Warframe

Warframe

I liked Warframe, I think it is a great game, a great game that I will probably never play. Also a small hint, whenever I saw now, it is meant to the version of the game before Eidolon release.

First contact

I first heared of Warframe when it was first revealed with a small trailer/teaser. It looked interesting, because it was a Sci-Fi game. You rarely saw that back in the day.
Digital Extremes announced also a closed alpha, but you could easily get into, if you would recommend it to (if I remember correctly) 4 friends who also would register for the alpha.

Some time passed by, and I did get an invite was it was intended. My first impression was a bit mixed. You had the weird UI, which was a little bit unintuitive. You had those cards to activate different missions, and you could mix them to get into different other missions. It was only the beginning and a lot of stuff was literally just almost placeholders. But then, when you actually played the game, you had a totally different experiance. You just jumped into the mission, you had a typical objection, like kill enemies or delived some intel, or steal intel, etc…

That gameplay was actually fun, but in my definition of fun. There were barely any weapons, or upgrades, and a lot of skills were… different. But you had still a lot of fun. The gameplay in a lot of missions was designed as a bit of a stealth mission. At least that’s the imperssion I got, when I started every mission. Enemies were never aware of your presence, even for the infested enemies. Now that was a pretty cool thing. Some time ago, when the No-Clip Documentary was released, it also confirmed a bit, that that was the idea, Metal Gear in Space.

Of course it had a lot of bugs, or to say it better, unrefined, uncompleted features. Once you were spotted by an enemy, even by an impossible angle, raised instanly alarm. Enemy movement pattern were way too random. Impossible to predict or adjust too, and even once spotted, thing as before, instant alarm everywhere. But that was kind of understandable, due to the procedural nature of the every development of the game. So overall you could say that stealth was bugged and could not be used.

Modifications

In Warframe you could modify your character. You had some kind of net, or something like that, where you could those mods you would find during missions, as random drops from enemies. They developers however introduced a weird design decision. They made it possible to buy an item with $ to unlock more slots for your character modification screen. Since we all know what p2w means, it was a total no-go.

Although the game showed some potential and promise, it still did lack on content for me, and since a lot of people I know couldn’t play it, it got boring. So I stopped playing for some time.

Return

Some months (maybe 3-4, definitely before the patch 6 but after the event with the braton vandal) later I did hear about more updates for Warframe and wanted to check those out. Came back and saw that the developers did input a lot of new content. They continued adding more and more stuff into the game with an incredible speed, maybe even a little bit too fast. There was always something to do. It even tried to do small improvements for stealth, really minor, like the level design, where you have some possibilities to enter specific places from different secret directions.

The game was progressing, stuff was being added, but the with more patches the game became less of a game, but more of an excel spreasheet, work. People would call it, grind. It was more about, getting to level up your gear, your character, and continue on doing it over and over. You stopped playing, all you were doing is playing the best optimized mission to get most experience. You were using not the fun characters, or fun weapons, but just the stuff which made the best combination for getting more experiance.

The game shifted it’s focus from challenging the player pressing buttons into challenging the player to write formulas for farming.

You could argue that any MMO is like that, and I would probably agree. The main difference was/is the developers. You saw their attitude towards the game, the community and themselves. The same was also later confirmed by themselves (through No-Clip). I did spend money on warframe and also other free-to-play games and for the most I do regret doing so, but I don’t regret doing it in warframe.