Devstream 87 Overview

[(XBOX)LUCIANX40]

Nice too make ur acquaintance, 

 

     I'm woundering if it is possible to let each warframe have there own inventorys , also a place to put weapons that we've maxed out this way we don't have too sell them all the time

[HyokaChan]

My biggest concern about weak point eximus is melee. If you have to shoot it, does this mean melee is now completely useless against them? This would make infested much more of a problem since a lot of Tenno prefer to default to melee since the Infested tend to get up close.

[[DE]Taylor]

10 minutes ago, HyokaChan said:

My biggest concern about weak point eximus is melee. If you have to shoot it, does this mean melee is now completely useless against them? This would make infested much more of a problem since a lot of Tenno prefer to default to melee since the Infested tend to get up close.

I don't think Rebecca had a melee (or secondary) weapon equipped during that mission. 

I can't comment on the viability of certain weapons vs others, or how difficult the hitbox would be to hit with a melee weapon, but don't take her trying to hit it with the Tigris as confirmation that you can only shoot it. :) 

Edited February 4, 2017 by [DE]Taylor
edited for clarity

[bl4ckhunter]

1 hour ago, [DE]Taylor said:

 

• Sentient Whirlwinds, Nullifiers, and the proposed Eximus Weak Points all hope to accomplish the game goal: to get players to stop the Mob Grinder for one moment and rethink their strategy on the battlefield. 

Has it occurred to anyone that before stopping the mob grinder you might want to tweak the spawn rates of supposely special units? When you're forced to fight 9 nullifiers/eximus units at a time (often both at the same time too) there's simply no time to stop the mob grinder and live.

[(PSN)EmilsTekcor]

so with regard to trials most players that I can think of expect them to be needed for at least 1 trial per enemy faction so to hear that there are none is kind of disappointing as they are pretty awesome, but I can understand why you don't put more in they sound like a pain to even think of. Would raid bosses ever be a possibility you know missions where it's quite literally just one mega boss.

[DarthBane1]

Multiple "bard" frames in a mission. Possible conflict of sound? EXE: I cast it in one spot and another person casts in similar area. What happens? Does your team hear the sound or just you? 

[theraot]

DE, On the Infested Eximus "weak" [1] points. If I understand correctly, the infested unit is invulnerable until the weak points are destroyed. We have a way to communicate that to the players: make the health bar grayed out. I would consider having the health bar as it was on the demo a bug.

The grayed out health bar will let the players know that the unit will not take damage until some condition is met (destroying the weak points in this case) which will also ease identifying these units from a crowd.

[1]: Weak in quotes, because the units that have them aren't weaker than those that have them. Yet, I understand that for the units that have it, it will be the only vulnerable spot.

[Undeademon]

Tyl Regor still sounds like he is touching himself when he says "I'm very excited now..."

[Domesticon]

I have to say, I'm not really a fan of Bardframe's animations, I know Danielle put work into the mocap and the dancing and all that, but it just doesn't seem right compared to the other frames, looks oddly loose, not smooth, a bit jerky. The other's however have very directed movements, I suppose is the way to put it. Honestly, I think it's the difference between the mocap and animating it, but I can't say I want to see more of the mocap style in the future.

[nostraightanswer]

I really enjoyed the stream. I wasn't expecting Codex to be playing during the pre-show standby, to be honest. It felt surreal. 

Additional sentient stuff is great. They're super challenging without the equipment, but admittedly there isn't very much variety and I wouldn't mind seeing some more stuff with them. I'm super interested in the new Fabricator units and the mini-raptors. I'm also excited for the changes to Infested Eximus; having weak-points to destroy before being able to damage them will require players to focus a little more than usual on specific targets rather than the bulk at large in order to remain effective. A lot of the people that are upset about it I think are disappointed by the concept of invulnerability of any duration on any enemy, even if the player can still damage it. Admittedly, invulnerability is not super-duper fun when you can't do anything about it, but the fact the weak points exist means the player can still technically damage the enemy- just not it's direct health pool until the weak points are taken care of.

