Warframe Story Pack Feedback Thread!

[(PSN)Stealth_Cobra]

Honestly, I don't really like where this is going at all...

Like, I get the idea that it can be hard to get into Warframe and get new people to stick around to catch up on anything, but the solution isn't to force people into paying to be able to play the new content... Putting a cost on this seems super greedy... If you really intend on pursuing this, at least make the option free.

Honestly, it would be alot more respectful of the fanbase and preserving of the experience of playing the story to do the following:

• Make an exception where the player can play the newest content with zero prequisites whenever a new update just dropped. Just give a warning that the player may get spoilers and use "borrowed" equipment and gear they don't get to keep. New War already did this with the Paracesis, they temporarily give you one during the quest if you don't own it, and it's gone by the end of the quest... That way , people see the cool new content, they can play it immediately, then they can catch up with the older core quest after experiencing the new quest and the new gamemodes.
• Just allow player to "borrow" the snake necramech and maybe the recovered Tempestari briefly in the new war for the like five minutes segment that actually requires an unmodded necramech railjack... And if your intention is to keep having Archwings / Necramechs / Railjacks as mandatory for new quests in the future, then give crappy  starter version at the start of the game to players.... I mean we already have the Snake Necramech, the Recovered Tempestarii, so just add a Rusted Archwing and call it a day...
• Remove all starchart clear requirements from main story quests so you can play the core story missions essentially back to back. That way the players can experience the full core story and catch up super quick. Leave side quests as unlocks by junctions...  maybe... if you really need to... Or just unlock all side quest the second you get up to date with the main quest (just so people don't get distracted by them. Honestly most of my friend quit warframe because they get bored clearing the starchart to access the cinematic quests, or they get distracted into mid or somewhat bad side quests like howl of the kubrow . Like i'm constantly pushing my friend to clear the nodes and get to Second Dream / War Within / New War cause I can't really play with him or discuss anything with him before he catches up with the spoilers.
• Maybe streamine the starchart so it has less nodes cause it's super tedious to clear and essentially deserted nowadays. Do we really need like 25 missions per planet, with often multiple repeating missions on the same planet ? It actually hurts the new player experience since most of these coop nodes are deserted and it's super hard for new players to solo a four man interception , disruption ,etc... Part of the reason people quit is because it's super tedious without a friend to unlock all planets to even get the quests unlocked to begin with. Heck, I personally think the starchart could probably go and be replaced by a small amount or rotating nodes on each planets imho... With the most active current nodes like Hydron getting permanent nodes.
• If you still , after all these changes, want to have a big "Skip all the cool stuff button", well , make it free , reversible and basically just an unlock of every planet / story quest / gamemode...

Also worried because even with the huge backlash you guys got for the Heirloom packs, you still seem like you're planning to sell more of those abominations, and now you're turning the main game into a pay to catch up game like Destiny 2, which I quit because it didn't respect it's playerbase, and I have a gut feeling you'll do the usual of just shipping the unpopular thing anyway but try to bribe people into accepting it by like throwing a couple cosmetics and regal aya in there to pretend it's something else entirely other than a glorified paid timeskip.

Also, don't you guys try and push buying Tennogen with real money on consoles ! Parity doesn't mean console players get shafted... Worse case scenario, allow purchase with both... But don't you dare trying to remove our ability to buy tennogen with plat we earned through trade.

Edited October 27, 2023 by (PSN)Stealth_Cobra

[Petroklos]

Story Skips are inherently bad, even if completely free.
It's as if you're saying to new players "hey, we have 10 years of content but you can ignore that if you want. it's not good enough.", "don't worry, our game and story are so simplistic and one dimensional that you don't need any context to jump 10 years in". That's not true with Warframe and it's frankly insulting to your work to even imply these.

Skipping Quests and other content will make Whispers and other future content less impactful.
Why care about Wally if you haven't done Chains of Harrow? If you haven't seen the deal in New War? Why care about Albrecht if you haven't heard about him in HoD and his Necralisk recordings? Why care about the Operator and Drifter if you haven't done the Second Dream and Duviri? How will you understand Void shenanigans like Transference if you haven't done the War Within?

