Warframe

[Tweed]

Octavia is the last really good frame they rolled out and my absolute favorite. Gauss is okay, I haven't even bothered to get Grendel yet since those missions are so bullshit.

It's just hard to be interested at this point, I haven't even ran through all the Deimos content yet.

 

[Gerrard]

Considering that Octavia has been one of the most broken frames in the game since release, that says a lot about you as a player.

 

[Tweed]

Considering that Octavia has been one of the most broken frames in the game since release, that says a lot about you as a player.

What does it say?

 

[Latelistener]

I recently got a better PC. It is worth getting into it? I played a bit during beta, it was fun, but there wasn't enough content. Then I played again some time later, but my PC had some troubles.

Also I remember reading here something about the game being in a decline in the last year or so. Any reason for that?

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

lack of direction. a lot of new content, sure, but every part of it is completely detached from the rest of the game. -so now you can build your own starship with weapons and all. -what for? -starship missions. with a ton of new resource to farm! -what for? -starship missions.
you land on an open world planet, you MUST farm for weeks, months, tens of new resources, which are used there and there only. even if you get out of there with some new weapon you'll always feel like you wasted a lot of time for very little reward. last one went even worse, with every new shop. every. new. single. individual. shop. having. its. own. currency. that's beyond having a rack full of extra chromosomes. i'm a sort of warframe addict, yet after the last big expansion i stopped playing, didn't bother with the new content, i only show my face for the daily reward and one or two of the rare "gift of the lotus" missions (easy and quick stuff for big reward, usually monthly, maybe longer).
if they did this to me, i can guess a pretty drop in the number of players.

 

[Snorkack]

I recently got a better PC. It is worth getting into it? I played a bit during beta, it was fun, but there wasn't enough content. Then I played again some time later, but my PC had some troubles.

Well, there's certainly not a lack of content.
And I gotta say the points that MadMaxHellfire raises may or may not be true, but that shouldn't be your concern right now.
I mean, I played the game a bit 4 years ago, picked it up again recently, my steam says I clocked in 100hr now and I still haven't touched any of the parts he talks about since there's so much other stuff to do. Haven't even unlocked the full Star Chart yet. The core gameplay didn't change for the worse and feels incredibly good and rewarding.

 

[Tweed]

It's probably different if you haven't touched it in ages, but for veterans who've been at it for too long it just feels like DE is in a contest with themselves to come up with crazier gimmicks that get further away from the original core concept of space ninjas. Veterans are worn out husks of players that DE has no use for, it's the newbies they want to hook.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

I find Warframe a bit boring. After a while it just becomes a repetitive grind. They tried mixing it up with Steel Path, but its such a poorly designed slog that it's just not fun.
There's no point in introducing a mode with high level enemies you can use your tooled up weapons on if they are so tanky that your weapons are effectively useless. They should have just made them level 100+ and be done with it, not give them those retarded fucking bonuses.

 

[DeepOcean]

Man, DE has no idea of what they are doing, they have the core of a fun action game with some really good ideas but most of their systems feel like abortions of what could had been good systems if they placed more effort into. The new patch with the infected open world zone seems nice but I was burned by Warframe before, I bet 99% of the new content they shown on the gameplay trailer already, the other 1% is the grind you will need to go through over and over to get some shit weapons.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

I have doubts if its really on just DE, it seems to be purely just how they have to be for selling their product. They tried to do that "okay, we're going to spend a whole year just revisiting and reworking and connecting old content" thing, and it as far as I know did not yield good results in terms of making that dough. Unfortunate fact seems to be that games like Warframe (online, ongoing, etc) by and large live by the spikes of interest caused by THE NEW HOTNESS since those are the big payday.

It rather seems that content getting abandoned into islands is just part of that imperative to chase the next NEW HOTNESS to get that next spike. So all new content ends up having a "shelf life" for updates before everything needs to be put into the next new project. A good example of this are the big spiders of Orb Vallis (or Command intrinsic), where there was supposed to be a third one, but that got shelved indefinately because all effort needs to be focused on getting that next spike. Same thing with the Railjack (Railjack in general is the most egregious content island, particularly since they really hit real good core gameplay there that could easily be incorporated to the wider game), they can do one follow-up update and then they gotta fucking go to work on the next spike. An additional factor in this for things like the Railjack is that they always have to work on the angle of the spike, they aren't in the business of whaling so they have to focus on catching a lot of fish with each spike of interest in their game. Like Tweed said, it's all about getting newbies and returns for DE to make money.

And to me, the important thing is that the core gameplay loop and focus on small steps of rewards instead of giant walls to climb is what makes Warframe enjoyable. They really should not fuck with the relaxing power tripping or with the pretty immediate flow of valuable loot, and they haven't.

