What Constitutes A Fun Game/ruining The Feel Of Warframe.

[Onite]

I keep seeing this alot: "MAKE IT MORE LIKE MASS EFFECT." Or.. "I basically just want to be able to spam my abilities and never have to touch my gun."

 

This is a terrible idea. And yes, i have mass effect 2 and i beat it. While i hate mass effect simply because the gameplay itself was awful. Guns are NOT the highlight of that game, this makes it boring. You might ask how?...

 

 

Warframe is unique and interesting because it employs both randomly generated maps along with acrobatics tied in with a slight rpg aspect of having to rank up and use mods and abilities. Right now, the game is more gunplay heavy and revolves around that, you would categorize warframe as a "TPS" or just "Shooter" in general. The feel of the game is about feeling mobile, identifying enemies, and customizing your gun's performance to your playstyle. This is outlined by the warframes you can pick and choose. If you essentially make all abilities more powerful and much more lenient, you're going to immediantly kill the feeling of it being a shooter and turn it into: "lets just wait around and spam magic missile, because its free and i can clear rooms with it." Abilities in combat will completely ignore the aspects of the game where you care about your equipment's mods, enemy patterns, enemy abilities, basically all flavor of the game becomes insignificant through the effect of being overshadowed by spammed abilities.  As a metaphor to understand: Everything becomes too sweet and not bitter so there is no appreciation of sweet. Slinging fireballs everywhere and making dudes float around in zero gravity all day on fire all the time is so so vastly different than constantly being in danger from waves of enemies or invading forces. The feel of the game will reduce into what feels like most boring grindy mmorpgs: wait for cooldowns and spam abilities over and over. DPS management while grinding higher level mobs. And for what? the EXP doesnt matter because the game is based around equipment and guns and things that you dont want to use, because the main focus of the game will be just to kill things with abilities. You can't have your guns compliment your abilities, it doesnt work. It just doesnt. But having your abilities compliment your guns, it works beautifully. Heres a scenario and its opposite:

 

theres a rush of guys coming at you while you're using cover. You're taking them all down and you're running low on ammo. You thwart a flanking attempt because you used an ability to flip them in the air, allowing you to take your time shooting them to cut them down. (Abilities compliment gunplay.)

 

Now the opposite:

 

You're blowing guys up left and right on your rampage of abilities. Theres a large group you have to wait on for a cooldown cause its slightly more than you can chew. A flanking attempt is being sprung on you, all your abilities that could help you are still on cooldown, you shoot at them with your gun which is weaker than your abilities and does absolutely nothing to slow or stop them. It makes you hate your gun and wish it was more powerful to be on par with your powers.

 

 

The only thing that would change that is if they were corpus and you used shock bullets to paralize them. Even then, what you're essentially doing is using an ability to buy you time so your abilities can wipe them out. This is not a shooter game anymore when it comes to this. Its just downright poorly designed. You dont want this. So please dont keep giving the developers the idea that you want the game to be purely or majorly rotating around abilities and the option to spam them to move through the levels. Give guns a chance and let your abilities have their spot in unique situations, not -every- situation.

[Tetsmeha]

+1

 

I love being able to switch between using my guns, my melee weapons, and my abilities for different situations. The flexibility of it all just makes me feel powerful when I make a good selection of weapons to fit my needs.

[arune]

You're making a pretty weak strawman argument here. Of course a badly designed ability system would suck compared to what we have now. If you gave infinite energy with the current system, it would be balls. In much the same way as if you made all guns oneshot and have infinite clips would be balls.

 

But you can also have abilities play a more major role, while keeping it in line with the current playstyle, introducing "mage style" gameplay as an alternative, not a replacement to what there is now. For example, if you could cast Ember's fireball repeatedly, and it did comparable damage to a shotgun (maybe you could mod up the ability strength?), it would make a viable alternative to using a gun. But that wouldn't take out the option of using the shotgun too.