Payed Skips just feel worse.
If you were saying "these old things aren't good enough anymore" before, you're now saying "pay us for the privilege of skipping through the bad stuff". I don't think I have to explain why this would feel awful. And having that be one of the first few things a Player sees right after doing the introductory Quest? It would likely make me go "oh its one of those games" and uninstall it.

Other MMOs whose old content "dissapears" when new Expansions release, are doing it wrong.
It's always felt wrong that WoW essentially scraps its previous story and content every other Expansion. And yes, FF14 lets you buys skips (it shouldn't, as e.g. EW barely makes sense without all the context from ARR, HW, StB and ShB), but it also incentivizes revisiting content of previous Expansions, eg Stormblood Relic Weapons asking you to do ARR and HW content. The fact that you keep revisiting and tweaking older content, rather than completely ignoring or even worse removing it, is a massive boon to your game, so why tell people that they can skip it, which as I said before, also implies that they should skip it.

~

Instead of incentivizing people to skip your hard work, hard work which still holds up, you should just keep up the great work of cleaning up and improving the early game.

Touch up some of the early bosses to be more interesting and less infuriating. Create new Tilesets for the Planets which are sharing theirs with others. Make progressing through the Star Chart faster and easier. Cut out the Mission filler that some of the earlier Quests have. Guide people to interesting content other than just the Star Chart and Quests, like (E)SO, Arbitrations, Liches/Sisters, Railjack, etc.

~

Just, don't do skips, neither payed nor free, please. Streamline and clean up content, make the overall progression faster, but no skips.

People who'd bounce off of Warframe because they have to play the good old stuff before reaching the good new stuff, would most likely bounce off with a skip as well, as they wouldn't be able to fully comprehend and appreciate what the new stuff is without all of the context from the old stuff.

To be frank, a Story Skip is as insulting as binging a show at 2x speed, or reading only the first and last chapter of a book. You should hold your art at a higher standard than that.

A grind skip could be fine if well implemented, even if payed. That's the basis of the game's monetization after all. But I'd rather you guys keep reducing the unecessary and mind numbing grind wherever possible instead.

~

Next day thoughts:

You were developing New War for how many years? On and off from 2018 to 2021 and activelly during 2021? And you're going to tell people that they can skip it with no issues? Do you really feel ok doing that?

You just released and Artbook and an OST Vol2 for your game, filled with art and music of stuff that I have to assume you're proud of. And you're going to tell people who just joined your game that it's fine to skip it?

Adding a Story Skip is an insult to your own hard work.

Edited October 28, 2023 by Petroklos

[CouchPotater]

Honestly, new players immediately being greeted by a microtransaction in order to play a free-to-play game with veteran friends is probably the worst first impression the game could give, and the fastest way to turn interested newbies away. Simultaneously I appreciate that we can't just give, free of charge, 10 years worth of unlocks and gear as a consequence free catchup.

I've written what I think is a viable alternative, in a seperate thread for the sake of keeping this one tidy, found here:

TL;DR - Allow players to opt for either their own gear or mediocre temp loadouts via duviri  (+temp railjack/nechramech with basic mods, only usable in the new content) to play with friends. This way new and returning players can experience new content while still seeing what endgame players are capable of and being incentivised to play the rest of the game in order to get similarly strong and smooth their own ride. All the while, they'll gaining resources to hasten their progress through the rest of the starchart and ease some of the grind without any paywalls turning them away from an amazing game.

Edited October 28, 2023 by CouchPotater
typo

[MortalMercenary]

It was mentioned as a giftable option which I think is the worst decision you could make with a story skip feature. If players can gift this to each other it will be abused and confuse the hell out of the new players who randomly get gifted this story skip.

I think the pricing should be in line with FF14 as that seems like a reasonable price to skip content.

