Hive Sabotage, Design And Overview

[RespectTheInternet]

One thing - Take out the secret areas. It's great that they exist, but unlike the void, they detract from the event. That is to say, you look in a secret area and the only thing going through your mind is

 

"No Node here? Moving on." It didn't fit the mission very well. Unless bonus points were awarded for finding secret hives or creatures / nodes, the area's are just red herrings.

[8r8kSpider]

Would it be too much to ask for you to post the actual scoring mechanics? It's a bit obvious that nobody really understands, and, frankly, I'm not doing another run in this event until I know exactly what to expect. I've run well over a dozen missions, with a variety of players, I have over 500 points total, and I keep brushing just under the 48 point top goal. It's maddening and just like every grindtastic event before it, It's more than likely to make me stop playing the game for a few days than it is to encourage additional runs. Please post the actual scoring mechanics, DE, please. Otherwise count me as someone who has begun dreading events instead of getting excited for them because all I have to look forward to are more- seemingly arbitrary, and therefor pointless- runs.

[Vaskadar]

There are numerous collision issues that should be addressed, mostly surrounding important path traversal spots, and with this wonky collision, it makes movement throughout the levels difficult.

[Zarlockk]

Awesome event and tileset. Only thing i disliked was scoring =( it was so random numbers could go up and down when same party is doing it again and again

[Zarozian]

Awesome event and tileset. Only thing i disliked was scoring =( it was so random numbers could go up and down when same party is doing it again and again

They average in the score of all your teammates your teammates.

 

If any of your teammates have a lower score the score you receive will be lower as well, for example you and your friend have the best score of 81 then two random players with the low best score like 60 or 51, the 4 scores will be averaged in together and the score you get at the end will only be slightly higher than the average.

 

As for getting a high score for each time you run, you need to make sure you and your teammates score are the same.

 

I usually run this event with my clan and I can check my clan leaderboards for the event and bring along those who are near me in the top 3.

[Tangerine]

I liked this event a lot more than the others, the infested tileset in particular is unique and interesting both aesthetic and gameplay-wise. It's probably the best tileset you guys have put out and it's hard to play the older ones without feeling a bit bland.

 

But one thing to note is that with the greater emphasis on verticality, parkour and avoiding environmental hazards, the new tileset has really highlighted the clumsiness of the game's current 'parkour' or movement system. So my question is, parkour 2.0 when?

[Zoid25]

This tileset might be my favorite so far. Love the game type as well. Scoring was a little hard to figure out but we got it figured out eventually. I really hope you do more with the lore as that is something that Warframe is seriously lacking.

[(PSN)SuperRaySonic]

I really like this new game mode sounds challenging! I saw you new concept art for the new tile set and I was wondering if it was going to be wide and open space. If so also wanted to ask if the developers ever considered having things in the environment to help you move. Such as the fans on earth when your assassinating vayhek. But I was thinking more of like bikes. Like a corpus on a motorcycle with his secondary shooting and when you kill him you press O in case of playstation to hop on it and ride threw the map. Its kind of sad playstation players going to different games (not giving names but you should know). And I guess new tilesets are helping alot. Cant wait for this to be released on PS4!!!! 

[MDRLOz]

Best score I have been able to achieve is simply through solo loki with perma invis. 

 

Still seems to easy for the invisible Tenno to jsut solo the event quickly 

[Hueminator]

I would love to have Gas, Magnetic Cloud, and Laser in a same mission.

[DietEbolaCola]

Perhaps the scoring would have been less exploitable if the event missions had turned into an Exterminate mission once all hives were destroyed.

[CY13ERPUNK]

best new event BY FAR

 

awesome tileset

 

great idea for iterative scaling on difficulty (ie the more you run a mission the harder it gets, vs the current endless game modes that require you to play a mission for 1-2+ hrs to get any kind of decent scaling difficulty), cant wait to see this design mechanic applied to other game modes

 

i really liked the hijack game mode introduced in the last event, and I thought interception was a decent addition, but infested hive sabotage blows them all away IMHO =]

[tmtke]

Loved the event, the new tile set is fantastic, the game mode is really good.

One weird thing: when I was running solo at personal score 47, all the enemies were at level 40 (which is OK), however when I joined a group (and finished around the 45 score), the enemies were around level 23.

