Plains of Disappointment

[A1m3r]

I've never written a feedback for this game despite the fact that I have about 3000 hours recorded on ingame profile and been playing it for 4+ years... but this time I feel like I MUST do it for the peace of mind... So let's begin.

Plains of Eidolon, or more like... Plains of Disappointment in my humble opinion, here's why.

 

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

• First of all the Focus 2.0, this one got on my nerves. I have over 6 mln exp for Zenurik alone, not to mention other schools, and can't unlock anything other than 2 starter passives because I need, am.. Quills... why? I generally like the rework of skills but the way of obtaining them is WAY TOO GRINDY and it's limited to Plains only. Either, let us buy it for platinum from the market, which is not a bad idea to be honest, or remove the Quills entirely. Who is going to spend his whole life on farming one thing, this game is already a grinder-simulator...
• (A part of my Focus feedback has been updated below.)

 

• Cetus, or more like: another relay on which lots of players spawn on your screen and drop your FPS to 5 (don't take it personally guys, you probably think the same). I understand the pressure from DE to socialise the community, but Cetus is the worst place to do it. All NPCs are covered by players and you can't see anything. Why don't you, DE, make Cetus a singleplayer/invite only place instead of relay-system, or if it really needs to be relay-system, give us an option to make other players invisible and remove them from the map (blue dots) since it's hard to see where given NPC is located, blue dots cover all the map.

 

• The Plains... 
• Optimization there is badly done, many elements repeat and FPS drop is still huge. No option to disable foliage at all which would help in some cases.
• Time of Day is a bad idea. Some people just want to play for the "night-challenge" but at first they have to play the 100 minutes of boring day. Solution: divide day and night for separate nodes and add "classic" Time of Day routine node.
• Random missions are one linear, same goes to bounties, nothing original.
• DE haven't used the potential which is given by open map. No excavation, no defense, or even survival, just boring objectives with escorting drones or capturing the target.
• Apart from random missions, fishing doesn't look rewarding, neither mining does. It's just mindless scavenge for new stuff.
• Poor animals variety as for such a big terrain.
• Grineers are all the same and mindless AI.
• No ability to view full map: zoom in/ zoom out/ move and so on.
• Playing solo is unbalanced, too many Grinners attacking the objective from every side, not to mention the fight with big Eidolon at night.
• When you enter the lakes, you get magnetic proc which is just hilarious... but annoying at the same time because you lose energy that way...

 

• At night new mobs appear, and it's time for the Operator! I can't deny, night gives some challenge but Operator is just being overused. Fight with big Eidolon is one linear, Operator everywhere. Operator's basic attack barely does any damage. Unlocking Focus skills is grindy as I mentioned above. DE focused too much on the Focus 2.0 but they didn't think about the Operator. They should have reworked both at the same time not only the Focus. Movement and actions of the Operator are too basic.

 

UPDATE

• After completing the Saya's Vigil, I realised that the Focus skill trees are fully unlockable by picking up the Mote Amp from the Quills faction. It solves the problem I mentioned above from my first impressions, BUT doesn't solve the grind-fest that is still present with the Quills faction. Also, player isn't clearly told to go to Cetus and visit the Quills to pick up the Mote Amp, which leads to confusion.

 

• Saya's Vigil - not gonna say much about it, loading simulator between Plains and the Liset. I don't know what else I should add here... scanning stuff generally wasn't fascinating at all.

 

--------------------------------------------------
Dear DE, I appreciate the work you have put into this update, but it's far from my expectations after my ~3000 hours of playtime. The ideas you've put into this update are good, but the execution is not.

Also, I'll allow myself to remind my request from the first Remote Observer since it's still a thing:

https://forums.warframe.com/topic/781165-the-remote-observer-vol-1/?page=2&tab=comments#comment-8564245

That's all as of now.

