We Need More Variation Within Tiles

[Teridax68]

I think we can all agree that Warframe has some beautiful tilesets and tiles. However, once you run through enough of them, tiles within a level will start to blend into each other, in part because levels will often have multiple instances of the exact same tile. When environments start to resemble each other like that, they tend to feel less organic and more static, which can lead to boredom. However, adding lots of new tiles takes up a lot of unnecessary resources and time, which is why I think a healthy compromise would be to for DE to take its existing tiles, and add some meaningful variations to them.

For an example of an existing kind of variation, let's take the massive double cannon room from the Grineer Galleon tileset. It's a long corridor, and the two main set pieces are cannons. In one variant of the room, the cannons are still, and in another, the cannons are firing. This changes the mood of the room ever so slightly, and can even add some variation to parkour when trying to cut through the cannons. If the room had another layout where one cannon was, say, destroyed, or under construction, that would also add more diversity, and randomly placing these different variants in the same level would prevent the different instances of that same room from being identical to each other.

One major tileset in need of more tile variants is the Grineer Sealab tileset: the actual tileset is gorgeous, and one of my favorites, but its environment is so narrow, and the levels it's used in are often so long, that playing through those levels ends up boiling down to zooming through a bunch of corridors, most of which are about the same three/four tiles. If the same tile had, say, different possible placements for the coral structures, or different variants of Grineer elements, i.e. machinery, storage, structural damage, etc., the tileset would end up feeling a lot less samey.

TL;DR: It would be nice for more rooms in each tileset to have different minor variants, e.g. different environmental features or variations in the objects within. Warframe's tech has evolved a lot over time, and it would be a good opportunity to make environments feel more organic and varied, and less static over time.

[UniversalPixle]

mostly this would only apply to the ships, the planets are all getting tileset reworks as time goes on. so the ships need some love, but i agree with you.

[Zhoyzu]

6 minutes ago, UniversalPixle said:

mostly this would only apply to the ships, the planets are all getting tileset reworks as time goes on. so the ships need some love, but i agree with you.

but then again ships wouldnt be significantly different from each other on the inside anyways

[UniversalPixle]

thats true, maybe the ships need an overhaul aswell.

[(PSN)LittleCloud]

You must have missed the last DevStream, it was shown that DE_Steve has worked on some new texture mapping to make maps look more unique. 

 

[UniversalPixle]

Just now, (PS4)LittleCloud said:

You must have missed the last DevStream, it was shown that DE_Steve has worked on some new texture mapping to make maps look more unique. 

 

 

while that will help, it will only really help for a short time, then again so will overhauling the tileset.

[taiiat]

er, you complain that Tiles look too alike to one another, then suggest that more of the same Tiles be created?????

[Xekrin]

20 minutes ago, UniversalPixle said:

while that will help, it will only really help for a short time, then again so will overhauling the tileset.

Of course overhauling it would help but since that is quite the massive undertaking that would likely overshadow every other aspect of design and content, let's take what we get, shall we?

[xethier]

How about the dozens of unused doors in various tilesets actually be activated and used?

I'm not so much against the repetitive nature of the tilesets, more the 'flow' of moving from one tile to another.

Once you've done these a few hundred times you tend to see the marker and know exactly which way to move and set yourself to proceed to the exit that's flagged. It would be nice to see some variation. I'd also like to see some of the removed tiles (like the ones from the asteroid mining facilities) be reintroduced.

There was a really good one with a vertical central column with exits in various places that I haven't seen in literal years. (bonus points if someone can find a screenshot with that thing) I LOVED that tile, but, alas, it is no more. 

Edited October 18, 2016 by xethier

[(PSN)WiiConquered]

10 hours ago, taiiat said:

er, you complain that Tiles look too alike to one another, then suggest that more of the same Tiles be created?????

Not really. S/he's arguing that there be a level of procedural generation within tiles, which is very different.

[Teridax68]

16 hours ago, taiiat said:

er, you complain that Tiles look too alike to one another, then suggest that more of the same Tiles be created?????

Yes, with minor variations. If you read the OP again, you'll see that I said that Warframe needs more varied tiles, but since creating new tiles entirely takes a lot of time and resources, a more economical way of going about it could be to take existing tiles, and tweak them a little to create multiple variants of the same tile. Tiles would then look a little less alike to one another.

16 hours ago, (PS4)LittleCloud said:

You must have missed the last DevStream, it was shown that DE_Steve has worked on some new texture mapping to make maps look more unique.

I've seen that part, and I think it's great and will improve things by a lot, but at the same time I don't think it will address the issue of sameness entirely on its own (neither does my own proposed solution, but it'd be another step forward). Changing textures is good, but that doesn't really change the environment you're navigating through. By contrast, if you were to take one room and, say, move one of the central pillars, or remove it entirely, or add some other feature, that would be enough variation to slightly change players' routes through the levels, and make them pay more attention to the tiles they're running/bullet-jumping through.