Also I died a lot (in solo) because something sucked away all my energy/shield which I can't really figure out - even when I was using energy siphon. Was it one of the eximi? Because most of the time I tried to evade all blobs and ancient disruptors.

Edited June 25, 2014 by tmtke

[K_Shiro]

Tileset

The new tileset is sick, I frequently get lost thus it has a complex feeling (just look at it, I sometimes wonder where is the hole I can fit through). It's dangerous to end up in a dead end and sadly sometimes you do find it hard to guess which way to go. The map/waypoint mechanic has a tendency to go haywire at the best situations, practicly tricking you into going circles with the angry mob behind you. That's bad but actually rarely happens - much less frequently than what I would expect in the case of such a detailed and brutally asymmetric design. I had problem trying to fit through holes that only looked like possible pathways but only in a couple of times and that's an incredible achievement from the creators - I do a bit of level-design and building myself and with such a theme this is not a small thing.

I'm happy that you didn't give in to temptation - it might have been easier (though bad on the long run) to push the whole thing out, full of flaws, saying it's a beta anyways...

 

Objectives

I have frequently found it troublesome to find all the tumors, 1 or 2 sometimes hide in completely separate, sometimes rather far-away corridors that makes you wonder if that tumor isn't connected to some other hive instead. Such a situation isn't quite good when you have reached rank 50 enemies and a stronger breeze from the direction of a toxic ancient can remove you from the equasion.

Also found it kinda troubling that I have about 1500 points total at this point (with above 70 best result), making me a bit more zealous than the expected norm (that only reaches the last point needed to get all rewards - prova, etc.) but I still have 3 or so hive types within my codex that I have never met.

 

I guess they are not used in the event but if they are, u seriously need to think about difficulty. A mission where only you can be one-hit by enemies you cannot defend against (toxic ancients and the new osprey aren't exactly easy to stop when you can't even see them coming).

Once in the past (or twice or...) I have proposed the idea of changing Enemy Sense and Enemy Radar mods making Enemy Radar the Aura that shows enemies on the map while Enemy Sense would be a Warframe mod that provides pulsating see-through vision, alike the scanner. Sure, we can bring out the scanner but in a situation where a single touch can kill you, that's not really funny. Especially since switching back to weapon doesn't always go that smoothly...

 

Enemies

As mentioned above, the enemies scale brutally. Normally infested are considered the weakest enemy race but as you have said yourselves, this tileset has much tighter combat situations. Things are different here. In numerous occasion you are completely occupied with navigating the map, searching for tumors or plain the way out and frequently end up being hit/swarmed/poisoned by enemies coming at you right at the corner. You try to rush, evade stuff just to end up in front of a door, it opens, toxic ancient, you die. That's not challenging, that's a pain.

Thanks to the invisibility of Loki (and that it doesn't break neither on attack nor damage) people can reach much higher score and difficulty than what they could survive any other way. That's a design flaw sadly, no matter how you look at it and while I love Loki and his invisilibty I think it should break on certain occasions forcing you to re-cast it.

Not asking for much, wouldn't even nerf it. I would take all the disruptor type Eximus elites and make them project a disable aura. They no longer 0 your energy but they shut off ability casting on a large area. At the same time some form of "indication" should provide us with the direction so we know where the perpetrator is. Maybe a shiny aura on us "leaking" towards that enemy?

Invisibility or not, it's incredibly loathful to end up losing all your energy to an enemy that never attacked you, you could never defend against and you cannot kill before it happens since it's rooms away and frequently arrives unnoticed.

At least enemies touched should react to invisible tenno - just because you cannot see, if something touches you it does result in some form of reaction from you, right? Blinded enemies should be able to attack you if you come into melee range, just like being invisible should only provide complete defense until you get too close. It's logical and helps keeping up the challenge even without nerfing the poor guy.

Edited June 25, 2014 by K_Shiro

[Loswaith]

The good:

- The tileset is amazing, the art team do a wonderful job on these, and now ships look truely infested.  It would be great to have some variety on these as we go forward in levels of infestation. The asthetics are very infesed, the tight enviroments, areas open to vacume, and the general claustrophobic feel all adds well to this asthetic.

- Gameplay was a new concept, always good to see new concepts come through.  Having to find nodes to break nodes is a nice touch.

- "Stink" mechanic for making missions harder from the outset of that mission is a nice move as well.

