Steering away from "horde shooter" (and combating metas)

[Tyreaus]

7 hours ago, (PS4)WINDMILEYNO said:

It goes back to that feeling of "power". This was something the community struggled with back when the corpus were the unfun faction, nullifiers and bursas had just been added in all their horrific glory pre nerf and lvl40 bombarbs and napalms could just pop up and wipe you off the face of the earth if you werent paying attention to everything in a 360 degree angle for 0.1 seconds. The game made us feel insigificant. I like having the minions to kill, honestly with the right set up, you can kill anyone as if they are a minion, but for newer players, i think it helps.

Interesting: I don't know about what the Corpus were like back in the day, but I believe the part of the Bombards and Napalms. Given the contrast, I can definitely see why it's preferred as is. Mind, I don't suggest buffing enemies to that kind of absurd level. Maybe altering / improving their AI so that particular ways of getting through missions can be easier / more satisfying (esp. if there's an external incentive to run stealth, e.g. bonus affinity), and maybe having that sort of agility scale in some way as levels increase (so that difficulty doesn't arise solely from bullet-sponging and insta-gibbing), but certainly not making them lumbering, level-80-equivalent tanks. Plus, it isn't like the horde type would go away entirely: the Infested are going to be the horde faction no matter what, so far as I figure (and being able to cut them down en masse is still going to be their draw).

So I guess the follow-up question is: can there still be a way to entice that feeling of power / satisfaction without relying on the horde idea? Things that could be applied to non-Infested factions? Or do all the factions have to have the huge numbers to cut down (even if only in the few first stages of a mission) to be satisfying?

I'm not sure how or whether it helps new players. For me, personally, that sense of "power" dropped off before I started getting wrecked at Neptune because I was still figuring out things like good modding. I could go on to point out the many gripes I have about it and how it falls short of other horde-based shooters and action games (L4D, Doom, Dynasty Warriors...) but I feel that'd just bore people lol.

7 hours ago, (PS4)WINDMILEYNO said:

Lore wise, I like the idea of the corpus using their brains to try and fight us after theyve thrown enough of the office workers they hate at us to realize its not going to work. I like the idea of the veteran grineer realizing the noobs that just came out the test tubes arent going to cut it, pushing them out the way to show how its really done and iv always wanted enemies, grineer especially to figure out how to DOOOOOOOODGE which is something infested runners can do.

Fix'd. And I agree. I even said to my group when playing Index the other day that I found it oddly fun, and it's because the enemies feel dynamic and responsive. That and the artificial sense of progression: as they get stronger, they start to swap out units, so it feels like the new guys are actually stronger (even though every run randomizes who shows up).

But my only gripe is that, when facing, say, 20 units on a level field, watching them all roll / dodge is likely going to look like an uncoordinated mess. One-on-one, it's intense and requires that flick to adjust: you feel it and have to respond to it. With a group, well, for every enemy dodging out of your crosshairs, someone is going to be stupid enough to dodge into them. Maybe if they could sprint as a group, it'd feel much more coherent, but I can smell the pathing issues and the lines they'd have to form to get down the myriad of small hallways from here.

7 hours ago, (PS4)WINDMILEYNO said:

We have a lot more now to that keeps alive then we did back then, itd be a shame to lower spawn rates, even if you did up enemy levels. I heard people calling sanctuary a horde mode, but when i went there, there were barely any more enemies then you would find in a normal survival....

And that's one reason why I don't like the horde mentality in the starchart: it stops being unique. The Infested? Sanctuary Onslaught? The Corrupted (arguably)? It's functionally the same thing with slightly different rules and altered visuals. SO isn't the place where you go for horde mode, it's where you farm Khora and get more focus.

[o.0-]

Between changes to AI, enemy scaling and mods, I can see the game get back to it's earlier feel by creating a new setup with what we currently have in the various systems in place, and then have our current 'Horde' mode be available as an option as we have Endless, Sortie, Nightmare, Rathuum, Index, Onslaught and so on.

If the Star Chart, Invasions, Alerts, Quests at the very least (and off the top of my head), would then be populated as how the factions actually exist in the system, and have more character with how they move in the presence of Tenno and/or Combat in general, I'd certainly welcome that.

