Kahl missions feel like a punishment, not a break from normal gameplay

[Brynslustafir]

I've been grappling with this since the missions came out. I knew I didn't like them, but I needed time to understand why this latest deviation felt so awful. I think I've broken it down to two major fields.

1. Gameplay. Kahl is slow and clumsy. as a result traversing the environment looking for bonuses or completing objectives is simply boring. Even with the jetpack it still doesn't feel good. Faster, but not good. Until you get an Archgun, Kahl's combat is just as unpleasant as his movement. I'm willing to be more lenient on this because I think his combat ability is just barely good enough, but he really needs better tools. For example, setting the player up with a bizarrely weak Exergis in the first mission instead of a weapon more capable of handling crowds seems like a very poor decision. 

2. Incentives. Having bonus objectives in a mission is fine. Good, even. Unless you make some predictable mistake that makes completing these objectives an obtuse and unreasonable chore. The "15 minutes or less" challenge has been a massive sore spot for me since day one, since seemingly nobody with creative control ever stopped to think that combining these with time consuming "collect all the flumbos" nonsense was a bad idea. Either you have to run an already tiresome mission twice, or you have to optimize like a speedrunner, both of which demand more from the player than a simple weekly mission should. 

[Drasiel]

I enjoy taking two mission to find everything I want then speedrunning it as fast as I can after.

I will say that Kahl does not move as fluidly as I expect a grineer to move. His jump height and distance is much smaller than what we see grineer leaping in normal gameplay and we can't hover without extra inputs like hellions can nor can we perform a quick sideways jetpack dash for speedy traversal. I can't decide if his run speed is actually too slow or if the issue is just that everything you interact with (including the jetpack) turns off toggle sprint.

as far as tools go, so far the only weapon I take issue with is the exergis because it's a stupid weapon to fight against corpus with. They have shield gating, unless you hit them in the battery pack which is very hard to do with shotguns you won't kill them in one go and the exergis is not a weapon that is comfortable to use when you require two shots to kill.

[BR31]

True.  Shard should be gone from there or at least give an opportunity to get it elsewhere.

And the prison break is much worse than the other 2 .

[(XBOX)ShadowWolf19]

On 2022-11-29 at 9:23 PM, Brynslustafir said:

2. Incentives. Having bonus objectives in a mission is fine. Good, even. Unless you make some predictable mistake that makes completing these objectives an obtuse and unreasonable chore. The "15 minutes or less" challenge has been a massive sore spot for me since day one, since seemingly nobody with creative control ever stopped to think that combining these with time consuming "collect all the flumbos" nonsense was a bad idea. Either you have to run an already tiresome mission twice, or you have to optimize like a speedrunner, both of which demand more from the player than a simple weekly mission should. 

you should add the fact that it seems that you can't even complete some of the collection challenges. i have tried to get the cache open multiple times and i can never find all 4 pass codes.

[Drasiel]

3 hours ago, (XBOX)ShadowWolf19 said:

you should add the fact that it seems that you can't even complete some of the collection challenges. i have tried to get the cache open multiple times and i can never find all 4 pass codes.

I have never had that problem, I've missed them and had to backtrack but I always find them all eventually. The camera ones can be a little fiddly for sure because you can't always see them from every angle but at least for me missing them is user error. You could be running into a bug that I have not encountered though so please don't take this as me dismissing your concern.

[sunderthefirmament]

On 2022-11-29 at 9:23 PM, Brynslustafir said:

I've been grappling with this since the missions came out. I knew I didn't like them, but I needed time to understand why this latest deviation felt so awful.

I agree with your sentiments and that it's not a welcome change of pace.  Lua's Prey is a welcome change of pace in my opinion, as it shakes up a stale game mode (survival) with some new wrinkles that players can either engage with or largely ignore:

• Moving buff aura
• Higher difficulty option with better drop rates
• Even higher difficulty options (SP) for reward double-dipping
• Temporary Necramech to encourage planning and lightly managing a cooldown.

These additions make it feel far more engaging and interesting than Survival.  If you want to optimize the heck out of it and camp as a Khora/Speedva/Nekros/Wisp while watching YouTube, there's nothing stopping you.  But you're not going to get your thrax plasm or rotation drops any faster than a player who takes advantage of the unique mechanics in this game mode to avoid losing their mind from boredom.

 

Lua's Prey makes me excited for Warframe's future.  I like interesting twists on Warframe content.  Kahl very much isn't an interesting twist on Warframe content.  He's a stripped down, buggy version of a game that came out 20 years ago, with his only meaningful innovations reflecting the area where gaming has changed the most in the past two decades: addictive psychology.

 

I would fix this by simply removing the weekly shard from Kahl's store, or setting a cap to it.  Once a player has purchased a certain number (20?  30?  52?) of Shards from Kahl, they can no longer do so.  His grind needs a light at the end of the tunnel; it shouldn't be interminable.  Another option would be to let us acquire our weekly stock in a different way while still respecting the weekly cap.

[Herick_MVP]

That "15 minutes or less" goal really sucks, Kahl is slow, the maps are big, the time for each part of the mission is time consuming like rescuing the brothers from Murex, this makes the mission frustrating already of looking.

Are we the testers and don't have a voice-active test team working? Does the team or its leader not know the purpose of having Kahl in play and how to conduct its missions?

Someone save Kahl from this unfortunate fate they are leading. I hope to see that Kahl with New War personality, own decisions and gameplay.

[(XBOX)ShadowWolf19]

On 2022-12-04 at 1:21 AM, Drasiel said:

I have never had that problem, I've missed them and had to backtrack but I always find them all eventually. The camera ones can be a little fiddly for sure because you can't always see them from every angle but at least for me missing them is user error. You could be running into a bug that I have not encountered though so please don't take this as me dismissing your concern.

sadly i wish i had you luck but i have search missions multipe times and only found them all one time

[Berzerkules]

What I don't get is locking half of all obtainable shards behind nonframe combat. 

Warframes movement is so good. We have infinite build options by combining 50+ playable frames, hundreds of unique weapons, arcane, mods, companions, operator etc. It's such a unique system and experience. DE totally scrapped all that for Khal missions where you have none of those options that makes warframe a great game. I will never understand the motivation behind that. 

I'd like to double up on my shard count and get to theory crafting builds but I will never play khal missions again. It's just not worth the frustration of subjecting myself to such an unenjoyable part of this game. If a change of pace from normal warframe game play was DE intention then it worked great, I've alt+f4 from every Khal mission I've started and found something else to do for the day.