Some more things... (Destiny)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Friday, April 03, 2015, 22:02 (3328 days ago) @ Kahzgul
edited by Korny, Friday, April 03, 2015, 22:48

So a few weeks ago Korny posted about how Warframe is handling content and world persistence with aplomb that Bungie could learn a lot from. This piqued my interest in Warframe (a game I'd never previously heard of), and I've been playing for the last week. I'd say I'm sold on it, but the game is free, so I'm... freemium on it? Something.

Glad to hear you're enjoying it. The toughest part of getting into Warframe are the initial hours where so much info overwhelms you, and you're only given a crash-course as to what everything does/is. There are many super-in-depth tutorials through the in-game codex, but many people won't bother with them (which is a shame, because I went through them recently and learned a couple of things that even I hadn't known).

The similarities between the games is striking. Incredibly striking.

Let's look at how the games start:

You are awakened by an AI as enemies close in on your position. You don't know who you are or what's happening, but it turns out that you are a warrior from an older era, where a Golden Age was brought down by a massive-yet-vague conflict. The AI that helps you is a product of this era. You have to fight through enemies, collecting weapons before you find an old ship that you have to steal to fly out. Once free, you learn that you are not alone. There are many other re-awoken warriors like you, and you must take the fight to the forces that have taken over the Solar System so that you might reclaim the glory of what was before...

Warframe.

The difference is that the story extends beyond that premise both towards the past and from when you wake up onwards. The lore is actually pretty deep, and there are hints (like in Destiny) that your people weren't the good guys during the Collapse. There's also a ton of similarities to Halo (Orokin created the Infested (Flood) as a weapon against the Sentients (Forerunner)... Or it could be the other way around).

It's like, a year before Destiny came out, someone played Warframe on PC, decided Destiny should be as close to that as possible, and then turned the whole game inside out and upside down to mimic Warframe in every way that they could, resulting in - and seriously I apologize because this will be hard to swallow - a crappier version of Warframe that has better play control.

If Destiny offered even half of the things that Warframe does, I don't think anyone would want to play anything else. In fact, there was yet another thing recently that I wish we could see in Destiny: Tactical Alerts.

There was (still going?) a Three-day-long Tactical Alert up this week, and the reward for success is a new, rare Stance mod for Throwing Weapons. To get the mod, you just had to complete an Escort mission. Simple enough, right?

Not so much. You were limited to bringing Throwing Weapons (of which there are four). You also had to do the mission on an Ice surface planet, which cuts your shields down to a third, I think. Also because of the planet being Iced over, the Vehicle that you are escorting takes continuous damage, and only moves if you have people near it. But the vehicle itself is also constantly draining your shields for power.

And to top it all off? Enemy Nullifiers and Frost Eximus are EVERYWHERE (Nullifiers cast large bubbles that make them immune to ranged attacks, but being touched by those bubbles disable any powers that your Warframe has cast, while Ice Eximus cast a similar shield that slows you down when you're within a certain range of it).

I captured my first attempt with some clanmates, and a successful run. As you can see from the video, we got steamrolled the first time, but quickly developed a strategy to succeed.

Oh yeah, we have bunny ears... because Easter...

I think I've said before that I'd love to see something like this in Destiny. Say, you were required to use Void Fusion Rifles (an Eris bounty requires Solar FRs, so they CAN track it accurately) exclusively during an arc burn strike, with the reward being a guaranteed Gjallarhorn?

- The social hub (the Tower, effectively) holds upwards of 30 players at a time. I think you only go there for a rare trader (like Xur?) and faction rewards. But there are several social hubs. Also, I never need to go there. People do, I guess, but I haven't gotten to the point where it's more than sightseeing.

It's pretty basic right now, but with Update 16, it's been expanded pretty exponentially. They added a Community Grimoire of sorts, which tasks players with scanning specific enemies for community rewards and such. They are also expanding the interactivity, such as being able to run Mastery Tests and such at the Hubs.

- Speaking of factions, factions are a real thing that do real things in the game if you make friends with or piss off the faction leaders. Angry factions will send assassins after you during your other normal missions. Friendly factions give unique rewards to you.

