New Quest: The Second Dream [U18 Megathread/spoilers]

[Fezairin]

I must say this whole "Second Dream" story highly devalues the game for me. Technically very well done, kudos! But the story?

 

Every time I play a mission now, I have this vision of a teenager with a bowl of popcorn and an X-Box controller - and this frantic look of someone takes a game far to serious. When I think of the Tenno council, I see a whole bunch of them munching away. When I think of Conclave fights, I see them bicker about PVP points.

 

This same story - mind-controlled robot or symbiont -  we had so many times before. Be it Akira, Ghost in the Shell, thousands of Bandai Gundam products, dozens of copycat new animes, sci-fi from the 70ies-90ies.

It is in no way original.

 

Quite a few people here asked, why is it offending to play as a teenager. For truly the "Tenno" are teenagers in behavior, though they shouldn't after what they experienced.

 

For the younger players: You might get as old as Methusalem, but you'll never forget what you were like as a teenager. You clearly thought you already knew it all - or that there was very little separating you from an adult. Sadly, there is. Life experience.

 

And you clearly do not want to be this kid again. Ever. Trust me! Not even in a game. (Though I did enjoy Max's naivete in Life is Strange. She was fun to play... Digressing..)

At the very best you'd want to be that kid at around 19 with your lifetime knowledge. Never without. And that would be the least one would expect from those Tenno kids now. But, no, their comments are just representing the snotnoses they look like. 

 

Now we do have the story from Ember Prime's Codex entry. Which just states that they inexplicably found children with powers on a ship that was in the void. 

Those children, changed by the void - or born by/in the void -, could have been horribly twisted, abused for the war purposes, to become the Tenno. Event Horizon passengers on their way back. (I'm referring to the SciFi horror flick Event Horizon).

 

They'd be nurtured to maturity, trained and put into the warframes to channel their powers. Then sent off to war.

 

I'd rather have had something like a flashback "Dream" of them perhaps getting to know the man that is now our Stalker.

Flashbacks to the time where they get trained.

 

Imagine the Stalker would have been one of their guards. Perhaps he even sympathized with them, felt with them, aided them. Perhaps he was proud, when they returned from the war. And then his whole Universe would bend when they killed the Orokin Elite.

 

I mean, honestly... The Orokin elite knew how their Tennos worked. If they wanted to kill them - as they are now - , they'd just put a kill switch onto the brats. Victory delivered. Thank you. Good-bye!

 

Imagine the possibilities for further stories, explaining why exactly the Tenno - well, my version of the Tenno, not the teenagers - came to hate the Orokin. How they aged, took their scars. How the wars went on and on.

 

How possibly they realized that the only company that they would ever have were themselves. The only ones that truly understood them.

 

There was a great chance to introduce something great that would have appealed to many different audiences. A more mature approach.

 

But, well. It was not to be and now we have some smart-! sitting in our backyard, so to speak. And he doesn't want to leave. 

 

There was another argument, as to "explanation when switching a Warframe".

I played Assassin's Creed Syndicate lately. I switched between Eve and Jacob quite frequently. *SWOOSH* Man becomes woman.

I never asked myself if he stalked her the whole time, she then threw a smoke bomb and thus it is currently him.

Or if in reality it is just one person with a multiple personality disorder.

 

Why do all the Warframe descriptions ascribe personalities to the Warframes?

Ash - the traditional Ninja. 

Valkyr - Quite what her name says with a touching fancy for berzerk slaughter

Vauban - An engineer

etc

 

If it is just one kid sitting there in the store room, playing with his future console... They are all the same.

 

I'd rather have them develop stories of the Warframes when we get a new one. Like a background story on Ash - how did he become that Ninja?

What was he like before? How did the war change him?

And put cinematic effort into that. It would feel like a huge reward for each warframe added to one's personal selection.

 

Anyway. Too late for that. Perhaps I'll put something like my version into a non-Warframe story of my own.

 

The latest warframes were kind of lackluster and I think I've spend my last money for a while on Warframe. Not that they will bother much.

It is just no longer my story. And - yes - the gameplay is the same. It is still fun. But story does matter to people with an imagination.

And perhaps I have too much of that to still connect with this story.

Edited January 21, 2016 by Fezairin

[Siphersh]

I've just played the quest, and I really liked it, thank you.

[Aimop95]

Here's the thing. I'm pretty damned sure that the Warframes do have some kind of sentience in there. It's just that when you combine lore and gameplay, that results in some very problematic implications, such as the fact that we can build and discard Warframes at will.

We know that they aren't just metal puppets, but that doesn't mean they are capable of building civilizations. For all we know the suites could have the sentience equivalent to that of a dog.

 

Now is chucking a dog away after you've finished using it considered wrong, yes. But it is not the same as slavery.