Can "hard content" even happen?

[tabernacl]

no. not really. the damage system is kind of umm... : /. also the ai is pretty bad. that's why there's just power creep and numbers. it's more sustainable for them to make new frames and gradually continue the 'story'. they can sell the hype of a new frame. they can't sell balance. hopefully they make Soulframe decent since it will be an mmorpg(?) i think an mmorpg will have to have a balanced system or it will be doa imo. 

[Ventura_Highway]

27 minutes ago, trst said:

Well they've already been doing the first one with ability resistance on bosses/Sentients, status caps on certain enemies, overguard CC immunity, and Lich/Sister/Archon damage attenuation.

The second was done exactly with Railjack. But DE went and nerfed every obstacle, hazard, and enemy while buffing everything players have. The really dumb thing with Railjack though is that they reworked it before finishing the update with the system (ai crew) that would have addressed the difficulty complaints on its own. And to a lesser extent it was also done with Trials by having failure states tied to the ""puzzles"".

 

So they've already done it all, they've just not stuck to it and caved into players who get upset at the slightest roadblock (or in Trials case deleted it because it was held together with paperclips and spit). Also players will outcry at literally any perceived nerf to their gear no matter what the practical impact actually is.

I'll give you the first one on account of overguard working as intended but as for the second, this game is advertised as an action-RPG third person shooter, not a spaceship sim and if I mean changes to something, I mean changes to the gameplay of blowing up enemies on foot. I like Railjack, actually have some very fond memories of Barotrauma which is Railjack with more players, Suffering, and ethanol but ultimately, I play Warframe to rip things apart with guns and blades.

The thing about Trials is that we had a pie chart of player-engagement that was presented before they yoinked it out of existence, if memory serves, that stated that very few people bothered with them after a while. This is where I derive my stance of few people actually wanting to exert effort. Do you remember? I remember the begging on the forums for raids, and it's quite apparent how that turned out.

[cute_moth.npc]

No - they used variances in the power level that gear has, introduced skills that bypass a number of game systems as well as created massive variances in how durable and damaging each Warframe is, players pick and choose how they want to play and how hard they want the game to be by modifying their gear instead of literally choosing a different difficulty level (like most games do). When you don't offer any kind of difficulty level for the player to choose on top of that, it is impossible to choose what "hard" should look like - hard to a glass cannon that's shield gating? Maybe a more balanced build with 1000hp / shields and some DR? Something that's basically invincible?

Revenant is almost invincible. How would they deal with that and make hard content for you without just taking it away?

 

At the same time, yes. It can happen, has happened ^^;

I decided to try fighting the Archons using my Operator, I'm down to like 15 minutes for each one.. It's really hard, also really doable but it is actually pretty demanding. I love doing Steel Path missions on Speedva with no defense mods and playing kill or be killed first, it's very be quick or be dead. The game has challenges already. I still have flashbacks of beating Deadlock Protocol with an unfinished Hek and a 0 forma Oberon lol.

Players have to choose by themselves to put down the invincible, eternally invisible, cheesiest things they own and go out to try making the game harder on their own.

[Joewoof]

Remember how many people *@##$ and complain about getting permanently stuck in the New War quest just because they don't have enough skill to clear it?

[trst]

5 minutes ago, Ventura_Highway said:

I'll give you the first one on account of overguard working as intended but as for the second, this game is advertised as an action-RPG third person shooter, not a spaceship sim and if I mean changes to something, I mean changes to the gameplay of blowing up enemies on foot. I like Railjack, actually have some very fond memories of Barotrauma which is Railjack with more players, Suffering, and ethanol but ultimately, I play Warframe to rip things apart with guns and blades.

The thing about Trials is that we had a pie chart of player-engagement that was presented before they yoinked it out of existence, if memory serves, that stated that very few people bothered with them after a while. This is where I derive my stance of few people actually wanting to exert effort. Do you remember? I remember the begging on the forums for raids, and it's quite apparent how that turned out.

And? The point was that they already tried that approach at making hard content. But ruined it by nerfing everything before finishing the system. Plus Steve also went on about it as an environment to test larger system changes to the game and that was never even attempted. DE killed the potential Railjack had by launching it unfinished and caving into the complaints before finishing it.

But the foundation clearly worked for creating difficulty even with our broken builds/gear in play, they just need to apply it to a more standard play environment.