 

Basically, since you like to use the word "spamming", I ask this: What's so much worse about spamming abilities as an alternative to spamming bullets?

[Eurhetemec]

Warframe is an excellent game, with the potential to be a lot better than ME3, and doesn't need to copy ME3 too much (but could learn some things from it). However, if you hate ME2 and think it has "awful" gameplay, you probably don't have very good taste in gameplay. ME2/3 had broadly excellent gameplay - that's a large part of why they had 90%+ reviews. Pretending it was "awful" is just being an ostrich and unhelpful.

 

The thing you're missing is that ME2/3 allow for two playstyles (and to claim otherwise isn't an opinion, it's objectively incorrect) :

 

1) Gunplay-focused with abilities only used as a backup.

 

2) Ability-focused with guns used as a backup.

 

Whereas Warframe only allows one playstyle:

 

1) Gunplay-focused with abilities only used as a backup.

 

Now, you prefer that style, so you think everyone else in the world also has to prefer that style. You're wrong to think that.

 

This would be less of an issue if Digital Extremes themselves didn't seem to think you can play in a more powers-based way, given the descriptions of various Warframes. For example: "This is a high-damage Warframe perfect for players who want a potent alternative to gun-play.". That's DE's words. Alternative, they say. Except that's not true. The Warframe does NOT provide any alternative to gunplay. No Warframe does except arguably the stealth-oriented ones.

 

This could very easily be changed without losing Warframe's feel. Don't add cooldowns. Add limited energy regen, a la Deus Ex: HR - i.e. a proper, rapid energy regen (not the ultra-slow artifact), BUT which stops when you reach 50 energy. Probably it should be a mod with a fairly high cost (like, starts at 8 or something) so it's viable for people to not take it. That way you could have people using their powers regularly (which is what they want), but also others could not take it and focus on gunplay.

 

One thing I do agree on is that it would suck if Warframe HAD to be about abilities. But giving people a choice, like ME3 does, is much better than not giving people a choice, like you're proposing.

BTW your example is completely terrible, because it ignores the possibility, which happens quite often in Warframe, that you cannot use your powers at all because you are out of energy because no energy orbs have dropped recently because RNG hates you. So both ME and Warframe actually suck in the same way, you just didn't think it through.

[Galiath25]

It does seem that energy drops way too often. I always have full energy and only use my crush ability on MAG in a pinch.

I'll crush like 5-6 enemies and almost always get 2-3 orbs, and 1-2 more finishing the other mobs that weren't crushed.

I haven't really played enough variety to say abilities are OP or unbalanced, but I think there's way too much energy available.

Also, the progression of the game seems to be a biiiiit off. By the time I was done with the first 2 systems I was already able to go into pluto and survive just fine.

[Onite]

You're making a pretty weak strawman argument here. Of course a badly designed ability system would suck compared to what we have now. If you gave infinite energy with the current system, it would be balls. In much the same way as if you made all guns oneshot and have infinite clips would be balls.

 

But you can also have abilities play a more major role, while keeping it in line with the current playstyle, introducing "mage style" gameplay as an alternative, not a replacement to what there is now. For example, if you could cast Ember's fireball repeatedly, and it did comparable damage to a shotgun (maybe you could mod up the ability strength?), it would make a viable alternative to using a gun. But that wouldn't take out the option of using the shotgun too.

 

Basically, since you like to use the word "spamming", I ask this: What's so much worse about spamming abilities as an alternative to spamming bullets?

Because if you can spam abilities, theres no reason to use a gun. And you cannot use a gun as a support to abilities the same way abilities support gun combat. The only way this could technically work is if you shot telekinetic bullets and had a gun that stunned people like a shotgun that fired rubber bullets. And this would just be stupid. And i "Assume" you would need spammed abilities and seemingly infinite energy, because if you were going to use abilities in place of using guns, how else are you going to accomplish that? The frequency of enemies and the energy to supply the abilities would be endless.