The free stuff we get through the quests should have builds a la Duviri builds everyone has access to so they just buy the story skip and have these builds equipped with little to no barrier on joining their friends as many players will have little time normally to play and will likely want to jump into the new content ASAP.

All in all I think a story skip is a good idea so long as it is packaged correctly and isn't confusing face value and correctly lowers in price the further you get into the story/if you take a break and come back in a year with content you missed but didn't/couldn't play for any reason. Don't make this the same level of complicated as Destiny 2 DLC.

[Chroia]

Edit

So, apparently this posted while I was typing. Joy.

Actual post is here.

Edited October 29, 2023 by Chroia

[lukinu_u]

The idea make sense but there should be a free quest access (that remove all prerequistes aside from the previous stroy quest) + "shortened" version of these quests so people get both the necessary gameplay introduction and lore in a much faster set of mission, instead of directly ignoring the thing.

One good example is the Natah quest. It's a very important part of the story but all the dialogues are very long and spread across multiples missions :

• 3 identical mission where you need to scan drones (can be fast, but not for new players who don't master parkour)
• a mobile defense
• a capture
• a 10 minutes survival
• a 5 waves defense (again, can be long for a new under equiped player)

For the average player it's probably around 40 minutes to complete the quest.
That playtime was necessary at the time to make the content a bit more consistent, but I think revisiting all quests to shorten them would be beneficial and doable without losing any of the richness and essence of them.

Taking Natah as an example again, the mission could be shortened to :

• a single mission where you have to scan 3 drones
• a single objective mobile defense that turn into a capture
• a 5 minutes survival
• a 3 waves defense

With these changes, we probably go from 40 minutes to about 15min. So with similar changes to all quest + the ability to chain them, you are probably able to catch up with all the current main quests in about 10h at most, which sounds fair given you just catch up with the "story" and still have plenty of stuff to do around.
I also don't think giving access to gears matching the progression should be a thing, and the player should instead have temporary access to them for the duration of the quest, with carefully choosen equipment for each quest.

[Cerikus]

Regardless of what I think about it I want to provide feedback about how it should be monetized, if you do it.

The "story pack" cannot be one singular pack with set price.
That would be very VERY bad. It needs to be a special menu in Market, where you can pick and choose which "story stage" and how many of them you want to skip.

I've made a mock up. "In this situation we have a player who completed The second dream and wants to skip The War within and Chains of Harrow only."

Each stage must have it's own price based on the length and difficulty of the quest as well as the items you get from it.

(For example Apostasy prologue should be super cheap, because it's nothing, but New war should cost more, because it's long and gives you Nataruk, Sirocco, Rumblejack and other stuff.)

[(PSN)M00n_Slippers]

The point of the Skip is so new players can get to the new content quickly. That means they need to have a Nechromech, a Railjack, an Amp and have completed Natah, The Second Dream, The Chains of Harrow, Apostacy Prologue, The Sacrifice, Prelude to NW and The New War.

You don't have to complete all the nodes for this or have unlocked Steel Path at all. So skipping nodes does nothing to help the issue the skip is trying to solve.

Edited October 27, 2023 by (PSN)M00n_Slippers

[PublikDomain]

1 hour ago, (XBOX)TheWayOfWisdom said:

I'll say that this experience doesn't really make a noticeable difference, as it's not going to where it matters. The battle is won in the arsenal, not the field. What makes "hard" content challenging is mostly the gear requirement, not direct player "skill". Grinding 20 hours for those 10 core mods, or new frame, or new gun doesn't make you better at applying them. If anything, the opposite is true. Having immediate access to them allows you to actually use and experiment with them.

