In the future a war rages on and the only ones who can stop a rampaging armada are ancient soldiers who have sat in quiet solitary stasis for generations; the Tenno, accompanied by their powerful exosuits these warriors will bring an end to their enemies and restore peace to the Galaxy. Yes, for our next article we want to know “Things You Would Change About…. Warframe” the fast paced space ninja shooter from Digital Extreme that teams players up in groups of 4 to take on some challenging PVE content, dabble in some PVP and craft and upgrade their own powerful Warframe battlesuits. Whilst we’ll fully admit that there is something about the game that we love and it generally receives a pretty positive first impression, under that initial glowing report there’s quite a few key issues that stops this game from being truly great.. so what are they?

• Shallow Combat Strategy - Combat is fun, it just isn’t particularly tactical. Whilst a good group can make or break any team you only really need an average level of competency to be able to steam roll your way through the games PVE content, though it does get admittedly more difficult as you increase in level, the issue is just HOW the game is made more difficult. Unfortunately your enemies don’t get smarter, they don’t start employing who new tactics, they don’t start to use the environment with skill; they typically just get more HP, more damage output and spawn in much larger waves. If you look at most MMORPGs raid content you can see the unique mechanics that later mobs and bosses get, that really requires players to think how they’re going to defeat their opponent whilst actually being in the process of trying to stay alive and even for veterans a miss-step can result in a team wipe. Warframe doesn’t really have that, the enemies hug cover occasionally but never really utilize it to outsmart the players, there’s no covering fire, no flanking and ambushing, it’s all about numbers and so the only tactic players ever really need is “shoot everything that moves”. So much so that players don’t really need to even communicate with each other, everyone acts like a one man army and just runs around killing whatever they like and in whichever order suits them. If the AI was improved, if teamwork was required, if the possibility of failure was higher then we’d say that in the long run the game would have much more to offer veteran players.


• Repetitive Maps - Maps become all too familiar all too quickly. Although the map generation is random it doesn’t take very long until you’re seeing the same areas over and over and they all merge into one generic map that gets quite boring to play one. While we do love the dynamic and random map build the game suffers from a lack of new themes and tiles, particularly when the look of the game (which we do love) has the same washed out grimdark look about it. When paired up with facing the same types of enemies and shallow combat strategy then the more you play the more of a grind it can feel like. We need more environments and atmospheres to take advantage of and break the tedium of seeing the same locations over and over.


• A Lack of Team Play - Players just don’t need to work together. As mentioned in the lack of depth to combat this results in players barely needing to show any team work other than contributing to the overall available firepower; for a team based co-op this isn’t exactly what you want as the “co-op” element is definitely lacking. There’s other reasons that can factor into this, the lack of regional servers for one means that players on EU often don’t even speak the same language (though there are elements of regional matching for groups), which is apparent due to the lack of communication that usually happens in chat or over in game voice comms. The truth is that players just don’t NEED to strategize with each other. If we’re changing the depth of combat to make it more strategic and difficult then we’d like to see a “Ping” system that you can see in many MOBA games to be able to flag areas with different commands, such as staying here, holding a position, attacking a particular enemy, etc. so that players can give instant commands to each other.


• Diminishing Interest - The game can get quite dull quite quickly. Once you understand the ins and outs of a few of your Warframes, mastered the controls and can pull off some acrobatics with ease, played maps long enough to start to notice the similarities between them and are already learning the AI’s “tactics” and behaviour then the game starts to really plateau. You reach a point where it feels like you’re just doing the same thing over and over, which is only further exasperated when you start collecting resources for crafting and modding (which is a system we like, but requires a lot of time being put into it) and the game can start to feel.. well… like a grind. As you realize you’re only getting low level resources at this stage then you have an epiphany that actually this grind is forever and it’s at that point that our interest suddenly started to fade. The biggest problem is that most of this comes after a few hours of gameplay, not after months. A few levels under your belt and you start to realise that what you thought the game was building up to just isn’t going to deliver, you’ve reached the “end game” as it were, which is the danger of a shooter that feels like it’s a story driven RPG/MMORPG and not just your typical MMOFPS/TPS; it feels like it should be going somewhere… and it doesn’t. The developers need to remove that tedium, there needs to be more maps, less grind, more types and difficulties of enemy, puzzles in battles and mechanics that require some thought, we need to see new content at regular intervals and even greater challenges, then we’ll have a truly amazing game.

So that’s what we’d change with Warframe, but more importantly what do you believe should be changed? What do you think could/should be added to improve the game? What would you add to your own personal wish list? Let us know what you think in the comments below!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2015 at 11:32 am and is filed under Articles, MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.