 

 

Warframe is an excellent game, with the potential to be a lot better than ME3, and doesn't need to copy ME3 too much (but could learn some things from it). However, if you hate ME2 and think it has "awful" gameplay, you probably don't have very good taste in gameplay. ME2/3 had broadly excellent gameplay - that's a large part of why they had 90%+ reviews. Pretending it was "awful" is just being an ostrich and unhelpful.

 

The thing you're missing is that ME2/3 allow for two playstyles (and to claim otherwise isn't an opinion, it's objectively incorrect) :

 

1) Gunplay-focused with abilities only used as a backup.

 

2) Ability-focused with guns used as a backup.

 

Whereas Warframe only allows one playstyle:

 

1) Gunplay-focused with abilities only used as a backup.

 

Now, you prefer that style, so you think everyone else in the world also has to prefer that style. You're wrong to think that.

 

This would be less of an issue if Digital Extremes themselves didn't seem to think you can play in a more powers-based way, given the descriptions of various Warframes. For example: "This is a high-damage Warframe perfect for players who want a potent alternative to gun-play.". That's DE's words. Alternative, they say. Except that's not true. The Warframe does NOT provide any alternative to gunplay. No Warframe does except arguably the stealth-oriented ones.

 

This could very easily be changed without losing Warframe's feel. Don't add cooldowns. Add limited energy regen, a la Deus Ex: HR - i.e. a proper, rapid energy regen (not the ultra-slow artifact), BUT which stops when you reach 50 energy. Probably it should be a mod with a fairly high cost (like, starts at 8 or something) so it's viable for people to not take it. That way you could have people using their powers regularly (which is what they want), but also others could not take it and focus on gunplay.

 

One thing I do agree on is that it would suck if Warframe HAD to be about abilities. But giving people a choice, like ME3 does, is much better than not giving people a choice, like you're proposing.

BTW your example is completely terrible, because it ignores the possibility, which happens quite often in Warframe, that you cannot use your powers at all because you are out of energy because no energy orbs have dropped recently because RNG hates you. So both ME and Warframe actually suck in the same way, you just didn't think it through.

 

Let me make an example. Lets look at starwars. How often do jedi in starwars use the force? More often than their lightsaber? No. If jedi in starwars just used the force to dismember and destroy and do everything in place of using a lightsaber, whats the point in using a lightsaber? The movies would be way too boring and predictable. Lets look at grenades in most games. Would you like a game where you just spam grenades in every gunfight instead of shooting them with your gun? At which point in the game would using a gun be a supporting role as opposed to just blowing up every single group of enemies you come across with seemingly unlimited grenades? Its a stupid concept. The only scenario i can see this in, is long range engagements with a sniper rifle where every other time, its just ability spam. Tenno shouldnt all be these ridiculous wizards that just spam abilities nonstop to destroy everything. And even if you do want that, there are some warframes where if modded correctly, can do this. Its even in the hints on loading screens, Volt is advertised to doing this. But only as an effective alternative sometimes, not ALL the time. There isnt a forced hand in just having everyone wield only guns 24/7, thats untrue. Even so, why would you come to a shooter and expect to play the game like you're playing skyrim or something? Abilities should remain a utility facet of the game for your character, not the main focus. Those kinds of games get insanely boring very quickly.

 

Also in mass effect, you had infinite energy and your "spells" basically one shot everything in the game. The gameplay was extremely boring because of this. And this is exactly how you described your example for warframe. Energy drops in almost every single tile in the game. Thats almost every single room. So if you're spamming your abilities, yes, you're going to run out. And again, there are mods for you to specialize in so you can have less cost and more storage for energy. You can also increase power and duration to makes your abilities have more potent for less spam.

Edited April 22, 2013 by Onite

[DataShade]

Also in mass effect, you had infinite energy and your "spells" basically one shot everything in the game. The gameplay was extremely boring because of this. 

 

Someone only played ME1 on easy....