Edited October 16, 2017 by A1m3r
Update

[Sherlock_Holmes]

As someone who put a little bit over 650 hours into the game I have to agree with most of the things said here. I've stopped playing warframe quite some time ago because it simply became too grindy for me and I was really hoping, that this new update would at least add something interesting to the gameplay itself. Instead we get even more grinding and above that... unrewarding grinding.

The idea of the open world is of course great, it always brings a lot of new options, but here those options simply aren't there. Sure, there are those ships that may add a little bit of diversity into the game, the idea of having the huge boss fights is also pretty good (except its execution isn't). The last thing that I enjoy about this update are the archwings available in the open world. But, sadly, this is where the things that I somewhat enjoy end.

Time of day is a terrible idea for those, who just want to play the "survival" night mode - you have to wait the whole damn day to actually get to somewhat exciting part.

I'd prefer not to talk about the operator and how forced its use is in this update, I'll be blunt here, the operator always seemed like a garbage, forced addition to the game. His animations simply stand out from the rest of the game, and not in the good way, it just looks bad and playing him is far away from exciting. And yet, we basically have to use him to do anything here.

Fishing in the ninja game - seriously? Whose idea was to waste time implementing something like that instead of... I don't know, improving the gameplay mechanics of the operator? Don't get me wrong here, I wouldn't mind the fishing itself if there weren't things that were way more important to actually improve on.

The open world, well, I do know that it's DE's first approach to something like that, but that world simply seems dead, there are occasionally some animals, etc. and in real world that would be fine, but it's a game, we play games for the exciting and fun to look at stuff, instead we basically have an empty, lifeless world. Maybe except for the grineers, but those are dumb little creatures, so I don't count them as something alive.

The "side" missions are just terribly dull and repetitive - escort the drone and exterminate some fellas, blah. The bounties are unrewarding and so you practically forget about them after doing them 1-2 times. Instead we could have some base infiltrations, some other missions that would require you to actually be the ninja that we supposedly are, you've got an open world, I'm sure you'll think of many missions that aren't that terribly hard to program and yet give way more diversity.

Also, there are some sort of grineer camps here and there - that's great, the turrets actually make it a bit more exciting, but... yeah... that's it. I mean, are grineer idiots or something? They don't communicate with other camps, call for backups, etc.? And if those camps actually had something valuable in them, the players could be rewarded for actually being ninjas and doing things stealthly, so that alarms won't be triggered and they won't get swarmed because of grineer coming from other camps. Of course, they could also go rambo style, like most people do, but this time it'd be much harder, because there could be more enemies, etc.

I'm not gonna talk about the bugs, because it is absolutely natural in such a big update. I do however have to make some complaints about the optimization... We've got this open world, and as in any game I'm sure that lots of objects repeat there, we've got some occasional grineer camps and other things like that, nonetheless it seems like there's something that could be optimized there for some people (I particularly don't have any FPS issues on the map itself, but I've heard a lot of people complain about that). The part where I do have a problem is Cetus... I don't know if there's some sort of a bug there, or is it simply due to the amount of players, but the FPS there is almost unbearable. While I easily get 60 FPS in the open world there... well... I can have 40-50 and then bam, a short spike back to 10. And as mentioned already by A1m3r - that "relay system" here is a terrible idea. Trying to find specific NPCs is simply painful. At least give us an ability to hide current players when needed.

There's a potential to it all and I do realize that it'd take a lot of time to actually implement some of the things that I've spoken about here, but as of now the plains simply don't seem to offer anything new, or exciting.

[low1991]

22 hours ago, A1m3r said:

• The Plains... 
• When you enter the lakes, you get magnetic proc which is just hilarious... but annoying at the same time because you lose energy that way...

True. Just unable to understand how entering a body of water triggers magnetic on the frame.