 

And, to my understanding, the reason Trials had low engagement outside of the constant run killing bugs was its reliance on systems not present anywhere else in the game and poor explanations of them. It wasn't that it took effort, but that you had to put effort into something the game never taught you how to do while under pressure. Thus players would fail constantly without actually knowing why do due to a lack of proper instructions. Pair that with requiring your entire squad to understand it plus having forced co-op (just having less than 4 players instantly failed the run) and you've built a system designed to fail from the start.

What Trials needed was an introduction quest or a casual nerfed version of it where players could learn the mechanics. Not requiring players to seek communities built just to provide the tutorial DE didn't make.

[(PSN)slightconfuzzled]

The tricky part is that you'd either have to define or determine what hard content is, in a way people can agree upon, or understand/acknowledge that the answer will always run a spectrum of yes, maybe and no, because many people have different ideas of what hard content could be, and how to achieve it, and whilst some of those ideas can overlap, its... People don't just have different ideas, definitions etc by can have different parameters, axioms and priorities around such variables. 

Additionally, there are ways you could create hard content, it may not be popular content though, or viewed positively. 

Some people are pretty critical of what they call bullet sponges. In certain games I have played though, some of the harder content, does involve increasing/inflating health values of enemies. That being said... the AI of the enemies, as well as player gameplay loops, are so, that you want refined, skilled, practiced actions, cycles of actions/loops the player recognises. Usually around avoided enemy attacks, finding opportune moments to get your offence in, not being punished etc, the increased health, prolongs the fight, requiring finesse in maintaining your cycles, as in don't make mistakes, and make sure you capitalise on openings. Can lead to very epic and satisfying bosses. Same example though would sometimes have bosses, with less health, but more damage output, so... the difficulty was more that the enemies attacks were punishing, their vulnerability windows were less, but the damage you did do, could be really effective. Playing perfectly could even mean quite fast fights, but the enemy themselves, might actually be quite intimidating for most players... you could afford to play less than perfectly, vs longer periods. 

That being said, the criticism can have better merit and value in other games/scenarios. Like if the AI isn't adequate or the gameplay loop isn't satisfying. Which again, can be subjective. 

Warframes issue is that there is a lot of choice, which many people like and value. Tied to that, Warframe players have a lot of choice in tools. Good tool selection can invalidate challenge. Gameplay can limit or create gameplay that limits choices but ehhh... I play a lot of Steel Path, in certain missions, when solo, I'll do a Incursion, like say Exterminate, which is pretty "easy" to myself, but I'll take in less than optimal builds, because its easy, so I can level or test out stuff. Today I used uh Serofang? Or whatever Vorunas new melee, which its default Stance, against SP Grineer, I forget to mod it for damage. My build for it was meh, also I had just formaed Voruna. I did have Tenet Plinx with me, and I love that gun, but... yeah, I increased the difficulty for myself, in one way. Well, when I was using the Serofang, and needing my Operator to make space, avoid taking lethal slash damage etc switching back to Plinx made it easy again. 

Given the amount of choices we have at our disposal, eh... Plus you have to remember, sometimes its about relative difficulty. I don't think Archon Hunts were introduced to be difficult content, but relatively difficult content for more players. We have enough tools/ways for them not to be, but also, even having those tools doesn't mean those with access, always use them. With Ivara I could one shot Archons and be done much faster solo, but eh... its more fun, for me, to play with people, sub optimally. Its relatively difficult. 

You can have things like Orphix Venom or Nihil where a lot of our choices are stripped away... I personally liked those things, but wouldn't want them to become the regular. 

[(XBOX)ECCHO SIERRA]

3 hours ago, (XBOX)Upl0rdYT said:

After breezing through archon hunts with Revenant, I have to ask, "is it possible to make hard content in Warframe, if everyone can use an unkillable frame, or overoptimize against said content?" 

For example, archon hunts and arbitrations were created with the intent of making difficult content where you can't afford to mess up, but if you use a tank frame, you can't really mess up and die. 

This sort of thing also happens with other mission types, like spy (where Wisp or Ivara guarantee a perfect completion), or mobile defense (where Limbo can shield the terminals from all damage and Vauban groups up all threats for easy extermination). 

So will we ever get challenging content, or will things like trials and raids fail as warframes stay undefeatable forevermore?

 

No.

Because nobody can even agree on what "hard" content is. 

