Jade Shadows long feedback

[MaximumCake]

After playing the quest on release, I’ve mulled over my reaction to it and a few of the responses from the community. I normally never ever ever contribute to discussion in games or media, but I’ve been disappointed with the quality of storytelling in a lot of media I consume in recent years, and I’d like to at least put in my 2 cents for this story. A lot of this is very general and I’m no famous writer myself, but I wouldn’t expect the devs to read my comments and say “Yes, we’ll remake the quest to have this exact plot point!” anyway.

To start with positives: I did appreciate the use of operator dialogue in the quest. It was a little odd not to have it in previous ones, so it was a pleasant surprise. I also enjoyed the writing and voice acting for Hunhow specifically, it gave him a nice gravitas while maintaining his air of mystery.

However, I did take issue with some aspects of the new content that I’ve seen echoed a few times, so I thought I’d share them since they’re signs of a larger issue in the storytelling aspects of Warframe.

First and foremost, the pacing and dialogue for this quest appeared very rushed. For a quest that centers around the very personal topics of childbirth and death, we do not see a lot of setup when it comes to connecting to these characters and building their history prior to the big reveal. Because it is treated as a surprise, we also finish the quest a bit bewildered (did I just play a childbirth minigame??) and without connection that could have been established by making her condition known more gently. I found a lot of the actual written dialogue to be a little silly, perhaps because the speed of escalation/resolution for each element of the story (e.g., the Stalker sneaks onto the ship somehow, we immediately help after threat) exacerbated the “this isn’t how a human would react” feeling. The dialogue fading to a 2 second cutscene and back to dialogue also felt a little whiplash-y and seemed like great places for us to go out and do something as an operator instead of getting the bare minimum of lore (some kind of magical warframe mindscape where we interact with some element of past Jade/Stalker as characters would have been cool!). Because this setup and these connections are missing, it also makes many of the event dialogues about Jade (and our attachment to her) during missions and with Ordis feel shallow, despite their variety and writing making them feel a little higher quality otherwise. I would have liked to see more dialogue work done to set up reveals and something to give us more space between each story point such as a mission where we discover something relevant to the story (i.e., history of the Stalker + Jade), on top of a little more fleshed out conversations.

Second, I believe that while it is important to include the whole of human experience in our storytelling, especially for those underrepresented groups, the topic of pregnancy and childbirth specifically is one that should be treated with care. Two of the polar reactions I’ve seen a few dozen times now are some variant of 1. “It was so good I cried” / “Beautiful” / “I gave birth and this is great” and 2. “This reminds me of trauma” / “I am really uncomfortable” / “I gave birth and this is awful.” I won’t say whether I agree with either one, but it’s obvious to me that some more care should have been taken to introduce this topic if it was truly a necessary thing, and perhaps it should have been vetoed altogether considering the severity of the negative reactions that aren’t just standard gamer “ugh, adventurous topics and women bad.” To treat one of the more personal and intense moments of human life as a surprise reveal with a minigame doesn’t quite sit well with me, all opinions of whether this fits in the Warframe story aside. To further have the image of that person carrying a child memorialized in an organic body-horror machine crafted for War and actively participating in combat has also come across as a bit distasteful to me and others.  

Third, I have some more personal taste things that didn’t really go down so well for me when it came to the story itself. As other players have discussed the treatment of Jade solely as a mother who dies for male character development, I won't get into that, but I didn’t really enjoy it either.

Some players, myself included, were hoping this would be more of a peek into the Stalker’s history that builds on some of the flavor text and main questline elements that mention him, such as his past role, why he is the way he is, or some personal story pre-fall of the Orokin. Of course, a full explanation wasn't expected, but at least some pieces would have been nice. Instead, we got entirely new stuff. Making new stories isn’t inherently bad, however it’s not why I, and I expect many other players, were looking forward to a quest on the in-game mythos of the Stalker. This is just personal taste though, so their choice to tell another story is not something I necessarily have issue with (besides being a bit misleading). However, I believe the perception of the Stalker as a mysterious villain figure with an intriguing past was a bit damaged with this quest. An important part of maintaining mystery (and thus boost the boogeyman vibes) is to limit direct engagement with a character (i.e., no driving him around to reveal he completes his spy missions one leg at a time just like the Tenno and seeing his single-word dialogues at home). A better way to keep this kind of character intact is well displayed in the treatment of Hunhow during this quest and others, as he is still imposing and has unknowable depths, but still reflects humanity. I believe our view of the Stalker could have been maintained if we explored his story and motivations from a different perspective, such as chasing him as our Operator through his escapades as the Corpus did, only to uncover history and mystery before we eventually aid him.

One can interpret the happenings of the story as a forbidden child resulting in punishment by transformation into Warframes as has happened with others (and being spared the Jade Light or something). This is fine, doesn’t explain the Stalker’s motivations, but works as a story. Adding the forbidden child as a new element of the world seems like a mistake to me, perhaps because they don’t sit well in the tragedy of Warframes or the Tenno-centric storytelling, but also because it’s some crazy body horror to have a child transformed this way. To have that child in the hands of a dude that’s kinda not a good guy seems wack, but it’s all so crazy that I really don’t have much to comment about any potential Warframe-baby spinoff quests.

Lastly, I believe that the Jade Light doesn't fit well narratively as an opponent to us outside of a specific scenario, either in a cutscene or as a feature in a mission that poses immense threat but has limited scope and mobility. The Jade Light is a significant piece of lore that comes up thus far with regard to serious punishment by high Orokin authority and not necessarily as a tool for wide dissemination. In my interpretation (from the Leverian, quests, Cephalon Simaris), it appears as a serious ceremonial display of power and a means for execution with unquestionable finality (or one time as a singular portable weapon used by a very powerful enemy with similar effect). Perhaps I’m misunderstanding, but dialogue could be implying that Jade is the source for the Jade Light, which I don’t super enjoy, but whatever. If not, it’s a bit lame that this lore piece was co-opted to stick on a Warframe and some Eximus units. In either case, to see it added onto Eximus units as a color change and relatively weak laser beam makes it feel cheap and insignificant given that context, even if we can explain it away by saying that it's a poorly understood technology weakened by placing it on mass produced units. As it is now, it’s a decent bit of visual clutter that I shrug off. To match how it has thus far been described, the Jade Light should be a singular emerald flash of annihilation, terrifying to behold.

 

This is all just to say that I believe Warframe has a really interesting world built with neat little tidbits everywhere, but some extra care and review of the actual dialogue and interactions might go a long way when filling in the gaps between the smaller lore pieces. For this quest in particular, it seems as if the heavy emotional impact it might impart is weakened both by the fact that we (and the Stalker) are murder machine vigilantes, and that the context and dialogue for the quest were weakly established and too fast paced. I also think that the development of the game as a series of minigames / gamemodes sometimes doesn’t mesh as well with storytelling, especially when trying to co-opt old lore elements into new widespread mechanics (such as the Jade Light), but hopefully we see more quality content encapsulate the older lore in the future.

Edited Monday at 08:12 PM by MaximumCake
forgot a point oops