It's Past Time To Change The Methods Here.

[Aspari]

This is the current method of making content:

 

New mission types

New events

New rewards

Same gameplay with very tiny variation.

 

The results are:

Grinding for new toys to continue the grind with. (Even with the new Archwing addition which was honestly really fun for the first two missions and then we release the game modes are exactly the same as the regular ground missions.)

 

We've been shooting mostly the same cannon fodder for nearly two years with the occasional not-so-cannon-fodder-but-still-cannon-fodder enemies and Lephantis (which is honestly the best boss in the game by design.) The gameplay isn't challenging, it's just a tedious number crunch in most cases. The enemies are dumb even though they do things like take cover and shoot from cover. Gimmicky Warframes are still painfully gimmicky and another one was just released by the name of Limbo. Over 90% of the available missions have zero relevance in the universe and are only a means of grinding to get stronger to do higher level grinding.

 

 

The truth is, we have nothing to grind towards. We don't have fun raid bosses (except for Lephantis), we don't get to fight much more intelligent enemies, and we hardly get any story with the game outside of "[X] is doing this. Go stop them."

 

Now to your credit, Vor's Prize was a lot of fun and the Syndicates are a nice addition excluding the absolutely ridiculous Title advancement sacrifices. But currently everything else lore related that's playable in the game is "[X] is bad because [Y] reason and they must be destroyed. Go kill them and we will reward you."

 

Was there really no script for a main story for the game, or at least mini stories? What happened to the story writers who wrote darkSector's story? Even Vay Hek, the latest re-vamped boss, is the same way as described above. What Hek does in the universe of Warframe is indeed significant but it's not told in a way story is told. It's told in the way where a client (Lotus) tells their contractors (the Tenno) about the evil man (Hek) and that they need to stop him or else bad things will happen to the solar system, and if you do this then you will be rewarded depending on how many times you do this particular task.

 

New players have more than enough toys to grind for and veteran players want nothing more to grind for. Veteran players want more intelligent enemies to fight with. They want their skills to be challenged. New players want progression to not be a chore (if progression feels like a chore, it's not good progression.) Players want their gameplay to matter and simply giving them new toys to play the same stuff with again isn't very rewarding at all. Players want new ways to play different parts of the game differently. Players want to feel important in the universe they're playing in.

 

 

 

Bug fixes are fantastic. New weapon releases are fantastic. Events are fantastic. New enemy types are fantastic. Rewards are fantastic. Major updates like Damage 2.0 and Melee 2.0 are fantastic. But what about actual core gameplay? What about the AI that's woefully stupid? What about the issue of slide-attacks being a ton faster than sprinting and directional attacks giving more mobility than they ever should have? What about the whole "numbers being greater than player skill" thing still being a thing? What about gimmicky Warframes being reworked into states where they're not gimmicks anymore and they actually feel great to play? What about an actual story where players are always looking forward to what's going to happen next in the game?

 

Speaking of story, I'll ask this again. Why is there so little actual story telling and so much codex and instruction with reward and consequence? You know what other game did that sort of thing? Syndicate, the best-looking cyberpunk first person shooter of 2012. The game's gameplay was excellent and the AI was mostly competent and challenging to face. But that game also had very little story (and it even had a script) and most of the information about the world was in codex form. People hated that aspect of the game, and even things like Call of Duty campaigns don't even go that route (we're not counting actual story quality, but just story telling in general.) And also to my knowledge, Warframe is the ONLY co-op game ever made that has very little story telling. Even something like Alien Shooter has more story in an hour than all that Warframe has to offer, discounting everything in the codex which most of it should be explained through story telling.

 

Why am I stressing story? Because it's absolutely necessary in making the player feel like what they've accomplished in the gameplay actually means something. Even though darkSector was linear, you were rewarded with more story for surviving what was being thrown at you. You got to see Hayden Tenno evolve as the technocyte virus continued to take hold of him. You got to see drama build up between the characters. You learned key character motives. You learned of the consequences for Hayden being in the condition that he's in. Even the ending to the story arc was satisfying to a degree, and the player earned the right to see it all through.

