More Longevity Suggestions

[Huitzil]

I posted some of these in someone else's topic that immediately fell off the front page with no responses, and some of these are new. They aren't really game balance suggestions, just about longevity.

- Cut the delay period on crafting. Straight up. It is absolutely inexcusable. Unlike most FTP trappings I can pay real money to get, the time delay on crafting doesn't feel like I can pay money to take a shortcut, it feels like the game is extorting me and making me pay for what it ought to give out for free. I already got the credits and the blueprints and the materials, there's no excuse to make me wait. Especially the three-day period for the warframes. If I am getting sick of how my current frame plays, I want to make a new one. It's bad enough how long it takes to get the blueprints and materials for a new frame, but when I see it's a 3-day wait to be able to use the new frame I crafted because I wanted to try something new, I'm not going to play the game in those 3 days, and there's a good chance I'll just give up.

- Make less missions. No, really. The levels themselves are procedurally generated, making them ostensibly different every time, right? So why are there so many "different" missions that have near-identical conditions? Io is an Infestation Defense mission for levels 11-15. Callisto is an Infestation Defense mission on the SAME MAP for levels 11-17. Why in God's name are these two different missions? When I click on Io and someone else clicks on Callisto, neither of us will be matched into a game. Why? It's a pointless subdivision. Choosing between Io and Callisto is not a meaningful decision, it just cuts matchmaking partners in half at random and thus makes games harder to fill.

And not only this, the large amount of similar missions makes the game seem like it's about linerarly going through levels one at a time, and repeating them seems artificial and grindy. Replaying a campaign in Left 4 Dead or a level in Mass Effect 3 MP doesn't feel "grindy", it just feels like I'm playing the game, because those games successfully present the same map/campaign as a new experience each time, and convey that replaying them is what you are supposed to be doing. Warframe's missions are all procedurally generated anyway: why present them in a way that makes it feel like I'm doing the same mission again instead of getting a new mission that has a similar objective? When I click a planet, there shouldn't be a line of mission nodes that all link into each other in a line; there should be a short summary of the enemy and how the war effort is going, and an option menu to pick the sort of mission I want to play and who to play against (and "Any" as options for both). Then when I hit play it matches me into a group and while it loads, displays the name of the region I'm going to and the nature of the mission. Now I'm not just replaying Pallas again, I'm getting a new mission that is similar to Pallas -- but it's still presented as new, and it feels new.

- Turn the top-level treadmill into a cycle, and give players a reason to participate. One thing Mass Effect 3 multiplayer did that I thought was BRILLIANT for longevity was the "Promote" function. When you got a class to level 20 (the max), you could "promote" it and send it off to your singleplayer save, resetting the class to level 1 and increasing your overall N7 Rank (total character level) and allowing you to increase it even more by leveling the class again. The effect it had on your singleplayer save was negligible because no amount of promotions would make ME3's ending not terrible, but the effect on multiplayer alone was worth it. Leveling a character up and making them more powerful is fun, and with the promotion system, you got to do that again and again. It didn't feel pointless because it raised your rank and reset your skill points, and everyone else could see how much you'd been playing. And it allowed them to make max level reasonably attainable, instead of having an asymptotic experience curve that gives you easy levels early and then takes forever and a half to get the last three levels.

Something similar could easily apply to this game. Warframes and weapons work better as you gain affinity with them, maybe some of that is personal familiarity and some of it is just "breaking it in." So once you break in a frame or weapon, you can trade it back to the Lotus to outfit regular non-cutting-edge soldiers with, and they give you recognition and access to higher tiers of technology (giving you Mastery Rank). Mastery Rank gives some non-cosmetic benefit too, say, your total mod capacity on all weapons and frames is increased by your Mastery Rank. Boom. Now you don't get to the max level and then plateau, doing the same "grind" again and again to accumulate a much more scarce and unreliable means of advancement (mods), you can either stay at max level and do the hardest missions for the chance at the best mods, or trade in your maxed out stuff to advance in another form and go back to leveling. Now leveling content is as important for your endgame as max-level content, and that's good for everyone. And, of course, you can spend platinum to buy a broken-in warframe or weapon, that starts at a higher (but not maxed) affinity level.

- Provide incentive to "ration" gameplay and prevent burnout. A bunch of my friends started playing this game at the same time I did, played it a bunch over a couple of days, got completely sick of it, and now have no interest in it. The more you play in a short period of time, the more repetitive it seems. Unfortunately, with the special-reward "Alert" missions coming up every half hour and many items only acquirable through alerts, the game is telling you to play a lot at one time to catch the most chances at the alert mission rewards, and that gets people burned out. Someone who plays (for example) 20 missions a day over a three-day weekend will get sick of how repetitive the game is and quit, but a player who plays three to five missions a day can go for months without it feeling too repetitive.

So change the alert system away from something that wants you to be able to do a mission every half hour -- make alert missions pop up every, say, 6 hours, and expire after 24, so as long as you play once a day you can get a crack at all of them. Then introduce/expand a mechanic that says "if you play this many times per day, you're good", like the first mission of the day bonus, but for more missions. Say, cut the overall rate of Affinity gain to 75%, and make the first five missions you do in a day give 2x Affinity, for a total of 150% the current number. Now the game says, check in and do five missions a day, and you're good; you can do more but there's diminishing returns, and in doing so discourages people from playing so much they get burnt out. And, of course, you'd be able to spend platinum to get boosters that extend that number out, if you really want to play a bunch in one day.