[Hallorann]

Warframe is an excellent game, with the potential to be a lot better than ME3, and doesn't need to copy ME3 too much (but could learn some things from it). However, if you hate ME2 and think it has "awful" gameplay, you probably don't have very good taste in gameplay. ME2/3 had broadly excellent gameplay - that's a large part of why they had 90%+ reviews. Pretending it was "awful" is just being an ostrich and unhelpful.

 

 

 

I am not going to lie. Mass Effect 2 left me with a pretty bad gameplay experience. It didn't feel like a shooter. The storyline was good, but I prefered the role play elements of TES IV: Ob. Mass Effect felt more like a sim dating game in space. The gameplay elements weren't bad, but I can't really say any of the bosses were memorable. 

 

Now, if it's good gameplay you want to talk about, what's your portfolio consist of?

 

I'll open up first and list mine:

 

Dark Souls

Star Ocean 3

Resonance of Fate

Halo CE

Monster Hunter (MH-MHFU, not MHP3rd)

 

 

Also, it takes more than gameplay to make a good game. I am not saying in anyway that Mass Effect [2] was not a good game. The gameplay was just rather lacking. Other examples would include Fallout 3, TES Oblivion, Assassin's Creed 2/Brother. Let's face it, you wouldn't applaud Oblivion for its combat system. Hell, I used V.A.T.S. for most all of my kills in Fallout 3. And as for ACB, well, I think everyone who's played the game understands. But still, like I said earlier, it takes more than gameplay to make a good game.

 

If you want some good gameplay, Monster Hunter is where it's at. With a learning curve of roughly 100 hours, I can safely say it's got one of the best combat systems out there.

[Tetsmeha]

Warframe is an excellent game, with the potential to be a lot better than ME3, and doesn't need to copy ME3 too much (but could learn some things from it). However, if you hate ME2 and think it has "awful" gameplay, you probably don't have very good taste in gameplay. ME2/3 had broadly excellent gameplay - that's a large part of why they had 90%+ reviews. Pretending it was "awful" is just being an ostrich and unhelpful.

 

You must be really behind on how gaming journalism works.

[Onite]

Someone only played ME1 on easy....

Someone deliberately misread on purpose...

[PaperAlien]

I will have to admit some (most) of ME3's power-using classes rely a bit too exclusively on their powers, although that's not cemented, as it's a matter of player preference. You can choose to run a caster class with slightly heavier weapons and still use powers at decent frequency (~3-5 seconds cooldown) (in fact I'd say this is the more popular way to play for good players, because weapons simply do more single target DPS), but currently Warframe is also leaning too far towards the other end, and unlike ME3 you can't slide the scale between weapons/powers, it's stuck on the weapons end atm, because you can pretty much only use most powers around 2-5 times in the space of a ~30-second battle, and you can't use them as liberally as power/weapon hybrids can in ME3.

[Onite]

I am not going to lie. Mass Effect 2 left me with a pretty bad gameplay experience. It didn't feel like a shooter. The storyline was good, but I prefered the role play elements of TES IV: Ob. Mass Effect felt more like a sim dating game in space. The gameplay elements weren't bad, but I can't really say any of the bosses were memorable. 

 

Now, if it's good gameplay you want to talk about, what's your portfolio consist of?

 

I'll open up first and list mine:

 

Dark Souls

Star Ocean 3

Resonance of Fate

Halo CE

Monster Hunter (MH-MHFU, not MHP3rd)

 

 

Also, it takes more than gameplay to make a good game. I am not saying in anyway that Mass Effect [2] was not a good game. The gameplay was just rather lacking. Other examples would include Fallout 3, TES Oblivion, Assassin's Creed 2/Brother. Let's face it, you wouldn't applaud Oblivion for its combat system. Hell, I used V.A.T.S. for most all of my kills in Fallout 3. And as for ACB, well, I think everyone who's played the game understands. But still, like I said earlier, it takes more than gameplay to make a good game.