 

Warframe's story goes a little like this (and I'm oversimplifying it a ton):

 

Events after darkSector escalate. We have a massive war and technological advancement to be able to colonize new planets. Hayden Tenno was the first Tenno, and the Orokin (people from the Golden Age, which were perhaps pure humans that may have been immune to technocyte infection) made the Warframes for the Tenno to combat the Sentients. After many years, the Grineer basically spawned and started hijacking everyone's planets and wage war on every faction that doesn't join them in their conquest and sovereignty. Tenno must perverse the balance in the universe, and they do that by hating Grineer and Corpus projects and fight Infestation wherever it starts... By contract of a client, or clients, that don't seem to be Lotus. Additionally the Grinner want to harvest the power of the Warframes and the Orokin and that's a problem.

 

This is how I see it just based off of what's being told to me in-game. Not only does this just seem a bit strange, but it's also only told to me through Lotus giving me instructions and the type of rewards we get for completing contracted missions which don't impact the world the Tenno live in... at all. The player will just look at what happened, which is basically nothing, and go "Okay... so what?"

 

Exactly. So what? The Warframe story isn't really even a story, it's a documentary of sorts that only exists to justify having cool organic suits with super powers in order to fight dieselpunk space Nazis, greedy robot dudes who seem to have a fetish for wearing armorless jumpsuits that look like basketball attire for prisoners, and nasty as all Hek fleshy metallic-y monsters that make some people itch just looking at their appearances. We've essentially been doing the same stuff with minor variations for two years. It has only been getting less rewarding on an intrinsic level.

[APBladeX]

Indeed.

[JohnProdman]

The 'methods' are how it is monetized. They're not going to go away.

 

That said, you have some fair points in there. Most of the issues you hit on are being worked on.

[Somedude1000]

Proxy Wars was a step in the right direction IMO to get something for investing time in game, but I'd have to concur that warframes biggest flaw is probably the repetitive feel of the game once we find our favorite playstyle, strategy setup and loadout.

 

We're led on continuously by semi-connected facets of the story, originally the mystery and intrigue was nice, but at least for me, it's worn out its interesting feel, and now it almost seems as if soemones like "let's wing it, x is gonna happen to the story".

 

Hopefully future additions to the game and its story telling breaks the cycle of getting stuff to get more stuff to get more stuff, and we get a slightly more solid and fleshed out story structure accompanied with consequences for our missions bth good and bad

 

 

I mean look at the Tenno even, they're silent faceless freaks we barely know anything about, how does one emotionally invest ad connect with a character that has basically no defining traits other than his / her / its abilities and visual (artistic) style? We aren't made to feel like the Tenno are people, they end up feeling like just another tool for each of us to use from time to time...

 

Of course, I may be seeing it all wrong, but i don't feel ashamed for thinking of the game this way

[(PSN)Strifedecer]

The Warframe lore is nothing but a failing method to counter logic and remove restrictions in development.

[LtZefar]

Lephantis is a good boss? :/ Please tell me you're joking?

 

It's weak spot system is just annoying and even if you have puncture mods you can't penetrate the skin.

When you got extremely high Conclave rating the boss will just soak up so much damage because it reduce your damage a lot. This can be solved by just bring one weapon with you and then you'll slaughter it.

It also has a natural damage reduction to any weapon which made critical weapons the only useful one.

 

Any boss which rely on weak spots only to be damaged are just bad. They are not fun to play against and not hard to deal with. Most of the time it's just waiting for the spot to appear.

 

 

New players have more than enough toys to grind for and veteran players want nothing more to grind for. Veteran players want more intelligent enemies to fight with. They want their skills to be challenged. New players want progression to not be a chore (if progression feels like a chore, it's not good progression.) Players want their gameplay to matter and simply giving them new toys to play the same stuff with again isn't very rewarding at all. Players want new ways to play different parts of the game differently. Players want to feel important in the universe they're playing in.

 

I don't want more intelligent enemies. Grineer flee all the time because they want to seek out cover and it's ridiculous that they start to flee the moment they see you. It isn't fun and it just forces me to hunt down the small packs of enemies that runs away. Corpus does the same thing and it isn't helping the game.