I can't say I agree. For example, enough players had trouble with the Angels of the Zariman quest that the level needed to be dropped after only one day. And those were players who had to play the game to get there, who would have had all of the gear requirements met! A player that could pay to skip to that point will be even less prepared, even if they are given all of the same gear. Experience is experience, and someone with more experience will always have had more chances to learn than someone with less. Being handed a pile of stuff you haven't been taught isn't going to magically teach someone how to mod or which mods are important. Improving the NPE's modding tutorial would. Giving new players more stuff to do while they learn would. Having more reasons for veterans to non-destructively revisit this older content alongside new players would. Dumping unprepared, clueless newbies at the finish line won't.

1 hour ago, (XBOX)TheWayOfWisdom said:

You still have junction requirements. The post doesn't say they would be skipped.

I'm not sure how you envision the pay to skip working? You pay money, get a bunch of stuff checked off, but still can't play the new content because a bunch of junctions and timegates are still in the way? Then what are you paying for? DE specifically talks about "players interested in accessing this new content day 1". You can't play that content "day 1" if it's still locked after paying to skip to it.

[ArchAngel7774]

I'm not sure a story skip is what is really needed. While have played (off and on) for 10 years, I did not play well or really enjoy the game until I started to LEARN the game after Fortuna dropped. The required quests are not that long (now) and would be a good teaching tool. What I struggled with early was Mods need to make builds powerful enough to survive Steel Path and similar level missions. I always saw other players doing 10x or 100x the damage I could put out. Or I couldn't make it through a mission without being picked up 10+ times. Even with friends to do this, it was discouraging. My problem I latter learned was Mods! I didn't know to use the ones I had effectively and I was woefully lacking in a lot of really good Mods, because they were rare drops from higher level enemies and RNG is not my friend.
Skipping all the learning time needed might be counter productive. I think selling different tier and set of Mods might be more productive in help new players to enjoy the game more AND learn more of how to effectively use those Mods. Maybe the 60/60s in a set. Maybe the Set Mods in purchasable Sets. Maybe a Basic and Advance set of Crit mods.
This also has advantages of not being 1 large purchase making more accessible to all players. Also, players can choose what Mod packs fit their play style.

[(PSN)PickUpYourJelly]

What if we can send new players a temporary copy of our loadouts to help them progress? 

[Joezone619]

I think we shouldn't have story skip up to the newest update. If we have it, and granted, i don't agree with it, but IF WE MUST, i say only to either "the second dream", or "the chains of harrow". Skipping up the the whispers in the wall will be skipping literally the entire game. Here's what that'll look like.

New player installs game > Story skip > Wtf is going on? > How do i do anything? > Uninstall game > Bad review on (x) platform.

Simply put, you miss too much story, you miss too much gameplay, warframe is not a game that is designed in a way to be able to have a story skip. The story matters, and in any game where the story matters, story skip will always do more harm then good.

[Roble_Viejo]

DE actually deleted the Comments against this. Wow.

[Geihlen]

27 minutes ago, Cerikus said:

Regardless of what I think about it I want to provide feedback about how it should be monetized, if you do it.

The "story pack" cannot be one singular pack with set price.
That would be very VERY bad. It needs to be a special menu in Market, where you can pick and choose which "story stage" and how many of them you want to skip.

I've made a mock up. "In this situation we have a player who completed The second dream and wants to skip The War within and Chains of Harrow only."

Each stage must have it's own price based on the length and difficulty of the quest as well as the items you get from it.

(For example Apostasy prologue should be super cheap, because it's nothing, but New war should cost more, because it's long and gives you Nataruk, Sirocco, Rumblejack and other stuff.)

For returning players, I guess this could work, but what about new players who really just want to play the new thing? You are introducing more choices with no context for what's actually being skipped. If the ultimate goal is onboarding people who are put off by the sheer volume of content they are required to chew through to do the thing shown off in the new trailer, more options just muddies that.

Warframe can be really muddy and confusing as it is, especially when you're new. This solution really just seems like someone would have to google "what's the best story skip to buy" because they'd have no clue. 

All or nothing, which updates what "all" is as we progress with more story quests, seems to me the cleanest option. It needs to be simple, not so expensive (or so in your face) that it is immediately off-putting, but also not so cheap that everyone says "just buy the skip".

