First impressions.

[Nyito]

First, a little about me, to give context. I'll also summarize my thoughts on each issue at the end of this post. I'm not a competitive gamer. I enjoy shooters, but PvP is an automatic turn off. So when I saw Totalbiscuit's video(search youtube if curious) explaining this was a co-op game, that immediately piqued my interest. There's a dirth of such games, Mass Effect 3 multiplayer has been my game of choice in this genre lately, but aside from it, we've got Left 4 Dead and.... nothing, that I know of, anyways. And when I saw the Asian theme, the stellar visuals, and the RPG-esque progression, I just thought "Yeah, this is totally my jam."

I also don't play many free games, or games with microtransations. The only ones that meet those criteria are the aforementioned ME3, Guild Wars 2, and League of Legends. Much of my first impressions has to do with business model, so the last two are particularly relevant, with everything that relates to gameplay being able to be earned in game in the case of LoL, and a direct gold to gems(real money currency) conversion ability in the case of GW2, meaning positively everything in that game can be earned in game.

Lastly, I'm mostly a soloist. I'll play multiplayer focused games either solo, or with a select group of friends. I don't randomly game join. It's just not my thing. I also do enjoy challenging games. Even games that are punishingly hard, Demon's/Dark Souls, things in that vein.

So, about the game. My absolute first impressions were quite poor. The tutorial was unplayable until I went into the graphics menu and turned off bloom. I just couldn't see anything, there was so much white glare. Sparkly text and motion blur added a level of eyestrain. The latter could be turned off, the former I eventually began to just filter out subconciously, but I could still feel my eyes straining after a couple hours.

After the tutorial, I chose Excalibur, and decided to see how far I'd get without feeling like I'm being pushed into spending platinum, as a real test of it's free to play moniker. I didn't get far. I jumped into my first mission solo while a friend installed the game as well. I failed, quite miserably, due to grenades. In pure gunplay, things would go fine, then suddenly I'd see something fly at me, unsure what, then explode and die. I burned through all 4 of my revives fairly quickly, still failed, and was kicked back to the main menu.

The buy revives for platinum button was right there, clearly pointing to them wanting me to spend that 75 cents to buy more, but I decided to search the store a bit for a credit-based alternative, see if it was a case of either or, but they obviously want to make the real money option more obvious. Clearly not an option. That sent up a red flag in game design. Punishing, instant death weapons, plus buying of lives? I'm reminded of arcades, and the days where arcade machines had a switch that literally made it impossible to win without spending a certain amount of money, that the arcade owner could manipulate. I decided to soldier on, and give it a chance, but I would still not spend platinum. That meant from here on out, I had no revives at all. This is also the first issue with the game I have, no credit alternative for buying revives.

I then decided to check out the arsenal while my friend finished up his install. The second big red flag came up when I saw the 'Pro' button. The idea that you essentially have to pay to get stronger past a certain point is unacceptable, but from what I've seen on the forums, that's going to be taken care of one way or another, so I'll leave that one lay. What I can't leave to lay is certain weapons being platinum only in the market. Now, I've not gotten very far in the game, I'm still in the Mercury system with about 20 missions total under my belt, so I could be mistaken, in that they can be crafted. If so, consider this point more or less moot. But the idea that certain weapons are platinum only goes right along the vein of unacceptability.

With the install finished, I jumped into my first co-op game with a friend, just the two of us. It went significantly better, with the ability to revive one another, but grenades continued to be a complete pain, randomly killing us. Furthermore, the bleed out time was so quick, there was really no option but to maybe gun down a sawman closing in before you had to move in to attempt to revive, and expose yourself to fire, because if you die, it's either burn a revive, or sit the entire rest of the mission out. I draw on my Guild Wars 2 experience here, and say, if revives are to stay in their current state of costing real money, there ought to be a way to revive even after you fully bleed out. It could take a long time, so it's only safe to do out of combat, but a way. The mission ended poorly when a grenade blew out windows and exposed us to vacuum, and we thought we were just bugged and stuck in that concussed state when a grenade goes off near you, and by the time we realized we were dying, it was too late to do much. He attempted to hack the panel to undo the lockdown, but was instantly kicked out of it, and unable to retry again.

The second mission went similarly poorly, with grenades killing us left and right, and us reviving each other as best we can, until I fully bled out about halfway through, and he was forced to attempt to solo the rest of it. He did admirably well, until he encountered a door that still required two people to simultaneously bypass, despite the fact I was dead for good. He suicided there and we tried again. This time, after we completed the objective, we were told to extract, and put on a 5 minute timer, but our minimaps bugged, and were frozen, so we fought our way around lost, until we ran out of time. Tried one more time. Again, grenades proved an unfair weapon, but we eventually won our first match. He called it for the night there, I continued to play solo for awhile.

