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Good games use difficulty to force mastery of systems/mechanics. DE hasn't come close to grasping this concept and instead disables entire systems/mechanics that may have taken players hundreds of hours to master. Fundamentally, there's no difference between someone doing an EDA/Icebind run and a player who chooses to nerf themselves to low health, no shield, no pet, no energy, etc in a non-Steel Path starchart mission.
Your average player who rolls with a group has at most 3 other people. Where are you supposed to get 2 more? These cannot just be randoms, but players who know what to do/mesh with your team. Maybe you're lucky to have an active clan or you frequently play with different groups, but that has to be like 1% of the playerbase doing that. Maybe I'm way off on that but looking at the reward pool and the hassle of the fucking modifiers I don't see many people wanting to fuss with setting aside time to get randoms from recruit chat and hoping they actually know what to do for rewards you can probably just get from doing other shit.
I'm also over the whole "well at least they're trying something new" argument. They aren't. 90% of the difficult content they make is just a glaring admittance that they designed themselves into a corner and have no idea how to get out of it. If they can't make proper endgame content then they should stop trying becuase it makes them look inept. The vast majority of the playerbase would benefit more from coding/design efforts being spent on reworks and new frames instead.
Good games use difficulty to force mastery of systems/mechanics. DE hasn't come close to grasping this concept and instead disables entire systems/mechanics that may have taken players hundreds of hours to master. Fundamentally, there's no difference between someone doing an EDA/Icebind run and a player who chooses to nerf themselves to low health, no shield, no pet, no energy, etc in a non-Steel Path starchart mission.
That's because warframe players cry and screech and piss and shit themselves while wailing nonstop the instant anything that requires a modicum of brainpower to counter is introduced or the instant a "oneshot everything and be immortal and never die with infinite health and energy at 1 keystroke" warframe is slightly nerfed. Half the warframes in the game are LITERALLY fucking immortal.
Warframe is the equivallent of a 10 hour risk of rain run where you have 20 copies of every item while complaining the game isn't hard enough at that stage.
DE has basically cultivated a fanbase that doesn't want to be challenged and is now facing the challenge of making challenging content for them.
Fixing warframe at this point would require a radical ground up rework of every single warframe, mod and enemy in the game. Its not impossible, but DE has nothing to gain from it and everything to lose because again, their fanbase does not like being challenged.
Genuinely baffled that this was delayed as well as DE thinking Zaw Rivens were ever an okay reward for fighting "lvl 999" enemies (with level 6000 EHP).
Even finding three other people to crack relics for the latest Prime release can be a total pain in the ass. Also, even if I have five people I am able to play with on the regular, what if 2-3 of those people have 5 people that they want to play with?
That's because warframe players cry and screech and piss and shit themselves while wailing nonstop the instant anything that requires a modicum of brainpower to counter is introduced
Saying this in the face of the latest Eximus launching with their DR double stacking is a choice, for sure. Even with that fixed, they still massively fuck over multiple frames that have to stop doing the thing they want to do to kill a single enemy. This isn't challenge, it's tedium.
Warframe is the equivallent of a 10 hour risk of rain run where you have 20 copies of every item while complaining the game isn't hard enough at that stage.
Apples to oranges. Warframe is a game where you're expected to built your power and the reward is being able to take on tougher challenges. Being told that all the time, effort, and resources I've put into my account are basically meaningless isn't a very funny joke.
The player base is already challenged. Even after all the changes to Netracells, I still play them solo because there's always one stupid fucking prick running off to grab syndicate medallions or killing enemies outside of the circle.
Fixing warframe at this point would require a radical ground up rework of every single warframe, mod and enemy in the game. Its not impossible, but DE has nothing to gain from it and everything to lose because again, their fanbase does not like being challenged.
DE is already making Soulframe. Even ignoring that, all this is doing is making Warframe into PvE Overwatch.
That said, the issue is not challenge because DE's idea of "challenge" is making you play the same fucking missions while facing the equivalent of lvl 6000 with heavily crippled loadouts. I mean, the fact that Reb's gameplay showcase of Icebind has her using infinite energy devcheats with the Constricted modifier should tell you everything you need to know. If they can't even play the fucking gamemode without using hacks, why the fuck should I care?
A max level player in warframe can literally deal 100% max health true damage mapwide every second and be theoretically, practically and functionally indestructible vs enemies that do 100% max health true damage every second on hitscan
By requiring the player to do something other than commit casual genocide. We have the parkour system. We have operators. We have Railjack, We had Necramechs until DE shelved them. We have Archwings. We have all these systems and DE doesn't fucking use them. That said, one of the most popular activities for Warframe players is Void Fissure Cascade where KPM... doesn't really matter. No, those balls of light you see flying into the Exolizers doesn't speed them up; it only reduces the threat meter you see on the left of your screen.