If getting in on the new thing gets players into the game, they'll go back and check out the content they skipped, it's not like it isn't there for them to do so.

 

[(PSN)Skytt__]

It's pretty absurd to me that you've identified a problem and this is how you want to start off with the solution:

3 hours ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

Our goals:
- Allow players to use Platinum

 

You already have the technology available via the circuit, just put two buttons on every story mission - play with own gear [requires grind] or play with preset/pre-modded circuit-style loadout [skips grind].  Or you could just have both options skip the grind entirely and they'll get to figure out if their own gear is capable of handling the mission.  Why do we have to have the grind for story missions in the first place?

[Cerikus]

Just now, (NSW)Juraash said:

For returning players, I guess this could work, but what about new players who really just want to play the new thing? You are introducing more choices with no context for what's actually being skipped. If the ultimate goal is onboarding people who are put off by the sheer volume of content they are required to chew through to do the thing shown off in the new trailer, more options just muddies that.

Warframe can be really muddy and confusing as it is, especially when you're new. This solution really just seems like someone would have to google "what's the best story skip to buy" because they'd have no clue. 

All or nothing, which updates what "all" is as we progress with more story quests, seems to me the cleanest option. It needs to be simple, not so expensive (or so in your face) that it is immediately off-putting, but also not so cheap that everyone says "just buy the skip".

If getting in on the new thing gets players into the game, they'll go back and check out the content they skipped, it's not like it isn't there for them to do so.

 

Very good point, but then the question is whether let's say 20 bucks is a good deal, when the price stays the same for "skip only New War" as well as for "skip literally everything after Vor's prize".

Maybe partial skip can be some advanced stuff that't not presented up front, but DE really shoud take into account how much you are skipping.

[Geihlen]

3 minutes ago, Cerikus said:

Very good point, but then the question is whether let's say 20 bucks is a good deal, when the price stays the same for "skip only New War" as well as for "skip literally everything after Vor's prize".

Maybe partial skip can be some advanced stuff that't not presented up front, but DE really shoud take into account how much you are skipping.

That is a good point as well. If you are skipping from a place mid-game, let's say, maybe DE could offer a discount off whatever the base "skip everything" price is. I don't think that would be unfair. Maybe they could roll that tech into deluxe bundles so we could get a deal if we only own a piece of it 😜

20 bucks, or the plat equivalent is pretty close to what I imagine the sweet spot to be. Not so expensive that it's gross, but enough to give someone who has never played a little pause. The plat equivalent is also not so bad that, if the gifting Reb mentioned were put in, that a vet couldn't farm/sell some stuff to be able to gift it to someone they were trying to bring in.

[DojikkoVoidNinja]

 I honestly can't get even remotely interested in committing to the multi-hour quest lockin for The New War or anything beyond it. There are just too many downsides (this would be far too long if I attempted to list them all,) and I don't think a Skip Pack could even begin to adequately address most of them. A platinum cost would likely just add to complaints that the game isn't truly F2P. I think DE will ultimately regret even trying to add a pack of this type. Even the lockin for the much shorter War Within, and the fact some people got their accounts effectively locked for a while due to progstop bugs in it over the years, is already a significant sour point. The New War ramps that up to 11. I have extensively upgraded mechs and a ship, those two aren't even the issues for me - there are so many others.

 

 I think the real solution must come in the form of branching the questline much earlier in the tree like Duviri as the only path forward. Zariman is already FAR too deep in the chain. IMO it should remain an endpoint, never to become a waypoint to even more impractically distant content.

 

 I therefore propose the alternative of severing Whispers from The New War and even The War Within, and instead dropping the requirements to the intro Deimos and Duviri quests as an answer to the problem the Story Pack is supposed to solve, but IMO cannot. I would also recommend avoiding any lockin quests going forward and removing the lockins from The New War and The War Within as a way to make the game more friendly to players. Quest lockins in a live service that has progstop bugs in quests on a fairly regular basis just isn't a winning combination. As it is, if I can't play new content without The New War, I'll just stick to the old content early in the quest chain, and I know a lot of other people who will too. A Story Pack, especially one that costs plat, won't change that, it simply won't effectively exist to me as anything but another disappointment. I feel DE's recent direction regarding quests has often been an evolutionary dead-end that may hurt company and players alike.

