Feedback After One Week With Warframe

[Jykil]

TL;DR - Fun game, but some real issues to fix before release. Something I don't see talked about enough is fixing boss fights and making them immune to CC.

 

I wrote this as one long post, rather than many threads in different feedback sections. I hope that's okay.

 

First, my "New Player" Experience:

My first impression of the game was that the movement system turned a rather generic co-op shooter into something unique and fun, but that there was very little explanation for how anything works. I spent hours pouring over the wiki and youtube videos in order to understand things like the moveset, the enemy types, the mods system, and the marketplace and crafting. I'm the sort of player who is willing to do that, and I had a friend who was a veteran in the game to answer any questions I had, but this was my main barrier to entry in this game.

 

Now I have to bring up AI and enemy variety as it relates to scaling difficulty. Having the enemies get smarter and more interesting as you progress through the game seems like a good idea, but the consequence of this is that new players only see the most boring enemies and the least impressive AI. I was so turned off by the bland enemies initially that I nearly quit playing, but fortunately I played a higher level mission with a friend and realized that the AI was simply not playing with it's full potential in the initial missions. Yep, a roller ball kept me from quitting this game. So I think you need to be careful not to dumb things down too much in the beginning. 

 

~~~

 

Now my list of Pro's and Con's from my personal experience with Warframe. I'll try to avoid problems that I have only read about online and focus on things I have personally seen in the game. I've underlined some of the suggestions along the way for anyone who just wants to skim it. 

 

PRO:

 

1. The loot and crafting system allows the player to pick up everything and sort it out later. This is a GREAT improvement over games like Borderlands and Diablo where you have to stop playing in the middle of a mission to read a weapon's stats and decide whether it deserves inventory space. Please stick with this decision and never put in any loot that we need to stop and analyze while we're playing. It also feels very cooperative with all the players having their own copies of the same loot, so people can point out mod and resource drops to each other and be helpful. I like that the weapons don't have randomized stats, but the weapons are in a bad state right now (see below).

 

2. I really like the Mods system and the way character customization works in general. There are some awkward things about navigating the menus, but the system itself is very enjoyable. I like that the magnitude of affect of the mods is very high compared to the differences between the weapons, so your mod choices really matter. 

 

3. I really appreciate the mission variety, and I hope that a major goal of future content updates is to provide more than just Endless Defense as a challenge. Frankly "Tower Defense" and "Horde Mode" have been done numerous times and your game doesn't stand out from the pack in this area. The best thing I can say here is please surprise us! If you want people to keep playing then keep delivering new and exciting experiences like the Void and the Dojo Obstacle Course. That is my #1 key to player retention: don't let the game become predictable. 

 

4. I got to do a few Void missions and they are amazing! The map is artistically beautiful, and the gameplay involving the environmental hazards was exciting. I think this is a great direction for new content and I'd like to see even more obstacles targeted at our movement and positioning skills. I would love to have some high level missions feel like I'm running an obstacle course while fighting off hordes of enemies. More traps please! Put this robust movement system to use!

 

5. Of course I have to mention the art style in this game. Overall it's very good, and the graphics even look great on my mediocre computer, but I do think the visual effects sometimes get into the "eye bleeding" zone. I have some things disabled, that's for sure. The Void tileset especially makes me excited for new future locations. One off the wall suggestion: revisit your skyboxes. Go check out the Mass Effect 2 space skyboxes to see what I mean. I admit it's low priority but it made a big impact on me when I looked out the window of a space station in ME2. Maybe you could include that work as part of a future tileset that has a more exposed skybox. 

 

6. I like the enemy variety. I like that there are 3 different factions with different strengths, and that within those factions there are enemies with different capabilities. This gets a bit confusing in the Void, however, because up until the Void there was a sense that you could be more successful by bringing the right tools for the enemy. When you have to fight all 3 factions at once, you are forced to use a less specialized build. It's not a problem as long as the Void isn't the only end-game content. Please keep adding interesting new enemies and enemy AI! 

 