22 hours ago, A1m3r said:

At night new mobs appear, and it's time for the Operator! I can't deny, night gives some challenge but Operator is just being overused. Fight with big Eidolon is one linear, Operator everywhere. Operator's basic attack barely does any damage. Unlocking Focus skills is grindy as I mentioned above. DE focused too much on the Focus 2.0 but they didn't think about the Operator. They should have reworked both at the same time not only the Focus. Movement and actions of the Operator are too basic.

Every true... If only players can attack and damage whatever operator-exclusive-weapon/beam but at a mush reduced rate... Like maybe 90% damage reduction to non-void energy (operator' beam)?

[Fallen_Echo]

O dont have that much time but the fact that veterans and brand new players alike have serious problems with it should be a red flag for DE to frickin change things FAST.

[A1m3r]

On 14.10.2017 at 6:35 PM, A1m3r said:

UPDATE

• After completing the Saya's Vigil, I realised that the Focus skill trees are fully unlockable by picking up the Mote Amp from the Quills faction. It solves the problem I mentioned above from my first impressions, BUT doesn't solve the grind-fest that is still present with the Quills faction. Also, player isn't clearly told to go to Cetus and visit the Quills to pick up the Mote Amp, which leads to confusion.

 

• Saya's Vigil - not gonna say much about it, loading simulator between Plains and the Liset. I don't know what else I should add here... scanning stuff generally wasn't fascinating at all.

 

[MortalSword]

On 10/14/2017 at 12:35 PM, A1m3r said:

Optimization there is badly done, many elements repeat and FPS drop is still huge. No option to disable foliage at all which would help in some cases.

PoE is crazy optimized. you need to adjust your settings for your specs.

 

 

On 10/14/2017 at 12:35 PM, A1m3r said:

Time of Day is a bad idea. Some people just want to play for the "night-challenge" but at first they have to play the 100 minutes of boring day. Solution: divide day and night for separate nodes and add "classic" Time of Day routine node.

Disagree completely. Day/night cycle has been a part of Earth gameplay for a long time. It's unique and an interesting mechanic. You complain earlier in your post about boring, repetitive things and then want them to get rid of one of the things that isn't?


 

 

On 10/14/2017 at 12:35 PM, A1m3r said:

Apart from random missions, fishing doesn't look rewarding, neither mining does. It's just mindless scavenge for new stuff.

How have you played Warframe for over 3k hours and not come to understand that the core of this game is resource gathering and crafting? 

 

 

On 10/14/2017 at 12:35 PM, A1m3r said:

Grineers are all the same and mindless AI.

There are new Grineer with new AI. What are you talking about.

 

 

On 10/14/2017 at 12:35 PM, A1m3r said:

DE haven't used the potential which is given by open map. No excavation, no defense, or even survival, just boring objectives with escorting drones or capturing the target.

Didn't you just complain about repetitive "boring" missions and then ask for endless modes? Are you serious?


 

 

On 10/14/2017 at 12:35 PM, A1m3r said:

When you enter the lakes, you get magnetic proc which is just hilarious... but annoying at the same time because you lose energy that way...

Magnetic procs are at night. Notice all the glowy blue stuff all over the terrain at night? Maybe it has something to do with the eidolons and their power? Man, wouldn't that be swell?

 

 

On 10/14/2017 at 12:35 PM, A1m3r said:

After completing the Saya's Vigil, I realised that the Focus skill trees are fully unlockable by picking up the Mote Amp

So you wrote several hundred words of feedback before doing the quest that the first NPC gives you? 

Your feedback is proving to be pretty low on the quality scale.

 

On 10/15/2017 at 11:27 AM, low1991 said:

True. Just unable to understand how entering a body of water triggers magnetic on the frame.

As I said to OP above, did you notice how the ground/water gets all glowy at night and eidolons come out? Maybe those things are related? Hmmmm. I know I hate it when things have contextual links to gameplay. 

[low1991]

3 minutes ago, MortalSword said:

As I said to OP above, did you notice how the ground/water gets all glowy at night and eidolons come out? Maybe those things are related? Hmmmm. I know I hate it when things have contextual links to gameplay. 

