"Making the Game More Fun"

[Nexecute]

This premise can come off as arrogant. I'm not a game designer and I have my own preferences. Some aspects of the game are likely boring by design, being a pay-to-skip MMO.

I've got over 6k Steam hours, though less than 2k mission hours. How much of that was spent having fun? How much of that was addiction, having been conditioned to trudge through repetitive content in pursuit of a massive number of various shiny rewards, hoping they might spice things up? Most of which I'm left with no reason to ever use. Repetition is expected of an MMO. What enabled me to stick to it was the gameplay being great at the most fundamental level: the movement, the gunplay, melee and special abilities. Even when you're forced to wait on wave defence, you can at least spam manoeuvres to keep yourself stimulated.

Warframe is most fun in the beginning, then gets exponentially more boring, relying on you developing a reward-driven mindset. To begin with, you have reason to use everything at your disposal. As you progress, you become more adept with your arsenal, yet at the same time, this becomes less relevant, as you supplement the need for input and engagement with stronger gear. At first, you might obtain a weapon stronger than anything else in your possession, encouraging you to default to it the vast majority of the time. Later into the game, you'll have specialist frames that dumb down specific mission types. Titania forfeits your variety of manoeuvres for an unengaging, spectator-mode style of flight. Wukong provides this same style of flight alongside invisibility and immunity to laser detection. Numerous frames can press a single button to nuke enemies through walls without any downtime. You are both enabled and actively incentivised to optimise the game's repetitive content to require as little time and input as possible.

There is so much I would change, but for now I could at least see this being a realistic addition:

 

1. Non-AoE weapons could have access to a mod that, on headshot/weakpoint kill, spreads a portion of the damage dealt to surrounding enemies. The lower the fire rate, the larger the radius, within reason. This way, players that have a preference for precision weapons won't be so heavily discouraged from using them in favour of more crowd-effective weapons and abilities.

 

Less realistically:

Incorporate more meaningful enemy variants. What if there was an enemy variant that had a TTK limit unless melee was incorporated in your attack against them? You wouldn't be dependent on your melee's damage output, only needing to incorporate it to ignore the enemy's TTK limit. What if there were other variants with this same feature; one with primary/secondary damage as its criteria, and another requiring ability damage (excluding weapon buffs)? Collectively, these variants would incentivise a variety of attacks, rather than defaulting to any one thing in an unengaging way. I - would - also suggest enemy variants with access to true lethality, such as slow-charging sniper shots that misfire when you break line of sight, or massive delayed AoEs that force you to actively reposition. However, being a power fantasy MMO, I doubt suddenly reviving the threat of death would be well received.

I also believe adding cooldowns to certain abilities, particularly high-impact AoEs, would make for far more balanced and engaging gameplay, but I understand this is a well-cemented part of the game's identity.

Edited September 3 by Nexecute

[Voltage]

8 minutes ago, Nexecute said:

Titania forfeits the variety of manoeuvres that otherwise have the game shine, supplementing them with an unengaging, spectator-mode style of flight.

I've been saying this for years.

[DigitalCielo]

15 hours ago, Nexecute said:

1. Non-AoE weapons could have access to a mod that spreads a portion of damage dealt to a single enemy on headshot/weakpoint kill to surrounding enemies. The lower the fire rate, the larger the radius, within reason. This way, players that have a preference for precision weapons aren't so heavily discouraged from using them in favour of more crowd-effective weapons and abilities.

Pretty sure this is what Mark for Death is for. Unfortunately Warframe abilities are way more valuable

[Nexecute]

On 2024-09-03 at 6:48 PM, DigitalCielo said:

Pretty sure this is what Mark for Death is for. Unfortunately Warframe abilities are way more valuable

Problem is Mark for Death needs to be cast prior to every attack. diluting the gunplay with constant interruptions. If choosing a precision weapon out of preference, Mark for Death ultimately defeats the purpose.

Edited September 4 by Nexecute