Not only that, but you can run missions for different Factions if your friends are aligned with them, and pick up specific resources that can help you improve your standing with factions that you're not a part of, without hurting your own faction standing.

- Unlike the Grimoire, that requires you to find hidden ghosts to unlock unrelated cards that you can only read about online, Warframe has the Codex, which requires you to scan enemies and objects, and that, in turn, unlocks their codex card in the in-game codex, which is a thing in the game. Did I mention it's in the game? It's in the game.

It's in the game! Also, the Scanning process adds some depth to the game, since it can be tricky with quick enemies, requiring you to be creative (I recommend a Nova's Molecular Prime, which can slow enemies down enough for a scan, at the risk of them getting blown up before your scan is complete.
You can also scan the Assassins that come for you, which can be a crazy proposition (good luck scanning the Grustrag Three when they come for you).

- There are many different mission objectives. Sometimes, like Destiny, the objectives are simply to kill the boss of the level, but they are also sometimes (very unlike Destiny): Kill EVERYTHING in a level OR find X number of hidden loot caches OR protect a bomb from waves of enemies OR capture and defend 4 control zones OR hunt down, subdue, and capture X number of high value targets OR hack the computer to steal data OR rescue a guy and escort him to your extraction point. Some of the defend missions let you vote every 5 waves to complete the mission or keep going to try for a better reward.

On top of that, there are Nightmare versions of all of those missions that can come up, which add two modifiers to the mission that increase difficulty in different ways, but have Exclusive dual-stat mods as a guaranteed reward for completion.

Some of my favorite (and tense) moments in the game come from Nightmare missions that we survived by the skin of our teeth.

Here's a clip where Sammy had to do a Rescue, but the Modifiers were Zero Shields and High-Level Enemies. In some rescue missions, there are Wardens that you have to watch out for. If they see your team, they will initiate an execution sequence that gives you a time limit to find and break out a prisoner from their cell. Sammy's team was spotted, so they had to blindly rush into a room full of enemies that could down them very quickly. Not only that, but it ultimately fell on Sammy to pick one of the cell doors and hack it as the clock counted down, hoping that the prisoner was inside. Completely exposed and playing a minigame that she was not too fond of... No pressure.

- 3rd person view makes melee more reasonable. You can run on walls, slide, jump, and climb your way up to enemies, and then chop them in half with your goddamn sword. I'm still not saying 3rd person is better because I like FPS games, but for varied melee combat, 3rd person is a huge help.

Not only that, but you can change the way the game works through settings. Don't want the camera to track your melee targets? Turn it off. Don't like the motion blur? Turn it off. DoF? Turn it off.
Wish the jump and slide were toggles? Yup.
Don't like how the controls are mapped? Remap the control scheme completely, button (or touchpad gesture) by button. You can even set Hotkeys.
No arbitrary settings. You can change nearly everything.

- Voice acting. It's a thing that exists in Warframe and it's a million times better than Destiny.

I love that the characters are voiced by DE employees, too. Lotus is voiced by [DE]Rebecca, who is one of DE's Community Managers that co-hosts their weekly Hour-long Livestreams, and Valkyr's screams are voiced by [DE]Megan, who is the other host. Lots of jokes come from this, and Rebecca has been known to contribute to fan machinimas as Lotus.
Speaking of weekly Livestreams, they're a thing. Every week, they play on a different platform with members of the community, doing random little challenges and giveaways (They give away anywhere from 3000-5000 Platinum per episode). They also highlight the best fan art and fan concepts of the week, and often have major community contests (such as a bake-off). And they're pretty easy on the eyes as well, if you're into those incentives. ;)

- Plot. OMG the plot. It's real! You feel like you're being thrust into the middle of an epic galactic conflict, because you are!
- World events that have an impact on the actual world. Every couple of months things will happen that allow the players a chance to change the game world permanently depending on whether they (as a group) succeed or not, See Korny's previous post for details. I don't know how to link to posts.

This one?. I like that you could be talking to someone about something that happened in the lore, and they could be like "Oh yeah, I was there! That was a tough battle!", truly a living universe.