Honestly, the whole "we kill enemies so fast and so easy that it's hard to design challenging content without nerfing the player" is the massive cope. They had no problem designing mechanics for Trials (which I did and have the Honeria to prove it) that didn't require killing everything on screen to progress through them. Of course, all this belies the fact that DE have nerfed CC into the fucking ground year-over-year which is the entire reason we're in the current DPS meta that we're in.
For fuck sakes, we literally have the Razorback active again. You know what doesn't require killing everything on screen? Razorback. You know what requires an actual mechanic between Thanos snapping entire cities worth of enemies? Razorback. Hell, we got done with Forma Plague Star where not being mindful of your damage can cause the mission to take longer if you kill enemies when the meter is paused. There's plenty of examples in the fucking game itself where you can make content that doesn't revolve around doing "100% max health true damage".
TL;DR - Don't piss on my head and tell me it's rain.
I'm happy you brought this up because its a personal sore spot of mine. I played railjack on release. The original pre patch railjack, the one where 9 times out of 10 the mission resulted in a loss. The railjack where you needed a dedicated pilot, engineer, gunner and dogfighter that knew and focused on their roles. The one that required actual coordination and cooperation and was actually challenging and actually difficult and actually forced you to engage, make decisions, conserve resources and face attrition. The one that was legitimately on the same level as guns of icarus and with a little polish could be a full blown rival to it.
The same one one that warframe players whined and cried and screached and pissed and shat themselves wailing nonstop until DE butchered it so much that current railjack missions can literally be fully automated with a single AI pilot.
Operators, railjack, necramechs and archwings literally only make sense in this context specifically BECAUSE they force you to use something other than the weapon and frames that can do and resist 100% max hp true damage. If you're going to cite them you are basically admiting that the only way to make engaging content is to stop players from using the thanos snap.
As for trials (which I also did and also have the honoria for btw) the issue is that simon says is not inherently engaging. The fun in destiny raids is that you are playing simon says WHILE under attack from every single direction and there is a threat of dying, running out of ammo and being overcome, making those mechanics intresting. Destiny raids and dungeons which are widely considered the pinnacle of encounter design across all of gaming would be boring as shit if there were 0 enemies to try and stop you while you were doing them.
And guess what, at any point in any encounter a warframe player can thanos snap the entire map out of existence on demand with no cooldown. Literally if you copy paste all destiny raids and dungeons in warframe they just become a shit version of simon says.
Plaguestar and Razorback are also not engaging or intresting encounter design. Hack a terminal and a bursa, wow! Dude fuck last wish, just give me more bursas to hack.
At any given moment DE has to account for players having access to noclip, godmode and killall. The only way to make a game engaging at that point is to make you play a different game that isn't warframe.
So to make a challenging encounter without relying on "cheap tricks" DE has to design around the idea that:
* No enemies are allowed to exist at any given moment.
* The player is not allowed to be harmed in any way whatsoever.
* Distances do not exist and neither does platforming. Unless there's a visible or invisible wall, the player can move/fly/straight up teleport so fast that all objectives may as well exist near one another.
What are you even left with at this point? Forcing player to use operators/railjack/necramechs/archwings? Ok, then you're admiting that warframes themselves are inherently unbalancable.
I was aware, but I do think there are plenty of ways to add challenge without needing to break to break my knees before telling me to travel 100 miles. Did I say Razorback was engaging or interesting? No. I said it was a mechanic that didn't rely on maximising KPM.
I'm not saying that DE going "You have no energy lolololol" is a good/challenging modifier, I am saying that the current foundation warframe is trying to build its content on is completely broken and needs a ground up rework.
As long as you have infinite free access to the infinity glove you cannot make challenging content in a shooter because warframes triviliaze all the mechanics that make a shooter a shooter to begin with.
I'm not saying that DE going "You have no energy lolololol" is a good/challenging modifier, I am saying that the current foundation warframe is trying to build its content on is completely broken and needs a ground up rework.
As long as you have infinite free access to the infinity glove you cannot make challenging content in a shooter because warframes triviliaze all the mechanics that make a shooter a shooter to begin with.
I thought he meant that taking your stuff away results in shit gameplay because the part he quoted was "not allowed to use mods results in shit gameplay".