They could slap another 200 levels on steel path and call it titanium path and some players/builds/strats still wouldnt feel like that was "hard" enough.

They could nerf all the things that would make that *not* "hard" (like armor stripping) and many players who sunk time into the game are gonna be mad. And maybe rightfully so. 

 

 

[vanaukas]

At this point I just pretend I'm the only tenno alive and just play solo and adjust my operator gear acording to my mood. There is no way they can create "harder content" with all our tools.

[(PSN)Tactless_Ninja]

"Guys I'm playing the most cracked Warframe with the most meta weapons for killing everything in the game in a single hit; WhY iS eVerYtHinG sO eAsY?!?"

They'd have to do what they did with Wukong, and explosive weapons and reign it in. And the fanbase retched and squealed and wanted nothing to do with it. Watch, watch what I'm going to do right now. Ahem. Xaku shouldn't have an auto turret that can indefinitely last the entire mission with zero drain. See? Someone is absolutely fuming right now. 

[MechNexus]

Unfortunately I highly doubt it - this community would react pretty badly to anyone so much as *suggesting* nerfs to stop everything from being cheesed. Difficult content can't exist under these conditions, and the community only has itself to blame for it's (percieved) absence. 

[Vahenir]

Anything harder that requires a group will become increasingly gatekept the harder it is, while also forcing a narrower and narrower meta. People will optimize to minimize risks however they can. If the game becomes hard enough they will optimize the groups as well to try and ensure success. Be that through requiring specific gear or some kind of "proof" that you know what you're doing. This proof is often completely arbitrary, like mastery rank or how much of the special currency from the hard mission you have. (This was pretty much the case in Gw2s raids where people required x amount of achievement points and "kill proofs" to join)

 

As for how i'd want them to do harder missions:

Look at the jackal fight. Do big telegraphs and attacks that need to be avoided. Look at boss fights in MMOs like FFXIV. Make people do the dance while trying to keep damage on the boss. Deal with the mess that is damage attenuation so it doesn't completely screw over entire weapon types, snipers and melee come to mind especially. If it can be dialed in properly then it could make for very interesting boss fights where the objective is more to survive the telegraphed onslaught than to deal omgwtfbbq levels of damage.

[Voltage]

7 hours ago, TARINunit9 said:

I'm gunna stop you right there. The majority of players didn't like them because they were glitchy as hell and had a notorious, as in literally notorious breakage rate. Devs spent more time fixing progression stopper bugs than players did actually getting to the exit

I hate this argument because the entire game is literally like this. There is a bug literally right now where multiple bosses are immune to single target weapons and only AoE weapons work. Warframe has a notorious breakage rate. DE has to constantly fix these kinds of issues for literally any mission they add, or random updates break existing ones. Trials weren't any buggier than the S#&$ we have now.

[Marvelous_A]

9 hours ago, Voltage said:

Yes, we did. They were called Trials. The "hard" part of the mission was team communication and competent players in a team working efficiently to complete 3 missions in a row. The majority of players didn't like them because they didn't stoop to the low bar of players that want to solo Revenant cheese or let On Call Crew wipe a tileset while they make a sandwich. It didn't help that the mode locked the most prestigious enhancements at the time (namely Arcane Grace, Guardian, Avenger and Energize). The ironic part is that back then people called Trial puzzles "not Warframe", but here in 2022, that is closer to Warframe than most of what we get these days.

I think DE is more than capable of making new content that has older players thinking about arsenal choices and cheeses being reeled in. The issue is the playerbase has been nurtured for a decade now that missions should have almost no fail conditions. I still feel that Self-Revives were a bit of a mistake, and Arbitrations were made worse with the addition of revives in my opinion.

Wouldn't the hardest part be finding players who give a damn about trials then? It had some of the best rewards in game and majority of players still wasn't interested on it.

[(PSN)CeetjeBeetje]

8 hours ago, (NSW)Joewoof said:

Remember how many people *@##$ and complain about getting permanently stuck in the New War quest just because they don't have enough skill to clear it?

Really? I'm a pretty bad player and I was able to clear it without too much trouble. Where are they getting stuck?

 

And about content not being hard enough. Just use a frame you haven't completely maxed out with 10 Forma's and don't use crazy OP weapons. I like to switch it up a lot, which keeps the gameplay fresh. If I just kept using my strongest stuff all the time, it wouldn't be as much fun. My strongest stuff is still way too weak for stuff like Archon hunts, though :) Guess that's what happens if you're not min maxing to the extreme and look up the best meta builds.

