Warframe is a game held back by how easy it is

[Tiltskillet]

1 minute ago, KitMeHarder said:

So it sounds more like you want to play pretend at being a Badass more than you really want to be one.

Who wants to tell Kit that all badassery in Warframe is pretend? :P

 

[CosoMalvadoNG]

In short, the reason the game is so easy is the players themselves who do not accept anything that is outside of their current broken thing. The developers have given us things with a certain level of difficulty but they have ended them by nerfing them, due to the complaints of the whiners on duty and despite the redundancy, the whiners are mostly those who ask for difficulty to.

Edited August 2 by CosoMalvadoNG

[Helverin]

This is yet another "you" problem. Min-maxing the current meta and taking the best cheese available for a certain task make things easy. Guess that's the idea behind it. 

You want skillchecks? Wrong type of game. The way warframes and enemies move, while quite agile is also very clumsy and far from precise. What you want would require a rework of the whole game and that's not happening. To be fair, DE tried to build in some challenges which can't be nuked that easily.

Mainly Orbs and 60 eyes (if you don't follow the hardcore meta archons too). And these things can kill. At least if you choose to actively engange and not just picking "invincible prime xy". Or maybe I feel the difficulty more because I usually stick to solo mode.

[PublikDomain]

DE's been doing a pretty decent job with this recently. Every new quest and new zone that comes along inches a little bit higher in difficulty, and content like the Labs and EDA have been really successful. DE's not getting there in the most direct way, but it's happening nonetheless.

And for those saying "it'll never happen DE's decided to cater to a different audience"... SP? Arbitrations? Sorties? 60-Eyes? EDA? Raids? In a recent interview Reb/Megan said cooperative content like Raids was DE's "white whale". "We just gotta see when it fits in. But we do have ideas for it, and we want to bring it back. We want it to feel like what Warframe represents now and not go back to what it was. So, yeah, it's a big project." "The thing we miss most about them is having to coordinate with the team. That's our white whale right now. It's a coordination-based mission." DE is constantly adding this kind of content and has been for years.

Edited August 2 by PublikDomain

[Kaiga]

17 minutes ago, Helverin said:

This is yet another "you" problem. Min-maxing the current meta and taking the best cheese available for a certain task make things easy.

Weapons and content that trivialize the game are easily available without very much minmaxing or meta slaving.

tonkor/zarr are easy builds. Revenant and gauss are cheap. This is a symptom of people not wanting challenges to overcome.

Edited August 2 by Kaiga

[(PSN)Lollybomb]

Well, on the one hand we have people complaining that level 9999 enemies are too easy.
On the other hand we recently wrapped up an event where people complained endlessly that avoiding a slow moving spotlight was too hard for them.

You can't win, and DE has decided that it's better to appeal to a wider audience with easy gameplay than a small audience with hard gameplay.

[MrInubis]

5 minutes ago, Kaiga said:

Weapons and content that trivialize the game are easily available without very much minmaxing or meta slaving.

tonkor/zarr are easy builds. Revenant and gauss are cheap. This is a symptom of people not wanting challenges to overcome.

Its not like i dont want them, i dont want them IN THIS GAME. Thats not why i play it in the first place. If this game was challenging i wouldnt be playing it, i would go back to PoE or any Souls game. I play warframe exactly because its power fantasy and its easy. I suck at shooters in general (i played warframe, borderlands and mass effect, thats all of them!) and i wouldnt be touching this one if i couldnt just mow down mobs. I wanted a chill game, i found one, go find yourself other game instead of changing this one.

[(XBOX)Graysmog]

Why would you try to appeal to a handful of people when you could appeal to a much larger group of people? 

Folks in general dislike harder content, and I imagine it's why Raids aren't coming anytime soon. The game really isn't being held back at all by being relatively easy. 

The game is more held back by the awful new player experience and very confusing sense of progression. This game is old and has a TON of content, so it's intimidating and hard to engage with on a small scale. 

Hard content should still be made of course for veteran players, but it's definitely not the priority and never should be considering it's not going to appeal to most people. Veterans don't make up 90% of the playerbase, despite what some people believe.

[Venus-Venera]

Gerade eben schrieb (XBOX)Graysmog:

Why would you try to appeal to a handful of people when you could appeal to a much larger group of people? 