I know what you'r referring to. But in these case, some bodies of water with those blue glows/light dont have magnetic proc on touching them. While some other waters do, but without any glows or night-time.

Just in-consistent.

[Thexceedel]

rip me :D..

 

Edited October 16, 2017 by Thexceedel

[Demaneth]

100% agree with Mortalsword. And pls stop the complaining about the grinding. Every game, every update for big games, online with open worlds or with missions have grind, more content means more grind, or at least pay for the new content. What do you guys expect at this point¿? DE cant add new content and give to us all the S#&$ with ease. We have new, map, new mechanics, new materials. what do you guys suggest to change that¿? Because every idea you suggest will become boring at some point. Warframe its not an mmo, but its like complain about the grind on new updates on World of warcraft or guild wars XD yes they are RPG games, but the new content, how do you get the new content¿? Same as always, doing the same S#&$ with new mechanics XD.

I like fishing and mining, and you complain about the overuse of the operator, well... till now I really never used the tenno, so hurray for adding something to use the fkng operator. And I hope DE will create more new Open areas with other theme, imagine an open area on Jupiter...

[SHADOW.XIII]

On 14/10/2017 at 5:35 PM, A1m3r said:

Optimization there is badly done, many elements repeat and FPS drop is still huge. No option to disable foliage at all which would help in some cases

Not really, before PoE you had small rooms which didn't require much rendering, with PoE there's larger strain on the resources, if your PC can't handle: lower graphic settings
Surely, if there will be in future large map after PoE that's 100 times bigger you also complain that badly optimised?

The only problem I have is lack of optimisation in Cetus itself - when getting a Bounty with lots of warframes around, graphic card is running hot on even a beast GPU, needs to be fixed to remove rendering of what's close behind me but outside of my field of view

 

You are mostly confusing issue here - PoE issues are about balanced gameplay, the update itself is amazing, just unbalanced.

I agree on unbalanced standing gain and bounty rewards, I very much agree on unbalanced enemies, on level 10-20 it feels like Sortie 1, near impossible to play last bounties solo or killing Eidolon (though some did it).

I like day/night cycle, I like to stay on the map when it cycles through, they could add 2 PoE which cycle respectively to cater for your needs ... or you just wait 1-2 hours and play again.

I am pretty sure DE thought that they have all those players with 1000+ hours each and wanted to give players reason to play 1000 hours more.
And if you played 1000 hours and play next 1000 hours, I am pretty sure you will have lots of standing, resources and everything from Cetus.
DE just didn't really realise that those players don't want to see a phantom of upcoming 1000 hours to get it (like they didn't think about it when they started the gameplay).

Shame DE didn't take lessons from Hema-fail, however issues here are all about balancing and DE agreed on it and they said it will be changed.


Before you start throwing pitchforks, better get involved in various discussion here or reddit with solutions,
anyone can complain "ugh way too grindy" - answer how you want to change that but keep plat economy balanced enough so the game can stay in development

I am waiting to see how it's going to be changed within first ~1 month being involved in various discussions and pointing out the balance issues for now

Edited October 16, 2017 by SHADOW.XIII

[A1m3r]

1 hour ago, MortalSword said:

PoE is crazy optimized. you need to adjust your settings for your specs.

Thanks for the tip, didn't know that I can adjust my settings until now.

 

1 hour ago, MortalSword said:

Disagree completely. Day/night cycle has been a part of Earth gameplay for a long time. It's unique and an interesting mechanic. You complain earlier in your post about boring, repetitive things and then want them to get rid of one of the things that isn't?

Am... wait... did I say I want to get rid of ToD mechanic? I suggested dividing day and night for separate nodes AND wrote at the end of the sentence, let me quote myself "add "classic" Time of Day routine node". Also, I specified that the challenge starts at night = no boredom... Quote from the same sentence "Some people just want to play for the "night-challenge"".

