Maps, Skies And Story

[Morkislair]

            Hi. I've been posting a few things and suggestions in the fan-concept sections of the forums, but I've been told I'd better do it in the feedback section. Just a quick disclaimer: this has nothing to do with new warframes, mods and so on. I'm not saying anything of what I'm about to say is good or should be done, this are just my opinions and reflections. I'll try to keep it as short as possible, but this will surely turn into a wall of text. That said, here we go.

 

1°) Starmap

            The map we have now makes it difficult to ad new worlds. Plus, Europe and Ceres are at the far end of the solar system -where there are not supposed to be- and some dwarf planets are their own world, like Ceres, but others are mere mission names, like Nyx. To change that, I suggest a starmap on two layers.

            First layer shows what we see now as the starmap: the sun at the center, and the planets orbiting it. But satellites won't be shown, and it wouls display the inner asteroid belt and kuiper belt.

            The second layer would be very much like the first one, but instead of having the sun in the middle, there would be a planet with satellites, center of its own system. Even though it would be pretty basic for Mars and the Earth, things would become very interesting with the gaz planets, especially Saturn and Jupiter, not to mention the asteroid belts.

            That way, it would become fairly easy to add new worlds and to add special locations for events, such as a fleet in a particular sector, a space station or whatever.

 

            Things could even go deeper like the starmap from the game Nexus the Jupiter incident, but it might be too complex for what it is supposed to be in a game like Warframe. It could allow very interesting things for events and infested incursion though.

 

2°) Backgrounds skies

            For now, we roughly have four skies: Mars, some nebula skyish, what we suppose being Jupiter's atmosphere and the blue sky for Phobos. To put it simply, more variety would be nice, for several reasons:

*It would help not to have the impression to redo the same tile over and over. And it would give some spectacular views; some of Saturn's satellites are right in its rings, the giant mass of Neptune up our heads, ... That would be awesome.

*Seeing Mars up your head when you're supposed to be orbiting Neptune... That's a little disturbing.

*More specifically, the blue sky from Phobos... Let us say, for a rock of roughly 15km wide orbiting the red planet... that 's a little strange.

*Still specifically, the cloudy sky on icy mountain tiles is... Well, Venus in a brownish always cloudy inferno with acid rains, and the from Neptune (and further beyond),the sun is hardly visible, not making that bright light we're used to. That goes right back my first point: if the sky varies, it helps to give the vivid impression to travel all across the solar system.

 

3°) Recycled tiles

            For new worlds and new skies, some tiles would obviously have to be made from scratch, like Titan's atmosphere and its hydrcarbons seas, Enceladus and its ice geysers, Europa and its ice surface and underground ocean.

But some of them would be easier to do by recycling what's already there. One of those would be Io: withe the Phobos tile, replacing Grineer stuff by Corpus one, some Io volcano being awesome in the distance and Jupiter up our heads. Same goes for some Kuiper belt's dwarf planets: more or less the Corpus base tile, darkening the rocks and taking the snow away, eplacing Corpus stuff by Grineer ones, maybe recycling the Grineer asteroid tile a little, and a dark sky full of stars where the sun is no more than one of them, a little shinier than the rest, withe the Milky Way slashing the sky...

 

4°) A proper story

            On a non related thread, someone spoke of an endgame, with some orokin boss. To this, I said that to have a meaningful endgame, one must have a proper story. For obvious reasons, it cannot be anything that disrupts heavily the game's status quo, so it has to be a quest for the self.

            Luck is the Lotus already gave a hint about one: our memory. And for this, we have affinity. Basically, the idea would be to use the mastery rank as a memory recovery process. Once every "n" rank, a memory mission would unlock, making us revive the birth, rise and downfall of the Tennos, where they came from and why the fell into slumber.

            To do this properly, I think two characters will need to be fleshed out during those missions: the Lotus and the Stalker(s ?).

            Once all those missions have been completed, it could unveil a secret hidden in a Tenno's memory about a place in the Void that leads to... something and is guarded by an orokin boss. There, I would all before not showing any actual orokin, because knowing only vague things about them and having never seen any single one of them is part of the magic that makes them interesting.

 Completion of the boss could unlock access to very high level stuff, maybe more or less something like in The Secret World.

            What's nice about using affinity as memory that unlocks "memory missions" is that players who don't care can completely ignore them.

 

 

 

            I have some other ideas, about the game, but that is enough for now. I hope you found some of this interesting. 

Edited February 2, 2014 by Huitzilopoltchi