All The Things Wrong With Archwing (From someone who enjoys it)

[Doubleplus]

Im one of the rare few who seems to enjoy Archwing around these parts but I do see some glaring problems with it. I will use this thread to go into detail of each one, as well as offer some solutions that may help the Archwing experience

Difficulty Obtaining New Weapons and Archwings = Lack of New player variety

Lets look at Warframe's vanilla start: You get a choice between 3 frames, two primaries, two secondaries and two melees. If you want a new weapon, all you have to do is buy one of the many blueprints from the market and if you want a new frame, you just kill a boss. Now lets look at archwing: You do your quest, get the Odonata, Impertrator and Veritux. If you want a new weapon for most of them you are going to have to rank up a syndicate for half the parts you need, trade for the rest. For a new archwing: Clan Research, and while this is usually fine, imagine every frame in the game being locked behind whether or not you are in a clan that has it researched. Assuming the new player in question doesnt have an "in" for a proper clan, this system forces players to A. Join a massive moon clan that accepts everyone to inflate its numbers B. Form their own clan and build it on their own, sinking over 10 forma minimum into simply getting the labs up C. Accept that new archwings are out of their reach and they are stuck with the basic stuff, making what little archwing content there is even more stale.

No real "push" to actually mods and improve Archwings and weapons and doing so is difficult

Now this one has gotten a lot better now that theres new missions like pursuit and the fact you no longer have to farm locust drones for Rubedo lined Barrel, but the few Archwing missions are just kind of out of the way so the experiance tends to be jumping from Grineer Archwing Extermination to Jordas Golem assassinate and being frustrated that they arent really being effective, with the only real middle ground being Archwing Corpus Mobile defense, which players seem to not even realize exists and is a good source of both mods and XP. 

 

Underwater Archwing Is Not Fun

Okay so I said I enjoy Archwing and I do, except when it comes to underwater archwing. One of archwings biggest strengths is being able to zip around at super speeds exploding enemies left and right. Underwater archwing on the other hand is slow, unwieldy and you get shot from x,y, and z directions. This is especially problematic as its the only form of Archwing that is really pushed on the player. Uranus is infamous because of this, despite being a planet that drops plastids, polymers, gallium, AND tellurium. When a planet has an interesting themed tileset and is a goldmine of resources that people want, while being regarded as the worst planet in the origin system, something is wrong.

 

 

Okay so how do we fix this

 

Revise and flesh out Archwing nodes

Basically, remove archwing missions from each planet and instead introduce its own area that is functionally similar to the new void in that its sections are accessed from differant planets. This area would be called The Neutral Zone and is a hotbed of Corpus vs. Grineer spaceship-based battles. At the end of each path of missions, have an archwing boss, such as a minor-class formarian, a corpus flagship, etc and have the archwing pieces drop from said bosses. 

Redesign Uranus's Archwing segments to play to its strengths

Big open areas, tons of enemies from all sides work well when you're zipping around space, not so much when you're in a slowly moving underwater vehicle. However, having small enclosed spaces, vast stretches of dark nothing with who knows what lurks outside of your lightsource, that could work. First off, make underwater segments dark with a flashlight that only partially illuminates the direction you're looking in, secondly introduce a few big enemies for the wide open (Like that shark you see just out of the levels borders or a giant grineer sub) Basically the idea here is to make underwater completely different from space, rather than simply being space with your movement impaired.

More Archwing Quests, not just Quests With Archwing

Archwing segments in unrelated quests tend to feel out of place, so rather than simply sticking an archwing level in a quest, make more quests that revolve around archwing. Theres definitely potential here such as having to locate a suspicious grineer shipment (Mobile defense) track down the courier (Pursuit), its revealed that it was headed to a formarian construction yard which you need to destroy the construction site (Sabotage) and destroy the partially completed formarian (similar to formarian sabotage but rather than using a disruptor, you must keep bringing its shielding down) This is just an idea off the top of my head so theres probably better that could be done with it.