Folks in general dislike harder content, and I imagine it's why Raids aren't coming anytime soon. The game really isn't being held back at all by being relatively easy. 

The game is more held back by the awful new player experience and very confusing sense of progression. This game is old and has a TON of content, so it's intimidating and hard to engage with on a small scale. 

Hard content should still be made of course for veteran players, but it's definitely not the priority and never should be considering it's not going to appeal to most people. Veterans don't make up 90% of the playerbase, despite what some people believe.

the company only has the statistics. so I don't want to make up numbers out of thin air.
and cash brings new players because old players have enough platinum. so when it comes to the company's survival, it's still about new players.

[(PSN)Pablogamer585]

I don't understand?

You saw a trailer where a solo Rhino is playing on the PoE, making full use of his arsenal and say that's a game you'd like to play, yet complain that pub lobbies are filled with meta spam. Why don't you play that same game the trailer showcases? It clearly was something you liked, so why not play like that?
You know that you can play like that, on solo, using covers and abilities, without having to be bothered by people around you not playing as you want them to.
But do you actually want to?

In many weeks straight playing Warframe every day I've only found one Slam&Spam Wukong, didn't know about those until I saw a thread complaining about it and found a player doing so the next day or so, and about 1 or 2 Thermal Sunder spammers, but they were on high level missions and not using TS properly - lol, if only they knew -, barely doing a thing in contrast to the rest of the squad...

So, correct me if I'm wrong but you're complaining that the random public multiplayer experience of 4 cool af "space ninjas" - might need to modernise this slogan honestly - isn't like that of a solo who is playing as they've chosen to? Sort of makes sense.

Saying there's no threat to the survival of the player is an understatement.
On most regular missions you're not at risk of getting killed that easily, but there's a good amount of nodes or situations that beg to digress, as can be for example SP Void Cascade fissures, SP max alert Fortuna, or Void Storms where you simply get overwhelmed with damage from every side & angle, so you just gotta keep using your tools to survive, and it gets, brutal(ly annoying).
That is a threat to my survival even if my damaging capabilities are good enough to get rid of enemies in short, which is sort of the intention after all.
I don't play to have to soak a single enemy in multiple mags of my weapons when they 1 shot every of my defences at high enough level.
Is that difficulty to you? It sure isn't for me, it's just unfairness.

Shooting a rocket launcher at everything isn't quite good either, the rocket launchers in WF are meh at best even if with x amount of buffs they get 'good enough' to be bearable for harder missions, but on their own they are first; ugly, second; not worth it compared to plenty of other options.

 

I really liked the Fragmented one special fight.
My defences are constantly being downed, my abilities being shut down, and my weapons if they were not incarnon to have limitless ammo, I wouldn't be able to complete the missions because of the severe damage check that boss is. But I wasn't surviving out of picking my nose, clearly the Revenants who didn't make it were not, it was because I was looking at the boss' attacks, had to pay attention, it kept me engaged, it was intense, somewhat difficult as well.

We even have gotten enemies as of recently that are easier to destroy by hitting weakpoints than sheer brute force, and doing so is actually rewarding (Culverins), or other enemies with mechanics already exist from before (Knoxes, Saxums, Undying Flyers), but they aren't everywhere.

Therefore, allow me to ask, what is difficulty for you?
It doesn't seem to relate to mission mechanical difficulty since what you're complaining about is certain things trivialising a part of the objectives.

What is the lack of that difficulty holding back Warframe from?
No seriously, outside of Soulslikes I haven't really heard from many games where the most important point is them being difficult.

Why do you want that difficulty in Warframe?
To feel better about your own skills and knowledge? That I can respect.
To have a challenge on a game you're already comfortable playing? That is understandable.
To, punish those meta setups that you do not like? Not sure if that'd be the correct thing.

The 'funny patriotic game' on max levels feels quite the same as high tier missions in Warframe, from playing both, but in Warframe I can rely more on myself than on random stuff that falls out of my control, and I don't feel forced onto a set of things that are meta because most of the rest is bad.
^{We have lots of bad tools regardless but there's also a massive amount of good ones}

I'm pretty happy doing what I'd consider tougher missions often, for I have the knowledge and an extensively modded arsenal that I can take nearly anywhere, mix & matching with themed setups, so I don't quite agree with your arguments.
But difficulty is in the eye of the beholder, so that's just my opinion.

