[Spoiler] The Sacrifice is very underwhelming.

[(PSN)Silverback73]

18 minutes ago, DrakeWurrum said:

Eh. I'm in complete disagreement. The reveals in the quest were somewhat expected (i.e. Warframes are infested Dax soldiers), and otherwise not THAT shocking (Ballas betrayed the Orokin because they killed Margulis), sure. If you wanna put this as "compared to previous quests" sure.

But the quest was still intense, full of feels, and leaves me wanting more. There's more questions unanswered, and I'm hoping the wait for the next cinematic quest (where I assume we head to Tau to chase down the Lotus? Or maybe we have to fight off a new Sentient invasion?) won't be even longer than this one. 580 days is a loooong wait.

I think the major delay for this quest coming out was the UI change. That had to be the heaviest work of all, from a coding and artwork perspective.

The major delay was likely the the new IP/Game that failed combined with Venus open-world.

I credit Steve and his team for acknowledging what amounted to a referendum on resource allocation by listening to the community and going “all hands on deck” for fans, but you can tell it impacted the final product.

Just to re-iterate, I love DE and Warframe and Steve and the team absolutely go above and beyond with community outreach without getting into the nitty-gritty on the Profit-and-loss, shareholder, business and “economic reality” side that can really hinder the creative side.

In Short, I’m still “all-in”.

I just miss that Second Dream moment...and I know they can give it to us.

[(PSN)Stealth_Cobra]

I also found the Sacrifice lackluster, especially when you consider it was announced a year ago at Tennocon and that Umbra had been released since 2015 in Chinaframe... Find it really hard to believe to took them a whole year to do an hour long quest the reused existing locations and a new frame that's a reskin with minor differences.

That said, I'll give DE credit for delivering some cool content along the way, including Chains of Harrow which imho is much closer to Second Dream and War Within in terms of quest quality and scope than Sacrifice ... But mostly the Plains, which did reinvent many things in the Warframe universe and manage to give player alot of new stuff to do. I also think most of the energy is currently being funneled on the Venus Open world, so I'll give DE a break, since that's imho where most of the content and stuff will probably drop.

In the end , my main issue with Sacrifice is that it comes after a six months or so content drought and it fails to adress said drought in a meaningful manner. Logged in, did an hour long quest, logged out. Heck, didn't even really need to level up the new stuff since it was already lvl 30. For vets dying for new content, this really didn't help much.

 

Edited June 17, 2018 by (PS4)Stealth_Cobra

[LuckyCharm]

My issue with the sacrifice are it answered questions not being asked and raised more questions than it answered. The whole problem with that is we're seriously lacking in lore at the moment. If this were an mmo we wouldnt have left the first zone yet in terms of quest line. 

Lets look at whats happened so far with your tenno.. you wake up, immediately fight the stalker, give the lotus some answers to things you should be questioning given it was a "dream". then you pretty much confront the queens, unlock your powers, fight the queens again. Learn about the man in the wall then bam, sacrifice.  

 

If it takes 2 years for a cinematic quest then i really want to say pass. The quests we get when warframes are released have been just as moving and revealing and require objectively less work. That and any sort of lore building is incomplete without actual character building. We dont get much because we dont have even simple side quests like "kill 20 kuva lancers" and hand in to get some small snippet of lore and a reward

[Gnlstorm]

All i can said it not easy to done so much along the paths and i enjoy every moment DE gave us and dun forget it free... And DE still got ton of new plan coming soon so why not praise them and give them some air? 5years of non -stop working just to make us feel special and happy for free. We should grateful and love them more...

[Ham_Grenabe]

36 minutes ago, Gnlstorm said:

All i can said it not easy to done so much along the paths and i enjoy every moment DE gave us and dun forget it free... And DE still got ton of new plan coming soon so why not praise them and give them some air? 5years of non -stop working just to make us feel special and happy for free. We should grateful and love them more...

And isn't that the real message of The Sacrifice: that anything is possible with the power of Love?