[(PSN)WINDMILEYNO]

5 hours ago, Tyreaus said:

Interesting: I don't know about what the Corpus were like back in the day, but I believe the part of the Bombards and Napalms. Given the contrast, I can definitely see why it's preferred as is. Mind, I don't suggest buffing enemies to that kind of absurd level. Maybe altering / improving their AI so that particular ways of getting through missions can be easier / more satisfying (esp. if there's an external incentive to run stealth, e.g. bonus affinity), and maybe having that sort of agility scale in some way as levels increase (so that difficulty doesn't arise solely from bullet-sponging and insta-gibbing), but certainly not making them lumbering, level-80-equivalent tanks. Plus, it isn't like the horde type would go away entirely: the Infested are going to be the horde faction no matter what, so far as I figure (and being able to cut them down en masse is still going to be their draw).

So I guess the follow-up question is: can there still be a way to entice that feeling of power / satisfaction without relying on the horde idea? Things that could be applied to non-Infested factions? Or do all the factions have to have the huge numbers to cut down (even if only in the few first stages of a mission) to be satisfying?

I'm not sure how or whether it helps new players. For me, personally, that sense of "power" dropped off before I started getting wrecked at Neptune because I was still figuring out things like good modding. I could go on to point out the many gripes I have about it and how it falls short of other horde-based shooters and action games (L4D, Doom, Dynasty Warriors...) but I feel that'd just bore people lol.

Fix'd. And I agree. I even said to my group when playing Index the other day that I found it oddly fun, and it's because the enemies feel dynamic and responsive. That and the artificial sense of progression: as they get stronger, they start to swap out units, so it feels like the new guys are actually stronger (even though every run randomizes who shows up).

But my only gripe is that, when facing, say, 20 units on a level field, watching them all roll / dodge is likely going to look like an uncoordinated mess. One-on-one, it's intense and requires that flick to adjust: you feel it and have to respond to it. With a group, well, for every enemy dodging out of your crosshairs, someone is going to be stupid enough to dodge into them. Maybe if they could sprint as a group, it'd feel much more coherent, but I can smell the pathing issues and the lines they'd have to form to get down the myriad of small hallways from here.

And that's one reason why I don't like the horde mentality in the starchart: it stops being unique. The Infested? Sanctuary Onslaught? The Corrupted (arguably)? It's functionally the same thing with slightly different rules and altered visuals. SO isn't the place where you go for horde mode, it's where you farm Khora and get more focus.

Disclaimer: I could talk factions all day long. I have multiple ideas that i have been thinking about for years, amd ideas i have seen from other people i have loved. Im trying not to write too much here.

Direct answer: all the factions dont need hordes, no. But i would not say that the grineer and corpus would be "fun" if all their missions were like the index and trials respectively. Your on to something if you can find a nice balance between the two, for the factions themselves or a few missions.

Hesitation. I hesitate to imagine a game where the infested left unchanged, are the only horde mode available. I would love for them to be less spammy with their attacks, ancients stronger, less common, and less buggy, and so on... But we do have the corrupted. 

I hesitate to imagine the corpus as the faction where you have to go through puzzle rooms. The rooms in the orokin maps were novel, you have a chance at finding one, and it isr just one. Maybe im imagining the wrong kind of thing, but using this as an actual obstacle for a player combined with lower spawn rates...skeptical. Im skeptical about the infested and the corpus...

The sentients were supposed to be the super challenging faction, but they are only on the moon, and they are either cheese or be cheesed. So much hype, and then entirely forgotten...

The grineer...a lower spawn rate i guess would feel like the planes? Enemies every so often....

Thinking on it, yes we have the infested and we have the corrupted for hordes, but every other faction would just feel like it was slower paced unless there was something else going on? Yes, more interesting enemies and mechanics will go a long way, but the missions would just ultimately feel slower unless they were radically different than anything else currently offered...

Missions.

The corrupted are also a good horde because they are literally mind controlled meat bags/chess pieces thrown at you by an ancient super computer with no regard to loss of life. To go on a tangent, i feel like they missed an opportunity with the orokin sentry. Like now we have these randomly appearing void fissures, and its supposebly because the void is falling apart or something, but itd be more interesting if it was the sentry itself, or corrupted capatain vor trying to target us, sort of "get back here, im not through with you yet". Imagine if the queens found a way to get into one of the towers....

id like to expand on all the factions and their roles, and see the derelicts and dark sectors to be important again. I want the star chart to feel like space exploration, like its a story being told, rather than points on a map where you go farm stuff.

Etc.

 

Edited May 17, 2018 by (PS4)WINDMILEYNO
Edit

[Tyreaus]

1 hour ago, (PS4)WINDMILEYNO said:

Disclaimer: I could talk factions all day long. I have multiple ideas that i have been thinking about for years, amd ideas i have seen from other people i have loved. Im trying not to write too much here.

