Derelict towers in Venus Proxima (beautiful!). Orb Vallis Corpus labs. The Ice Mines in Neptune Proxima (beautiful!). The really darkened ships from Chains of Harrow. The Unum tower. The mountain from War Within. The big Sentient ships. The Cliff from Sacrifice, et cetera. Loads of scenes that are already available as Captura. Yet what players see in Sanctuary are some of the oldest tiles in the game. Warframe is so disconcertingly wasteful with the things it already has. 

Sanctuary, that virtual reality, is the only place where re-using these assets is not logically inconsistent. Simaris spins up VR versions of these places because you didn't disable the data sharing policies in your Helios. Sure, it shouldn't spoil scenes for new players, but not every stage needs to feature for every squad. The same is coincidentally true of enemies - Deimos critters, Ghouls and Raknoids are entirely missing from Sanctuary but would greatly alleviate the repetition.

In short - the biggest "low hanging fruit" with the least amount of developer effort required and biggest payoff for alleviating the daily grind - I propose - is just taking existing tiles, and copy-pasting them into Sanctuary. Does that seem outlandish, or do you concur that this is a low-effort, high-effect boon for players old and new?  

 

PS: in Tennocon 2022, Pablo said he wished there was a place in the game where the detailed rooms that people build in their dojos could be integrated into the actual game. If only there were some kind of game mode where players get to briefly stay in a single tile inside a virtual reality...

[Pakaku]

2 hours ago, voidctrl said:

PS: in Tennocon 2022, Pablo said he wished there was a place in the game where the detailed rooms that people build in their dojos could be integrated into the actual game. If only there were some kind of game mode where players get to briefly stay in a single tile inside a virtual reality...

Maybe Pablo is thinking more along the lines of a tileset designer, which could be an expansion on the foundation Dojos have laid out. Two problems I see with Dojo rooms as they currently are would be how the AI handles navigation around those rooms, and the curation aspect.

Chances are most Dojo rooms aren't built around being played in or fighting enemies, they're only designed to look good. I'd be worried about optimization when it comes to loading several hundred/thousand models at once. The only reason that's necessary is because Dojos don't even give you a proper terrain designer...

So you'd probably run into issues if you ported rooms straight out of Dojos. If the Dojo tools were upgraded into a proper level designer, including terrain design and ways to play-test the AI, that would iron out some of the kinks. Might need to overhaul the rooms or even start from scratch, though.

As for curation, imagine a submission process and DE having to look through several thousand submissions per day to find anything good... These are more than just reskins, these are playable levels. They'd have to dedicate time to final play-testing, and I honestly think DE is too lazy for any curating outside of TennoGen (i.e. cash influx)