Gameplay Feedback

[GianniVoices]

Hey, this is a copy/paste of my reply to a reddit thread, but I wanted to post this on its own because it's my own feedback about the core gameplay experience that I've thought about for a while now.

I love how I interact with things in Warframe, the things I control feel great, but the things I interact with, the things I use my controls against are often lackluster. The levels often come down to feeling more like a power level check than a real challenge. If your number is big enough, you roll it. If your number isn't big enough, you're one shot downed and just trying to see if you can bullS#&$ the mission. Sucks. Not the definition of engaging shooter gameplay, yet I still find Warframe fun because again, the things I control in Warframe do feel great to use.

For this reason I actually play a lot of conclave, as it enables me to control these things I love against enemies and situations which actually often have me use everything at my disposal. I know people complain a lot about having to shoot at the very slippery jumpy warframes, but I didn't find it to be so bad. Definitely not more annoying than conga lines are boring.

I also spend a lot of time creating fun, but weaker loadouts to take into missions, often solo or with my wife who will also bring deliberately weaker loadouts to try to make sure we're consistently playing content balanced to actually feel like you're uh... playing it.

I don't actually wish for this but, a #*!%ed up part of me wishes the player had little to no control over their actual power level and instead we grinded for cosmetics, sidegrades, and just different weapons and pieces of kit, and then the missions were balanced around default levels of power regulated by DE. Or something like missions only letting you be a maximum power level even if your gear is stronger so that the content was still something you had to fight for every time.

Given, it's fun to stomp weak babbies sometimes, but not most of the time, not to me. To me it's only fun to play God once in a while. And what really sucks is that this game features so much farming to get the things you want, so if you want to work your way towards those things, you either have to do it the most efficient way possible (snoozefest "gameplay"), or you have to deliberately gimp your own efficiency so your gameplay doesn't feel like some mobile game clicker farming bullS#&$. I take the second option often, but it does cheapen the experience a bit because, well, it's hard to explain but, when you know you could be getting the thing you want a lot faster, it just messes up the feeling of working towards it to know you're deliberately handicapping yourself in an attempt to balance your own gameplay.

And like many others have said, a lot of things would need to be changed, designed and overhauled about how enemies perform in order for the game to not really feel like a power level check and give you more situations where you felt like you got through because you outperformed them aside from just adjusting numbers. I'm definitely no game designer and I hate the armchair dev S#&$, so I won't do that part, but I can express the feelings I've collected about the game having played it for a while now as a big fan of shooters and competitive shooters (only around 450 hours in Warframe now).

Do I enjoy this game? Absolutely. Love almost everything about it. I always have fun in Warframe, even if it's mostly just chilling and farming and having a little fun. But I find myself needing to go experience other games regularly to scratch that really dynamic feeling gameplay itch. I don't regard my opinion as absolute fact about how the game is, but it's just been my take on things and how I've found myself feeling about it as a player.

Reading this back now, it comes off as a bit more negative than I actually feel about the game, and I fail to highlight clearly enough how much I do enjoy it and all the things that are good about Warframe. To be clear, I love this game and I know that what I've said here isn't the case for many players. I'm speaking only opinion, not fact.

Thank you for reading, and if anyone from DE reads this, thank you for the incredible experience that is Warframe.