 

 Finally, I want to urge DE to be more thoughtful towards busy adult players who don't get a lot of time to game and want to do so as a means to socialize with friends - long solo quests and extensive content prerequisites often drive me and my friends to less-demanding games to socialize over because new content is increasingly just not viable for those purposes. Trying to monetize that artificially created problem instead of fixing it for free is... ahem... likely to backfire and continue to drive us to other games that don't impose it to begin with. It would be nice if Warframe were more practical for that kind of gaming.

[(PSN)rexis12]

It's obvious that the main goal is that so new Players can enjoy the new shiny game mode and tell everyone about it so that they can play as well. And the excuse given that players have time and other commitments that they can spend on Warframe to play through it's game to get to the main quest

But like, say they do. They skip to the Whispers in the Wall quest, they do the cool new story quest.

What now?

They go I to regular Warframe that's all the horrid grind that they skipped just for like 1 hour of unique quest and mechanics that we'll most likely never revisit ever again? Or at best, try to implement in the game ala Archwing, Railjack, Necramech and then have the devs give up after 1 month?

How are you going to say that you are respecting player time investing and commitment to their lives, when these people who most likely pay to play the new quest and then enjoy the rest of the game, get slapped with the 12 Hour wait for each Warframe part and the 3 DAYS WAIT for their main Warframe to be completed?

"Oh you can skip that just fine!"

So what, the main goal is to then attract players that just spend micro-transactions level of money into the game with the Story Skip pack then?

How're you going to respect player commitment and time when things like Nidus, or Khora, or hell even CALIBAN! Grind exists and that's the rest of the game besides just the new quest. You only started implementjng things like Necramech pity systems literally last update ago.

Oh and about the new quest, unless it's all just 1 to 1 Warframe gameplay, then it's also going to give a false image.

Because you TRIED with Duviri and you outright stated that it was a incorrect showing of what the rest of Warframe is like. Why do it again, but this time make it so that you have to pay to get the incorrect showing?

[MagicWhiteRabbit]

This doesn't affect me personally because I'm a veteran and I am completely ready for the WITW to come, but I can understand all of the "whats" and "whys".

I think having such an option could be beneficial but I also understand the concerns it raises among the playerbase. I must agree with Rebecca that skipping trough those quests is kind of a dealbreaker, because you really have to get trough this journey in its full glory and not just "rush for plat" same as you rush things in your Foundry, so here are my thoughts on this matter:

 

I think the best solution to this would be giving the new players an ability to play the story arc of Warframe almost completely separately from the main game. Think of a campaign in a multiplayer game - you play trough the campaign solo and then hop in multiplayer to play with other people - Battlefield, COD and other franchises have done that and it is a pretty successfull formula in my opinion.

I'd even go as far as requiring to play trough the storyline up until the latest quest before accessing the rest of the game. And first and foremost - those quest requirements (MR/gear/whatever else) has to be lifted for the new players so that they can jump straight in and be engulfed by the meaty lore of this game.

And then they are met with a choice, similar to Prime Access:

A complete free-to-play option where they get temporary, pre-built, non-customizable, baseline Railjacks, Necramechs, whatever else is required per quest. Give them blueprint rewards for completing the quests so they can start building their own Railjacks, Necramechs, etc once they've finished the storyline like "Hey congrats on getting trough this story here's your own thing that you can now build and customize to your liking and take it into battle". The rest is up to them - they will still have to farm resources, build them, learn how to use them, etc.

And a paid option - instant access to a fully built Archwing, Archgun, Railjack, Necramech, weapons, etc all complete with a set of basic mods + and maybe even Endo to get them to max rank. So like a "Frame of War pack" thing that sets you up to be ready to tackle the rest of the game.