 

 

 

[RealisticName]

Uranus underwater archwing, no offense to the devs, but it gives me motion sickness.

and we do indeed need more of a variety of mods for archwing, thats for sure along with more quests please

[AdunSaveMe]

35 minutes ago, Doubleplus said:

One of archwings biggest strengths is being able to zip around at super speeds exploding enemies left and right. Underwater archwing on the other hand is slow, unwieldy and you get shot from x,y, and z directions.

It's probably nice to know that the reason for this is that in normal Archwing, you get shrunk down to a fraction of your normal size. You're not actually going at high speed. You're just really small, so it SEEMS like you're going at high speed. Since sharkwing also needs to connect to land-based combat, it can't do this. Whether this is a design choice or an engine limitation, I don't know, but it's not quite a simple thing to change.

[Airwolfen]

I like AW as well. And I have to agree with the problem points. And I mostly like the solutions you give to these problems

20 minutes ago, Doubleplus said:

Difficulty Obtaining New Weapons and Archwings = Lack of New player variety

For archwings themselves there are currently too few to go for the easy access route (even though the odonatta is THE most boring thing you can rank in warframe as its so overly generic that it hurts)

For weapons we could use some resource based weapons that you have a guarantee of getting by simply getting the BP from the market and building it with resources that can be found early in the game.

25 minutes ago, Doubleplus said:

No real "push" to actually mods and improve Archwings and weapons and doing so is difficult

such a pain point. as of now AW missions are so few and far between that people mostly only encounter them when they block their path of progression.

The amount of times where I do an archwing mission and get matched with people who do not even have the starter stuff at max rank are way too high even though leveling in AW can be quite fast.

30 minutes ago, Doubleplus said:

Underwater Archwing Is Not Fun

Nope, EXTREMELY slow and forward movement blocks most of your vision.

33 minutes ago, Doubleplus said:

Revise and flesh out Archwing nodes

It would need to get some good rewards, that is for sure. But it would be interesting to see. If an incentive was given to get to the highest tier then it would show that you need to gear up in order to progress.

38 minutes ago, Doubleplus said:

Redesign Uranus's Archwing segments to play to its strengths

Don't really know about this one. I think it would be too frustrating. Id rather see the maps cleared up a bit and made faster. Darkening the place has the opposite effect.

41 minutes ago, Doubleplus said:

More Archwing Quests, not just Quests With Archwing

as long as its done in a way to raise interest in the mission types then yes.

[Shalath]

Totally agree! I really like AW but there is so little of it the whole thing becomes stale really quickly. Weapons locked behind syndicates is a really bad idea as it is a really long time before you can get out of your "training wheels" gear.

[Gamma745]

I really like Archwing. It's concept is nice and I would like to see it expand further. It will most likely take a while, since considering Warframe itself took a long time to get where it is now. I agree with a lot of your points here, since so many gears seems to be gated for no real reason.

 

1 hour ago, Doubleplus said:

Difficulty Obtaining New Weapons and Archwings = Lack of New player variety

Lets look at Warframe's vanilla start: You get a choice between 3 frames, two primaries, two secondaries and two melees. If you want a new weapon, all you have to do is buy one of the many blueprints from the market and if you want a new frame, you just kill a boss. Now lets look at archwing: You do your quest, get the Odonata, Impertrator and Veritux. If you want a new weapon for most of them you are going to have to rank up a syndicate for half the parts you need, trade for the rest. For a new archwing: Clan Research, and while this is usually fine, imagine every frame in the game being locked behind whether or not you are in a clan that has it researched. Assuming the new player in question doesnt have an "in" for a proper clan, this system forces players to A. Join a massive moon clan that accepts everyone to inflate its numbers B. Form their own clan and build it on their own, sinking over 10 forma minimum into simply getting the labs up C. Accept that new archwings are out of their reach and they are stuck with the basic stuff, making what little archwing content there is even more stale.

 

8 minutes ago, Shalath said:

Totally agree! I really like AW but there is so little of it the whole thing becomes stale really quickly. Weapons locked behind syndicates is a really bad idea as it is a really long time before you can get out of your "training wheels" gear.

