New Player Feedback

[PlagueOfGripes]

I've been playing Warframe for about two weeks, I suppose. While I can't give expert feedback like an older player, I can give initial perspectives that older players can't give anymore. Here's my first impressions of just about everything, whether they are wrong or not:

Peer to peer hosting. I'm sure the devs are aware this is a bad thing, so I'll just mention it to mention it.

Map variety. I'm sure this is also a work in progress, but it doesn't take long to see it all. Right now the game is almost exclusively taking place inside spaceships, or buildings that look suspiciously like spaceship hallways. And ever so often, there's a snowy exterior.

Combat is not especially difficult. You can be brought down, of course, but this is usually the result of being careless, or simply being stun locked. It feels like the core issue with combat is that it's almost exclusively about sustained fire. There are a couple of enemies that do have unique abilities, but generally, fighting is very straight forward, and mostly about outputting as much DPS as possible, versus making good decisions. This is a pretty broad issue that's related to how abilities are used, waves of enemies being more common than singular, dangerous opponents, mods focusing more on ways of increasing damage than actually doing unique things, and so on.

Speed running. This style of play doesn't really bother me, but it can definitely become boring, very quickly. The only inherent reason to take your time in a mission is for random drops, which players use Defense missions for. As enemies always seem to show up in massive waves, and refuse to thin out, there's no reason to clear out rooms. It's much easier to ignore the enemies and just run to your objective, then quickly leave. The fact that missions have only one or two objectives, rather than many more, doesn't help, as the objectives are then spaced out far, far across the map to make up for it. There are many more reasons why this seems to be par for the game, of course. It seems like Exterminate missions are currently the only real alternative.

Stun locking. Knockdowns are far too common. Enemies either try to DPS you or knock you down, and that's about it. It feels like there needs to be more intermediate status effects. Slows, poisons that drain health as you deal damage. That sort of thing.

Green lasers. The presence of these things still baffle me. Why are they part of the design? I know about cameras. Even so, I still don't understand why they're in the game. Lockdowns achieve the same thing, which themselves are fairly pointless since they lock enemies out. They're mainly a nuisance. Even if they weren't, and you could not slide through them, I again don't see the point of their inclusion. Again, lockdowns achieve the same thing, which itself is fairly pointless.

Energy. Energy balls don't make much sense to me. Either they're so plentiful they trivialize combat and encourage spamming abilities, or they're so rare you just end up never using them. In general, guns are far more effective than abilities anyway. As a result, most matches you see either a "0" or "1" next to the "Abilities Used" stat for most players. What should have been an important aspect of combat, as it's a secondary resource, instead is more of an afterthought. A lot of this is because you get energy back from these random drops, rather than from some function of combat (time, getting kills, unique kills, taking damage, or something similar). There's an important distinction between finding a resource and generating it yourself.

Progression. An important part in any free to play economic model. Probably the most important. The core objective in Warframe seems to be in getting new Warframes and new weapons, and then grinding them to 30. Once you complete them, you rotate out and grind something else. There aren't many warframes, and not many weapons (many of which seem to be blatantly worse than others, since they're so similar), and the only way to customize them outside of a "potato" comes from random drops and general gameplay. As such, there's not much of a sense of progression. The way it probably should have worked is to buy a weapon and then spend time grinding many various accessories to customize that weapon, including mods. In this way, you buy something that's already maximized, but has enough variety that you, as a player, will want to explore a weapon's various options. Horizontal progression. As it is, there's not much to buy in Warframe. Not that the conversion of USD to in-game currency seems fair to begin with - prices seem laughably high to make up for the rarity of things to want.

Mods. This is the big one, to me. This is one of the messiest, most baffling upgrade systems I've ever seen in a game. Most of this is from this "fusion" aspect to the mod system. Trying to manage mods is incredibly complicated and time-consuming. No amount of tabs and sorting options will remedy this. The list of mods a player generates over time becomes massive, very easily. In addition to maxed out mods, you may also need ones of a specific level to fit a build, meaning that many more slots occupying space. This all coupled with the need to cross between mod types to fuse does not help matters. The entire interface is very bloated, both visually and in terms of accessibility.

Continuing on the subject of the mod system, if mods are kept as random drops (which itself would better serve your economic model to be part of a weapon upgrade system), each mod should have its own dedicated slot, in the weapon menu. Possessing the mod would make it show up in this slot. Having more than one should simply increase its numerical listing. If you have 30 True Steel mods, True Steel should only appear once, and have a "30" next to its name. To achieve the same ends of the current system, a better alternative to fusing would be a researchable resource option. Having 30 True Steel mods would do you no good, as you could only use its tier 1 version naturally. Each mod on each weapon could have its own research option that increases what tier you can use on that weapon. The amount of mods you have amassed act as resources, in this way, which you can then invest into your weapon. You could also use the mods as consumable resources during research. Point being to all this, the current system is very messy - especially to new players, and needs vast simplification.

Overall, I like the game, although it has its share of flaws. It's a bit too easy, and has many systems that seem to exist for no particular reason, or fail their implementation. Hopefully my first impression will help with initial retention of future players.