 

_{Hey you, want to know how to make the strongest Thermal Sunder ever? Spamming it isn't actually the best option!}
^{Follow me to this little section:}

Spoiler

Did you know that Gauss' Thermal Sunder is quite special?

Enemies that are affected by cold with get blasted if you cast a hot sunder, same happens if you do the opposite on enemies affected by heat.
Cold or heat don't have to come from your Thermal Sunder, they can be from your weapons, companions or even teammates!
Now, the damage of the Blast proc from TS scales off some factors, one of them being how many procs are affecting an enemy, cold is limited, heat is not.

Would you believe if I told you that I hit a 325k Blast proc from using a cold Sunder just once?
No previous spamming or silly annoying stuff for my team, no viral, no damage debuffs, not even with Redline active on a fully stripped enemy, nah, just, casting a 40% strength Thermal Sunder, cracking a cold one pretty much.

I bestow upon ye this knowledge, now go experiment and do some funny Warcrimes with Gauss (Or Ember, wink wink) as I like to.

 

[KitMeHarder]

4 hours ago, Tiltskillet said:

Who wants to tell Kit that all badassery in Warframe is pretend? :P

So a pretend of a pretend, even worse. :p

And when I said "more than you want to be one", I didn't mean we actually literally achieved it. I meant people with the later mindset more accurately portray what a true badass would be like. Regardless, I was making a joke at the OP's expense as I couldn't past up such a good opportunity. But I do think a true Badass wouldn't need to "take cover", especially against grunt Grineer like I assume that trailer had.

I have more nuanced thoughts on this topic, but I have literally responded to so many of these threads that I'm kinda over it for the time being.

[Tiltskillet]

1 minute ago, KitMeHarder said:

I have more nuanced thoughts on this topic, but I have literally responded to so many of these threads that I'm kinda over it for the time being.

Yeah, same. 

[Pakaku]

5 hours ago, Prof-Dante said:

A better alternative to the silly suggestions above, is to do what I do and use old time, non meta, or gimmicky weapons and try to maximize them to the absolute.

make thematic builds that usually wouldn't work but somehow do.

 

for example, I finally crafted Aklex Prime, let me tell you, it's really weak...but I am enjoying how much I am trying to make it work.

Not sure why the modless idea is less valid than this idea, when both accomplish the same thing. Weak weapons are the limit when it comes to maxing them with mods, and strong weapons give you more room to run weaker or less mods. Both involve working within limits, it just differs in approach.

[Voltage]

What "holds Warframe back" is actually a very complex issue. It's not clear cut like "Oh it's all Steve!!!!" or "Game2Easy!!!". It's a woven fabric between the playerbase, Digital Extremes' design choices, and how each party nurtures each other in different content as well as their expectations for the game. My attempt at boiling this down into a more concise statement is that Warframe is held back because it caters to Warframe players instead of expanding to be a successful game within the context of games who are competitors. Look no further than Soulframe and its perception outside of Warframe's community. Now, this does not mean that Warframe would suddenly be good or better by trying to cater to everybody. What it means is that Warframe focuses on an existing playerbase that is coddled to behave a certain way and is actively rewarded in a positive feedback loop from the continuation of said behavior rather than focusing on how the game would branch success past the established community. As an example, people looking to get into a game with an established endgame and a polished progression system will not enjoy Warframe, as the game caters to the existing playerbase that has a vocal majority that do not like progression or a gated endgame due to words like "toxic", "elitist", "forced", "accessible", etc. Warframe expects you to create your own goals as a player that are arbitrary in nature but self-fulfilling if you enjoy the base content. There is hardly anything worth owning that is only acquired by a subset of dedicated players that you're urged to work towards as you progress the many systems the game offers.

The game's lack of "challenge" resides in the understanding of fundamental mechanics and potential synergies through creative modding. Almost every difficulty a player will face is overcome through the Arsenal, not moment to moment gameplay or combat (with the exception of some mastery of movement and combat such as parkour or certain chained attacks).