 

1 hour ago, MortalSword said:

How have you played Warframe for over 3k hours and not come to understand that the core of this game is resource gathering and crafting? 

Yes, resources are important, but the way of acquiring them is profligate. For such a game I prefer the classic method of resources farming. The classic way: we get the resources "by the way" while playing, and now we have to waste time for... fishing, seriously? It's interesting addon, but shouldn't be the key of acquiring resources.

 

1 hour ago, MortalSword said:

There are new Grineer with new AI. What are you talking about.

Yes, there are new Grineer, if reskin = new, but AI still seems to be as derpy as before. As Sherlock wrote above, there should be some calls for backups when you disrupt a camp, waves of offensive and so on.

 

1 hour ago, MortalSword said:

Didn't you just complain about repetitive "boring" missions and then ask for endless modes? Are you serious?

It's just a thrown idea of implementing some bigger gamemodes to open world. Thrown idea, since I don't expect survival etc. to be as it is now, because that would be sick. Bigger gamemodes should somewhat fit into the map's concept and be reworked for it if needed. Like: defense would require from you to raid the enemy's camp so they don't destroy your objective.

 

1 hour ago, MortalSword said:

Magnetic procs are at night. Notice all the glowy blue stuff all over the terrain at night? Maybe it has something to do with the eidolons and their power? Man, wouldn't that be swell?

As low1991 said. During day some pools of water give you magnetic proc. Perhaps it's a bug, but it's feedback thread and it's not the topic.

 

1 hour ago, MortalSword said:

So you wrote several hundred words of feedback before doing the quest that the first NPC gives you? 

My feedback thread was and perhaps still is to be modified, the "That's all as of now." at the end could suggest it, but perhaps I was kinda misleading and should write: "Maybe I will add more stuff later or change the current content, because I could discover something new and I will need to point it out". To be fair with everyone I didn't remove the original content so you could read my FIRST IMPRESSIONS. Also, it's good for developers to know player's first impression, another reason why I didn't remove the part with Focus feedback...

 

1 hour ago, MortalSword said:

Your feedback is proving to be pretty low on the quality scale.

Feedback is subjective form of expression, you don't have to like it, but if you decided to read it, you could at least respect it. I'm glad you pointed out these things to me, that's how the forums work. Thank you for your constructive reply, much appreciated. Hope some things are now expounded.

[Sherlock_Holmes]

1 hour ago, SHADOW.XIII said:

Not really, before PoE you had small rooms which didn't require much rendering, with PoE there's larger strain on the resources, if your PC can't handle: lower graphic settings
Surely, if there will be in future large map after PoE that's 100 times bigger you also complain that badly optimised?

The only problem I have is lack of optimisation in Cetus itself - when getting a Bounty with lots of warframes around, graphic card is running hot on even a beast GPU, needs to be fixed to remove rendering of what's close behind me but outside of my field of view

Before you read (if at all) the spam I wrote below just note, that I'm kinda into things such as game engines, etc. so I might get a bit... nerdy... :P

Well, comparing the optimization of small rooms versus the optimization of large, open areas is to be fair kinda silly. Due to how different these are the "tools" used for optimization are really quite different. For instance let's take a simple example - we have rooms made perfectly, so that they all fit into a set of squares. Great. We could then use a simple grid and create a sort of parent-child relation and simply check which neighboring squares (rooms) have to be drawn - for instance - if the neighboring room has an open door, we'd have to go further down the road, otherwise we could stop. This is of course just a simple example, but you can still perform a very similar, but a bit more advanced version of such algorithm and implement it into a game such as Warframe. Now, this is great and cool because you draw just a very small fraction of the actual, whole map so the rooms can be literally littered with all kinds of details. However, in such a small rooms techniques such as LOD (level of detail) are practically useless, because we're simply too close to such objects. Instancing (which basically limits the amount of interaction between CPU and GPU (which is really slow compared to other things)) in such a small areas is probably used just for the loot, as it can litter up the whole room, but there really isn't much point in using it in other places.