7. I have to praise the overall stability of the game and the good effort toward making it feel like an online community. My experience with other players so far has been almost universally positive, and the tools you put in place make it easier to make new friends and then go on missions with them have supported that. I haven't felt like I had to struggle with the game in order to play it, and that's a pleasant surprise for a F2P game in Open Beta. 

 

8. I like that this game supports the ability to hop in and play for a little while and then leave. One thing that I think a lot of games overlook is the time it takes to go from your desktop to playing the game, and then from playing to quitting out. Your game does a pretty good job with this especially for a multiplayer game (the ability to hot-join after a mission starts is key), and it delivers content in small enough chunks that I don't worry about whether I'll be able to fit in 1 more mission. 

 

9. I am really enjoying the Alerts system, particularly because it doesn't have any loot RNG. You do the mission, you get the reward. I'd like to see some resource rewards, though. I realize you can't just keep giving potato/forma/blueprint rewards because there simply aren't enough of them in the game, but most people would appreciate resource rewards just as much. And it would help reduce the boss farming problem (least enjoyable part of the game). 

 

 

 

CON:

 

1. Bosses should be immune to CC! If there is one thing you take from my post it should be this! When my Boltor staggers a boss with every single shot, it is no longer a boss! I think the boss fights in general are probably the weakest part of this game (and it is therefore extremely frustrating that they must be farmed repeatedly to get Warframes and rare resources). I might do a whole separate thread about improving bosses, but the big first step is removing the ability for the players to turn them into immobile target dummies! Biggest Offender: Tyl Regor! 

PS: My favorite boss fight so far is Captain Vor. I think he has an interesting moveset but his difficulty is constrained by his location on a low level planet. I'd like to see some endgame bosses along these lines. 

PPS: CC can still be useful against bosses by dealing with trash mobs the boss summons. You don't seem overly concerned right now with making every warframe useful in every situation, but I just wanted to throw this out there to show that the CC-focused warframes won't be useless.

 

2. Weapon Variety should be encouraged, not penalized. You did a lot of work to put a ton of amazing weapons into the game, but then you limited the viable weapon pool to only the weapons with Armor Ignore. When I started farming bosses for Warframes I felt like I was running into a brick wall with how little damage I was doing... and then I started using the Boltor. I want to be able to choose my weapon based on playstyle, not viability. That's a known issue, however, so I'd like to move on to talking about melee weapons. First of all, as I look at melee weapons and try to decide where to spend my hard earned crafting supplies, many of the weapons seem to be statistically weaker than others. Many of the mid-tier 1-handed swords just seem pointless, and weapons that specialize in normal attacks will be weaker than those that optimize charge attacks. Also, when it comes to balancing Melee and Ranged weapons, please consider that melee involves more risk. It should therefore be either higher reward (more damage) or it should have capabilities that ranged weapons don't have (such as CC). It's hard to gauge because I've fused a lot of mods into making my melee weapon strong (while ignoring my other weapons), but it doesn't seem significantly more damaging than a ranged weapon, and it certainly can't be said that ranged weapons lack CC. My preferred solution would be to allow melee attacking while reloading. While this sounds ridiculous, it's a good way to encourage people to use both melee and ranged weapons rather than worrying about one being stronger than the other. I think this is a relatively small change that would make a big impact. 

 

3. Damage Spunge enemies. I did a Defense alert the other day where the enemies got to a pretty high level. I wish I had paid attention to the number, but I think it was at least in the 60's. During the final waves there were enemies that could literally soak up the entire ammo pool of my Boltor. I had to just sit and melee them down for a long time. Now the problem here is not just that these enemies are so tanky, it's that they are so trivially easy to defeat. Giving them more health didn't make them any harder to kill, it just made it take longer. Tone down the damage soak a bit and increase the difficulty in other ways. Give them a CC resistance meter where they can eventually become immune to your perma-CC. Make them more coordinated and determined to kill the player and give them respectable damage. I'm sure you've heard other suggestions.

 