I read many of these comments, and I just think they are missing the mark unintentionally. Everyone has their biases of what to focus on, but the base discussion of this topic is a much larger scope than "challenge" or "difficulty". It's one of the modern era of Warframe's community and how they interact with the game and the developers. It's no singular problem, but a fundamental way the game is handled and played by its players and developers alike. That creates an awesome game with a very "in the trenches approach" from developer's taking feedback, but this comes at the cost of growth.

5 hours ago, Fallopia said:

You can always run around with MK1 weapons if game is to easy.

5 hours ago, Venus-Venera said:

or remove all mods. There are countless opportunities for "challenges"

5 hours ago, Waeleto said:

Feel free to go solo with unmodded Rhino and mk1 weapons

Do the people who make this "counter-argument" (and I use quotations because only the people saying it see any substance here) hear themselves when they regurgitate this? Playing a looter shooter, a genre whos main attraction is the volume of gear acquired as you play, for hundreds, thousands, if not tens of thousands of hours with intentionally weak gear just to feel substance and reaction from enemy units is the blatant omission that the game is flawed. Telling a player who is disgruntled with unbalanced gameplay to throw away their vast time spent in gear optimization is a ludicrous request. You may as well tell them in the same breath that they should play a different game where your gear has more weight in your loadout (which instills to the reader that Warframe is a worse game for not having much weight in your loadout choices).

I love this game, but there is such severe imbalances now within our Arsenal that in many cases you not lose appreciation from many gear choices, but your choices often feel insignificant because your ability to overcome the mission is several magnitudes above the mission requirements. And no, you don't have to be playing Saryn Prime with Torid Incarnon to experience this dilemma. 

Edited August 3 by Voltage

[Pakaku]

4 minutes ago, Voltage said:

Telling a player who is disgruntled with unbalanced gameplay to throw away their vast time spent in gear optimization is a ludicrous request.

You have loadout slots you can pick between, and it's not the end of the world to choose a weaker/handicapped build for when you want to give yourself more of a challenge. You're not permanently bound to weaker builds or throwing anything away, and you have the option to go back to whatever max builds you worked towards when you feel like it's necessary.

Handicapping yourself is also much easier than holding out on the devs for any fixes to the flaws in the game, assuming those flaws will ever be considered in the first place. You already know who this game is catering to, after all

[Voltage]

Just now, Pakaku said:

You have loadout slots you can pick between, and it's not the end of the world to choose a weaker/handicapped build for when you want to give yourself more of a challenge. You're not permanently bound to weaker builds or throwing anything away, and you have the option to go back to whatever max builds you worked towards when you feel like it's necessary.

Handicapping yourself is also much easier than holding out on the devs for any fixes to the flaws in the game, assuming those flaws will ever be considered in the first place. You already know who this game is catering to, after all

There's a huge difference between bringing off-meta weapons and intentionally choosing unmodded or universally recognized garbage options. Also, it's gotten so silly that installing Incarnon Adapters on the respective Mk1 weapons they can be applied to makes them suddenly usable to blast through most enemies in the game. You have to intentionally enjoy pain and wasting your own time as a player when you understand modding and such to deal an amount of damage that actually struggles in most relevant content. 

I'm not against the idea of players choosing to handicap themselves, I'm against the notion of trying to use that as an argument towards someone else's complaints about the game's balance shortcomings. I don't really agree with OP entirely (as I wrote above), but telling them to take unmodded or junk items at their stage of the game is asinine. Kahl's Break Narmer missions were made intentionally irrelevant after the one-time rewards on purpose for this exact reason. Gameplay like this goes against the very grain of Warframe, and for most people, it's not even remotely fun to think about, let alone play this way.

[0_The_F00l]

5 hours ago, Tiltskillet said:

Who wants to tell Kit that all badassery in Warframe is pretend? :P

 

Nah , some people pretend so hard that they forget they are pretending.

[(PSN)slightconfuzzled]

Warframe is a game thats held back by being Warframe.

Why are you watching ads for a dead game anyways? Should be watching the Youtube videos insisting that Warframe is dead from 5 years ago. Its not like you can have a honest or nuanced conversation about the game on the Forums with all the white knights around trying to take away your freedom of speech for simply disagreeing with them over their precious pretty video game (which is long dead, they just don't realise it yet, but the numbers don't lie). 

