Some Suggestions By Nevan

[Nevan]

Hi guys. I love the game, just to let you know first, but I do have some ideas to suggest that I personally believe would boost this game to a whole new level of awesome! Please give valid, constructive criticism to my ideas if you disagree, rather than insulting me (though honestly, I doubt that will happen in this awesome community). =)

To start with, I've been playing the game roughly two days now. Not a lot, I know, but enough to clear the first map set and half of the second (I believe it's Venus?), and also to hook me enough into buying Ash with platinum and investing a good several hours of those two days in the game when I could have been out having a life. So while you could say I'm basing these suggestions on what's little more than first impressions, I'm going to go ahead anyway.

My Ideas:

Warframe Playstyles:

As I said earlier, I bought Ash with Platinum... Only to find out he played pretty much the same as Excalibur (my starting Warframe) aside from special abilities. I don't know if this is planned to be changed but I sort of imagined different Warframes having different attributes such as speed, acrobatic agility, clear differences in health, etcetera? From the description and abilities, Ash is a ninja-esque figure with a speciality for stealth and melee combat: shurikens, smoke bombs, teleportation and bladestorm, right? So wouldn't it make sense to up his speed and agility (maybe you could have some cool wallrunning ability too and change his speed and jump height and so on?) while bringing down his health? Got to be honest, the level design allows for open areas and I'd love to be able to zoom around them as a badass Tenno sword-based death machine. =)

Melee Combat:

Right now, it feels a little underwhelming. In co-op modes I can effectively USE primarily melee, what with enemies being distracted by teammates, but this comes down to a simple rinse and repeat of "put enemy in range, hold E, run forwards, get one hit kill". I've only used the bo-staff and the Skana so far but honestly, the normal melee attack seems worthless. I take way too much damage while dealing way too little damage, with no multi-opponent strikes (as far as I can tell) and my sword swings take way too long. I understand you might not want to let the player jump into a group of enemies and slice them up effortlessly, but right now I seriously feel as though melee combat needs some new life given to it; especially in the combo area. I'd love to see some dedicated combos for these characters beyond what we currently have.

Stealth:

I seriously hope (and imagine) that you are going to expand on the stealth mechanic. We can SEE that it's meant to be there! It just.. Isn't implemented yet? Or doesn't work? Honestly I'm not sure. In TotalBiscuit's WTF is he mentioned how he likes the fact that you can't take cover behind objects and I agree... But at the same time, I can't imagine how you'll do a good third-person-based stealth system without it. As Ash, I'd love to be able to complete the objective and get to extraction without alerting anyone and right now that is pretty much impossible. The level designs don't allow for stealth, quite frankly, and the enemy A.I doesn't seem up to scratch though I can't pinpoint what's wrong with it. There are also security cameras and alarms and this is definitely a step in the right direction.. I wonder how much more you're going to improve on this?

Come to think of it, maybe a good idea is to have alternate paths. I mentioned earlier that Ash would be awesome being able to move faster, jump higher and be more acrobatic. I've seen shimmers of secret vent moving and the like and you could really expand upon this for stealth based characters. Bypass the enemies by climbing into the maintenance shafts and so on?

Then again, another issue about this is EXP. I suppose you could give an EXP bonus for beating a mission without being seen, or implement a stealth kill system, but from what I can imagine it would be way too easy to just give up and go back to slice-and-shoot grinding.

One final thing: awareness system for enemies, please? Once you get spotted, that's it, you can never hide again. Honestly, this makes sense from a realism perspective: you have an enemy on your ship, probably best not to forget about him. But from a gameplay perspective, I feel like there needs to be a way to fix slip ups that could trigger an alarm.

Level Design, Mission System and Hub:

The level design seems somewhat randomized to me, is this true? In which case, I love it. Can we go one step further? Can we randomize missions and mission objectives, too? I see what's already implemented as having the potential for being a 'story mode', so maybe you could add a fully fledged randomized mission system on top of that?

This entire mission system could be accessible from a central hub: the Tenno base, maybe? I know another player on an earlier thread mentioned this and the developer response seemed keen, but I'm going to reiterate anyway: it would be awesome to have a base to walk around in, people to meet, a star-map to go to and activate to go on missions, a way to interact with that woman who talks to you during mission execution and possibly other NPCs? Maybe these randomized missions could be secondary objectives on the star map, each one unique in some way and available only to you and your squad one time only? That would be awesome. Perhaps there's a small chance for a boss in there, too? A boss that no-one else will ever encounter, and YOU'RE the one who defeated him... Or failed. Perhaps once a boss has been generated for you, he pops up again in another mission should you fail to beat him?

"We meet again, Nevan!"

"This time I will defeat you!"

"Muhahha!"

Now i'm pretty much rambling, but you get my point, right?

Oh yeah, also new environments please, plus planetary missions and maybe even cool missions in low gravity like on an asteroid or other celestial objects?

PVP:

Not much to say about this, I'm sure you plan to have it already. But yeah, PVP would be so freakin' amazing.

Conclusion:

TL;DR? Haha, I know this has gone on for some time but I feel I had to share these ideas. This game has the potential to be so amazing... To literally be one of the best games I have ever played. It also has the potential to be another third-person-shooter I forget about in a few weeks because it felt too samey. Please, please, please make it be the former! Make this game go down in history!

Also, can we have an official "planned features" thread from the developers? :)

[RawrKitty]

Read most of your post, want pvp, i like the idea of planned features certainly, and as per your melee attack..

Single attacks have one critical function you're not mentioning or may have overlooked - they ministun most targets 100% of the time, allowing you to garuntee a clean charge hit.

but other than that yeah they're pretty bad

For stealth, i agree wholeheartedly, the bonus challenge of killing X unalerted enemies is almost impossible to pull of f most of the time

They key with corvis and the grunt guys (too tired to remember) is you have to prevent them from getting to the panel that you can hack in each room, that triggers a ship alarm, i HAVE completed missions completley undetected before, but its damn hard and its a good 90% luck.

they definitly need to have those shown up in big red overlays, and have stealth a little more doable, somehow. and if so, give stealth mission rewards, that'd be a cool incentive.

Edited January 10, 2013 by RawrKitty

[Nevan]

Thanks for your reply RawrKitty. :)

Honestly I never even noticed that single attacks stun for a charge hit, but even so it still feels very limited in melee options, like you said. I'm glad someone agrees with me on some points, I was kind of worried that most people would see this and just go "lolno".