 

[ADL]

That's the thing, the only thing keeping players around right now is the promise of the calm before the storm. The game has certainly improved over the last year or two despite the no fun allowed nerfs, but given the revenue, the much needed reworks clearly aren't what drive people to the game. Hopefully with the China money, they can stick a small team on the reworks while the larger team works on the mass market appeal stuff.

 

[Gerrard]

Hopefully China money will send some auditors to their offices to understand this clusterfuck and some people will lose their jobs, or at least positions.

 

[gurugeorge]

I played the heck out of Warframe for a couple of years and really enjoyed it, grind and all. For a time, I think it was the best multiplayer game in the world. But it's gradually become something of a Rube Goldberg contraption over the years and lost coherence.

I think it's time for DE to make another game instead of trying to stuff all their game ideas into the one game.

I've never understood why people think a game like this can last for more than a few years, or expect it to satisfy veterans forever, no matter what the devs do to it. All things have their time, and I think the effort to keep it going beyond its natural lifespan has actually spoiled it. Even in terms of the lore, it was better when the lore was merely suggestive and relied on peoples' headcanon, rather than filled out in excruciating detail as it has been.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Man, DE has no idea of what they are doing, they have the core of a fun action game with some really good ideas but most of their systems feel like abortions of what could had been good systems if they placed more effort into. The new patch with the infected open world zone seems nice but I was burned by Warframe before, I bet 99% of the new content they shown on the gameplay trailer already, the other 1% is the grind you will need to go through over and over to get some shit weapons.

They struck gold with a third person diablo where shit like hellgate london failed. Game simply needed more tile sets and bosses like the stalker and grustrag three.

I fell off just before Plains of Eidolon was announced, and outside of the immediate first impressions of it looking pretty cool, I had a feeling half the weapons, frames, cards and gubbins would be rendered obsolete.

The actual team now looks depressed to fuck on the video blogs. They're obviously sick of the game by this point.

 

[gurugeorge]

Man, DE has no idea of what they are doing, they have the core of a fun action game with some really good ideas but most of their systems feel like abortions of what could had been good systems if they placed more effort into. The new patch with the infected open world zone seems nice but I was burned by Warframe before, I bet 99% of the new content they shown on the gameplay trailer already, the other 1% is the grind you will need to go through over and over to get some shit weapons.

Ste Sinclair admitted years back on one their video blogs with the team that endgame kept him awake at night because he didn't have a clue what it was. They struck gold with a third person diablo where shit like hellgate london failed. Game simply needed more tile sets and bosses like the stalker and grustrag three.

I fell off just before Plains of Eidolon was announced, and outside of the immediate first impressions of it looking pretty cool, I had a feeling half the weapons, frames, cards and gubbins would be rendered obsolete.

The actual team now looks depressed to fuck on those same video blogs. They're obviously sick of the game by this point.

I lost interest shortly after the Plains. I think the idea of having big open spaces as a break from the corridor-ey stuff was sound - the great thing about the plains was that it was super-spectacular and fun when you had all those enormous superpowers showing up in a big open space, the sense of scale and power was excellent. And the plains didn't really affect the gubbins that had been in the game up to that point (if you bracket the Operator/Eidolon stuff). For me, the problem was them larding systems over systems over systems, most of them half-arsed and buggy. I think even the Operator was a mistake in the end. It all just got fussy and tiresome.

I think you're right that all they really needed to do was have a LOT more different tilesets and cool bosses. It didn't take long till you knew all the extant "shapes" of the different tileset bits, so what they should have done to keep it fresh was keep introducing new "shapes" so you didn't always know which direction to go. That would have kept teams together more, and obviated the problem of vets rushing and leaving newbies behind as well.

And re. endgame: they HAD an endgame dammit. They had an endgame in precisely the "emergent" sense that they praised, and people for the most part were happy with it, because those long, long missions in the towers where you were holding out for the 4th increment of harder mobs so you could get the gold whateveritwas, and where you were increasingly struggling to cope with the harder and harder enemies, contributed to a feeling of camaraderie (even if it was only temporary with the team you had) which in turn contributed to the feeling of community that the game had. And that sense of community is all they really needed. But they threw it away with the egg thingies system and didn't replace it with anything else until too late. That's when the drop-off in interest from Youtubers, etc., started, so far as I can tell.

Re. "emergent" - I think another huge mistake they made was not nixing "coptering" immediately as soon as it showed up. People got addicted to the speed, which again nullified the maps, and meant they had to introduce the new movement system (the more advanced parkour system). In and of itself, the new parkour system was well-implemented, but the incredible speed you could cross maps with made the extant maps seem seem psychologically tiny. IOW by leaving coptering in for so long they allowed the playerbase to get used to the speed, and in that way DE created a rod for their own backs - because once the speed was in the game, you couldn't take it away.