It was worse before, when almost all of new Archwing gear are locked behind mission drop RNG, which means new players are stuck with vanilla gear even longer. Making it a Syndicate offering is a step forward, but we still need new gears that are more easily accessible through resources.

[Melos-mevim]

more variety in weapons would be nice, it also be nice for it to have more of a presence (after it finds a good movement system that appeals to players) in average gameplay, we should have more tile sets and situations where we go back and forth between fighting on foot and flying around, the kuva fortress would of been a great opportunity for this.

[Chewarette]

36 minutes ago, AdunSaveMe said:

It's probably nice to know that the reason for this is that in normal Archwing, you get shrunk down to a fraction of your normal size.

Really ? The extraction cutscene in Earth's Archwing missions clearly shows that you're not shrunk at all.

And the Corpus Ship would appear insanely gigantic if we were shrunk.

Only Titania's Razorwing shrunks her, as far as I know.

[(PSN)PadMar777]

I've said this before and I say again: directional guidance for underwater is needed; the R3 ping-style radar a la Dead Space would sooo helpful in some of the exterior reef-style areas as the map indicator is about as useful as a chocolate teapot and goes haywire.

I want to enjoy Sharkwing more than I do - hell, I want to enjoy the whole PLANET tileset more as I love windswept, seasprayed locales in games but it does need work with the inertia and zoning of mobs.

[(PSN)OmegaSlayer]

I'd add putting the necessary mods (not exotic) behind silly walls is another choice that I wouldn't define as wise.

You really have to be quite crazy to do 4 rounds of interceptions to have a slight chance to get important mods.

Rush requires no vanilla archwing to have a chance.

Pursuit is broken.

The good archwing mods are behind that, and even if I like archwing stuff, I haven't the time/patience.

Also...Dual Decurion, at least on PS4 is silly, not for damage, but because it's broken as hell

Edited June 6, 2017 by (PS4)OmegaSlayer

[chaotea]

My toughts, i like the underwater sharkwing, but the space archwing lacks scale. I'd like to fight much larger enemies rather than lots of small enemies. The gameplays to similar to regular gameplay, but with far less choices, so its less interesting in comparison.

[mplokijuhygtfrdeszqa]

A problem you didn't state: you start with an unplayable archwing and unplayable weapons.

Odonata isn't able to contribute in high level mission (ike salacia or caelus). It's not a good archwing in low-level missions (Kepler is hard as hell with a level 15 odonata; odonata dies randomly during the quest mission). It can't even farm parts for the playable archwings, since other archwings aren't a reward for playing Odonata. New players start with some unplayable junk, and they are supposed to... Not use it and obtain the playable archwings? I don't know. It's not a big surprise they don't like it when the free test sample they get isn't meant to be playable or even played.

 

3 hours ago, Doubleplus said:

Underwater Archwing Is Not Fun

 

Okay so I said I enjoy Archwing and I do, except when it comes to underwater archwing. One of archwings biggest strengths is being able to zip around at super speeds exploding enemies left and right. Underwater archwing on the other hand is slow, unwieldy and you get shot from x,y, and z directions. This is especially problematic as its the only form of Archwing that is really pushed on the player. Uranus is infamous because of this, despite being a planet that drops plastids, polymers, gallium, AND tellurium. When a planet has an interesting themed tileset and is a goldmine of resources that people want, while being regarded as the worst planet in the origin system, something is wrong.

No one like Uranus because it's a bug fest. No one like underwater archwing because it's on uranus and it's the reason of those bugs.

Seriously. You how how I found the sabotage cache on Uranus (it's a thing you have to do for the junction) ? My UI was dead (so no loot detector for me), I was playing with a friend who wasn't able to interact with objects anymore. My friend had to guide me to every single object he saw on his loot detector, while I was waiting for him because he wasn't able to open doors. And it was our second try, at first try both our UI were dead and the mission was frozen with a locked door. What an awesome experience! Let's not play on Uranus ever again until it's at least in a beta-test state.