 

If you want some good gameplay, Monster Hunter is where it's at. With a learning curve of roughly 100 hours, I can safely say it's got one of the best combat systems out there.

 

Oh i'm very much a monster hunter fan. And i dont know why you havent listed portable 3rd as one of them. To me its one of the best. Switch axes and dual blades are phenomenal. I played through and did everything by myself in the gathering hall, including Alatreon.

 

As for a portfolio of good games:

(mostly just gameplay, nothing ever has a decent story anymore.)

 

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Half Life: (2, opposing forces, blue shift.)

Metal Gear: (Solid, snake eater, 4, peacewalker, revengeance, portable ops.)

Unreal: (99, 2004, gold)

Morrowind

TimeSplitters: (1,2,3)

MDK/MDK2

Jet Set Radio/Future

Brave Fencer Musashi

Crysis 2

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

Castlevania: (SOTN, LOS)

Persona 2: (Innocent sin/Eternal Punishment)

Parasite Eve/2

Perfect Dark

Golden Eye 007

Jet Force Gemini (-Warframe reminds me alot of that game.)

 

Theres really too many to name, but these are all titles that i can for sure say have been great experiences where i poured hours into them.

[neKroMancer]

I will have to admit some (most) of ME3's power-using classes rely a bit too exclusively on their powers, although that's not cemented, as it's a matter of player preference. You can choose to run a caster class with slightly heavier weapons and still use powers at decent frequency (~3-5 seconds cooldown) (in fact I'd say this is the more popular way to play for good players, because weapons simply do more single target DPS), but currently Warframe is also leaning too far towards the other end, and unlike ME3 you can't slide the scale between weapons/powers, it's stuck on the weapons end atm, because you can pretty much only use most powers around 2-5 times in the space of a ~30-second battle, and you can't use them as liberally as power/weapon hybrids can in ME3.

 

I agree with this. ME3MP allows 'caster' as an alternative to 'shooter'. These playstyles use power as their main source of damage while equipping light weapon(s) to defend themeselves while waiting for relatively short CD. They are effective in all difficulties (I believe the record of fastest platinum match still belongs to the N7Fury).

 

However, Warframe doesn't allow that kind of play. It encourages use of weapon>>>>>power which gimped the power-based builds with extreme modification in order to make powers almost as effective as a gun. 

 

Is this bad? No, probably not. It's depend on DE direction on this subject. However, I believe we may see a revision in this matter since DE already stated they want to balance melee/gunplay/power. PreUD7, power was too dominant strategy with room-wide power radius. Now it's clearly not an alternative to gunplay.

[_Tiamat_]

"Pure" shooters are almost a static genre. Same things seen over and over again become boring. This is why games are always attempting to incorporate new gameplay ideas and mechanics. Doing this they change. There's not a lot left to change about shooters though. After a short while, it gets problematic to invent new ways to aim, shoot or move. Most things in "pure shooter" avenue have already been seen and are now largely considered boring.

This inability to change is what creates games like Deus Ex and Mass Effect. If you can't advance the genre, you can still cross-breed it. This game is rather primitive in it's gameplay at the moment. Other than where to move and who to shoot there's not much to it, and even these things are on a questionable level of quality. If anything, shifting the balance towards abilities would help it, not hinder it. It's quite comfortable and intuitive to use an ability that let's you jump better, or run faster, or transfer health to energy, or support a team mate, or keep an ally/enemy out of combat for a time, or teleport around, or place a wide variety of hindering effects on enemies, or throw your enemy from one end of the room to the next. That list can go on for much longer and it's (generally speaking) easy to fill. A good enough implementation of such options in both the players' and the enemies' arsenals creates a fun, VARIABLE gameplay, something "pure" shooters have problems achieving.

That said, the audience around here doesn't seem to be fond of complex gameplay (or they wouldn't stick around), and all they seem to be asking for is shooting more of the same stuff with less concern for ammunition. I miss the times when such primitive gameplay was still my idea of fun...