[Gnlstorm]

6 minutes ago, Ham_Grenabe said:

And isn't that the real message of The Sacrifice: that anything is possible with the power of Love?

 

6 minutes ago, Ham_Grenabe said:

And isn't that the real message of The Sacrifice: that anything is possible with the power of Love?

If everyone can put DE hardwork in the first place, warframe is a wonderful place forever

[VincentRegios]

I too have mixed feelings about this. I'll give them the story about the Warframes (lore) and stuff were interesting, I loved stabbing Ballas and telling him to squirm like the maggot he is. i'll give i think its cool with a Warframe that moves around when you leave it in Transcendence?/Transference? I'll give that I found the mimics interesting because now i had to notice the "irregularities" I'll give i think the new interface looks neat, I just need to find the place where i can deactivate that A,S,W,D keys is able to move the cursor. I were both confused and happy with the rework on Warframes that needs weapon mods in their arsenal, ( but that system was already done when they made Khora, right ??)

 But, as many others in this tread points out, it was also tame, I honestly thought " Is that it? Is this all?" could they not have made "Sentient Lotus" alittle less creepy/disgusting? Why does she not stay? How did she go from "space human lookalike spacemom" to "creepy-disgusting-living-weapon-spacemom"????  I honestly had been so exited for this patch, and now I really just feel disappointed.at DE for having blown it up to these levels of anticipation, and we're left with a cliff hanger? 

If what others in the tread says in regard that they have too many tasks at hand, they could have waited, I don't care about Limbo prime, and i don't care if it was released at Tennocon instead or later even, because this feels like a hurried and sloppy story writing,  DE should cherish their game and the amazing story they've had until now, but the ending with the sacrifice is tame or even lame. ( i personally dislike cliff hangers )

@XandyPants mentioned in his stream that maybe  it would look bad for them as a company if they didn't finish in time because they were talking about it a year ago.  That kinda makes sense, except why not have the pride to do things properly, and if they can't make it in time, then just be honest about it? " Sorry we didn't make it"   
( @XandyPants Sorry for tagging you, if you dislike it please let me know)
 

It's becoming harder for me to find something i enjoy to work towards lately, and I hoped this update would give me a mood boost but i finished it way too fast, it barely made me enjoy it. DON'T get me wrong! I'm not shaming or hating or implying anything towards DE I just honestly don't understand, really i don't understand why it's made this short a questline, and why we don't have to level the Umbra +weapons ourselves? 

If on the other hand this is just the beginning of a group of new quests, and this is just the ground work then i'm all in and everything makes sense. 

[GlaikitMayflies]

The sacrifice was disappointing, just when it was getting good, it ends. I swear, if we need to wait another year, or two, I am going to be upset.

[True_Naeblis]

The quest was great, but the Tau system being released with it--having been the focus of resources rather than Venus--would have been amazing. As it stands, it was a lot of patching and a lot of glitches for an hour or so of game play and video. I'm not sure what the priorities are going forward.

[Fallen_Echo]

I can ignore the terrible UI they created.

I can ignore the cost of the mods and their missing type from the forma menu.

I can ignore the madness they created with the exalted weapons.

I can also ignore that Umbra Excalibur is basically Excalibur reskinned.

What i cant ignore is just how lackluster this whole update was. Yes we got answers to long questioned things and important lore data but that doesnt keep me and a lot of other people playing, we need actual content for that.

New weapons, maps, enemies, mods, focus, whatever but it has to be some actually playable content.

 

[ChaellExE]

On 2018-06-17 at 1:54 AM, (PS4)iQuedas said:

Yeah, I was also looking forward to post-quest content...

If we had to farm for Umbra and those 5 mods, I'd be satisfied.

That would've been whole new level of disappointment. 

• 1 Minor Quest in comparison to TSD & TWW, and even the CoH if you mind.
  
  Also mind that I haven't played it yet, but from what I have seen from the Day 1 streams, it felt like what apostasy should have been. (console pessant here, for the moment)
   
• The grind for the frame and mods, not forgetting the location grinding like keys and other things that go along with it, like drop chances.
• even more Endo farming

No thank you !!

