PoE - a review by a casual tenno

[RDN-5263]

So, a bit of a foreword - I am not a hardcore player, I don't spend hours and hours on getting best everything, I usually play 2-3 times a week and participate in events. I do have a bit of a completionist streak, though not wide enough to forego everything else for it. My MR 22, approaching 23 reflects that quite nicely, and I started around U18 being deployed. With that picture painted, let me tell you about my experience with what pretty much is completely new game mode, starting from good and going to bad and ugly.

Plains themselves, despite being a bit plain are very beautifully done, especially with me enjoying my new vid card. Day-night cycle aesthetics, skyboxes and lighting are among best I've seen. And the map is huge, leading to a new sense of scale. However, this scale is quite underpopulated, which stems from themws party system of four tenno per instance. This map feels lonely and empty even with full cell, especially compared to Cestus nearby. It really needs some variation of free roam mode that will have more than four players at once on it.

Continuing with my design praises - Orokin ruins, Grineer camps and excavation sites and patrols, Sentient giant wandering the planis at night. That all makes for a very atmospheric setpiece. A setpiece criminally underutilised at present, but with those unopened caves and other pieces DE seems to have plans for changing that.

What not as good is technical side of things. Plains looading time is 5-6 times that of any normal mission map - but that can be excused due to it's scale. What can hardly be excused is still quite atrocious loading time when coming from plains to Cestus. This have been very bad, along with variety of glitches, but here I have to respect DE at how expeditely and thoroughly those were fixed, hence this bit is not lower on the list. I don't claim to know the development process, but I see those release glitches being there due to how hard it's to playtest area this big with only 4 players on it.

Now we come in to bad-to-ugly part of it - balance.

Here is my main complaint about this expansion - it is made more friendly to new players at expence of being interesting and friendly to older, more geared and experienced players, though certain design decisions kinda contradict that. And this problem is multifaceted.

Facet one - enemy types and scaling. Free roam mode offers lvl10-30 enemies of all Tusk variety. This seemes on surface as a nice area to easily gain Mastery points for newer players abd some nice mods with lower level bounties. But when you look closer you note that both Tusk enemies are somewhat deadlier than their usual Grineer counterparts, and defence emplacements on the camps will dismantle low-level tenno. Minigun ones are manageable, but the missile launchers with their ridiculous radius are more likely than not to cause sudden death. And that is during day time. During night time there is literally nothing to do for newer playrs. Grineer camps don't offer any signofocant increase in enemy numbers to have them be worth raiding for xp and drops, and they plain can't kill Womvalists for their core drops.

Which brings us to second facet - plains resources gathering and economy. We have four main categories here - fishing, hunting, mining and sentient cores. Again, ordered from good to bad. Fishing can be quite fun and allows a decent amount of resources gathered in reasonable time, and I have no problem with it. Hunting is worse - critters have natural camouflage (which is ok) and don't spawn that often (which is not). Minig is even worse, with resourses dropping in amounts of rare drops, while they are required in common resource quantities for recepies and Ostron standing. This could be offset by you being new player and having gathered enough of it by the time you really need it, but older players are locked out by grindwall. But last and the worst is thew Quills standing - that one can't be alleviated like mining can, as new players lack the ability to gather Sentient Cores and have some stash by the time they are needed. And you need a crapton of those. So, we have a bit that alienates both new players by being inaccessible to them and old players by being grindier than most Tactical Alerts.

 

So, final thoughts? Plains of Eidolon as they are now are flawed quite a bit. DE needs to ether segregate new and older playr oriented content more, or less, as it is done now it's horrible. Fix that and this will be an excellent addition to Warframe content. Also, need more areas like that.

[Donnell]

There is quite a lot of PoE that i've come to dislike after a while. I would also consider myself a casual player but have been around since late 2012 somewhere. (blimey)

I love the scale and potential but I dislike it being open plains; as you mentioned, it feels quite empty at times. Saying that, when I get near a base, you get bombarded and shot at from so much that can be hard to see and respond to. Doesn't feel there is a mid-way or indeed a progression to me.

I don't mind the fishing and mining being there, I just despise being forced to do it. Building technology that needs certain fish brains to hold it together but to get this fish you need a lure. A lure that is made from other two fish butts which spawn in different types of water. For god sake :( I log on to warframe to shoot or chop bad guys, not stop an admire the beauty of nature, have a picnic with gathering mangos, fishing and digging for shiney stones.

I try to play on the plains more but I find it quite dulls. I sigh in despair when I see the crafting needed to make my own weapons, the amount of sentinel cores I need to improve my operator, the distance I need to run to find something to shoot.

I know this is the first step in what could be a brighter future of maps but I hope there are many lessons learned. Maps that are too open look empty: maps that are complex (lua & kuva fortress) cause frustrating and gets you lost.