That's not even counting the rescue target randomly committing suicide by jumping into water, and other funky stuff happening only on Uranus. "Oh, a syndicate rescue alert on Uranus! Great, let's not look for the marks, or our target will commit suicide at some point. Let's not do the mission at all!"

Uranus shouldn't have been released as-is. Maybe the game is in a beta-test, but Uranus isn't even in a beta state. The titleset may be the best tileset ever, the enemies the most interesting enemies ever, everything may be awesome, this planet is so bugged it's a pain to go through. There's no point into improving underwater archwing right now: just remove it, erase it from the game, open visual studio and press ctrl+x and within 5 seconds you've corrected the majority of Uranus' bugs.

Edited June 6, 2017 by mplokijuhygtfrdeszqa

[AdunSaveMe]

3 hours ago, Chewarette said:

Really ? The extraction cutscene in Earth's Archwing missions clearly shows that you're not shrunk at all.

And the Corpus Ship would appear insanely gigantic if we were shrunk.

Only Titania's Razorwing shrunks her, as far as I know.

Did you consider the ship and other models are also resized?

There's also the relative size of enemies, i.e. giant crewman, and a few bugs that have revealed it, like someone who went into operator mode during the Jordas Verdict, and was running around as a foot-high operator, and where a resource dropped from a node, and the player was barely bigger than it.

Edited June 6, 2017 by AdunSaveMe

[Chewarette]

10 minutes ago, AdunSaveMe said:

Did you consider the ship and other models are also resized?

So the Archwings are stuff that can shrink everything even if it's not attached to it ?

I don't buy it

[AdunSaveMe]

9 minutes ago, Chewarette said:

So the Archwings are stuff that can shrink everything even if it's not attached to it ?

I don't buy it

Archwing is downsized. Everything else around you is resized to keep the illusion consistent. What don't you understand?

I'm not saying that in-universe, they're small. I'm saying that in the game, they are small, but everything looks normal-sized.

Edited June 6, 2017 by AdunSaveMe

[Gamma745]

5 minutes ago, Chewarette said:

So the Archwings are stuff that can shrink everything even if it's not attached to it ?

I don't buy it

It's not Archwing that shrinking them, it's DE. The shrinking stuff is just something in-game on the background to reduce the amount of models and geometry the game need to render. Lore-wise, we're still the same size. It's just performance related issue, nothing lore or world related.

 

If you want a little proof, there was a time back when Archwing first introduced that DE forgot to code Stalker out of Archwing, the result:

[Doubleplus]

3 minutes ago, Gamma745 said:

It's not Archwing that shrinking them, it's DE. The shrinking stuff is just something in-game on the background to reduce the amount of models and geometry the game need to render. Lore-wise, we're still the same size. It's just performance related issue, nothing lore or world related.

 

If you want a little proof, there was a time back when Archwing first introduced that DE forgot to code Stalker out of Archwing, the result:

Thats horrifying and I want it as an actual feature. Also its still where if a container drops an ayatan star, its bigger than you are.

[Culaio]

I agree with everything that was said but want to add one more thing to it, we need reason to play archwing, what I mean by that is that there is no actually reason to play archwing, here is something I mentioned in another thread:

DE also should focus on giving players reason to play archwing since  currently  rewards in archwing are very self contained which means those reward dont affect you at all in rest of game so people who play only ground missions have no reason to try archwing, people will probably hate me for saying this but there needs to be a reason to play archwing, some kind of unique rewards or something at which archwing is better, for example: some of unique resources being easier to get in archwing then in ground missions(of course it would have to compete with meta farming since DE seems to want us to farm stuff with meta and people will always choose meta farming if it makes farming faster, so some resources would have to drop as frequently as farming with meta method), another possibility would some tiers or individual types of relics droping more frequently in archwing missions then in ground missions.

