More things Destiny should learn from Warframe (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Friday, May 01, 2015, 23:18 (3282 days ago)

This is from the twitter account of a Warframe developer. He's specifically talking about the map / level select screen.

https://twitter.com/sj_sinclair/status/593889843094155265

Here's the text with my Destiny-relevant analysis:

- Every UI element I see is relevant to me, I don't see a mess of choices and noise. Destiny actually handles this quite well. It's very slick. Warframe, on the other hand, can get overwhelming, what with the 19 planets (or moons) and 12-16 zones/missions per planet.
- The game is presenting a clear goal for me everyday Does the daily story mission count in Destiny? Not to me, as I stopped doing those eons ago. Yeah Destiny, you could really give us more clear goals. Why are we doing... anything? Speaking of:
- I see a call to action, something that tells me why I am fighting. There is literally zero reason given in Destiny for why we're fighting. It's wholly unclear why we're killing everything that moves, if they are the real enemy or not, and why we have no meaningful interactions with anyone else. In Warframe, you get a message such as "A plague infestation is breaking out on Phobos. Please help us exterminate the infested and we'll pay you in credits!"
- I can continue to work toward something I want. I guess by earning vanguard or crucible marks? You sure as hell can't "work towards" a Gjallerhorn, and there's no progress bar for getting a Vex Mythoclast. In Warframe, you need materials, you know what materials drop on which worlds before you go there, and you almost always get a handful of the ones you need every time you complete a mission.
I can see possible rewards and challenges before I commit to a battle, so I can prepare. Sort of. Destiny tells you what skulls are active, but the rewards are intentionally made to be RNG-based gambling addict rolls. LAME. In Warframe, you are told in the game what specific rewards will drop during a mission. You may get even more stuff at random (well, from each enemy's loot table, which you can find out by scanning them) during the mission, but you always get the mission reward at the end.
Even when I'm seeking a single reward, I still face a variety of locations and enemies. Not in Destiny. It's grind the raid over and over and over or run the same Nightfall 3 times a week, and then run the Weekly Heroic mission 3 more times, which happens to be the same goddamn level as the Nightfall. And since loot drops are basically random, there's no sense of progress, either. Contrastingly, Warframe has drops by world, and running any of the 12-16 missions in that world will drop the materials from that world. Certain missions give specific drops at the end (such as boss kills), but at least 1 drop is guaranteed every time you run those missions.
It feels like the world is alive, that a story is happening from an ecosystem. Oh Destiny, where the reward for completing the story is a single mote of light and nothing ever changes in the actual gameplay over time. I guess blades of crota showed up, but that's it. And now we've killed Crota thousands of times... why haven't these blades figured out their boss is dead? In Warframe, every update shifts the game world. The most recent one added special rare enemies all over the place and an AI construct who wants to scan them all into his genetic database. It also added some new guns and a new suit of armor (which is basically a new class). And the infested outbreaks seem to be getting worse.
Finding people to play with is as easy as joining a mission, there are no ghost towns. HAHAHAHAHA. Destiny LFG? HAHAHAHAHA. Seriously in Warframe you just pick a mission (any mission) and it starts matching you. That includes raids.
I make choices and they matter to me, and cast a vote into the world's ecosystem. Nothing you do in Destiny will change the game world ever. Sorry. In Warframe, there are combat missions where two factions that are opposed will have competing options in a single zone. You choose which faction to fight for when you choose that mission. Whichever faction gets its mission completed, say 10,000 times first, has a lasting a permanent effect on the game. That choice mission goes away and is replaced by something appropriate, and the people who supported the winning faction are rewarded. In the past, the players have opted for the greedier option and ended up making missions much harder for themselves by letting one faction gain dominance in an area.

So yeah, Bungie, please get some mission statements along the same lines as the Warframe folks. They've got it nailed now when it comes to a living, persistent game world.