First Impressions

[DeadEyeDeale]

So this is Day 3 of my playing Warframe, and I'm enjoying it enough to start looking at the forums (and that Founders program). I had the game recommended to me, and knew almost nothing about it.

I wanted to give some first impressions from my handful of hours playing (8 or 9). I hope this is entertaining, but also useful to DE as they probably don't get a lot of new blood yet (being Closed Beta).

I started with the Volt. I love electric powers and was leary of the 'Advanced Play' note about the Loki. In hindsight, I probably should have taken the Loki. Ah well.

My first level I went solo thinking I'd take my time to get a feel for things. I didn't expect nor quickly realize that enemy forces were infinite. I'd killed nearly 100 Grineer from a fixed position before, out of ammo and power, I went down swinging. It was a good death.

The way the game brings enemies in waves, sometimes trickling and sometimes pouring in together from one or more entries - had me totally thrown. I thought I was hold up in a great place, depleting the ship of its defenders. So I applaud DE on making enemy arrival varied and fairly natural.

I knew things would be rocky starting off. It took me one more try to realize: I was playing an infiltrator/agent/operative/ninja-thing.

I began running, sprinting, mixing melee into my fights - and then I realized: this game is fluid.

I can move, look, move and look in different directions at the same time, dive, climb, duck, slide, roll, and generally ninja my way around the environment with ease. More than just movement, I can switch between melee, powers (I took the Volt), and gunplay - or more precisely, I can use them all together. And it's so much fun.

Once I started focusing on completing the mission, and not trying to exhaust the entire Human Empire all in one go - things improved!

Instead of trying to fight from fixed positions, I started moving around rooms, forcing enemies to either reposition or engage me. I mixed sword, gun, and lightning to great effect. With ambushes, guerilla tactics, and hit-and-run strategies I cut a path through the ship. Sometimes you need to kill everyone. Sometimes you need to sprint away.

Playing those first two levels I knew this game was going to be good when I saw just how well the AI enemies were reacting to me. Sometimes they freaked and ran for cover, other times they just grouped up and advanced in the open, trying to overwhelm me. Sometimes they coordinated, and othertimes they fell out of sync as a unit.

I felt like the AI was both trying to develop a reasonable strategy, and also roleplay the human soldiers somewhat "realistically" rather than just be a chess machine with pawns. Either way, I've yet to think of the Grineer as mindless waves of soldiers - and if those Saw-men didn't make so much noise then their ambushes would be terrifying.

While I'm not far in yet, I would like to see the Infested use some more clever tactics once the game is further along. Their bulk forces can be as zergy as they can - and it's great fun. But if the Ancients weren't so tough they'd seem trivial.

I'm wondering if some of you are laughing and thinking "just wait till you get to X". If so, then I'm looking forward to it.

This game takes all the fun of combined powers+gunplay in a cooperative, objective based game and combines it with extreme mobility and proceedurally generated levels, adds equipment, EXP, and mods - and manages to keep it action packed, stylish, and fun. And I've been having a blast.

Now for some feedback on some of the difficulties I have had.

Public Play

After the first two missions, I switched back to Public. I noticed that many players were simply... sprinting... through the entire level... at top speed. Maybe they're farming/grinding new equipment and the starting levels are easy to skip through? Maybe they just realized they needed to be at work 2 hours ago? Maybe they are impatient? This was frustrating enough that I ended up completing Mercury Solo before giving Public play another try on Saturn.

Being left in the dust while I was still trying to figure out how waypoints and multi-level maps worked was not fun. Much more difficult was when the person would run off and die, and I had to cut a path through half-dead commandos as I tried to catch up. Perhaps I just had bad luck of the draw. Players I've met further into the game have been a blast, and most are good team mates.

What I would have preferred was a way to perhaps only play with other low-level/new players at first. Sure, I did learn some slick moves from watching other, more veteraned players - but it didn't outweight the frustration of other people soloing an entire level while in a party. I felt like I was missing something. Probably the entire level...

Now I exercise my discretion - I ask people to chill out and stick together if I see them consistently 2 rooms ahead of the team, or I leave and find another party. And I must say, it is easy to move in and out of games - and leaving one early on carries no penalty, unlike many other games.

Wall-Running

The first time I found a portion of the environment with wall-running I was stuck for maybe 10 minutes. Running straight up was more intuitive -> the wall was brightly lit compared to its surroundings and had a clearly visible walkway above it which very obviously was otherwise inaccessible. The wall also happened to be marked with white paint, which I have concluded is a visual hint present on all the other wall-running surfaces.

However, it was running horizontally across a chasm that stumped me. I saw a zip-line, and spent a few minutes getting up to it only to find it was the end, not the beginning. I wrongly concluded that "maybe I could access the area from the other side, and this was a quick return for extraction - circular level design is good practice"

Well, when I did finally bite the bullet and try using the wall, it went like this: Oh-god-oh-god-mash the sprint and forward key down-slap space bar-ohno-ohno- oh. I'm running on the wall. THIS IS AWESOME!