[CarrotSalad]

What kind of challenge are you looking for exactly?

PVP/conclave challenge?

Fortnite battle royale style challenge?

PVE style challenge where you need to study something like a 12000 word thesis on all the mechanics involved to avoid causing a wipe?

More HP spongy enemies?

Enemies that 1 shot shred your stats?

Maybe all of the above?

Do us a favor. give it some deep thought into the specifics on what you think would make your experience more challenging. ^^

[Voltage]

4 hours ago, Marvelous_A said:

Wouldn't the hardest part be finding players who give a damn about trials then? It had some of the best rewards in game and majority of players still wasn't interested on it.

That wasn't difficult if you put an ounce of effort into looking.

[---Merchant---]

This is console game, so it can not be hard.
You can not expect some dude with nintendo switch in his hand on the way to school inside train on bad wi-fi doing 360 no scope headshots to win.
If it was pc exclusive which is known for more "sweaty gamers" it would work.

Even dark souls which is btw not hard game is played mostly by PC users with controller aka the sweaty gamer demographic.

Hard games for console are so rare that you can not stop hearing about them when they release (dark souls, tokyo souls, china souls....)

I'm not saying that console games are bad, i'm just saying that they are very limited in how hard they can be as you can see by every FPS adding "auto aim" features for console users... they simply do not have the tools and mentality to face challenging content. Sometimes I too just want to chill on the bed playing minecraft or something, there is nothing wrong with it.

Sure we can find one or two exceptions but what i describe above is 99% right.


It is fine to not be challenged, I mean what would be the point of grinding best rivens and stuff if I end up feeling no different than dude who just logged on? Top end should feel like "this is so easy i can afk" because you are "god" at that point, as Chris Wilson likes to say.

[TARINunit9]

6 hours ago, Voltage said:

I hate this argument because the entire game is literally like this. Warframe has a notorious breakage rate. 

See that's the thing... no it doesn't.

Warframe has a non-zero breakage rate. But it isn't very high. The situation with Sargas right now is a rare anomaly I haven't seen before. Raids/Trails, their breakage rate WAS high, much higher than the rest of Warframe before or since. I once compiled a list of patches with fixes for Raids/Trails, it was HUGE, 30+ patches over two years, and that was just the ones they admitted to. Do you have any idea how disastrous that is? The claim the rest of the game has a breakage rate even half that high is completely dishonest

Speaking for myself personally, I encountered progression stoppers on Jordas Verdict multiple times and eventually just gave up on it entirely. I would have loved to join one of those "Raid school busses" and finally be in the interior squad instead of playing space soccer, but I just didn't want to bother. Too many times the esophageal wouldn't open, the nerve clusters wouldn't open, or the infested would stop spawning entirely. I had more breaks in Jordas Verdict over one year than I've had over the entire rest of the game over eight years

[---Merchant---]

23 minutes ago, TARINunit9 said:

See that's the thing... no it doesn't.

Warframe has a non-zero breakage rate. But it isn't very high. The situation with Sargas right now is a rare anomaly I haven't seen before. Raids/Trails, their breakage rate WAS high, much higher than the rest of Warframe before or since. I once compiled a list of patches with fixes for Raids/Trails, it was HUGE, 30+ patches over two years, and that was just the ones they admitted to. Do you have any idea how disastrous that is? The claim the rest of the game has a breakage rate even half that high is completely dishonest

Speaking for myself personally, I encountered progression stoppers on Jordas Verdict multiple times and eventually just gave up on it entirely. I would have loved to join one of those "Raid school busses" and finally be in the interior squad instead of playing space soccer, but I just didn't want to bother. Too many times the esophageal wouldn't open, the nerve clusters wouldn't open, or the infested would stop spawning entirely. I had more breaks in Jordas Verdict over one year than I've had over the entire rest of the game over eight years

Raids were the only place where i felt like i matter to the mission.
Sure i do commonly 100% damage done and 20000kills but anyone with saryn and ogris can do that, in raids i mean the things you do were much more specialized i even enjoyed playing trinity making sure that no one dies, something i would never care about in 4men squad in any avaible mission.
It was simply the only place that had that "mmo feel" where you have tanks, dps, cc, supports. 