Defector rescue seems like it could be fun, but I'm not yet sure of it in the current state. Maybe when it's playable I'll have a better opinion.

The Kingpin stuff sounds incredible. It'd give a reason for the clan I'm part of to regularly play outside of story and item grinding, I feel like. The fact they will kind of mess with the guild as you make progress towards taking them down is exciting!

Bard frame powers look amazing. I'm super hyped to play around with it.

Can't wait for next devstream! Thanks guys

[RoniLumen]

1. Be careful with the eximus buff.
For us, good luck when a couple bombards and scorches show up in our Sortie 3 Eximus Stronghold mission.
I keep seeing good teams getting wiped in damage spike situations, scorches / bombards in sortie3 or no shield nightmare mode in kuva fortress and void mostly.
I'd recommend eximus damage reduction instead of invulnerability and keeping the weak spot mechanic for missions/enemies under level 50 or 60. 

Is there a thread for Damage 3.0 ?
The biggest drag is when well geared, well built players need to do low level missions: alerts, grind for resources, invasions, fissures except axi and sortie 1.

Buff sentients with a reconstructing unit? Why ? I only play sorties, kuva flood, Nightmare mode missions and mostly T4/Axi fissures and it's already challenging to kill a couple sentient fighters if I'm not with my top warframes.
I often get killed by a couple of their long ranged attacks in Nightmare mode.

[Koldraxon-732]

4 hours ago, [DE]Taylor said:

Sentient Faction

I knew the Echoes of the Sentient trailer's 'Sentient Fighter Carrier' would show up eventually.

It's planned functionality reminds me of a necromancer, or, for a similar example, the Promethean Watcher from Halo (namely, Halo 4, where it revived the Knight it was spawned from), I look forward to destroying it, if not trying to use it as a platform and force it to expend it's Fighters.

[Latiac]

I truly hope we don't have alot more enemies where you 'Have to go into operator mode' - I'd prefer a choice sure, but I don't think these things should be forced upon players, personally.

For example, Kuva missions people go in KNOWING they'd need to use these powers, I'm NOT against those types of missions in the slightest.

What I am against though is if you guys decide to add Kuva Guardians for example as a normal spawning enemy that requires us to go into operator mode. That's a no go for me.

It kills game momentum and will make it a chore popping in and out of operator mode every single wave of enemies.

Edited February 4, 2017 by Latiac

[Loswaith]

Nef Anyo:
Nice appearance, fits well with his strange asthetics.
Honestly why do we even need to have battles directly with Nef Anyo?  The corpus aren't a faction of hands on type or warriors like the grineer leadership are.  Why would they ever put themselves in a position to be attacked by Tenno, which would certainly mean their defeat.  Corpus are afterall meant to be rather intelligent, thus why they use the proxies as a large part of their armies.  
The glast gambit did however show a great way for bosses to be indirectly 'attacked' (even if the index battles went a bit too long), that really fit with the corpus ideals.

 

Sentients:
Looks ok.  Not that I'd ever noticed them using one another's limbs (though likely just presuming it was their own or regenerating).  A concern is the constant, virtually immune army of resurrecting enemies.  Some limitation on the times the new sentient could replace the other sentients would be nice to have.

 

Defector Rescue Mission:
Now while the mode is a nice concept. It brings to mind "what if we don't want to save grineer defectors" or "what is the benefit of saving grineer defectors" from a lore stand point.  In essence it feels more like a mission specifically designed for Steel Meridian ideals, than any general tenno ideals.
This kind of thing could be great for Syndicate specific style missions (for meridian in this case), rather than just general missions attached.

While the idea has come from having more civilian interaction (civilians having little physical footprint in the game yet) but it will just push it all back onto a current faction, if its made just as saving grineer.  This mission type along with the one shown in the glast gambit, could really launch civilians as a side 'faction' that shows it is caught in the turmoil of the system, and often need help.

 

Kingpins
This looks interesting, but please dont turn the tenno into a police force of the system.  Also will these be a singular one or will clans be able to have one going for each syndicate?