4. AoE CC seems too strong. I feel like Bastille, Snow Globe, and Chaos make the game less fun because they turn a difficult fight into a trivial one. Nyx is becoming one of my favorite characters due to her Mind Control ability, but I actually try to avoid using Chaos because it feels like an easy-mode button. There needs to be some middle ground where the CC helped but didn't end the fight immediately.

 

5. The monetization is a little overblown. I can't say that it's impossible to play this game without spending any money, but it certainly doesn't seem like it would be enjoyable. That's okay with me, though. The real issue is not the items available but the prices. I don't mind spending money on a game I'm enjoying, but if I feel like I'm being ripped off then I'm less inclined to pay anything. At the current prices I would never buy Platinum without a discount. Also, the ability to speed up build times is okay, and to substitute resource farming with platinum is tolerable, but if you add the consignment shop and allow people to buy mods as well, that is a step too far I think. In any case, whatever you do, do not implement trading. Try to avoid any sort of player economy. That would ruin this game faster than anything else. (Economy accelerates the process of reaching end-game, getting bored with end-game content, and then quitting).

 

6. As much as I like the movement system, I have one pet peeve. Please allow me to land from a jump without having to release sprint and then press it again in midair to avoid going into a roll. Obviously falling from a height is different, but in the normal course of playing the game I find myself rolling a lot because I forgot to release the sprint key while i was in the air, or it bugged even though I did release the key in the air, or I was zoomed in so it rolled anyway (that's a weird one). I very often use the long forward flip (sprint -> jump+crouch) as an alternative to the air-slide, and I find that it's a coin toss whether my character will roll at the end of it or not. I think rolling should be deliberate (tap sprint) or a recovery from a fall (if you failed to time the slide landing). It shouldn't happen accidentally during normal movement. 

 

7. The Shade Sentinel is fun, but trivializes enemies almost as much as AoE CC does. The cooldown on the invisibility is much too fast, but if it was longer it would feel unreliable. I think a better solution would be to make it cast only when you get CC'd by something, or only when your shield breaks. Something along those lines would give you the increased survivability from the Shade without blinking in and out of stealth every few seconds like an Ash/Loki.

Edited July 24, 2013 by Jykil

[Shion963]

Bosses can stagger from a weapon, but they can't be knocked down (they patched that out).

 

They're already looking into improving bosses, will probably tie in to the lore episodes (i.e. change Mercury's boss, then move to Venus, so on so forth)

 

AOE CC does naff without the means to damage the enemies. And AOE damage means naff if you can't target all enemies, or keep them in the radius. IMHO they're good right now because it encourages tactical thinking or team play, and not just press-to-win.

And try doing endgame-level defenses without these 'trivialisers'.

 

Platinum price is deliberately made to discourage straight purchase in in order to prevent P2W-ness. In fact, Steve himself mentioned how “We avoid pay-to-win like the plague.” in this article. http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/07/19/warframe/

Commission store is more towards getting those less fortunate the ability to gain plat by putting up their rare mods for sale. The pricing will probably be heavily regulated to avoid P2W, or platinum value inflation by selling Hellfire at 1k plat.

[Zareek]

It's seriously admirable, that some people take their time to write something like this. Too much for me to read, but I did go through it a bit, and you have some good points. This thread deserves more attention, it would be cool to hear what people had to say to some of these things.

[Jykil]

Bosses can stagger from a weapon, but they can't be knocked down (they patched that out).

 

They're already looking into improving bosses, will probably tie in to the lore episodes (i.e. change Mercury's boss, then move to Venus, so on so forth)

 

AOE CC does naff without the means to damage the enemies. And AOE damage means naff if you can't target all enemies, or keep them in the radius. IMHO they're good right now because it encourages tactical thinking or team play, and not just press-to-win.

