My Friends Feedback A "review" Of Warframe

[MetroidHunter26]

This is from my friend who played Warframe before me. I in no way share most of his opinions but he hits on some key thinks like Tutorials for new player base and more intuitive design and such. Now I am in no way an expert on this game. (Hell I'm just a guy who plays video games for a living come on...) So most of his info is on HIS Interpretation and some of my feedback I tried to help him with when he asked me why I love this game so much. Without further ado(sp? I don't even know..) here is my friends "review" of Warframe.
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If you told me in a pre-Warframe world that there would be a game where I could basically play as the Cyborg Ninja in space and that said game would be entirely free for me to play, I would have told you to stop toying with my emotions. My precious, fragile, emotions. That's why it really hurts that I couldn't invest more than a day into Warframe due to how aggressively unfriendly it is to new users.

 

 

For reference, I downloaded your game roughly a month ago, probably around when the beta first opened to Steam users. For all I know things have been patched or changed entirely since my time with Warframe, but my experience has made it really difficult to work up the effort to reinstall your title and give it another go. I'll try to hammer out the three things that turned me off of the game rather than pour over every detail, but they basically boil down to this: the game is unintuitive. 

 

 

The first thing going in that stood out to me was how confusing character customization worked. During the course of my play through I amassed a huge amount of modifications for my armor and weaponry, but despite my best efforts I could never figure out how to apply any of them. I must have screwed around in menus for a solid hour spread across the game trying to get something to work as far as customization, and the best I could do was change the color of my character's armor.

 

 

At some point I gave up and assumed I needed to reach my first level-up before I could customize anything substantial, so I went back to grinding. Grinding is an accurate way to describe the act of leveling up in Warframe, because it takes forever. Reaching the first level in Warframe is like trying to struggle up another peg late game in any other title that uses an exp based leveling system. Factor in that I couldn't figure out how to operate whatever arcane ritual was expected of me to get equipment modding to work, and the game just started to feel samey. It makes trying to just get started an incredibly boring experience.

 

So apparently the guy who is posting this (I don't know what username he's going by here) explained to me that maybe it was mastery that was taking forever to go up, and I never considered there was two different levels moving at the same time. But if so that's just a whole other problem. Why are there two levels? What item needs to be based on what level? What can I do differently depending on where my levels are at? Why not just make one so there's no confusion ever and then milestone things to unlock whatever dumb thing mastery gives you.

 

 

The final straw was after two different matches I had where it became evident that nobody on my team had any more of an idea what they were doing than I did, and by this point I thought I just didn't know anything about anything and that it was more my fault than Warframe's. The first of which was attempting to bridge a long gap by wall running. I don't recall the level name or any specifics beyond this: there's a wall you can run across on one side, and a series of pipes on the other, and on the far end is a cliff with a door that you obviously need to get to. It looks as though you can possibly bridge the gap by timing your jump on the pipes, and hey guess what you can. So you travel along, you do your thing, you're Warframing or whatever, and then you have to backtrack through the area. 

 

 

New problem. While you were able to jump down from the entrance and scale the pipes over to the cliff earlier, you cannot do this in reverse, because the pipes are too low and the new exit is now too high up to reach with a jump. Turns out you can run along the wall, but this came at a point where I had no idea wall running was even a thing. The game made no effort to inform me about it, hell it actually gave me a totally different means to progress minutes earlier in the same room, but here I am with two other people and our expectations are being totally subverted. We all tried to find out how to progress, and through some stroke of luck after minutes of throwing our robobodies off a cliff, I and one other player manager to pull off a wall run. The last player could not. We waited for him for a while but he just couldn't do it, no matter how hard he tried, and so we had to stand there and watch him flail around and fall to his doom over and over and over until he eventually left the match.

 

 

In another section, with another team, you must scale a wall vertically to reach an overhead vent. For maybe ten minutes this time I and another team of two attempted to just keep on moving through the level, but none of us could figure out how on earth to get into the vent. Somehow one of us did, and he did his best to explain it to us, and then we all managed to keep on going, but the whole ordeal was only after spending what felt like an eternity throwing our characters into a freaking wall in the hopes that something magically would happen and we'd be able to start enjoying the game again.

 

 

Boy that's a lot of words about Warframe, a game I played about 20 or more matches of and then gave up on forever, but my friend won't shut up about it and he's a good guy, and apparently you are all taking feedback and actually working to improve your game. There's a good game floating around somewhere in the Warframe I played, one that lets me play as the Cyborg Ninja in space, and I would still like to enjoy that game. It sounds fun. But the Warframe I know is a hot mess.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe4LG1NNIgs

http://i.imgur.com/YWTU5oD.jpg
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Now if anyone can answer most of the stuff he's hit on so that I may relay to him how to play it right then good. But then that also implies that One must first learn themselves to play Warframe efficiently THEN Teach others and that may be a problem in it of itself.
Granted he is a VERY different player than I am so take this as you will but he does know what he's talking about.

 

[MetroidHunter26]

While reading this I remembered a video that hits this on the head

This is by Egoraptor and he reviews Mega Man and Mega Man X. Yes there old but it hits on how players learn how to play a game and how a game can teach a player thru level design. so yeah here ya go.
The video is mostly a compassion about sequels but it still very informative. Edited May 4, 2013 by MetroidHunter26

[OoKeNnEtHoO]

So apparently the guy who is posting this (I don't know what username he's going by here) explained to me that maybe it was mastery that was taking forever to go up, and I never considered there was two different levels moving at the same time. But if so that's just a whole other problem. Why are there two levels? What item needs to be based on what level? What can I do differently depending on where my levels are at? Why not just make one so there's no confusion ever and then milestone things to unlock whatever dumb thing mastery gives you.

This is there to separate player skill from item levels.

 

It is essentially to allow players to differentiate between someone who have tried many different weapons/warframes and have spent a significant amount of time in the game from others who only spent enough time in the game to level up 4 items to level 30 (Warframe, Primary weapon, Secondary weapon, Melee weapon).

 

The former will very likely understand many of the game mechanics including issues like wall-climbing (it actually follows Assassin's Creed controls so if you played it before it would be easier to get it), crafting system, blocking with the weapon (default is mouse 4) and navigating the different pages on the screen (customisation page, mod page, inventory, etc).

 

The latter will however likely not know a majority of these but having lvl 30 items will still allow him to play on high level missions. It doesn't really make a big difference but it just signals how "into the game" the player is because a casual player will likely not be bothered with the mastery levels and just using his 4 main lvl 30 favourite items will be enough.

 

The old leveling system has been changed to a card based "drag and install" system and it is easier to understand than the previous one, in my opinion.

 

All the other issues that your friend has listed are highly subjective.

 

This is because not everyone takes the same amount of time in understanding the game mechanics.

 

He has however hit a very valid point regarding the tutorial not teaching players everything that they should know and making the assumption that ALL players will be able to figure them out all by themselves.

[neKroMancer]

In the end, the lack of tutorial problem.

 

Probably not going to be fixed until release version, I think.

[lncarnation]

It can be difficult to automatically grasp aspects of this game however the key word in beta games is "adapt" If you cannot adapt then I suggest you avoid any betas.