- Give the game some personality. Because right now it has almost none. Our characters are voiceless protagonists, which for the setup of the game, is understandable. But our mission control is also blandly "professional" and whose only notable attribute is that she does not understand what the word "overhaul" means, and our three enemy types are Generic Space Marines, Generic Organic Plague Monsters, and Synergistic Robot Army Who Might Be Interesting If They Actually Talked. Personality gets people involved and interested in the game's setting, and helps them emotionally connect to the events that are happening.

Give us a couple mission control characters (assigned at random) who address events in different ways, which could make similar missions feel different. Maybe one operator reacts to everything with dry sarcasm, one gets WAY too into your mission and gloats about how invincible you are and revels in the carnage you cause, one's a Corpus defector who's constantly on the edge of panic that everything is going to go wrong, et cetera et cetera. And give our enemies some personality to them too. Make Grineer say things that aren't just tactical instructions, but reflect something about them. Boisterous and overconfident, zealous and preachy, consumed with preposterous levels of anger, SOMETHING. Give Corpus understandable dialogue too, and make it distinctly different. And Infestation obviously shouldn't have dialogue as we usually consider it, but for God's sake, give them a visual redesign to make them not so totally generic.

It's a "technocyte" plague, right? They're actually cyborgs reshaped by nanites? make them look cyborgy. Uniquely cyborgy. Like someone tried to build zombie dogs and corpse monsters by jamming bodies full of old computer parts. Infestation-controlled areas don't just have "organic corruption grass" growing everywhere, the Infested compulsively draw bizarre math equations over every surface, and recite nonsensical data snippets in a low, even drone as they rush at you. Or something else, something to separate them from the dozens of similar organic-corruption enemies players have seen in games like this.

Also, fire your voice director, because apparently the direction he or she gave to the Grineer VAs is "Try to sound like the guy who says 'get out of there it's gonna blow' in Counterstrike 1.6, only care a lot less."

[SolluxCaptorTA]

You have a lot of great suggestions here. I hope DE gets a look at this, especially the stuff about making Mastery Rank worth it and adding more falvor to each mission.

 

Genius.

[Huitzil]

Nobody else has anything to say? Really?

[Guest]

I especially agree on cutting down the amount of missions.

 

They can add more when we have a good amount of tilesets, but right now it just feels like many missions are complete repeats of each other.

[Vhegna]

there's nothing else to say really u pretty much covered all the bases here man,I whole heartily agree with pretty much everything stated here +1

Edited April 28, 2013 by Vhegna

[Caiman]

When I click a planet, there shouldn't be a line of mission nodes that all link into each other in a line; there should be a short summary of the enemy and how the war effort is going, and an option menu to pick the sort of mission I want to play and who to play against (and "Any" as options for both). Then when I hit play it matches me into a group and while it loads, displays the name of the region I'm going to and the nature of the mission. Now I'm not just replaying Pallas again, I'm getting a new mission that is similar to Pallas -- but it's still presented as new, and it feels new.

 

I support this fully.

 

Supplemental idea for keeping area progression between planets: add a "completion/control gauge" to the planet's mission type selection menu, which gets filled up as you complete missions in that planet. When it's filled to certain increments (delineated with notches or whatever) you gain access to "connected" planets that were locked.

 

The gauge could also unlock new mission types for the planet, so you can still find matches for Raid or whatever if you want to, and keep players from just rushing into a Defense mission really early on.

 

Also, alert missions can work by making the reward for completely filling the planet's "completion meter" be access to Alert missions on that planet. Either that, or just make Alerts available as soon as you unlock a planet.

 

Alternatively, you could just make an ordered progression of mission types (without repeats) for each faction, where you beat the last unlocked one to unlock the next.

 

Progression between planets would pretty much stay the same this way, and you'd also get rid of the issue of being able to fully unlock boss planets just by having someone who already has it unlocked invite you, and then completing it once.

 

- Turn the top-level treadmill into a cycle, and give players a reason to participate. One thing Mass Effect 3 multiplayer did that I thought was BRILLIANT for longevity was the "Promote" function. When you got a class to level 20 (the max), you could "promote" it and send it off to your singleplayer save, resetting the class to level 1 and increasing your overall N7 Rank (total character level) and allowing you to increase it even more by leveling the class again. The effect it had on your singleplayer save was negligible because no amount of promotions would make ME3's ending not terrible, but the effect on multiplayer alone was worth it. Leveling a character up and making them more powerful is fun, and with the promotion system, you got to do that again and again. It didn't feel pointless because it raised your rank and reset your skill points, and everyone else could see how much you'd been playing. And it allowed them to make max level reasonably attainable, instead of having an asymptotic experience curve that gives you easy levels early and then takes forever and a half to get the last three levels.

 

From the livestream #3 transcript:

 

[27:44] Why are there so few weapon polarities?

There are only a few set up on each weapon, just the way it was done to be flexible as possible. Toying with the idea of a Prestige or Paragon system to change slot polarities.