In addition, I loved that falling into the terrible abyss does nothing at all - except place you back where you were before falling. If you goof up a jump - hit the wrong button, or lag out - you do not insta-die without hope of revive. You just 'poof' and get to try it again. Excellent!

Certain player interractions were confusing

Reviving was striaght forward enough: the little 'Hold X to revive' prompt comes up. Okay, the bar fills up, okay I can see this happening. Cool, person X is now standing up and the flashing red message has gone away. Must be that he's revived.

Those little grabby-electric balls the Grineer have? No clue. I watched a team mate die in front of me as I mashed buttons on my keyboard. I had tried shooting and swinging my sword - but I suppose I did not hit it and thus discounted that as a possibility.

Not sure what you could do to make it more intuitive without a dynamic in-game tutorial/hint that can come up as new content is encountered. I'm sure that other Teeno would have appreciated it if a great big 'You need to shoot/melee the ball off the person' message had come up on my screen. I figure a hint/new user system or something similar is probably in the works or somewhere down the line.

Climbing through that one room's roof/grate

One of the rooms I have encountered several times involves needing to go up by climbing a stack of boxes, then jumping and grabbing the lip of an open grate in the cieling. What made this hard was that the waypoint moved once I was in the room - I thought it was bugged and didn't even see the hole at first. After coming back to the room after exhausting the rest of the level, an enemy dropped down and drew my attention.

Then I spent a couple minutes trying to jump at different sides of the opening. I presume, now, that only the side opposite the crates is set to be easily grabbed? Either way, it was far less intuitive compared to wall-running (which I will call myself a dork for not figuring out sooner).

Re-use of DataKey Item on Defend/Hack mission wasn't clear - probably my fault

Being new, I did not know that the Data-Key thingy which is used to begin a hack on the objective during a Defend mission - has to be picked back up afterwards. Oops. Since both objectives were marked before hacking, and both objectives appeared to be marked after hacking, I just went on. The female operation handler (I forget her name) didn't make mention of needing the same key, so off I went without thinking. Once at the other console, it prompted me to insert the DataKey-thing, which I didn't have.

My next thought should have been - oh, of course, the one I was just using and left in that machine. Instead, it went - "well, I didn't get an objective to pick up the key like I had before, so I probably need another one... but the waypoints are not showing me. Bugger. Time to wander the entire level."

Again - if I hadn't been playing by myself, someone would have probably know what to do and I could have observed. Instead, I slew some 200 more Grineer before finally deciding to run back and forth between waypoints. At last, I saw the DataKey sitting on the ground in front of the previous objective. With the waypoint. Right there on it. Doh!

Perhaps it would be worth having the advisor/handler character mention it, or perhaps listing it as the primary objective.

Looking back on the first few days

Once I started running with other people and, by luck, time, or location, they turned out to be great teamplayers, I was having a blast. Leveling up was fun, and the rate seems to be fine (I'm already like 16-15-13-13) although I had to go read a wiki to figure out that I needed an item (okay, I could see the item on the screen, but had no idea what it was). Ah, it comes from Alerts and it will unlock more of the skill tree. I would have just assumed it was story related since the advisor/handler woman ominously said "I'll bring you back here later" at the end of the tutorial.

Mods are cool, but I find them somewhat difficult to manage. I'd like to be able to sort them so I can see which of the 3 damage mods I want to keep or sell, find specific elements, etc. I'm guessing that is in the works somewhere. The thing that got me was that I couldn't sell them the same place I could apply them, so I had assumed they couldn't be sold. Once I had 30 of them, though, I figured it was time to hunt down the inevitable 'sell' screen. Ah, there it is: 'Inventory'.

My only real regret is not starting with the Loki. Looking at it on the wiki I can see where its powers work together very well, and provide for some interesting possibilities. Creative was the best word I saw to describe it. I almost deleted my account and just made a new one to try the Loki, but figured I wasn't giving the Volt enough time to shine.

Not being able to easily get a different Warframe was not expected. I figured key upgrades/unlocks for them would be a limiting factor, not the suits themselves. Not a problem - though I would have liked a chance to try each of the 3 starting suits in that little tutorial area before picking the one I'd be using for at least 10 hours (okay, probably 20). Once looking through the Store and the Wiki, though, I can see that the game is still very new, and content is small but growing. Most of the players will be veteraned, have most of the equipment, and be looking for new things. Until you hit open beta, the new user experience is hard to work out.

Okay, so maybe I just don't mesh with the Volt

Here is my problem with The Volt. It's not a bad suit at all, and for certain I haven't used any others -> but it doesn't have the lightning-destructive power I hoped it would. With the first 15 ranks I have 3 powers: medium range splash stun+damage, a turbo sprint, and a deployable shield. All good powers to be sure, but I was thinking of chain-lightning, electric cages, snares, enormous bolts of electricity - things which would be 'more' than my guns could be.