Upon completion of the storyline both options will still have to complete their Star Charts, gain MR, rank up syndicates and factions, farming, craft/buy other weapons - so this pack isn't disrupting the gameflow and doesn't set them a tier above the free-to-play players.

And the best part of this - once such a system is implemented it is very easy to sustain it in the future - all of the following story of Warframe and its lore can always be accessed by anyone at any point in a coherent progressive path.

[(PSN)rexis12]

I just think it weird that the newest story update in the game, required you to... Play the game to get to it.

Like what?

How does that make sense.

"Hey guys this MMO that's been running for 5 years released a new story update that build up on all the lore that been present in the game."

"Cool, I wanna skip all of it so that I get a completely unrecognizable story beats and reveals that make no sense to me when I play it and also completely dampen the narrative beats of the previous levels when I do."

Like imagine if Whispers in the Wall have you kick Wally in the balls, and then you go into Chains of Harrow and you laugh that this guy is supposed to be threatening. Like what?

[(PSN)MaistBitPollen]

10 years to create not 10 years to complete. Warframe is grindy and if your wanting to pay to skip story you’ll not be around long anyway. There’s loads of things friends can do regardless of mr, the experienced friend can even help catch up. Going to offer planet skips so friends can play steel path also? I see loads of clan chats that don’t even talk about the game because they’ve done everything, I think endgame content should be a priority. 

[Hypernaut1]

I dunno. I'm not against DE making money. I have no reason to believe they'll suddenly turn into evil money grabbing devs.

[JShenobi]

I think that a pay to skip is misguided. The quests themselves, while some could use a little bloat trim (looking at you, Natah) are not some long slog to get through. The larger issue is that you have only one, very in-your-face way to progress the game: the star chart. The star chart and junctions being the gates to the story are what slow folks down getting up to and through the New War, aside from the being-worked-on Necramech and Railjack acquisition. For a new player, after being guided through Vor's Prize, they are dropped in front of Navigation and the only goals immediately apparent to them are unlocking more nodes on the star chart and doing junctions. Aside from occasional voice lines from Lotus saying you have new quests and a fairly ignorable notification in the top right (all the side quests are baked in with these, no way to tell if "Howl of the Kubrow" is important story or not), the game only points you toward its awesome story as junction objectives. This puts a quest as involved and important to the story as Natah on the same level as "complete 5 missions with only your melee equipped."

Proposed solution: Story-focused Mode/Menu
A much better solution would be to have a heavy, in-game focus on the quests. Warframe already has a quest guide (https://www.warframe.com/game/questguide), and honestly if you had a menu that was "Here are the main story quests, in order, you can do these regardless of your star chart progression," then players could get through the story in a relatively digestible manner. It should be something on the level of the navigation screen-- like the Duviri or Railjack buttons on the navigation screen, but more prominent / some other way of ensuring that players see it. Maybe the game defaults to the Main Story menu when you access navigation until you've completed Once Awake, or some other fairly-early mission. Until then, there is still a button to swap to the star chart normally, and afterward you can still swap between the two. The point is to ensure players know and see that there is a lot of awesome main story and how to access it.

The story menu wouldn't unlock new planets and the story quests would not require junction completion to be able to access them. The menu could say whether or not the quest is solo only and convey the "here's kinda where you should be / what to expect on this mission" in the quest selection similar to the quest guide, with a huge first-time tip of "These are the main story quests in order, but you do not need to complete them all at once. If you find yourself struggling in a mission, explore the star chart to gather mods, resources, and blueprints for new weapons and Warframes to strengthen your arsenal before coming back!"

I think this would really help put more of a spotlight on quest progression, and along with some trimming of the fat in certain longer, repetitive quests, as well as streamlining getting a worthwhile amp, a Necramech, and a Railjack, the burden of "10 years of content before I can play with my veteran friend" would be very manageable and remove the 'need' for a skip. Junctions can still keep quests as objectives to unlock as general story-gates, but ideally players will have long completed them by the time they get to that junction.