I'm glad that DE did it this way.


 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
I do agree with you OP with most of the things you've said. Even to the Index part. But I am not going to get emotional about that again.
It is what is right now, and the next big thing is Tennocon. All we can do is support and give constructive feedback. They are working on it and are
moving forward. As players and fans this is what we got. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

The only letdown IMHO was the quality and fact that it doesn't look that bright in the near future. 
But I think the only reason I feel this way,is maybe because DE is becoming this really huge commercial company and not the game studio, they ones were. The focus is changing. And during moments like this it is clearly showing.

I realize now that I've gotten on the hype train. It did not arrived at the designated station and I had to walk. 

Edited June 18, 2018 by ChaellExE
more!!

[Cosmic_Elf]

Actually the quest took about 2 hours to complete... if you looted and explored the maps, and killed all the enemies.. One simply does not race through a quest. If one raced through the quest they could do it in 25 minutes. ... Farming Umbra parts would have extended the length of the quest...

yes it would have been nice if they added more in it, more dialogue and conversations using sun/neutral/moon selections and more activities and puzzles...

Warframe does tend to have less dialogue... would be nice if they made it more dialogue choices and conversations  in quests like Mass Effect 

  But I enjoyed it. I wish it was re-playable like the others so you can examine the lore.. but I did take my time with the quest and looted the maps, and attacked almost every enemy along the way, because they would drop loot also. 

 

 

[FireSegment]

On 2018-06-17 at 6:21 AM, Voghelm said:

The Sacrifice came out with UPD 23 (580 days later after release of UPD 19), besides the quest itself the patch brought these major additions:

  Hide contents

• 2 new tiles
• Orokin puzzle minigame (wew lad, this was quite the journey) 
• New sentient type (Mimic) 
• Partial UI update (with free/PAID UI themes)
• Moddable exalted weapons
• Umbra Excalibur (assets for whom were in the game for a while now, which has minimum changes compared to ordinary Excalibur/Prime)
• Edgy Katana
• Umbra Mods (Which realistically are "Umbra" tagged set mods with unique polarity) 
• Other various improvements and bugfixes to existing parts of the game

u missed the new void/lua style hacking minigame (the matching symbol thing), which i hope will be use outside the quest soon.

and to be honest ... you should not see The Sacrifice as it own equivalent of TWW and TSD quest, as i understand, DE are testing the water with partial multiple quests that spread across a big stretch of time

Like .... Apostasy Prologue should be including with The Sacrifice, plus another quest that bring closure to the Lotus returning that DE are planning in order to make it have the level of lore that TWW and TSD hold accountable.

Remember that both TWW and TSD are out at the last quarter of the respected year, of which DE pull all the punch and put forward everything they have. With the Sacrifice, i'm quite sure that they still holding up for Tennocon

if you have to compare, compare The Sacrifice with Octavia Anthem release in scope

 

[seprent]

On 2018-06-16 at 5:18 PM, Gandergear said:

We don't even get the mastery for Umbra and the skatole (don't correct me on the pronunciation)

From the wiki 

• Umbra, along with the Skiajati Nikana, will be obtained by the player fully ranked. All the mastery rank points that would normally be granted from ranking up both the Warframe and the weapon will be automatically received after acquiring them.

[Felsagger]

 

DE slacked the whole Sacrifice quest. You can see their lack of enthusiasm and laziness throughout the quest. 

 

Yes, it was good and entertaining but expectations for it where too high after 580 days between updates and a long wait for more than two years. When these types of events happens would be great to include weapons and serious improvements with them. 

 

I enjoyed it but it felt flat. It wasn't bad but it wasn't good either. It was just meh.  