- Huge maps with secret passages, security cameras, traps, moving platforms, and enemies and loot appearing in different places each time you run the maps. Like, each map is Vault of Glass big. I'm going to guess that it would take me 10 minutes to just run from one end of a map to another, assuming I knew how to get there.

The tilesets are often revised, added to, and even overhauled (up until the Cryotic Fronts update, we didn't have Ice Worlds, which host exclusive Gametypes and events themselves). With the coming Sentient story arc, I imagine we'll have whole new tilesets added as well.

- There's a minimap. It exists and is helpful. You can get mods to put enemies on there with radar, or loot caches. Your nav points show up on it.

You can even move it to the center of the screen with the click of a button (if you have it mapped), which makes it easier to concentrate on the action.

- Space future grenades in warframe are better than modern grenades. This is a stark contrast to Destiny. Though in Destiny the players have grenades, and in warframe as far as I can tell only enemies have them.

Players did have them at one point early on, but they were removed because they were'nt meshing well with the overall pace and gameplay (among other reasons, I'm sure). Vauban is the only player-character that still uses them, and is invaluable during defense missions as a result. Incidentally, he is also one of the most difficult characters to craft, as his components can only be obtained through timed alerts).

- Where Destiny has shaders, which are fixed 2 or 3 color "sets" you can wear, and which take up inventory space, Warframe simply gives you access to color palettes to customize your character's look to your liking. You can get more color palettes during holiday events or you can buy them for real money.

Right now, they have free (well, 1 credit) Easter Shader set, as well as bunny ears for your Frames.

- Warframe has space combat where you fly through space and shoot things. Destiny does not.

It's also in its infancy. One of the Devstreams revealed that they're pretty unhappy with how limited it is, and are going to expand it greatly in the future, including trying to fit it in with infantry gameplay.

- When comparing weapons in Warframe, it shows you actual numbers. Destiny does not.
- The mods in your warframe weapons can be removed and put into other weapons if you like. In Destiny, you only get the mods that come with your weapon, and you can't change them (except for iron banner weapons, which change randomly) or save them to use elsewhere.

A single mod can also be distributed to all of your weapons, provided that they don't clash (if your equipped sentinel uses a weapon mod, and you have a gun that also uses that mod, you have to unequip it from one of the two while you use both), so no frustration about what weapon gets what.

- All new content is free in Warframe. All free, all the time. I think I mentioned that?

I have never had anything in the game that I started working for that I didn't have in less than a few days, unlike the strictly-RNG Destiny. I've actually spent hours and hours in the game doing nothing but trading, and making a profit in the market through careful purchases (I bought a very rare part for 20p (normally sells for 35p), then found somebody willing to trade a part that sold for 50p because he was desperate for my part. I then turned around and sold his part for 45p. A 25p profit in about an hour, between many other trades and deals.

Heck, I bought a part for 30p, held onto it for a few months, and sold it for 180p when it was rarer.

I have only played Warframe for a week, and these are the similarities I noticed. It is weird that the game is so much more in depth than Destiny while being so similar in so many ways. It really, eerily feels like Destiny is a Warframe rip-off in a lot of ways. I seriously don't think that's the case, but if Bungie wasn't Bungie with its reputation for being so creative and independent, I'd probably think it WAS the case.

I wish they'd rip it off much more...

TL;DR (and who can blame you): Destiny feels like it ripped off Warframe pretty badly, but it could benefit greatly from ripping it off even more. Warframe handles almost all of my complaints about Destiny really, really well.

I'm pretty burnt out on Destiny as it is (having 99.99% of everything that the game has to offer), but despite playing Warframe for much longer, it still feels fresh and fun, and everything surrounding it, from Community (fan creations are highlighted every week during their Livestream), to Developer communication (they are never vague about what they want to do, or what their plans are. Sometimes things don't work out, but fans never crucify them for it), to the simple ways fans are even acknowledged as a strong influence on the game itself (The Warframe Zephyr, tons of weapons, and even some enemies are direct results of fan-submitted content).

If Bungie did any of these things, I'd love them to no end.