My new-player anecdote:
I have a friend that I got into Warframe recently (started just after TennoCon), after touting its story. While she was able to get to the Second Dream fairly quickly, a byproduct of that was that she had no idea who the Stalker was. I made sure to covertly divert her to farming some other things before questing up so that she could get invaded a few times. We play friends only usually, so I was able to leave the Stalker up and let her experience the fight instead of him getting one-shot. If you don't particularly farm a boss for a new frame (never get marked), prioritize the story missions, and play public (Shadow insta-dies), you could very well not even know who or what the Stalker is by the time you start this quest. Maybe working him into another quest or something as an introduction to the character would help this.

It helps that I am in the same room playing with her, but there are a lot of times she asks who someone is or if she should know what something is. Everything with Alad V, for the most part (his story is so scattered across the star chart), Teshin showing up during Natah, people talking about the Dax, Tyl Regor's inexplicable sex appeal, etc. are all a mysteries / contextless to her. I steered her away from Deimos for a short while until she got through Second Dream because of the questions that arise with Transference swapping between frame and mech. We haven't got around to getting her a Necramech and RJ, since I advised her to wait for the Abyss of Dagath updates to that process and recipe, but in that time she's gotten much more powerful in mods and arsenal and even got her first Kuva weapon.

The idea that a new player would need to skip to play with a vet is silly. I can and do play SP and Archon Hunts and Zariman bounties, just not with her. If my low-leveled friend and I want to play together, we just play at her level. She wasn't swayed by a trailer for a big story update, so I understand that aspect doesn't apply in this case, but the half-dozen friends I've brought to the game all have been comfy playing at their level and haven't felt like they needed to be where I am to play together.

[Hupkadoo]

Here's my 1-2 cents. Having over a year of play time on steam, I've played enough that I've forgotten many of the quests and what order they come in or how to even do some of them. And for those that want to skip the story and just live the power fantasy I fully understand. In my eyes the quests are just an attempt to have the game make sense. Most of the time in the game isn't playing quests but replaying the "content". In other words, the grind. I'm not so worried about how the operator goes in and out of the frame as much as if they do enough damage. So, making the quests more accessible is a good decision, I think. They've already mostly fixed the content issue with adding lower tier missions that are less rewarding for newer players. As for making quests more accessible to new players, here's what I suggest.

• Make all quests playable at a quickly achievable MR like 2-3 or after the orbiter is mostly unlocked.
• Make quests playable in any order without requirements.
• Give warnings of spoilers etc. as necessary. (similar to the length warning at the new war quest beginning).
• Have a "recommended quest order" in the Codex. Or at least a main story quest order with side quests in any order.
• Give the basic railjack/necramech/archwing/operator/etc. for the player if needed for the mission only (like the deimos nechramechs). Have a simple quick tutorial before mission (yet also skippable in case friends want to teach) on how to use them before a mission that they want to skip. Star chart would still require you to have those to play the nodes those are required on.
• Lock the quest rewards to the star chart junctions that would have been completed as if they had gone through it normally. Maybe this could be something skippable with plat (the grindy part).
• Quests need more difficulty scaling when we use the warframe loadout. I think the quests enemy rank should scale. Some options would be with star chart completion rate or player MR or an option at the beginning to let players choose difficulty level would probably be easiest to implement. Like in the case of the New War, I had a harder time when I wasn't in operator or warframe using Khal and Veso since they were not modded etc. The sirocco amp was more difficult as well as it did not have the same power as a normal amp.

If you're gonna do it, take the time do it right. With the way content is currently tied to progression, I think it is a good idea to separate them. Content should be accessible at any time, but progression should not be skippable. I think the story quests should be a demo of "power" until it is unlocked through progression in MR/star chart/"grind".

Edited October 28, 2023 by Hupkadoo