Introduction to Warframe (Gaming)

by MacAddictXIV , Seattle WA, Tuesday, July 09, 2019, 07:19 (1747 days ago) @ Korny

A decent mission structure would help that game a lot, when it comes to story. There’s like six mission types (kill everyone, steal data, capture someone, free someone, mine something, survive, etc). They are fun. But then the story missions (from what I’ve seen) are just those missions again with some dialogue, and what you’re actually doing doesn’t seem connected to the story you’re supposed to be getting.

Playing actual bespoke missions for the story and not just redoing the same nodes you’ve already done with some extra dialogue would go a long way.

I like Warframe. I started playing again yesterday. It’s fun. But it basically feels like all I’m doing right now is “unlock every node on this massive map by doing these six mission types over and over again, then maybe we’ll show you some cool shit.”

I agree. That's how I felt. For 30 hours. I think you are right that it needs to start with some very story driven missions before it opens up to those types.

If you don't know the exact path to unlocking the story missions, it takes, on average, 40 hours to get to the structured story missions.
That is a problem for people who want to play for the story, and one that came about as a result of those story missions being added two years after the game came out. If you DO know the exact sequence of events that you have to do to get to those story missions, it takes about seven or eight hours to get into the meat of the game. I've seen MR5s that have completed all of the current story quests, but they followed a guide, and were carried through by a Clanmate.

It wasn't so much that I was playing for the story, it was that I heard that Warframe had a good story but that I just never really got to a "story line." Yes, there were bits and pieces here and there, but nothing that I would call even a background of your character.

The issue with that is that the long investment was pretty deliberate on DE's end, and rushing through kills a lot of the attachment that you are supposed to have to the characters/world if you play the game normally and do the side quests as they become available. A huge part of this is that the lore isn't just tucked into flavor text and the Codex (though there is plenty there), but it's a part of the quests themselves, and it fleshes the world out slowly. The attachment and time is what earns the story twists the big oomph. But simply knowing that there really are deeper story missions makes a lot of players impatient about what they're doing, and being dumped into the world without adequate direction is a huge turnoff for those who play, often even 30 hours into the game. You're expected to take pictures of hidden objects, play specific nodes for a specific number of waves, and one of the big triggers for the major story quests is finding a specific enemy that spawns on specific nodes on a certain planet, AFTER you do a seemingly unrelated sidequest (The New Strange), which itself requires you to do specific actions to unlock certain Rail nodes. Again, you can totally miss out on any one of these things and stay locked out of the main story missions.

Having played Destiny, I get the specific things to do specific things that is kinda figured out by the community, but at least I was trained on how to do those things and had already been to the locations. I had google how to take a picture of hidden objects because I couldn't find it anywhere in the controls or help files. Again, I don't mean to rail on Warframe, but this is just expressing what frustrated me about the game and what really held me back from wanting to like it.

I think that's a big reason why they push players to get into the Cetus and Fortuna storylines very early into the game, because they are very focused story missions set in the open worlds, which helps give players what Steve has referred to as an "island" to play with. It helps you learn more about the universe, helps level up things like your Archwing, lets you craft weapons and tools early into the game with some solid mods that you'll use for a long time, and showcases the guaranteed reward pools pretty well before you hop off the island to explore the rest of the game.

I believe I got to this "island" at around 40 hours of play. And to me, I felt like I had done the meat of the game at least 10 times over. It was getting very grindy at this point but at the same time I had managed to get a side quest or something, I honestly don't know all I know was that it was different. But even that quest required that I access planets that required more grind to unlock. I slowly stopped playing at that point.

DE has made great strides in this regard, but the difference in playing alone, and finding someone that can help you is night and day as far as your engagement goes. That's why the community is famous for how helpful it is, because they kind of have to be for the game to draw players in. Open up the chat, and ask for help in doing X, and you're almost guaranteed to get one or two people who will drop what they're doing to help. It's one of the things I enjoy doing in the game, and have specific "non-Nuke" loadouts just for playing with low MRs.

I can get this, but why oh why would you keep playing from accessing a public area until you are like 20 hours into the game? And why would you make a chat window (obviously made for PC players) the only form of communication? There was no way in hell I was going to post into a live chat via a controller. I should have played this with DBOers.

I also want to add that I know this is a free game but I think the icing on the cake for me was feeling like I was grinding for components of this cool gear and finally getting what was required after 10 hours of searching and unlocking stuff only to put it in my machine to assemble it and have it take more than 2 days to "build" or I can pay to do it instantly. I basically lost my shit at that point.

Anyway, the game play was fun, the shooting was pretty good as was the abilities. I just felt an instant 200+ hours of investment level within 10 hours of playing the game. That never feels good.