 

[Tweed]

I'm not sure they have the resources or creativity to work on anything new. I tested Keystone and that died long before it got out the door.

Re. "emergent" - I think another huge mistake they made was not nixing "coptering" immediately as soon as it showed up. People got addicted to the speed, which again nullified the maps, and meant they had to introduce the new movement system (the more advanced parkour system). In and of itself, the new parkour system was well-implemented, but the incredible speed you could cross maps with made the extant maps seem seem psychologically tiny. IOW by leaving coptering in for so long they allowed the playerbase to get used to the speed, and in that way DE created a rod for their own backs - because once the speed was in the game, you couldn't take it away.

I wasn't around for coptering, but the idea of moving around the maps at a slow pace sounds like a nightmare and I would have quit ages ago if I had to crawl each map given how much grinding there is in the game.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Whoever figured out Zorencoptering made DE hundreds of millions of dollars, It helped set the game apart from everything else.

Them nerfing it would be like trying to patch out the rocket jump/strafe jumping in quake or skiing in Tribes.

 

[gurugeorge]

I'm not sure they have the resources or creativity to work on anything new. I tested Keystone and that died long before it got out the door.

Re. "emergent" - I think another huge mistake they made was not nixing "coptering" immediately as soon as it showed up. People got addicted to the speed, which again nullified the maps, and meant they had to introduce the new movement system (the more advanced parkour system). In and of itself, the new parkour system was well-implemented, but the incredible speed you could cross maps with made the extant maps seem seem psychologically tiny. IOW by leaving coptering in for so long they allowed the playerbase to get used to the speed, and in that way DE created a rod for their own backs - because once the speed was in the game, you couldn't take it away.

I wasn't around for coptering, but the idea of moving around the maps at a slow pace sounds like a nightmare and I would have quit ages ago if I had to crawl each map given how much grinding there is in the game.

I actually came in just as coptering was, ahem, taking off, so I played the game "straight" for quite a while, in teams most of which also didn't know about coptering (which at first was something you had to discover on the forums, or from team members who knew about it).

It was fine, in fact it was - dare I say it - more immersive. The maps felt big and dangerous, and again (going back to the sense of community) there was more of a sense of camaraderie, and more of a sense of sticking together between vets and newbies. And even at that stage, you weren't exactly slow, and there was some parkour too, just more limited than the later version. IOW, the "balance" was just right.

As coptering started coming in, you started to get a phenomenon where some members of the team - the ones who knew coptering - would zip ahead and leave other team members who didn't know, or who were newbies, behind, baffled. So the sense of teamwork was lost to some degree. And then eventually everyone knew - and then they had to introduce the new parkour system to "make it official" (the speed).

But here's the thing: as everyone's speed increased, they had to bump up the mats reqs for gear (otherwise players would have been getting gear faster and - in terms of traditional dev theory at least - would get bored with the game more quickly). So then, whereas before you could get the mats you needed from x number of missions, now you had to do x+1 or x+2 missions in the same amount of time (because everyone could). Now in one sense of course that's a wash, because you were spending the same amount of time in the game and getting the same amount of gear for it; but in another sense it meant you were "wearing out" your feeling for the maps more quickly. Instead of one mission that felt serious and consequential, you were doing 2 or 3 maps in about the same time that felt more inconsequential because of the speed. Hence psychologically it started feeling even more "grindy."

So on the one hand, it was more "fun" because of the speed, but on the other hand, quite a bit was lost psychologically in terms of one's feeling for the mise-en-scène. On the sliding scale of "gamey game"-ness vs immersion, it slid too much over to gamey-game, and the feeling was less like "we iz a taem of future ninja superhero warriors" and more like "gotta get the things quick to get the thing."

Also, people stopped talking to each other as much in-mission. When things are a tad slower, there's scope for a bit of chit-chat as you go. But if everyone's concentrating on blitzing the mission to get the thing to get the thing, nobody can be arsed faffing around fumbling with chat. So it was more like the way MMOs went - people were more soloists who happened to be on the same map, instead of teams on a mission.

 

[gurugeorge]

Whoever figured out Zorencoptering made DE hundreds of millions of dollars, It helped set the game apart from everything else.

Them nerfing it would be like trying to patch out the rocket jump/strafe jumping in quake or skiing in Tribes.

I don't know how true that is. Warfame was already getting quite popular by the time coptering came in. I started playing it because of buzz on a forum somewhere.

But that's why I'm saying they should have nixed it immediately, I mean as soon as the devs heard about it.

