When it works, the plains teaming experience is starting to gel - DE have created something really special here.
Up till now, all the stuff we’ve been doing has been imaginary (e.g. none of us have ever seen a real Grineer galleon). But in the context of something we as players are familiar with, a natural world with hills and grass and trees and things, the warframes start to feel really real too.
And then when you have a cell of 4 Tenno against the overwhelming firepower of the Grineer, it starts to feel legendary, exhilarating. You feel like you’re this hi-tech future superhero, and all your space magic abilities and weapons and hyper-mobility start to feel real against the real-feeling background - but it’s nicely balanced because for all your abilities, there’s still only 4 of you and the Grineer just keep coming and coming and the whole thing just feels like an absolutely epic warzone.
I’ve never felt anything like it in a videogame before - in some senses of course one has experienced the same thing cushioned by some layers of abstraction, but because of the modern graphics and the attention to detail, and particularly the one-with-one’s-avatar mobility, the realism (in the sense of bringing space magic superhero ninjas to life) just makes it go to another level.