Well, I for one don't mind reading ideas—that's one way how new and better ideas can be generated, after all!

(But if you don't have the time or motivation that's another story entirely haha)

1 hour ago, (PS4)WINDMILEYNO said:

Direct answer: all the factions dont need hordes, no. But i would not say that the grineer and corpus would be "fun" if all their missions were like the index and trials respectively. Your on to something if you can find a nice balance between the two, for the factions themselves or a few missions.

I don't know how trials acted in terms of enemy numbers, but it'd have to be more than the four present in Index. Just for one: maps get much bigger than Index arenas. The best scenario is if enemy spawning could, somehow, compensate for the size of a given tile so that enemy density is constant, rather than just set numbers. But considering they spawn from other tiles and many players are on a constant move, I'm not sure how that'd be possible.

1 hour ago, (PS4)WINDMILEYNO said:

Hesitation. I hesitate to imagine a game where the infested left unchanged, are the only horde mode available. I would love for them to be less spammy with their attacks, ancients stronger, less common, and less buggy, and so on... But we do have the corrupted. 

Some attacks, for sure. And the Ancients definitely do need to be fixed (I don't get any sound FX when hit by their arm things and, really, there's gotta be something more impactful than what they have). Like I said from the onset: these are just higher-level concepts, and there's probably a boat-load of fixes for all the factions to make them less annoying and better aesthetically.

1 hour ago, (PS4)WINDMILEYNO said:

I hesitate to imagine the corpus as the faction where you have to go through puzzle rooms. The rooms in the orokin maps were novel, you have a chance at finding one, and it isr just one. Maybe im imagining the wrong kind of thing, but using this as an actual obstacle for a player combined with lower spawn rates...skeptical. Im skeptical about the infested and the corpus...

Less on puzzles, not parkour-centric like the Orokin treasure rooms, more on the traditional "spy"-game things like cameras and automated turrets where parkour can help or reveal different routes. The sort of things they already have, possibly stealing motivation from spy rooms, but emphasized.

1 hour ago, (PS4)WINDMILEYNO said:

The sentients were supposed to be the super challenging faction, but they are only on the moon, and they are either cheese or be cheesed. So much hype, and then entirely forgotten...

Admittedly: haven't gotten to the cheese tactics yet so I, personally, still find them entertaining, and can't say what others think.

1 hour ago, (PS4)WINDMILEYNO said:

The grineer...a lower spawn rate i guess would feel like the planes? Enemies every so often....

Thinking on it, yes we have the infested and we have the corrupted for hordes, but every other faction would just feel like it was slower paced unless there was something else going on? Yes, more interesting enemies and mechanics will go a long way, but the missions would just ultimately feel slower unless they were radically different than anything else currently offered...

One possibility is to have enemy squadrons teleport into a tile so that their numbers at any given time aren't so excessive, but they appear often enough to keep a decent pace—especially for Grineer, which have demonstrated the technology for short-range poofing anyway. Corpus would have their level hazards to serve as replacements, as mentioned before—maybe with units that are activated when detected, like the MOA closets? Beyond that, I feel like boosts in enemy responsiveness and agility and movement would help a lot for making up the numerical deficiencies, perhaps with boons in enemy kit diversity to borrow inspiration from the Index. Just because there are fewer enemies doesn't mean there has to be less going on.

1 hour ago, (PS4)WINDMILEYNO said:

Missions.

The corrupted are also a good horde because they are literally mind controlled meat bags/chess pieces thrown at you by an ancient super computer with no regard to loss of life. To go on a tangent, i feel like they missed an opportunity with the orokin sentry. Like now we have these randomly appearing void fissures, and its supposebly because the void is falling apart or something, but itd be more interesting if it was the sentry itself, or corrupted capatain vor trying to target us, sort of "get back here, im not through with you yet". Imagine if the queens found a way to get into one of the towers....

id like to expand on all the factions and their roles, and see the derelicts and dark sectors to be important again. I want the star chart to feel like space exploration, like its a story being told, rather than points on a map where you go farm stuff.

Definitely intriguing future plot-lines. A quest in the / a derelict would be interesting, and tying quests to the starchart (which could reveal itself as one completed missions, rather than everything being visible but locked away) would make for a far more organic and exploratory experience.

[Corvid]

To me, Warframe has never been a horde shooter. It's a more typical shooter with challenging enemies, that just so happens to have suffered from a long-lasting malignant case of power-creep.