 

The bad (I'll be a bit more specifc here)

- The scoring needed to be more open in how it actually worked, for the most part you are scoring blind.  Having to go to the Wiki, Forums or chat is not a great way to require us to know that.

 

- The tumors are always much the same places so after 3-5 missions there is no longer a need to hunt for them. Once you know where they are it is quite a trivial matter to get all 5. A potential fix could be to have a random number of tumors (say 3-8), with many more possible locations for them to be.   An alternative being that players need to destroy a certain number of ancillary tumors (scattered about the entire map) before those close to the hive nodes can be destroyed (haivng the tumors covered by infestation much like an eyelid but open once vunerable).

 

- Teamplay basically is really only relegated to picking up fallen teammates (still), one person could kill all the tumors and hive nodes, there is no need to actually use any real teamwork, though using some coordinated attacks does make it easier.  This could of been more enforced by having linked tumors that need to be destroyed within a short timespan of each other, or prehaps ones that respawn quickly unless a few are taken out at once.  Obviously player counts in the mission would need to alter the potential behaviours here as well.

 

- No real way to remove 'stink'.  I found that once I had the points for the rewards I wanted to go just play some of the hive missions just for fun.  Unfortunatly by that time most players were quite high on 'stink' thus the enemies where overly high for just having a go at some casual fun.  I'd suspect some newer players may have even had issues getting the full points needed for the rewards due to this factor as well.

 

- Perma energy and shield drains.  These bugs made it vastly anoying to play at times.  The 'permanent' shield loss tends to show up when it is drained below 0 from the vacume (I'm guessing its code getting triggered from nightmare mode).  While the energy drain often put the energy value into negatives so when you picked up an energy orb you actually gain less than the 25 energy from it, in other cases it permanently remained at 0 reguardless of picking up enery orbs, using team energy restores or having the energy siphon aura.

 

- The waypointing as other have mentioned can be a major issue here.  This seems to be particulaly noticable in the hive sabotage and derelict missions.

 

The nitpick: (simply minor anoyances that would be good to be fixed)

- invisible 'walls', in some areas of the hive it looks like you can go through gaps or into some areas, but you simply get blocked (maybe adding more twisted branches of infestation could help these areas look impassable).

 

- parcore; the hive really shows up the issues with the responsiveness of parcore.  Some feel due to issues form when the wall runnign sensitivity was toned down, others from invisible 'walls' and others simple from the way the terrain is.  Occasionally you will even lint over some invisible barrier.  All of this simply makes the game feel unpolished or "clunky" if you will.

 

- the "Stink" term; using the term stink seems to imply you will smell more and more like the infested, given you get 'stink' from spending more time in the infested ships (sure its a feasable term, but not that intuative).  Wouldnt that actually make infested less agressive towards you as you 'smell' more and more like them.  Infestation seems to incorperate pheromone style factors, given most infested creatures have quite small eyes and tend to live in darker areas it makes alot of sence for this ancillary pheromone to be a factor for the infested creaturesanimalistic nature to use in assisting in finding places to spread the infestation., or be alerted to threats.

[Monolake]

Liked this mission a lot, very replayable with changing conditions and randomised layout, hats off to level design team

[Festinger]

What I disliked most about the map is the bottomless holes they have. The game brings you back up, but the penalty is that infested, with supposedly (weak) claw attacks can tear you apart while getting up. I find that it is rather costly as a mistake.

 

Next, it has to do with the current direction which the infested has taken. Previously, with exceptions of supposedly old ancients (including lephantis), the infested gains very little new material over the host. This tileset, along with the ospreys, changes that. I enjoy conservation laws and at the very least I beg for an explanation of all the infested material that sprung out, on the tileset and how so much got on ospreys.

 

It is also unclear, except through trial and error, on what walls that were covered with the stuff/irregular shaped walls, that can be vaulted upon.

 

There were also tendencies for the infested to cluster in the tight control room. I am not sure if that was intentional or that they got stuck there.

 

Changing of strategies usually comes about at high difficulties, at lower difficulties the map can be bulldozed through, just with more confusion. Even then, we ended up stealthingly rushing through the thing.

 

Nevertheless this tileset was very well done. The event... probably not so well done, with the exploits and all. But that cannot be helped - the players have the law of large numbers on their side.