Edited June 18, 2018 by Felsagger

[Lazuli3]

For me the best part about this quest was everything about regarding Umbra, and then Ballas' style of villainy. I have to agree that this felt really cheap as a cinematic story quest. Bloated with filler missions, a final boss containing the exact same enemies the quest has been spamming on you the whole way through, and a story that while really powerful just ended up being kinda confusing at times and made it feel like a distraction from what we really wanted: the relationship between lotus, ballas, and the operator.

It's like DE teased us with the prologue and suddenly realized that they didn't know what they were doing so they shoved a warframe in the way instead. And that new Lotus design is just laughably rediculous to look at. I wish they just showed her as a sentient instead of making this weird anime mech mode. I still have many questions that feel ignored: what happened to ballas to make him look the way he did? If Lotus adopted the mindset of Margulis (or was her all along) in the prologue, then why is she once again viewing herself as the lotus in the sacrifice? Are all warframes infested orokin or just the first batch? How were we able to resist Ballas' hold at the end with no explanation? 

If anything I actually really liked that game of Komi. Seriously, I would love to have a few matches of Komi with other tenno in a relay or something. But because the quest is not repeatable I will not be playing komi again, finishing some codex scans, or getting a better ingame understanding of the lore which is more convoluted and bewildering now than ever before.

[Chewarette]

I loved the "cinematic" (not really but still) parts with Ballas. His voice and glowing eyes when he talks to Umbra "outside of the real scene" is really frightening and I loved that. I also liked the Vitruvian parts, those were interesting with nice drawings.

I have a problem with the quest itself though. Mainly because I had to confront Umbra 3 times without an upgraded Amp and not-Tenno-oriented Focus Schools, let's face it, that was no fun at all. Because the Javlin one-shots your Tenno and there's nothing you can do except die & come back in chains until his shield is broken - and that takes a while with the basic Amp.

Regarding the quest, overall, I think it has not to be looked at at the same level than TWW or TSD. To me, The Sacrifice is not the 3rd part of the trilogy. It is a part of the third part. The 3rd part of the Trilogy started with the Apostasy Prologue and will end up with the closure of the Lotus arc, when we finally get the end of this. TWW or TSD had very clear endings, not cliffhangers. Here, we gained nothing (except one Warframe) in terms of character development, we're just left with more questions than answers.

[weirdichigo]

Spoiler

 

 

Edited July 21, 2018 by weirdichigo
changed my mind...

[DreisterDino]

vor 15 Stunden schrieb Gnlstorm:

All i can said it not easy to done so much along the paths and i enjoy every moment DE gave us and dun forget it free... And DE still got ton of new plan coming soon so why not praise them and give them some air? 5years of non -stop working just to make us feel special and happy for free. We should grateful and love them more...

Sry, but this some of the most stupid things to say (and so many people have this attitude)

 

1. Just because it is free that doesnt mean you are not allowed to criticise certain aspects of the game.

2. Just because it is free you dont need to "praise them" (seriously?) for everything they do.

3. Constructive criticism is something every artist needs to get from his audience! Nobody grows if everybody around them always says "i love you so i love everything you do"

4. They announced this quest over a year ago, and regarding all the words that came from the Devs about this quest and the hype they (!) created, you are allowed to feel disappointed and let them know it.

5. "5 years of non-stop working" .... nearly everyone who has a job works "non-stop" for many years, that doesnt mean they can get through with every mistake or flaw they make while their customers and or boss say "well, this wasnt good but hey, regarding you work for such a long time...its ok dont worry" 😄 

6a. "Just to make us feel happy for free" again...seriously??? They dont work for free, they have a business model! Yes the businessmodel is different, but it still is a businessmodel and they need and want to make money (which im ok with ofc!) If they wouldnt get payed at all, lets see how long they work for free just to make us feel special and happy.

6b. And if they want to continue to make money with this businessmodel, they have to deliver. And they have to deliver something good, not just something thats ok more or less. And again, if they fail to deliver something great, you should critise them and dont just praise them because you are such a nice person.