In normal missions you either are aoe dps or you are the afk guy and there is nothing in between, exception is only endo farming where you need 3 specific frames to be optimal Nekro, Nekro, Khora and Nekro(or nidus with the range invigoration)

Difficulty between maximum level survival mission and lvl 100 in steel path is simply nothing just like in rest of the modes.

I really miss that feel of team actual affecting the result but I do not miss any of the 50000bugs raid mode had (well i miss the one that allowed you to have 24people in single mission)

[Squick]

DE could definitely make it hard. Years ago, for about 2 months, grineer were basically aim bots with constant slash procs, and this was long before there were tons of ways to recover health. You had to go in to any grineer mission full stealth, with a trinity, or lots of health restores. They've toned a lot of that down due to feedback, but I'm sure they could reintroduce things.

 

The real question is, would people play it?

[TARINunit9]

15 minutes ago, ---Merchant--- said:

Raids were the only place where i felt like i matter to the mission.
Sure i do commonly 100% damage done and 20000kills but anyone with saryn and ogris can do that, in raids i mean the things you do were much more specialized i even enjoyed playing trinity making sure that no one dies, something i would never care about in 4men squad in any avaible mission.
It was simply the only place that had that "mmo feel" where you have tanks, dps, cc, supports. 
 

That's because Raids predated Energizing Dash, Adaptation, and even manual bleedout 

Keep in mind what level Raids were: lvl100. That's basic Sortie level. Archons have about 10,000 more EHP than Nightmare Vay Hek had.

So while I respect your opinion on Raids, I also warm you that those days are long gone. Bringing back Raids now would see them get annihilated by power creep

[---Merchant---]

5 minutes ago, Squick said:

DE could definitely make it hard. Years ago, for about 2 months, grineer were basically aim bots with constant slash procs, and this was long before there were tons of ways to recover health. You had to go in to any grineer mission full stealth, with a trinity, or lots of health restores. They've toned a lot of that down due to feedback, but I'm sure they could reintroduce things.

 

The real question is, would people play it?

Path of exile has hardcore community and they made each patch characters stronger and faster, they ended up running faster than server can process it and kill so many at once that instances were crashing.
Then they started working on Path of exile 2 and realized "damn game needs to be much slower to be anyhow challenging"
So they reduced PoE1 player power and speed in preparation for switch to poe2 next year.. 50% people quit
and then they nerfed "too much loot" that we had for years and another 50% quit

Now they had to reverse these changes because community was pretty much dead at this point and there is some new hype for next league that starts tomorrow

So would people play it? YES! But not the people that play today, only people that like what warframe never was and would be new blood for the game.
Which would be maybe smart financial decision just gotta calculate New vs Old player earnings.

[---Merchant---]

1 minute ago, TARINunit9 said:

That's because Raids predated Energizing Dash, Adaptation, and even manual bleedout 

Keep in mind what level Raids were: lvl100. That's basic Sortie level. Archons have about 10,000 more EHP than Nightmare Vay Hek had.

So while I respect your opinion on Raids, I also warm you that those days are long gone. Bringing back Raids now would see them get annihilated by power creep

That is fair point, but as shown in grendel mission and other places that simply disable your powercreeped items it would be possible to achieve it today easily.

It would be much like "balanced pvp" in mmo games, it is when developers have too much powercreep and bad balance so they normalize character loadouts to 3 main archetypes to keep things fair and challenging, same thing is done for some raids in lost ark to prevent people from crying too much about "grinding items only to not use them" some parts of loadout are avaible (Engravings in lost ark's case) and consumable items(potions, campfires..)

So you are totally right that if we just bring the exactly same raids we had before to today's situation they will be piss easy, but that is simply not how they would be realistically reintroduced for DE realizes this balance issue too.

[bad4youLT]

Not till DE takes away 99% of our power , rework damage , EHP , mod system and reintroduce stamina bar .

[Haleks]

13 hours ago, vanaukas said:

At this point I just pretend I'm the only tenno alive and just play solo and adjust my operator gear acording to my mood. There is no way they can create "harder content" with all our tools.

Same here.

I kinda hope DE extends the drifter's gameplay to make him more fun and viable on his own (especially regarding melee) with Duviri; I could imagine a new game mode restricting warframe usage (maybe a survival variant, where using a warframe would cost some resource or require several conditions to be met) : now that would be a good avenue for better difficulty balance, since operators/drifters have less modifiers overall.