 

Infested Eximus 'weak points':
Now while the concept is a nice idea.  Infested come in swarms, meaning most of these 'weak points' will just be concealed by other enemies.  It wont really offer any more 'challenge' (players want challenge not difficulty) and will just solidify the power of AoE weapons over precision ones as simply just better options to play with.
Likewise sure we could CC them but when 70% of the infested eximus spawns have drain energy, then players will just not have any energy because of these weak points making the enemies immune to damage.  Meaning no powers, which the team agreed was a bad idea to take away warframe powers.
 

Ambulas and Mini Hyena:
These look great, cant wait to see them in action :)

 

Boss Fight Design:
While these are great keep in mind that the game has progression, so while at times players can kill a boss in 5 seconds, they wont be doing so the first time they fight them (likely not even the first few times). 
Only once a player has progressed and is way overpowered for the boss will they defeat them in 5 seconds, and to be honest why shouldn't they.  Lore wise; if all these enemies run around completely invulnerable at times why wouldn't the technology eventually be given to every unit.
A starting boss shouldn't be much of a challenge at all for a player that has defeated the last boss (isn't the point of progressing to become more powerful).  If a boss is good challenge for a player that has defeat them all, then it will be an impossible task for players at the progression point its meant to be at.

A boss that has immunity should really look and behave like they do.  Lephantis is a good example of that, he looks like our puny weapons wont do much to it's hide.  Likewise the Vor (non-void) and Keela, fights take the boss out of battle for their immunity which are also good ways to achieve the effect (players cant hurt them but then they cant really hurt players directly either).  Jupiter Alad V is also another that makes sense, he is over confident (expects zanuka to win), runs from the tenno should you chase him and relies on the teamwork with Zanuka (zanuka immunity/rapid shield regen not so much).
Lech, Ruk, Hek and infested Alad, are all ones that don't make much sense to be invulnerable to damage.  They are after all only wearing armour, flimsy masks or clothing.  So given our weapons can shoot through ship pressure seal doors, would offer little protection.

Likewise it seems strange that while warframe powers are from the void, only operator powers (also from the void) effect enemies.  Both powers come from the same source, one that the enemies seem to understand so well as to be able to block them, yet by lore they have little clue at all about them?

 

All in all thanks for the stream, and sorry for the text pile that turned into a text wall.

Edited February 4, 2017 by Loswaith

[(PSN)Terpesr367]

Going off what others have said about the Eximus weak points with how they should be actual weak points, perhaps they should also provide passive effects that benefit the Eximus while they're still intact.

 

Like for the Infested, each node gives them passive health regen, with the more nodes it has, the larger the regen percentage. And when the nodes are all destroyed the Eximus deteriorates into nothing.

 

The Grineer could have something like stimulant injectors, where overtime during a battle, some of their stats get buffed gradually,with the buffs slowly going away out of combat. When they're all destroyed the entire system malfunctions and floods the Grineer's body with all kinds of chemicals, liquefying them.

 

Corpus Eximus units could have devices that convert some of the damage done to them as shields which are then transferred to nearby allies. When said devices are destroyed and the intense energy has no where to go, it surges through the Corpus and vapourises them.

 

On to another topic, I really like the idea of drop ships deploying reinforcements to support allies, maybe this could mean the Grineer dropship we see Vor use at the start of the game could be worked into normal gameplay as well?

 

The Infested would need something too, like a Zerg Overlord expy that comes in, drops Boiler style seeds everywhere, and either uses electric attacks or corrosive sprays to defend itself/provide easy material for the deployed Infested.

[Khlamydia]

I feel like some of these "changes" are being made with the mindset/viewpoint from the development team that they don't want players face-rolling the content. I understand that perspective, but the problem with building your encounters around stopping player momentum or interrupting the normal way to play the game is that every time it will only result in frustration for the end user, regardless if your a high level player, low level player, you used skill shot weapons that require aiming, or you blast through everything with shotguns. When you design around invulnerability as a stopgap for players (bosses, kuva guardians, insane scaling armor..) It doesn't add to the fun of the game, and we're all here to have fun right?