 

 

Yes, DE might have put more heart and soul into Warframe opposed to some other Gamedevelopers especially in their early days with the game (still, in the Sacrifice quest i really didnt see that they've put much love into it), yes you can totally play this game for free, but i honestly hate it when people forget that Digital Extremes is a company with a serious businessmodel and that they do not ONLY work to make us happy...

 

DE does a lot of things right, and if its appropiate to praise them for something good they should recieve those praises. For example its really fair that if you want to buy something with real money, you always know exactly what you get and dont have to go through lootbox stuff where you can end up paying 50$ and still not having what you want. Thats transparent and DE deserves the praise. BUT that doesnt mean you have to praise everything all the time while saying "hey its free, show some love".

 

Thanks for reading 😄

Edited June 18, 2018 by DreisterDino

[LotsOfLore]

After reading all of your interesting comments and having played the quest I can say I have to agree, unfortunately, in saying that overall The Sacrifice quest felt a bit underwhelming, even though I enjoyed it very much.
Here are some arguments that maybe haven't been already covered:

1) on top of it having received less work because of Venus (obviously), it was also probably hold back by a lot of energy and effort gone into scrapping damage 2.5 (thank the heavens for that), and having to rework Khora / sanctuary as a result
2) it is objectively extremely hard for any cinematic quest to go up against Second Dream and TWW. Those are just unbeatable overall (also because of the groundbreaking gameplay changes they introduced
3) for me, the other weak aspects of the quest (apart from the final boss-fight) was the constantly back and forth, diagonal, convoluted and excessively cryptic way of telling the story. My issue, essentially, is with the writing. I had a hard time understanding what was happening for the entirety of the quest. I had to go back and watch a couple of youtube videos of other ppl playing and commenting and rewatching bits to finally understand. That is fun for me because I am lore lover but I honestly don't see how it could work for the average or even a consumed player of the game that is not into dechiphering. The lack of effectiveness in the story telling of this quest suggests to me that it may have been rewritten by several hands at different times and the central message has maybe evolved over time and gotten a bit out of hand.
Specifically: a) when the narration changes from the hospital room to the black and gold drawings scenes with narration I initially could not understand with whom Ballas was talking to, was he addressing Hunhow, or the Dax becoming Umbra? There's such a confusion around who betrayed who and when, because it seems everybody did at different times and to different ppl, this is fine as it is intrigueing but it also makes the bigger plot extremely hard to follow. This confusion made me suffer through trying to understand what the heck was going on half the time instead of fully enjoying it.
b) Ballas' love for Margulis didn't come out convincing enough to the player because we have only seen Ballas under an negative or evil light, so we haven't had enough time to understand his other feelings and be receptive to this, which is the central theme of his betrayal of the Orokin ppl and his cooperation with Hunhow. As a result this kills the emotion that should have come with the scene where he reveals why he imposed this "sacrifice" on the dax soldiers.
c) On the same grounds as (b), I was frustrated by not knowing who the hell the Umbra dax is: how can I understand and empathize the way you want me to with the "sacrifice" of this person if I haven't even seen his face once, I don't know his name, his story was dropped on me from nowhere. Not enough building up to it has been done, I think.

and finally...

4) I have issues with the title "Sacrifice" with regard to the hype ... After I played it I was left wondering "but that sacrifice had NOTHING to do with my Tenno..." this doesn't affect the player at all. In fact the player only gains from this quest, it doesn't need to sacrifice anything for any greater good. It feels like my player just picked up another stranded piece of machinery and added it to the collection. Which is absolutely fine, don't get me wrong, but NOWHERE near as epic as all of the hype and speculations and wallpapers etc. seemed to have alluded to (e.g. "are you ready for your sacrifice, Tenno"? .. what?! sounds completely empty after the fact).