When I said unique I meant rewards/loot that drops only in archwing missions but I dont mean mods/stances for frames/ground weapons since it would be stupid and would actually make people hate archwing mode more, what I mean by unique to archwing rewards is stuff like:

-unique ayatans

-unique ayatan stars that make ayatans animation even cooler

-unique collectibles: space rocks, planet models, space ship models and so on(unique stuff to decorate our ship)

-unique lore hidden in archwing missions(like ground missions have cephalon fragments and kuria)

-unique space event that shows up from time to time, kinda like that message that shows up from time to time when loading mission but instead of message something shows up, something like unknown space ship(either sentient or of some unknown origin) arriving  on the map(it could only happen on open archwing maps), Elite: Dangerous has one of most EPIC rare space encounters:

I cant even imagine how community would react if we had chance for unique EPIC space encounter in archwing with sentient space ship(worm ship maybe? since lore mentions sentient worm ships) or even better with space ship that doesnt fit with even of current factions hinting at possibility of another faction showing up in the future(all current factions are related to humans/oroking one way or another: corpus are descendants of orokin as is hinted in lore, grineer were originally servant-clones of orokin(not orokin clones but were engineered and cloned by them), sentients were originally oroking terraforming tools sent to another solar system who were given ability to adapt, who evolved and came back and tenno are orokin children who were changed by void, so currently there is no alien races in warframe so hint at possibility of encountering unknown species in warframe would make community very excited. 

Or instead of encountering unknown space ship we could encounter some kind of void-based space anomaly, hinting at possibility of there being something more to void, even orokin didnt seem to know much about it and there are some hints(but unconfirmed)  that there is possibility that there is some kind of sentience in void.

 

I know people will hate me for saying that archwing needs unique rewards since people dont want to be 'forced' to play archwing but truth is that warframe game always 'forced' you to do some stuff, like for example sorites droping unique  rewards(riven mods, focus lenses, unique ayatan statue)  'forcing' you to do sorite to get those rewards whats more sorite frequently force you to do mission types you may not like(everyone has mission types they dont like) but sorite make people come out of their comfort zones to try something new which is good..

Of course before we are 'forced' to play archwing DE needs first  to fix its problems since everyone agrees that people shouldnt suffering motion sickness while playing it.

[mplokijuhygtfrdeszqa]

1 hour ago, Culaio said:

I know people will hate me for saying that archwing needs unique rewards since people dont want to be 'forced' to play archwing but truth is that warframe game always 'forced' you to do some stuff, like for example sorites droping unique  rewards(riven mods, focus lenses, unique ayatan statue)  'forcing' you to do sorite to get those rewards whats more sorite frequently force you to do mission types you may not like(everyone has mission types they dont like) but sorite make people come out of their comfort zones to try something new which is good..

Actually, people will hate you because you're showing how low our expectations are in Warframe.

"No one plays archwing.

- Let's add a Skinner box ! And force people to play it! Archwings won't be better, but at least people will play it!"

 

[Culaio]

1 hour ago, mplokijuhygtfrdeszqa said:

Actually, people will hate you because you're showing how low our expectations are in Warframe.

"No one plays archwing.

- Let's add a Skinner box ! And force people to play it! Archwings won't be better, but at least people will play it!"

 

Sorry but I must disagree, in this game there is always something that "forces" you to do something, want riven ? you are "forced" to do sorites, want to get relics at resonable pace ? you are "forced" to do endless type missions, if you removed all the good loot from sorites or relics from endless missions then barely anyone would play them.

Many players are people who dont have much time each day to play and if they want to keep with game they need to farm with most efficent methods, people play for simple fun once they pretty much got everything, I am close to that point so I from time to time play archwing for simple fun but I would really like if playing archwing was both fun and given me good rewards.

Me and many people like me who actually enjoy archwing regardless of its problems dont play more for simple reason there is nothing to do there, we have all archwings, all archwing weapons and all archwing mods, new content is released so rarely for archwing that there is pretty much nothing to do there that would feel like progress in game, archwing simply doesnt have any endgame.

Edited June 6, 2017 by Culaio

[theMongoose]

Can we add hiding holstered weapons the the list? I just got the Fluctus and it sticks out like a sore thumb when I switch to melee mode. We have it on our regular weapons why not these?