[The_Abdul]

5 hours ago, Fukushu said:

I said it in Bunny's overview, so now I'll say it here with a little more clarity since I've had time to sit and come up with a valid argument to what seems like a poorly thought out idea and hope it gets seen.

Eximus Unit "weak points". If the stream was anything to go by, this idea was met relatively poorly by a majority of the viewers, and I was one of the viewers voicing my concerns. The way I see it, I question DE's definition of a weak point since that doesn't normally mean "shoot this part so you can damage the whole". I know this is till the "experimental phase" of developing this feature, but if it's added as is after being given such a negative response, the forums will ignite similar to the Hema resource cost. Not only did Rebecca having trouble shooting a single point with a shotgun on a fast moving, constantly twitching and rolling mob seem like an oversight, the number of points that spawned on the Eximus' back was a major issue I saw due to how quickly enemies can turn around, leading me to believe a lot of players are going to rely on CC 'Frames or constant knock-downs to take them out, making these "challenging" enemies nothing more than a complete nuisance, especially in large numbers, which is another thing I fear none of you have taken into consideration a la Eximus Stronghold Sorties and Infested Survival/Defense missions (since the Infested seem to have the highest Eximus to regular enemy ratio).

If I may make a suggestion, I'd recommend you actually make these act like their name suggests: weak points. As an example, Dark Souls 3 has a boss named Highlord Wolnir who, in my opinion, is an excellent example of how this feature should work. As a boss, he understandably has a large health pool, but when attacked directly, he takes minimal damage, but he has three actual weak points in the form of golden bracelets, two on his left arm, one on his right. After hitting a bracelet a few times, it shatters and takes out a large amount of his health. Repeat the process for each bracelet, and he's dead; no "Oh, he has a sliver of health left and needs a few more hits" a la The Four Kings of Dark Souls, just straight up dead since his bracelets are set to kill him once they're all shattered.

In short, make these "weak points" into actual weak points! Shoot the Eximus itself? It still takes damage, but reduced. Break one weak point? Big chuck of health down. Break 'em all? Dead Eximus. That way, instead of feeling forced to hit the weak points just so you can unload who knows how many shots into the enemy, players are properly rewarded with a quick kill for taking the time to choose their shots carefully.

i definitely agree with this. I recently playing dragon dogma (check that game btw good game) when i'm fighting the dragon(devil grove one) in that game. this type of enemy have the weak point, the heart. When i'm attacking the heart, amount of the damage i dealt is really high and if you keep attacking the weak point, it damaging the enemy really fast and you can take down the dragon pretty easily but if you attack another part like his neck, legs, or even the head it's still damaging the dragon but in small amount of damage (even sometime doesn't do any damage). Please Steve and team consider this option.

[(XBOX)DomTheKilleur]

So with round 7 of Tennogen coming on all platforms at the same time does it mean we will get on consoles future rounds at the same time? What about past items we don't have on consoles yet?

[Caelward]

To just throw these on any old random existing infested eximus seems like a waste.

These points of vulnerability seem like they'd go nicely on a big slow lumbering infested similar to a juggernaught. Something large and unique. I don't want these blended in with the usual agile infested. They'd be much better as the gimmick to a new high value target infested.

[malekas]

My biggest concern with the eximus weak points is it feels like a reversal from the nullifier rework. One of the biggest complaints people had about nullifiers was that bows and sniper rifles were useless against them. It seems like the eximus weak points will be the exact same thing. No one would be crazy enough to try and hit a small weak point on a fast moving charger with a Dread. High fire rate and AOEs will be the only way to go. Bows and sniper rifles will become something considered unusable in serious missions.

 

On top of the slow fire rate weapon concern, sortie eximus strongholds would be an instant skip with this change. I won't even subject myself to that.

 

PS. Another thought. Higher level missions would become NOTHING but CC. Forget trying to hurt things, any mission that isn't Ext/Def/Surv will be pure CC with damage being forgotten about. Kind of like Law of Retribution is now.