[Dark_Zarke]

Someone only played ME1 on easy....

That seems besides the point...

[Beelzebubbles]

I've played Mass Effect 3 multiplayer extensively, and Onite, I appreciate your concern, but I don't feel like you played the multiplayer enough to appreciate the fact that guns are still exceedingly important, even for casters.  I played adepts mostly and was always firing my gun in between cooldowns.  It was still an integral part of my gameplay.

 

If you talk to most people or sift through the forums, you'll find that the general concensus is that as power creep set in, the casters were slowly outclassed by all the weapon buffs.  In the beginning, casters were overpowered.  In the end, there's a great balance, but playing as a pure caster without using your gun at all means you're going to be missing out on a lot of DPS.

 

I'm playing Mag, and I would love to be able to "spam" Pull to be able to bring enemies into melee range.  It would add variety to the game, rather than having the game be overly weapon-dependent like it is now.  It would also help the pace of the game--right now everyone rushes the game, tryign to get to each objective, etc.  Having an ability that could bring the enemies to me and get them into shotgun range would at least allow people to control the fight in a different way instead of "EVERYONE RUN FORWARD!" like it is now.

[Onite]

I've played Mass Effect 3 multiplayer extensively, and Onite, I appreciate your concern, but I don't feel like you played the multiplayer enough to appreciate the fact that guns are still exceedingly important, even for casters.  I played adepts mostly and was always firing my gun in between cooldowns.  It was still an integral part of my gameplay.

 

If you talk to most people or sift through the forums, you'll find that the general concensus is that as power creep set in, the casters were slowly outclassed by all the weapon buffs.  In the beginning, casters were overpowered.  In the end, there's a great balance, but playing as a pure caster without using your gun at all means you're going to be missing out on a lot of DPS.

 

I'm playing Mag, and I would love to be able to "spam" Pull to be able to bring enemies into melee range.  It would add variety to the game, rather than having the game be overly weapon-dependent like it is now.  It would also help the pace of the game--right now everyone rushes the game, tryign to get to each objective, etc.  Having an ability that could bring the enemies to me and get them into shotgun range would at least allow people to control the fight in a different way instead of "EVERYONE RUN FORWARD!" like it is now.

It is not "Everyone run forward" In fact when you first make a new character or play solo on higher difficulties your level, its often, you get to a group of enemies and digest through them with gunfire and use your abilities to get easy edges as trump cards. Being able to just rip enemies around in every single instance to your convenience is something i already gave an example of, where the game becomes too easy, the gameplay becomes stale quickly and its annoying for other people trying to play with you. Abilities also are what provoke rushing- They clear enemies so quickly that your teammates feel like they have to compete for kills, so it becomes a drag race to just plow everything in the level the quickest possible with abilities.  This isnt fun. The game feels way way more interesting when you actually have a feeling of survival and vulnerability against volleys of enemies with special units mixed in. Then the cooperative play with more focus on guns on your difficulty is much more worthwhile, with abilities here and there to keep it interesting so it doesn't completely feel like you're without relief of making unique oppertunities for yourself and your teammates. So that your warframe of choice will be to your playstyle instead of everyone just picking the "which one has the best abilities to spam so i can DPS run farm everything in the game?" Its just inane as an idea for a game like warframe to get wasted on.

[Beelzebubbles]

It's interesting how everyone has a different experience and different perspective on what would make the game better--your experience in Warframe seems to be COMPLETELY opposite of mine!  This must be a matter of personal perspective.  I feel like every PUG I go into ends up being nothing more than "who can get to the enemies and shoot them first", with very little coordination and teamwork. I feel that abilities would really help alleviate that one-dimensional play style!

[Onite]

It's interesting how everyone has a different experience and different perspective on what would make the game better--your experience in Warframe seems to be COMPLETELY opposite of mine!  This must be a matter of personal perspective.  I feel like every PUG I go into ends up being nothing more than "who can get to the enemies and shoot them first", with very little coordination and teamwork. I feel that abilities would really help alleviate that one-dimensional play style!