And try doing endgame-level defenses without these 'trivialisers'.

 

Platinum price is deliberately made to discourage straight purchase in in order to prevent P2W-ness. In fact, Steve himself mentioned how “We avoid pay-to-win like the plague.” in this article. http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/07/19/warframe/

Commission store is more towards getting those less fortunate the ability to gain plat by putting up their rare mods for sale. The pricing will probably be heavily regulated to avoid P2W, or platinum value inflation by selling Hellfire at 1k plat.

 

Very informative comments, thanks. About the High Level Defense stuff, I haven't done that so I can't evaluate it. I made an effort not to bring up things that I haven't experienced personally in game. So far in my experience in Defense missions the Bastile, Snow Globe, and Chaos skills have made it so there was never any risk of losing the mission.  

Edited July 24, 2013 by Jykil

[Shion963]

Very informative comments, thanks. About the High Level Defense stuff, I haven't done that so I can't evaluate it. I made an effort not to bring up things that I haven't experienced personally in game. So far in my experience in Defense missions the Bastile, Snow Globe, and Chaos skills have made it so there was never any risk of losing the mission.  

 

Ditto, not exactly a fan of 'endgame' defense runs as I only play with one clanmate, so we tend to play the 'lighter' stuff. Just meant to say that things that might seem to trivialise the experience now, could mean life and death further on. A Frost/Vauban team would still have it tough due to high-level enemies taking tons of ammo to deal with, and liike Nova's abilities and how she can clean entire waves in Venus/Mars.

[Jykil]

I feel like "tons of ammo" does not mean "difficult". It's life or death, but not in an interesting way. Use the ability and you live, comfortably, don't use the ability and you die. Maybe that's not how it is, it remains for me to see. 

Edited July 24, 2013 by Jykil

[Auber0n]

a lot of good points brought up and well phrased!

[mogamu]

 

5. whatever you do, do not implement trading. Try to avoid any sort of player economy. That would ruin this game faster than anything else. (Economy accelerates the process of reaching end-game, getting bored with end-game content, and then quitting).

 

 

 

 

I have been saying it, and now even a new player can see it.  Player economy is a terrible idea.  I hate to take a negative tone but I can not get it across any more clearly.  Leveling up Serration and Hornet Strike are the true time barriers that can keep people playing longer.  Handing someone a max level damage mod in exchange for platinum is a massive game breaking mistake.  I think DE wants to take a page from the Valve handbook of player item selling but they dont see that at the heart of Warframe is player progression and a sense of accomplishment.  You cant just throw that out of the window for 1) Lazy people who want it all now or 2) A quick boost to profits on the backs of player profit motivation.  Its just a bad idea...I cant plea with the developers and community enough.  I really like this game, and this talk of trading is like watching someone hammer a nail into a wooden boat when you KNOW the outcome.  Please dont ruin warframe.

[RebornsAlmark]

From what I read, you've got a pretty good hold on the game right now for a player who's only played for only a week.

 

Good points about the current meta-game of weapons (where armor ignore/innate AP weapons dominate) and how the overpowered AoE CC makes the game a bit too easy (I play both Nyx and Frost and they basically can run with their 3rd skill only). In fact, a Vauban + Frost + Nyx team could easily dominate a tier 3 Void Defence with well modded "meta-game" weapons (in fact, not to brag, my clan members and I have dominated it the few times we ran it with these 3 frames and a Rhino). I have suggested that Nightmare enemies have some sort of CC resistance in one of my recent suggestion posts, as this allows more experienced and challenge-seeking players to face more difficult foes without alienating newer and/or more casual players.

 

Edit : Here is the thread I created about this

https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/85008-crowd-control-and-nightmare/#entry929968

 

As I mentioned before, armor ignore/innate AP weapons are the best and since higher level enemies get more armor, these weapons become the only viable weapons. One suggestion of mine is to make the armor base among all levels while increasing the HP of enemies OR lower the scaling of armor on enemies while increasing the HP of enemies slightly. Another suggestion would be to rework these enemies to allow them to use special tactics, for example Grineer Lancers could have better grenade throwing AI to smoke out players out like Cerberus troopers did in ME3 or maybe Grineer Commanders buffing nearby Grineer troops to be more aggressive and increasing their damage slightly.

 

