Warframe's sandbox endgame

[(XBOX)D00M INCARNATE]

4 hours ago, Kimimoto said:

Good thing Warframe is closer to these games and not MMO's/Destiny, otherwise you might not have a point. /s

I think you may have missed the point.

[Kimimoto]

4 hours ago, (XB1)D00M INCARNATE said:

I think you may have missed the point.

I have not

[DrakeWurrum]

9 hours ago, TinFoilMkIV said:

Yea. That's the way I'd likely go with it as well, but I wouldn't necessarily call that a "combat oriented challenge". The most challenging part of your example would almost certainly be the player running the gauntlet. A group that was serious about minimizing the risk of failure would in all likely hood result in the other three sitting around staring at their watches and occasionally swatting away whatever enemies are trying to bother them.

Depends on what the other group has to deal with. Obviously I just rattled off one idea off the top of my head. I'd expect any dev team focused on creating a hardmode (a Sorties 2.0 perhaps) to put more thought and planning into it.

A good example is the Razorback fight. It's not completely straightforward, but it's also tuned for ezmode farming rather than being an actual wall that players hit. Once you understand what to do with the Bursas, you'd probably find that those Bursas will melt under the slightest pressure, and then once hacked they will probably kill the boss FOR you.
On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd say that fight is only scaled to about a 3 and it could be turned way up if the devs really tried.

The devs have shown a lot of creativity with mechanics when given the chance, but ultimately the fights are still easy because they aren't tuned to be a real challenge, and they only have one layer of strategic complexity.

[TinFoilMkIV]

You're not entirely wrong. The issue though, is that as soon as things become "statistically" dangerous, you see lots of people bringing in the tools that just "turn off the numbers". Doesn't matter if the enemies can insta-kill the entire party and have billions of hp if they never get to attack and such. That's the point where you get "Bring X or gtfo".

I think DE does a good job of making the higher end stuff not very easy for people who don't have everything, while not being so hard that no one wants to carry an unprepared player through it. I'm certain they intentionally err on the side of making things way too easy, with the intent to make sure the most interesting content is accessible to most players who put in any real effort. We could certainly do with some higher difficulty versions of content though. Since it seems they want to have content be accessible as possible, our best bet might be to just have alternate versions that ramp the difficulty up a bunch. The next question though is going to be how to reward players enough that people have reason to do said hard content more than once without making people feel like it's the only version that gives good rewards.