But oh no, Steve waffled on about "emergent gameplay" and all that, and they let it linger for ages, and then they had to "make it official" with the new parkour system.

 

[Gerrard]

Whoever figured out Zorencoptering made DE hundreds of millions of dollars, It helped set the game apart from everything else.

Them nerfing it would be like trying to patch out the rocket jump/strafe jumping in quake or skiing in Tribes.

Except for the little fact that it ruined the game.
There's no point in investing time and resources developing content 99% of which is going to be skipped.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i want stamina back in.
people constantly quintuple somersaulting to move anywhere is retarded and makes some tiles pointless, like the corpus chasm or the grineer room with console and three floors. after all, even on foot no mob can keep up with the player, outpacing them a tenfold is ten times redundant. and that parkour void chamber would be easy again, i hate failing it because i always completely, totally, shamelessly avoid the last platform and jump straight at the end.

 

[gurugeorge]

These kinds of things remind me of "God mode" in games. Sure it's fun - for a while. But unless you're a very special person, it completely ruins a game pretty quickly.

I'm also reminded of a big problem with superhero MMOs, which is probably one of the the main reasons why there aren't more of them relative to fantasy MMOs - a disparity that might seem surprising given the popularity of the genre, which surely isn't that far behind fantasy. The problem is that if you have travel powers - as any superhero game must - you are capable of covering so much ground so quickly that it shrinks maps psychologically, so devs would have to make truly gigantic maps to compensate, which would double or triple their work. And who needs that noise? City of Heroes kind of managed it to some extent, but that was partly because missions were instanced, so they could claw back a lot of feeling of extra "space" that way.

I'll never forget a discussion on the Champions Online forums where some guy was moaning about how tiny the central big city map was. Someone else then demonstrated that it takes about the same amount of time to cross that map at a walking pace as it takes to cross one of the continents in WoW But it doesn't feel big - because of travel powers.

I think that's why most MMO developers have been wise to restrict players to shanks' pony for a while, and gate the equivalent of travel powers (like the gryphon rides in WoW) till the player has gotten a feel for the scale of the map by yomping around in the early levels.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

maps in dc whatsitsname online are pretty big.

 

[gurugeorge]

maps in dc whatsitsname online are pretty big.

DC Universe Online.

Yeah that was actually a pretty decent attempt at a multiplayer superhero game (though not a full-on MMO), and the way it integrated the established DC characters with the player as a grunt superhero wasn't bad. I gather the big problem with DCUO is that it was hacked to death and the devs didn't do anything about it, or didn't do enough about it in time, so interest fell off a cliff at some point. But the action combat was actually rather engaging, and had quite a bit of headroom for player skill.

Unlike Champions Online, where the attempt at action combat was lacklustre. CO had lots of merit in terms of story, and it had the usual Cryptic customization extravaganzapalooza, but it felt too much like a WoW clone.

It always baffled me how Cryptic had knocked it out of the park with City of Heroes as a social game, but completely cocked up Champions in that regard. It seemed like they were casting sheeps' eyes at WoW, and believed that having more of an open world feel like WoW would do the trick for them. But it didn't. Where CoH was the PUG MMO par excellence, precisely because of its heavy instancing and difficulty control (by the leader) - an incredibly social game with PUGs lasting for hours and hours, dropping and picking up members, leading to much friendship-building and sense of community - CO devolved in the sad, sad direction that most MMOs have gone, and Warframe too, where you're just a solo player who happens to be on maps with other people.

I think maybe also that action combat just doesn't mix very well with text chatting, which I believe is really essential to an MMO. The virtue of the standard MMO point-and-click combat that CoH had, is that it's not so frantic that you can't text chat pretty easily as you're fighting, which meant that people could have fun doing superhero quips and laughing at the antics of the mobs and that sort of thing.

I always felt that Warframe was quite superhero-ey in spirit, albeit far-future superheroes mixed with iron-man-suit ninja warriors with guns, etc. - that's kind of why I liked it so much.

 

[Lhynn]

Shamelessly plugging a discord for a private server of city of heroes, its a great community that any codexer will appreciate and as gurugeorge said, its an amazing game.

Luckmann can back me up here.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Nice to see them collaborating again. Even if both are now owned by Liandri unholy chink mega corporations.

What a world.

 

[gurugeorge]

Nice to see them collaborating again. Even if both are now owned by Liandri unholy chink mega corporations.

What a world.

Aren't they chicken overlords? Or am I thinking of some other Chinese mega-congolmerate?

 

[Gerrard]

They are both owned by Tencent now. Tencent bought the company that owned DE.

Those are just skins though, I thought they were going to actually pout the weapons in. The Drakgoon was already based on the flak cannon, though overall the Zarr is closer to it in functionality since it has 2 fire modes.