The description was 'an alternative to gunplay' but instead I got 'a suppliment to gunplay'. After slapping some cold mods onto both weapons, I find that I shoot often, and use lightning only when I need to run away or rescue someone. Maybe other Volt players are lightning rods of destruction, but I find that the amount of power on my suit is fairly limited, and damage is only somewhat higher than my weapons.

Guns just feel like they are better. They have more range, store many more uses (ammo), can score headshots (although if I'm scoring headshots with the lightning I haven't noticed yet), and actually harm the Infested (okay, the lightning hurts them, but not much). I haven't fought the Corpus yet, which the Volt is supposedly great at - so there is that to consider.

Now the suit looks fantastic - but I'm mostly a gun wielding commando who crackles with lightning. Maybe the lightning really shines once I can get the other skills? I'll wait and see. Well, not much choice. Though, having sprint and shield are pretty good powers to be 'stuck' with.

Last Thought

Ultimately, I'm having a blast. This game looks great, plays great, and has a good mix of fairly short games you can get in and out of when you don't have a lot of time to play. It has a long long metagame of gaining different gear and leveling it up. So far I haven't become 'bored' at any point, or felt like I was farming for its own sake. This game is action packed enough that even if I don't achieve much progress with a mission, it was still a blast to play. I can only imagine what the game will be like even a year from now. Probably an epic climb to powerful abilities, weapons, and enemies in some crazy locations, doing what the Tenno do best:

Killing everyone, breaking or stealing all the nice things, taking almost no casualties, and doing it in style. So much style.

Edited March 5, 2013 by DeadEyeDeale

[zikkim]

............. too long im not gonna read ıt all.

Edited March 5, 2013 by zikkim

[Brasten]

Welcome, I started with a Volt as well during the Free Play weekend and baught in. The part your missing with the Volt is Overload, the Ulitmate power acessable by the almighty space potato.... Orokin Reactor. Overload is your blast of electrical destruction that you expect.

I will note you can shoot through your own shield. It does a slight damage type swap and makes part of it Electrical. Use it to help extend your cover and keep shooting at exposed bits of targets. It's also good to start getting used to an internal timer on how long your shield is up. Also you can drop more then one. In some places I'll drop two, one in front and one behind.

Most 'caster' frame 1 powers are kinda meh. I use Shock on the Volt on annoying riot shield Grineer or to quick finish a single target if I'm getting pressed.

Yes, speed running is a problem. Still no good solutions as yet.

Most of your damage output is going to come from weapons. Warframe is not really a power spam game... which is why I find the idea if 'caster' style frames so halarious. If you want to try for it you really need to bring a Energy Syphon artifact to get some recharge on energy over time. And by weapons I mean guns and melee.

[ReiganCross]

Glad to have you around man. Hope you don't turn into the very thing you found was annoying to play multiplayer, which is a speed-runner. It comes from the game being ultimately pretty easy and people would not go on full charge if they had more of a challenge.

[plznohurtme]

I went through almost all of the same growing pains with the game as you did before I started to figure out how things go. Even though I have over 100 hours of time in the game I still don't really understand people who sprint through maps, or to exits. If you don't actually want to do the mission, why don't you go play a wave based defense mode so it's over when everything's dead. I know when in a group I've never done this, and the only times in solo I can remember was when the game tricked me when I took out a reactor, had a 5 minute timer and then it gave me a second objective (now this was intense in a couple of circumstances where it came down to under 10s left, and for as harrowing as it was I really enjoyed it, but I wouldn't want to see it on every mission).

I'm not sure of a way that DE could really address that problem aside from perhaps harder difficulty. I wish people would just not do it, but I know that's way too much to ask for.

[Davante]

Impressive, nice write up.

[Juper0]

This is an excellent post. it decribes the reason for a proper full length tutorial.

I actaully find the volt op, with his ult. on the ship like maps (Corpus) it is REALLY powerful. ht eult does more damage and extends with range with the more electronics there are. a friend of mine can hit 3 rooms away!

you should have started with 75 plat. use it to buy at least one orokin reactor. equip it to the volt. then super run into the middle of the enemies, then ult!

not joking or over stating here, one level 30 volt with all ult boosts can kill 25 level 20 enemies in one shot. that is SO powerful! im acutally working on getting that frame.

gald to have oyu around! i am a contributor on the wiki. please let me know if there is anything missing that a new player would have liked to know.

also, join a cool clan. then you might get team friendly players in privet mode more often!

[DeadEyeDeale]

Thanks for the replies.

Spending more time in the game and on the forums I like what I see. I've invested and become a founder.

One of my friends once asked me: Why do all this founder business for a game, why not just play the game and get things as you need it?

The same reason I own climbing shoes and a harness for rock climbing and a bike for riding - the same reason to own a car and not use a cab -> if you're going to use it a lot, plan ahead and invest now.

@Juper0: I'll take you up on that offer and will throw a few ideas your way later. I'm very glad to see how responsive and involved the community is. I hope DE goes far, Warframe is a unique entity and I want to see where it goes. And you know, shoot stuff, the whole way there.