Edited February 4, 2017 by malekas

[SnuggleBuckets]

The proposed Eximus change worries me.
As one of those players not min-maxing everything, I already pay great attention to whenever an eximus unit shows up, they have nasty auras that can quickly steal all your energy, slow you down to a crawl, zap you with nasty electricity, drain your health or knock you down in a damaging fireblast. So I want that eximus unit taken care of fast, and they can be tanky as well.
And as others have already said, eximus units are not rare, their spawnrates climb up exponentially in mid-level missions already, so having 3-9 invulnerable tanky units around you at the same time that take cover, run and dodge around, and have nasty debilitating aura effects, sounds like a nightmare, and not the challenging welcoming fun kind of nightmare.
Already looking at that video and seeing those leaper and charger eximus units dodging, weaving and running around looks really scary, hitting their "weakpoints" in the middle of huge hordes on the move?
Would make better sense for very slow very large units.
How will this encourage varying styles of gameplay?
All I see is AoE, CC and automatics being preferred yet again and everything else penalised. And when I say that, I do mean they bloody well should be weak against CC, AoE and status procs or else it will be even more horribly frustrating and annoying to deal with them, but it is a shame that now you can't switch to your high damaging semi-auto rifle or bow or sniper etc to quickly take a shot at an eximus unit and then switch back to AoE or CC or other crowd clearing weaponry.
And what about the existing health of Eximus units?
Surely you can't just leave them with all that health and armor they have at the moment, they are already envisioned to be invulnerable with this weakpoint addition, at least make the unit a lot weaker once weakpoints are taken care of.
Or, make them tanky and hardy, but taking care of weakpoints is rewarded (not mandatory) by slowing down the enemy and making them very weak, making the weakpoints a bit more forgiving for rifles and pistols you need to aim with, and then maybe weakpoints having resistance to AoE damage.

Regarding that Syndicate Assassination screenshot, those values look a little grindy to me, I don't know how large the clan was for that picture, but doing the same Capture(?) mission over and over for no immediate even minor reward, sounds very unwelcoming. Hopefully it scales well for smaller clans and the enemy retaliations also scale according to clan size in a reasonable manner. Though clans need some fixing as well.

The Bard... Is just not for me. More power to those who like that sort of thing.
I think if they had to do her that silly, why not go all the way and make her abilities force enemies into dancing, at least it would be a good CC ability then and funny to do. (Passive: 50% chance of enemies in range of any active Bard ability is forced to dance for the next 5 seconds.)

I understand the concept of the Sentient Carrier and at a certain level I can respect it, but at the same time it makes me as a more "casual" sloppy player scared even more to face the Sentients now, I guess I'll avoid Lua some more for the time being until I've reached a better spot with my gear and tactics. Hopefully the Carrier can only very slowly resurrect it's dead brethren.

Defector mission looks possibly interesting, as long as the Rescue targets/defectors do have at least some health+armor+functioning AI+decent weapon, not like that would matter a lot on higher levels. I like missions with NPC allies, though escort mission structures should be avoided and redesigned, babysitting is not enjoyable gameplay.

The Sniper Crewmen spawning those little cute mini hyenas looks nice, hopefully it is balanced well, with the spawning timer being not too slow but not too often, and the mini hyenas not being too tanky or threatening individually, should go down just as easily as the Sniper himself.

Talking about boss fights being rewarding and a change of pace from the regular horde grinding would be great in theory, problem is I find the regular horde massacre more rewarding than most bossfights, I rarely fight bosses these days, even though I haven't farmed every Warframe yet, I just find them more frustrating and limiting to deal with, whereas with hordes, you pick when and how to fight them very often, and it is satisfying having weaponry that can deal with them effectively.
Also, I doubt most player play Warframe to feel vulnerable, most of the cool design and equipment available feeds into a powerfantasy, and that's okay, not every game should aspire to be the next Dark Souls or Rogue-like.
Challenge is a bit different. I've brought up the new DOOM before because I feel it is a good comparison to make, something that could be learned from, it handles powerfantasy and challenge in a great way, where they complement each other.
I want to have fun in this game, the momentum and movement is fun, enemies that stop you in your tracks is not so fun.