 

So when you say Intelligent enemies I'm gonna guess ones that flank you but that won't happen. You're too fast and too powerful. What could help is if they actually attack as a group and don't flee. This is what makes Infested fun to play against. They actually try to kill you. But with the recent addition of ridiculous enemies to their side it gets less fun on higher levels because they just suck all of your power right away. Hit with a damage of 500 points and more.

[Aspari]

LtZefar, on 01 Nov 2014 - 12:43 AM, said:

Lephantis is a good boss? :/ Please tell me you're joking?

 

It's weak spot system is just annoying and even if you have puncture mods you can't penetrate the skin.

When you got extremely high Conclave rating the boss will just soak up so much damage because it reduce your damage a lot. This can be solved by just bring one weapon with you and then you'll slaughter it.

It also has a natural damage reduction to any weapon which made critical weapons the only useful one.

 

Any boss which rely on weak spots only to be damaged are just bad. They are not fun to play against and not hard to deal with. Most of the time it's just waiting for the spot to appear.

 

I don't want more intelligent enemies. Grineer flee all the time because they want to seek out cover and it's ridiculous that they start to flee the moment they see you. It isn't fun and it just forces me to hunt down the small packs of enemies that runs away. Corpus does the same thing and it isn't helping the game.

 

So when you say Intelligent enemies I'm gonna guess ones that flank you but that won't happen. You're too fast and too powerful. What could help is if they actually attack as a group and don't flee. This is what makes Infested fun to play against. They actually try to kill you. But with the recent addition of ridiculous enemies to their side it gets less fun on higher levels because they just suck all of your power right away. Hit with a damage of 500 points and more.

I'm not joking at all about Lephantis. It really is the best boss in the game right now. And to correct you on your comment about weak spots on bosses not being good, look at the Dead Space bosses, which almost all of them have weak spots that are the only ways of damaging them. Look at Resident Evil bosses after RE4. (Not saying that every boss from those games are of at least decent quality, but a lot of them are.) Maybe you don't find it fun, but by design alone they are good bosses. Lephantis just happens to be the best one Warframe has.

 

 

 

I think you're also missing the point with more intelligent enemies too. The running away from a more powerful enemy is the intelligent thing to do, but they aren't intelligent enough to do anything about their enemy even when they're equipped with a Heavy unit (which even though they do considerable damage, they're still stupid enemies).What  I also mean by intelligence is that enemies will either get stuck in an animation loop, end up standing still while shooting at you, or realize that nothing that they're doing is working and refuse to change their tactics. Also keep in mind that Combat Formation Bravo is basically just zerg rushing and nothing more than that. There's no challenge to that. That's not even fun to fight after a while anymore for the veteran players because those enemies are nothing but dumb cannon fodder and the majority of the game has nothing but those kind of enemies.

 

As far as Infested go, they have zero regards for their own lives and that's why Infested don't ever flee. It's not within their concept to be intelligent, so they're exempt. Still, they do have their shortcomings such as weird attack animations (Ancients, I'm looking at you.).

[Neocyberman]

Agreed. Development is wide not only in terms of always creating new content but also not fleshing out and developing existing mechanics to make them engaging. 

 

Overall this leads to bloat. DE already has to deal with droprate bloat caused by warframe mods. Void bloat is dealt with in a variety of ways, most frustrating of all is the ABC rotation system.

 

Some mechanics also remain undeveloped and can barely be said to be integrated into the game. Stealth stands out.

[unknow99]

I agree with 70% of OP's words.

 

I'm a little fed up of grinding/farming stuff & rushing through events to get the latest badges/weapons/cosmetics/frame. When I do this, it's in a really fast way and then, I go back to something that needs a lot of work,but is more enjoyable to me : stealth runs.

 

I don't know, it just feels better for me, sneaking around like a ninja would,plan my path & risk to alert everyone. And that quiet atmosphere...It reminds me of the old Warframe,when I was crouching in the darkness of these corpus ships (they feel too bright now)...

 

I'll stay here until we get proper stealth. But I handle the "new-shiny-things-to-grind" method less and less as time goes by.