Now, when you have open worlds things get a little bit trickier. You can of course use techniques such as LODs which greatly reduce the work that has to be performed by the GPU (objects simply have less polygons which allows shader stages to quicky pass through them, especially given the parallelism of GPUs). Of course you still have to make appropriate draw calls and that requires CPU - GPU communication, which as I mentioned is a pretty slow thing. Thankfully in the open areas people learned to nicely repeat objects in a way that doesn't make it all that obvious - here comes the instancing - there are many games that make whole forests with just a few tree models, they're simply rotated and scaled differently and since trees are rather complex objects it isn't all that obvious. Of course, you can no longer use things such as this "square" algorithm that I mentioned previously, but you can still use quad trees, or octrees (depending on your needs) to determine how things should be drawn. In the open areas, whenever you encounter some bigger objects they'll probably use occluders - games basically draw everything the way they're given, they don't know if something is in front or behind a given object before they actually go through z buffers, etc. (you can of course perform such checks beforehand on the CPU side, but doing so for huge amount of objects would kill the performance rather than help it). Occluders help to sort of determine beforehand whether object has to be drawn or not - for instance by simplifying the objects and doing some checks on the GPU, which performs them rapidly. Not to mention techniques such as impostors, which basically allow you to draw thousands and thousands of "trees" (or other repetitive objects) without "that much" of a hard work. And of course, probably the simplest thing - draw distance...

I'm not even going to mention specific algorithms for optimizing terrains, etc. The point is - comparing optimizations of small rooms and open worlds isn't that easy because of how different they are. Now... when it comes to maps 100 times bigger than PoE - honestly, it really wouldn't matter, unless they had some GIGANTIC objects visible all across the map and they were so bloody detailed even from far away. As an example... the infamous No Man's Sky (yes, I hate how it turned out too) - you've actually got whole planets there (sure, they aren't "that" big of a planets, but they're still WAAAAAY larger than PoE) if we were to follow the logic, that 100 times bigger maps mean much worse optimization the game would honestly run on 1 FPS on every currently available computer, especially since it has to generate the worlds on go.

I don't know how exactly DE optimized the PoE (as I said, I don't have any issues on the map itself except for Cetus, which seems to be the issue for most people), perhaps they used most of the ideas I mentioned, perhaps even better ones, dunno. I just wanted to point out here that comparing optimizations of closed areas and open ones doesn't really make much sense and that increasing the size of the map even 100 times wouldn't make that big of a deal in terms of performance drop - especially if it were all from ground (or close to ground) level (things get a little bit more difficulty if you'd also want to fly quite high above such maps - for instance the impostor technique that I mentioned would require a bit more work before being usable).

If you made it this far, I applaud you (I really do) :P

[CrisFenix]

PoE feels boring, unnecessary and not requested for the game. It is very beautiful, the art and visual are excellent, very nice terrain design BUT is trivialized: you grind many hours to get what? more weapons? We already have a bunch of weapons.

Warframe doesnt need an open world because already have the planets. This game needs end game content created from the ground for high level players, not reused content-missions like the sorties. Leveling is just a phase, everybody will reach end game and will need good missions to keep them re-playing the game.

Problem is: this company doesnt know how to do it and ignore vets requests. I have almost 2.6k hours in this game and after 2 years reading requests from vets (me included) asking for a proper end game, epic, raid-like missions, giving them a bunch of good ideas what we got: + casual + unnecessary content + from the same - epic + grind for nothing.

I have weapons, arcanes, kubrows, kavats, all damage and defense I need, one warframe to each situation BUT all this for what? to just play old-boring missions? I pass. Just waiting de2.

Edited October 16, 2017 by CrisFenix