What I observed while playing solo: Warning when a group is spawned and coming up behind us would be very nice. While solo, slow and steady is definitely necessary, taking careful shots to conserve ammo, and avoid the aforementioned grenades. So a group coming up from behind really throws a spanner in the works. Along the same vein, while enemies spawning from behind is a decent idea to keep the player moving forward, it's too frequent for solo play. When I'm presented with a room positively bursting with marines, and continual respawns both ahead and behind, it gets a tad ridiculous. I can barely clean up one group before I have to deal with the second behind me, at which point more are coming from ahead. This might sort itself out later on with higher DPS weapons, or with more players, but solo, it's a problem.

Ammo. This one is more preference. I rather like being forced to be frugal with ammo, being rewarded with ammo later down the line for taking time now to kill low threat groups with primarily melee attacks, and regularly working in skills to land easy kills at no ammo cost, and making use of energy drops more. But by the same token, quite a few times later on in missions, I'd be finding myself very low on ammo, and faced with about a dozen enemies in a big room with no safe cover. No matter where I'd try to take cover, someone would have a clear shot at me, tying a bit in to the first issue.

And tying into both issues, is exploration. I'm very much an explorer. When a mission objective points me down one path, but I see a different path, I'll take that different path every time. So the proceedurally generated levels are quite a joy for me, but the continually respawning enemies doesn't match up to the scarcity of ammo, if you attempt to explore. After a few tries, I realized I'd have better success if I just followed the mission markers, because despite exploration awarding ammo and loot, you'll always come out of it spending more ammo than you found, and there's no shortage of enemies around at any point, being a continual drain on your ammo. This is a bit disappointing, and somewhat counterintuitive, at least to someone who played old school shooters like half-life, where exploration was the way to keep your ammo in the positive, not the other way around. Doubly so when said exploration also means more drops and credits.

Finally, with around 50 thousand credits saved up, and one blueprint found, I decided to spend some of this money. First, I wanted a new warframe. So I bought the Ember blueprint, since she looked the most interesting. Then I realized none of the materials I found were useful for crafting her. Indeed, I had never even heard of any of these materials needed, nor any idea where to find them. I came here, looked it up, found out where it all comes from, but that's still too late. Still spent that 25k credits. Giving an idea where materials for these things can be found before you buy a blueprint would be very helpful.

I did however have enough materials to craft a new sword, of which the name now escapes me. So I did so. 15 thousand more credits burned, and I have to wait 12 hours. I'm not so keen on the steep cost to crafting in terms of in-game money, AND having to wait 12 hours... unless I want to pay money. Which overall I'm pretty okay with. You pay with money or you pay with time, is the real way free to play works out. But again, options would be nice. A steep credit cost to make it instant, or a cheap platinum cost. After all it is a convenience item, essentially. With my sword in the crafting queue, I called it for the night.

So, to sum up my thoughts: Most of my issues have to do with the business model. Some of the difficulty problems(not grenades, those need to change) can be sorted out with buying revives with credits, if the cost is balanced properly. I'm unsure what the game economy is really like, so I have no idea what those balanced numbers would be. This would continue to reward skilled play, by giving more net credits at the end of a mission if you died less. It also would encourage people to be less stingy about reviving in co-op games, because those revives wouldn't be so cost prohibitive. Indeed, it might foster a behaviour, like I've seen in Mass Effect 3, where if you don't have a full set of revives, people will kick you out of their game.

Similarly, some things are behind a pay wall that shouldn't be. Pro is the big one, but inventory space too should have a credit alternative. Even LoL has extra rune pages via their in-game currency, and those truely are purely convenience, since it only allows you to save multiple templates you can easily switch between, rather than reallocating the page manually between games. The current inventory actually limits how much content you have access to, limiting you to just the two warframes. Cosmetics being pay only, are of course fine, all the time. Weapon/frame skins, color options whatever. If it's cosmetic, putting it behind a pay wall only is fine. Credit options are of course always nice, but not an issue.

Lastly, the ways you can pay are more limited than I'd like. Options is the key word I keep coming back to. Microtransactions are fine. Why not a "buy the box" option? Pay one big upfront cost, and say, get instant crafting, affnity and credit boosters for a lifetime, and maybe some extra starting gear or platinum, and from then on it's free + microtransations. Or subscription, where you pay a small amount every month, but have instant crafting, and boosters active as long as you're subscribed? Maybe a little platinum every month as well, to go along with it? Just some ideas.

As for me personally, I'll keep playing. Beta is beta, and everything has time to get sorted and settled, if the devs are made aware. And I'm seriously eyeing a grandmaster level founder's kit if things seem to sort out the way I'd like, because like I said, this type of game is totally my jam.