So, thank you for the quest DE, as usual, I love your game and I am beyond grateful that you can deliver this for FREE! My comment, to summarise in one sentence would simply be: make your narration SIMPLER, decide which aspects are the most important for your story and stick to those, without meandering too much, please.
😄
 
Cheers

[LotsOfLore]

Also adding to my previous post:
The quest left me with so many more questions than before, that it just might too much. There is a line where that is still fun because it leaves one wondering for days after, but if crossed it just leaves one frustrated for the answers they didn't get.
e.g.: 1) what about the other survivors of the Zarimann incident? Do I have to understand they are irrelevant then? If so just say it clearly. 2) the man in the wall, the entity in the void... all teased up to 11 but still not even superficially addressed in this quest.

I think one thing would have been awesome to see in this quest that would possibly have added to the emotion of the Ballas storyline and make it believable for the players:
 >>> Actually seeing Ballas's sacrifice! Seeing, with even just a simple cutscene, before the first hospital scene, or even better at the start of the quest, through his eyes, the moment when they sentenced Margulis to death! Having seen this we would have experienced first hand his profound pain and resentment towards the Orokin society, we would have understood his betrayal and his need to impose a similar sacrifice to the Dax. (Besides the event was covered through echoes during the Apostasy prologue, so it would only naturally follow that we would get to see it in the actual quest)
 

Edited June 18, 2018 by LotsOfLore

[Leland_Gaunt]

Quest itself was alright, but it didn't do anything for the game itself content-wise, it's pretty bland.

Everything could be finished within 2h: playing the quest, forma'ing out Umbra Excal & Exalted Blade and maxing the mods.

That's pretty bland.

[Chewarette]

42 minutes ago, LotsOfLore said:

4) I have issues with the title "Sacrifice" with regard to the hype ... After I played it I was left wondering "but that sacrifice had NOTHING to do with my Tenno..." this doesn't affect the player at all. In fact the player only gains from this quest, it doesn't need to sacrifice anything for any greater good. It feels like my player just picked up another stranded piece of machinery and added it to the collection. Which is absolutely fine, don't get me wrong, but NOWHERE near as epic as all of the hype and speculations and wallpapers etc. seemed to have alluded to (e.g. "are you ready for your sacrifice, Tenno"? .. what?! sounds completely empty after the fact).

I think there is a parallel with the Tenno.

We as a Tenno have gone through the same steps as Umbra, we killed a lot of people when we were infested during the Zariman Ten Zero accident (just not by Helminth, but by the Void). We killed our family, our friends, just the same way as Umbra did : we barely controlled anything.

Plus, the "Sacrifice" refers both to the Umbra killing his son, but also the Sacrifice we make at the end of the quest : We have fully accepted this memory as our own. So from now on the memory of killing Isaah will haunt us, too. During the quest we're telling Ordis "He's going to kill my... his... son". I don't know if you've personally discussed with The Man In The Wall since Sacrifice but I'll let you discover this yourself, that's even more clear.

[LotsOfLore]

2 minutes ago, Chewarette said:

I think there is a parallel with the Tenno.

We as a Tenno have gone through the same steps as Umbra, we killed a lot of people when we were infested during the Zariman Ten Zero accident (just not by Helminth, but by the Void). We killed our family, our friends, just the same way as Umbra did : we barely controlled anything.

Plus, the "Sacrifice" refers both to the Umbra killing his son, but also the Sacrifice we make at the end of the quest : We have fully accepted this memory as our own. So from now on the memory of killing Isaah will haunt us, too. During the quest we're telling Ordis "He's going to kill my... his... son". I don't know if you've personally discussed with The Man In The Wall since Sacrifice but I'll let you discover this yourself, that's even more clear.

Yes, that's right, I think that's a parallel one could draw. I just wish they would have narrated it in a simpler, more effective way.

[Klokwerkaos]

I agree with OP, but I have something to add...

TWW and TSD also cleaned up the story nice and tight.

This not only didn't do that it left us with a crappy cliff hanger and that also deserves extra rage.  It's half the story of what it should have been.

First you give us a 2 min cut scene and call that an "intro"

Then you give us the "EPIC MEND BENDING QUEST WE'VE BEEN HYPING FOR 3 YEARS!" and still, not done...

The lesson to learn here...

 

Edited June 18, 2018 by Klokwerkaos