I thought release EDA was ideal difficulty-wise, it wasn't that hard, but it was fun and made me stop and think about how to approach it to solve it week to week (although after 2 months I just devolved into abusing Dante or Arquebex every time)
Realistically though, I don't think Warframe can be an actually challenging game because of a few game design issues:
Enemy damage scaling is too harsh, and generalized healing (ie. health orbs) doesn't scale at all
Strong defensive abilities are way too strong as a result (ex. mesmer skin, overguard, invisibility, shieldgating), trivializing enemy difficulty
Lack of level/difficulty deltas for enemy health, leading to builds degenerating into 1shot AoE spam
Generally unequal weapon balance, leading to certain options (ie. incarnons) sticking out far too strongly
It basically functions closer to a third-person modern ARPG than anything else, devolving in the same way that D3/4 and PoE1/2 do where the endgame is AoE-spam "blasting" and the game relies on annoying 1shots and hard-disables to impose challenge, which just feels bad and unpredictable rather than necessitating any real decision making; though unlike those games, Warframe doesn't reset your progress with a ladder/season every 3 months to make it a repeatable journey to end up there, resulting in endgame players running out of ways to meaningfully progress
I think some of the above game design issues could be "fixed" (mostly by nerfing enemy damage, player defenses, and player AoE damage) to have the game impose challenge more similarly to a slower paced game like Diablo 2 or Destiny 2, but I don't think that's what Warframe is or what the Warframe community would want; the game is an AoE spam game like Diablo 3 and making it not that would alienate the playerbase the same as something like RuneScape's Evolution of Combat did
tl;dr: You would have to slow down the game and nerf both players and enemies to make it challenging, and then it wouldn't be Warframe anymore, and Pablo's pursuit of making the game challenging is both pointless and impossible
It's also just incongruent with Warframe's systems. A good example are superbosses where killing them solo rewards you with a Glyph with certain frames. In each respective superboss, the best method to get the Glyphs is to completely disregard your Warframe's abilities, use some kind of lazy shieldgate build, slap on rolling guard, and use guns with infinite ammo and slam melees. Because, at the end of the day:
It's also just incongruent with Warframe's systems. A good example are superbosses where killing them solo rewards you with a Glyph with certain frames. In each respective superboss, the best method to get the Glyphs is to completely disregard your Warframe's abilities, use some kind of lazy shieldgate build, slap on rolling guard, and use guns with infinite ammo and slam melees. Because, at the end of the day:
I still want to know you believe challenging conctent could be accomplished without DE cheating by using modifiers that turn off frames or parts of frames. And by challenging I mean stuff like destiny raids or dungeons that have enormous failure rates even if everyone knows what they are doing and is not a gorilla nigger.
Like assuming tommorow you get infinite budget and full creative control over warframe, what do you do?
Hey DE? Are you trying to push people away from the game? No one likes this fomo bullshit. How dare I not play the game on "your" time. was nothing learned from literally every past fomo event? Have you not seen what happened with destiny 2?
This entire year has felt like the game is trying to intentionally make me hate it. Don't even get me started on the amir night wave and his nuclear tantrum, but bringing back one shot story important events sure is one way to conclude the year.
Hey DE? Are you trying to push people away from the game? No one likes this fomo bullshit. How dare I not play the game on "your" time. was nothing learned from literally every past fomo event? Have you not seen what happened with destiny 2?
This entire year has felt like the game is trying to intentionally make me hate it. Don't even get me started on the amir night wave and his nuclear tantrum, but bringing back one shot story important events sure is one way to conclude the year.
Between this and the "sit in a relay and watch a big naked man appear" bit that happened during last Tennocon it does feel like they're trying to include more "woooah be there to be like part of the story dude" moments which A) are FOMO bullshit and B) only works for people who weren't utterly checked out of the story after the travesty that was New War
Yeah, now that it's out and I've done it, I can already tell you that my issue of this not being fun or interesting or even really challenging was correct. The side objectives are just "stand around and wait" with your thumb up your ass. Lockbox is "stand around holding your secondary". Cryothermia is "stand around playing hot potato". Indomitable Ice is "stand around shooting a thing". Entropy Orb is "stand around a Wisp mote". Signal Chain is stand in a line". Wow, a what a shakeup. There's also literally no threat considering you can have Dante, Oberon, and Revenant giving you three different forms of invisibility. Did we really need to exclude matchmaking for this? Did we really need six man squads for this? Did we really need this to be delayed several weeks? How the fuck is any of this an experiment when "stand around and wait" is literally half the fucking game modes in Warframe?
Also, what the fuck are these drop tables? Why are shards more common than fucking Rivens in the "Kuva/Riven update"? Why the fuck is 100k Kuva a "lottery" drop? What the fuck is Vosfor more common than Rivens? Why the fuck are shards and Vosfor even in the fucking drop tables?!
Looking forward to solo Icebind so I can get my Splicers each week because this is garbage. Never tell me I'm wrong again, fuck yourselves.
You underestimate the level of gorilla niggers that play warframe. Excepting randoms to stand in line for 30 seconds without being explicitly forced to is beyond the level of the average warframe player.