It honestly makes it worse, not to mention 4 people spamming abilities as fast as they can with 0 drawbacks on energy or power makes the game extremely disorienting and chaotic. The problem with abilities is they're too convenient and giving each warframe 4 abilities that are convenient in any situation all the time basically turns warframe from this ninja fast paced shooter, into a boring mmo superhero game. If you really cant find cooperative play in a shooter aspect, then i honestly think you're looking for something else. Every coop i've had the most fun with has almost always been a shooter. Shooters and survival sandbox type games have always been the best coop games. Its why only shooters have the big team realtime combat that most other games can't do. Things like having 34 vs 34 players in battlefield, or massive teams of people fighting hordes of insects in firefall, 6 player coop in killing floor, horde mode in gears of war, coop in brute force, playing with friends in planetside, borderlands is way more fun with a returning team mate, going through coop on saints row or lost planet or even halo. You just dont ever find the same nich and satisfaction if you turn a game like warframe into something like diablo 3 or world of warcraft with spell like abilities. Literally shooting fireballs constantly, shooting lightning constantly, throwing ice and poison everywhere all the time, just all these elemental one shotting abilities being slung left and right. There really isnt any room for guns with that unless you make the guns wacky and cartoony like something out of TF2. What happened to the rest of the game where you can use parkour, blocking, sliding and melee. None of those aspects go in hand with spell like abilities. Knocking down enemies that get to close to you with melee? Forget about it, just use one of many many abilities in the game where you can just insta-stun everything in the room over and over while launching dps abilities. I really doubt this is what you really want the core of the game to revolve around.

[Beelzebubbles]

I can appreciate that that's what YOU have fun with, but seriously--that isn't the only kind of fun gameplay style, and I think you're fixating too much on a comparison to WoW or other spell-heavy games.  Did you read my notes on Mass Effect up above? No one is suggesting turning the game into Diablo 3 or WoW.

 

Mass Effect 3 multiplayer did a great job of balancing abilities with guns. The "spells", as they were, weren't overpowered in the slightest, and if you want to put out real damage, you DO have to use your gun, and use it a LOT.

 

There's a large satisfaction to being able to play multiple styles within one shooter.  I expect that as time goes on and DE adds more warframes, we'll see more of those different styles emerge.

 

If you haven't played ME3 multiplayer, I don't feel like you've experienced a third-person shooter that has done this well. Give it a shot--I think you'd be surprised at how balanced it feels.  Well, minus all the bugs, LOL.  But it's far from the "every spell you cast one-shots the enemies" like you described, based on your Mass Effect 2 single-player experience.  On the harder difficulty levels, you have a greater chance of one-shotting enemies with guns than with powers.  Coming from Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer to Warframe has been an interesting transition. You have so much more mobility, but power use is very limited.  Certainly though, it's more varied than a straight up shooter like Call of Duty or Planetside.

 

I don't think the game would be fun if I could enter a room and cast a spell that makes everyone in the room explode, but having the capability to play a more power-focused character adds variety, much like adding different guns or different warframes does. It does add a lot more balance challenges for DE though!

[Onite]

I can appreciate that that's what YOU have fun with, but seriously--that isn't the only kind of fun gameplay style, and I think you're fixating too much on a comparison to WoW or other spell-heavy games.  Did you read my notes on Mass Effect up above? No one is suggesting turning the game into Diablo 3 or WoW.

 

Mass Effect 3 multiplayer did a great job of balancing abilities with guns. The "spells", as they were, weren't overpowered in the slightest, and if you want to put out real damage, you DO have to use your gun, and use it a LOT.

 

There's a large satisfaction to being able to play multiple styles within one shooter.  I expect that as time goes on and DE adds more warframes, we'll see more of those different styles emerge.