[DrivaMain]

DE has embraced the “braindead power-fantasy” playstyle. DE only shut down things if its either. :

• Too disruptive to others. Come to think of it, I believe DE will address the Wukong Slam issue like they did with the Kuva Zarr twin spam.
• Automates the game too much.

I gave up on hoping DE to add meaningful challenge. The challenge-phobic casual majority are their cash-cows. DE, at the end of the day, is a company. They are not our friends, they want our hard-earned money. If you want challenge, create one for yourself. Warframe’s freedom of player choice makes it possible.

[ReddyDisco]

On the contrary, this game thrives for over 10 years because of how chill and relaxed it is. it a f2p looter shooter, and not made to be difficult, i don't play this game for difficulty, it's a way for me to relax. if i want to be abused by bosses and environment 24/7 i would play Elden Ring, which i do regularly. 

[Xzorn]

The deviation between 'normal content' and difficulty started back with Damage 2.0 + Survival release which was 2013.

Technically it was there before but Defense was the only mission that scaled and was usually cheesed to keep the objective alive.

Damage 2.0 itself was a reset of difficulty in that a level 40 enemy in 2.0 was equal to 100 in Damage 1.0. On release of 2.0 we still managed level 80-100. Keep in mind in the same system, some 2 years later in power creep Sorties were announced as 'end-game content'. At that point the parse for a Solo run on any frame was at least level 300. This gap continued until Enemy Damage Scaling was nerf'd at which point I quit playing because of that change.

Now that enemies don't scale exponentially in defense the min/max stats and skill factor of high levels were simplified to "Just don't die".
The original flaw in design was damage ramp for both players and enemies which caused AoE CC and tunnel camping meta.

I often wonder if they had toned down damage and AoE CC back then. What sorta game would we have now?

[Alpha_Tango]

EDA is your fix. Just do 37 point runs as your real "flex." 

I know people are still torn up this exists but it is the closest thing we have for a real challenge in this game.

[RichardKam]

16小时前 , Kaiga 说:

I watched an ad for warframe today.

It showed a rhino battling up the stairs in a tusk plains base, jumping, hitting shots, taking cover, using abilities, finishing enemies, and generally being a space bada$$ in every sense of the word.

Well heck I'd play that game. 

But actual in game warframe?

Slam kong thermal sunder, 24/7. Aoe explosions fill the map. 

There is no threat to the survival of the player, no reason to even remember what the enemies do or even look like, as they're obliterated in seconds by nukes.

Why do any of that cool space ninja stuff from the ad when you can just shoot a rocket launcher at everything?

If this game had even a modicum of difficulty at higher levels, it would be capable of all that combat depth, which is what's being advertised, obviously.

Rhino obliterating enemies: good

Thermal sunder obliterating enemies: bad

Subsume Rhino thermal sunder obliterating enemies: ???

[Slayer-.]

It sounds like you were playing public in the Asia region servers. lol

It can sometimes get pretty bad between the Bramma Bow and Thermal Sunder to play a low-level mission where the enemies die from bullet jumping past them. 

[Venus-Venera]

vor 3 Stunden schrieb Xzorn:

The deviation between 'normal content' and difficulty started back with Damage 2.0 + Survival release which was 2013.

Technically it was there before but Defense was the only mission that scaled and was usually cheesed to keep the objective alive.

Damage 2.0 itself was a reset of difficulty in that a level 40 enemy in 2.0 was equal to 100 in Damage 1.0. On release of 2.0 we still managed level 80-100. Keep in mind in the same system, some 2 years later in power creep Sorties were announced as 'end-game content'. At that point the parse for a Solo run on any frame was at least level 300. This gap continued until Enemy Damage Scaling was nerf'd at which point I quit playing because of that change.

Now that enemies don't scale exponentially in defense the min/max stats and skill factor of high levels were simplified to "Just don't die".
The original flaw in design was damage ramp for both players and enemies which caused AoE CC and tunnel camping meta.

I often wonder if they had toned down damage and AoE CC back then. What sorta game would we have now?

back then it was about trinity/necros macro spam and saryn nuke + frost bubble (optimal). because auras didn't exist back then and I would have to constantly click on enemies (come on...). so absolutely miserable way of playing. I camped for hours back then. but we were in voice with people from France and Britain. otherwise I would never have taken part in the nonsense. especially because there were no rewards.