Most AoE damage abilities become somewhat useless later on in the game (lv80+ enemies), especially in tier 3 Void Defence; however with the addition of Nova and the rework of Ember, AoE skills maybe able to be more viable late game. And to be frank, your weapons should be doing the damage to enemies late game and not your abilities.

 

As Shion963 mentioned, bosses are currently being reworked. Vor was the first to be reworked and Golem seems to be confirmed for next boss to be reworked.

 

Regarding Platinum, the only thing you should buy with Platinum is slots (which I hope DE will provide with mastery levels soon so free players have more breathing room with weapon/frame management) and possibly potatos/formas if you really need to. That and colors if you like customizing your frames.

Edited July 24, 2013 by RebornsAlmark

[Jykil]

That was a good thread. I went ahead and commented even though the conversation had died. 

 

On the topic of armor scaling I must say that there seem to be plenty of other people suggesting solutions, but my instinct would be a simple solution: Remove armor scaling and adjust the health values to compensate. 

 

Have some enemies with high armor and some with low armor based on their type (ie Grineer have armor, Grineer Elites have higher armor, maybe Ancient Infested have armor, etc). Set it up so that Armor Ignore weapons will be a useful tool in specific situations but not a universal requirement. I feel like this diversity was already in the game at lower levels, there's no reason to move away from that at higher levels. Even in the Void with unpredictable amounts of high armor enemies there is an interesting push-your-luck decision to be made. Do you take an Armor Ignore primary and risk having less damage output against no-armor targets? Do you use an Armor Ignore secondary instead to have as a backup? Or do you simply rely on your melee weapon's charge attack and hope that you rarely see enemies with armor?

 

Now obviously because you are still scaling enemy health this doesn't fix the bullet sponge issue, but I think that is a separate and more complex problem to solve.

[ClockworkSpectre]

I am impressed that this is a review by a relatively new player, it is pretty well done.  Though I really have to disagree with your view on crowd control abilities.  As far as the Nyx goes, that is the point of the frame, and chaos is balanced by not being able to be cast again until the effect is gone or the enemies effected are dead.  New enemies can spawn and become a threat while it is not possible to cast it yet again.  Bastille is balanced by its short duration and need for several specific mods to make it truly effective.  As far as snow globe is concerned, some major changes to enemy behavior would be in order before changing the functionality of this ability, it is almost a requirement for success in some cases.

 

As for the monetization of the game and in game items costing to much platinum.  DE has said they can't reduce that right now, but down the road it is possible.  I would assume that the production costs are standing in the way at the moment and when the game has a larger community as well as the PS4 players added to the pool, then the platinum required to buy items may be decreased. 

[Jykil]

I played some more defense with Nyx today, and wow is she strong. Chaos deals with the riff-raff while Mind Control is like having a personal mobile turret that's as strong as the enemy's strongest unit. It's so fun I'm not sure it should be nerfed though. :D

 

I suppose I'm okay with these things being so strong in defense as long as that's just one mission type. I'm not sure how the AI reacts to ongoing AoE effects outside of defense missions, but if it plays smart and tries to avoid the AoE then that might be an even better way to balance the skills rather than changing the skills themselves. I'm not sure how that would be implemented. 

 

One thing that comes to mind is that they could add a "cover buster" unit that uses special attacks to force people from hiding inside a defensive field for too long, while the regular units set up to ambush people leaving the field. Obviously this attack would have to pass through Snow Globe to be effective. The Corpus could use those bomb-dropping drones and the shockwave MOAs. The Grineer could have stronger rollerballs that ignore CC and those melee units who pull people out into an exposed spot with a wire. I'm not sure about the Infested but it seems like the other two factions already have the tools. Maybe I just haven't seen that AI yet? Does this happen in higher level content?

Edited July 24, 2013 by Jykil