 

If you haven't played ME3 multiplayer, I don't feel like you've experienced a third-person shooter that has done this well. Give it a shot--I think you'd be surprised at how balanced it feels.  Well, minus all the bugs, LOL.  But it's far from the "every spell you cast one-shots the enemies" like you described, based on your Mass Effect 2 single-player experience.  On the harder difficulty levels, you have a greater chance of one-shotting enemies with guns than with powers.  Coming from Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer to Warframe has been an interesting transition. You have so much more mobility, but power use is very limited.  Certainly though, it's more varied than a straight up shooter like Call of Duty or Planetside.

 

I don't think the game would be fun if I could enter a room and cast a spell that makes everyone in the room explode, but having the capability to play a more power-focused character adds variety, much like adding different guns or different warframes does. It does add a lot more balance challenges for DE though!

The game is too far down the road for a change like that though, they would have to re-do almost all the powers in the game. Or else they're going to be pointless or too powerful. Either you kill them in one shot, or you spam the ability quickly over and over to kill them. Either way, doing it every encounter seems counterproductive to just using a gun instead, and then having interesting powers for your warframe for your playstyle that dont have to either slaughter everything, or stun everything. Cause thats basically the only powers in the game right now. The only ones that stand out are mind control and teleport. I really wouldnt mind abilities being more commonly used if they werent super OP flashy things. I'm for things like throwing shurikens or special warframe specific melee abilities. Volt's shield isnt a bad idea for an ability, but its useless in execution and no one uses it. The abilities i see people use the most are the ones that destroy everything. No one bothers to use anything else. So accelerating this to me is a nail in the coffin for warframe's potential.

Edited April 22, 2013 by Onite

[neKroMancer]

One thing worth noting is the difference approach in power design between ME3MP and Warframe. It's radically different approach. While ME3 relies on cooldown in order to make power more 'spammy' with heavy power class, these powers don't deal much damage on their own. They require a combination of power (primer and detonator = boom) in order to deal real damage. As far as I know, there's no power that is capable of OHK Gold difficulty enemies with its default setting.

 

ME3 powers also have a lot of variations in design - buff/debuff/mobility/damage + hitscan/projectile/toggle which offer a lot, even to shooter/tank classes (sentinel class, especially the Turian, is the best design in the game imo) which cast less frequently still have a good reason to cast these powers. Some of the best powers in the game are oriented toward buff/debuff/combo since BWdev (however incompetent they're with other area of the game) know that power DPS will not exceed weapon DPS anyway thus designed them in a way that improve gunplay. Warp is a good example of this design approach.

 

Warframe's  design approach in power is different. They are direct damage oriented more than utility/buff/debuff. It create a good sense of difference when player try to compare these two games together. However, due to direct damage nature of powers - their usage are limited by energy system. The sense of chaotic in the game is generated from AOE type power which is usually ultimate. I have always been against this kind of design since these emergency buttons are taking away a lot of tactic/strategy in this game.

 

Shooter and power can coexist, ME3MP demonstrate that this approach is doable without making the game 'less fun'. Warframe, under a more competent hand of DE, should be able to achieve the same result after a lot of changes in the future.

[Beelzebubbles]

Right, neKro, I responded to your comment on this in the other thread (https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/33574-discussion-cooldowns-vs-energy-orbs-again/page-2).

 

I think both you and Onite have good points in these last two responses. The game WOULD require a lot of redesign.  But, at the risk of continuing two threads on the same topic, I'll say what I said over in that thread: I don't think the ultimates should be on a cooldown, definitely, but the more minor powers that kind of "define" a class--I feel like those should be a little more accessible, and without having to resort to finding rare mods to do so.

 

It'd be a lot of work to redesign the Warframe powers to make them a viable--meaning, not overpowered--form of game play, but I think it would be interesting to see how they do it.  You can only make so many different kinds of direct damage-type powers before all the individual warframes start seeming undifferentiated.

Edited April 23, 2013 by Beelzebubbles