Edited February 4, 2017 by SnuggleBuckets

[cyphonhawkex]

OK I do like everything that has been shown off on the devstream EXCEPT for the Eximus Upgrade. The concept would be a very bad one considering at higher lvls where a player would get swarmed by enemies while just trying to hit the shards on the eximus unit in order to make them vulnerable. If they take the route with the juggernaut where you have to hit the weak spots to do the damage, I'm all aboard for it. The whole invulnerability idea will force a lot of the player base to use aoe weps like tonkors, simulors, ignis and the such. 

So finally I would like to say that the weak points should give multiplied damage to the eximus unit rather than a simple "switch" to make them open to damage. And please make the hitboxes larger. Rebecca was having problems hitting the points herself on stream. 

Edited February 4, 2017 by cyphonhawkex

[-CAT-Drakulon]

Thx and still wait on tennogen skin

[Sir_Alex_Traffo]

This was an interesting stream, tho I have to admit that I am a bit concerned about 2 things in particular:

- Eximi changes: while I understand the need to make them a bit more challenging, invincibility phase is not the way to go; I am a Dark Souls huge fan and there are plenty of terribly difficult enemies, but invincibility is not a feature: damage, movesets, powers, environment,  that's what makes them a challenge and that's what I'd like to see in Warframe. 

The change we're going to receive has to be tested, of course, but I fear will only bring a lot of frustration because warframe is not a game where you have time and way to aim for small weak points, especially with normal units; Rebecca struggled with a single unit and no one else, imagine that in a normal scenario, with a crapton of infested around running to you, poisoning you, grabbing you, plus all the Eximi effects. Seriously, think about this a bit more, it looks like a great idea on paper but I honestly don't think it could actually work on your game. 

- Kingpin clan feature: ok this really sounds awesome. But I have to admit that the recent Hema issue has really hit me hard and made me realize that despite the good intentions of making clan cooperates, you may not have truly idea of how(especially huge) clans work. 

I fear that if you only take into consideration clan sizes blindly, many big clans will have a lot of troubles with this, which could instead be a very good content if implemented wisely; do not assume again that a the size of the clan is proportional to his activity, as it's quite the opposite and if you set goals assuming nearly the whole clan will cooperate(again), you're gonna screw this awesome concept up. Please don't! 

Edited February 4, 2017 by Sir_Alex_Traffo

[(PSN)EmilsTekcor]

1 minute ago, Sir_Alex_Traffo said:

This was an interesting stream, tho I have to admit that I am a bit concerned about 2 things in particular:

- Eximi changes: while I understand the need to make them a bit more challenging, invincibility phase is not the way to go; I am a Dark Souls huge fan and there are plenty of terribly difficult enemies, but invincibility is not a feature: damage, movesets, powers, that's what makes them a challenge and that's what I'd like to see in Warframe. 

The change we're going to receive has to be tested, of course, but I fear will only bring a lot of frustration because warframe is not a game where you have time and way to aim for small weak points, especially with normal units; Rebecca struggled with a single unit and no one else, imagine that in a normal scenario, with a crapton of infested around running to you, poisoning you, grabbing you, plus all the Eximi effects. Seriously, think about this a bit more, it looks like a great idea on paper but I honestly don't think it could actually work on your game. 

- Kingpin clan feature: ok this really sounds awesome. But I have to admit that the recent Hema issue has really hit me hard and made me realize that despite the good intentions of making clan cooperates, you may not have truly idea of how huge clan works. 

I fear that if you only take into consideration clan sizes blindly, many big clans will have a lot of troubles with this, which could instead be a very good content if implemented wisely; do not assume again that a size of the clan is proportional to his activity, as it's quite the opposite and if you set goals assuming nearly the whole clan will cooperate(again), you're gonna screw this awesome concept up. Please don't! 

Yeah invincibility should never be an option maybe give them a more aggressive phase where they go berserk. Also nice to meet another dark souls fan we should play on pc/ps4 sometime.