Warframe: silly named F2P coop TPS

I’ve been back in this on Xbox the last few days instead of Destiny 2 (sorry, guys). Looking forward to hearing the impressions of the new system from y’all on PC.

The servers just took a dump I think, but so far I just love the open world aspect. I grabbed a nice pair of headphones and just wandered around the Plains during the day and night cycles. Watching the mortar shells launch from outposts and grineer dropships approach as they’re fighting Eidolon is just awesome to see. The ambiance and atmosphere feel very cool.

Thus far, PoE seems to offer a much-needed change of pace in Warframe. The game is frenetic, and missions usually involve rushing to the end as quickly as possible, or murdering hundreds of enemies as quickly as possible. This is great in the ARPG mob-bash sense, but I really like being able to switch it up in PoE. I’ve mostly been trying to keep a low profile while I’m out there, as I was hunting for some of the new resources and zapping rocks with my new mining laser.

Oh, I also got my face smashed in the first time I tried to engage a smaller Eidolon. I was playing with Gara (I just decided to buy her even though her quest/farm is supposed to be quite easy. I wanted to support the game) so my stats weren’t the best and I didn’t know how to play her, but still. It didn’t help that I stumbled into a Grineer patrol and kicked that hornets nest as well. :)

It’s absolutely exhilarating scampering around with Volt just randomly doing stuff. You can either pick up missions from the guy in the village or you can just wander around and the Lotus gives you missions on the fly. There’s tons to do as well, one can only scratch the surface in a few hours.

Quite a spectacular and beautiful job DE have done with the general vibe of the open world, it feels very much like a real place - and it really is quite huge, even with Volt’s travel speed. The Ostron village is quite cute too, and feels lived-in.

The gameplay’s been given a new lease of life now, as it feels very different in the open world, you’re much more aware of distance and you have a sense of scouting. I can imagine people actually having fun with sniper rifles for the first time ever. Looking forward to trying the new Operator stuff.

Apart from a few glitches here and there - to be expected with such a massive departure from their previous norm - it’s been a great success I think. The team must be exhausted, an incredible amount of work has gone into this.

This could easily transition into an amazing MMO, there’s so much scope for other massive zones with very different atmospheres. It actually has a bit of a Guild Wars (1) feel with massively multiplayer hubs and the open world being instanced for solo or small groups.

Sweet. I can’t wait to take some time tomorrow and dig in. I’m also bringing a friend back to the game. Now seems like a great time for it.

Thanks for the impressions, guys! Looking forward to this. Question- I saw a reference in a news article that said something about a reworked ‘sky’ archwing? Is that new? Or do you just use your regular equipped wing?

Also, how’s the new crafting thing?

According to the release notes, it’s your regular archwing (with some balance changes to fit in with ordinary warframes). There’s a gear item you can use to summon it.

Yeah, you use your regular Archwing, but from my understanding it has a limited number of uses while you’re out in the Pains. Steve was explaining on his stream that they needed to do that to avoid Warframe turning into a “helicopter game”. If you could use your Archwing at will, the speed and mobility would mean that’s where you’d spend all your time. So you can still use it to get around and to a divebomb some Grineer outposts, but you’ll be spending the bulk of your time on foot.

I’m researching the Skywing component now, so I won’t be able to try it out for myself until next week.

Thanks! I’ve been trying to get the Oxium to get the Itzal wing (only ~2000 left!) In preparation, and I’d hate to hear that effort would be wasted.

In a related note, I did finally get the faction standing to get all the Kaszas bits the other day, and coincidentally got an affinity booster as my login reward, so leveled that and my dual Decurian to 30 in three runs of the archwing mobile defense mission. No bleu potatoes to power them, though, dammit.

PoE is filled with archaic design decisions. I had to do a double take when someone in chat told me I have to walk back to the city to turn in the bounty. No biggie, it’s only like 1-1.5km for the average bounty…

Also, FUCK escort missions.

Plains themselves look really good though, but I’ll probably stay out until our clan researches the archwing module and they fix some of the mission scripting bugs.

But yeah, considering how much this was hyped it’s pretty meh so far. The whole thing kinda reminds me of that walrus village from WoW.

You get your “mission rewards” when you exit the plains, as you would when extracting from a mission. It makes sense given their architecture: this is a peer to peer game, so most of it is running locally on your machine (I was still able to play in the Plains when the server went down, for instance). When you exit is when the server transaction takes place and your loot, rewards, etc get stored. The only place you can do anything with the rewards is in town anyway.

Even on the far side of the map, I’ve had regular mission extractions take longer just by the fact that I don’t have to navigate corridors, locked doors, etc. You can cover a lot of ground fast out in the open.

Sucks that it’s pretty meh to you, it’s more than lived up to the hype for me.

Me too. I hopped on for a few minutes this morning before work. At about 7:00 a.m. Eastern time, there were 160 Cetus instances and 450 open squads in the Plains.

They could really stand to add solo extraction, though, so people can jump in and out of squads a la defense.

What has that got to do with it? They could easily make a system that has Ordis pick you up with the orbiter instead of having you bullet jump for a fucking mile just to end the mission. It’s beyond stupid that this even made it out of planning stage, let alone into a final release. There is absolutely no point in it except to waste player’s time.

Hopefully PoE will be at least 50% less shit with the archwing module, otherwise I don’t see myself spending too much time there, the rest of the game is simply better.

I guess? But I don’t want the lander to pick me up when I’ve done a bounty. If I just want to mission spam, there’s… the entirety of the game to do that in. The whole point of PoE is to offer something outside of that paradigm.

If it’s night, there are Eidolons to hunt. If it’s daytime, there’s incursions to deal with. And in between, I’m mining and fishing for standing. It’s a free-roam map, and that’s how I play it. It works great for what it’s designed to be, at least for my tastes.

Again, even when I’m pretty far away, it really doesn’t take much longer for me to get back to town than it does extracting from some missions. I don’t have to navigate corridors, deal with repeated knockdowns, hacking terminals to open locked doors, etc. I just zip to Cetus. Except I’m not often not just bullet jumping my way there, I’m doing shit along the way. That’s what they’ve been advertising with PoE, to offer a change of pace and a different way of playing the game beyond rushing missions ad nauseam. If they intended for you just to bounty, extract, bounty, extract they needed haven’t bothered creating the Landscape system to begin with, because it’s functionally the same as mission running.

It’s all just a matter of tastes, but what you see as shit I see as a feature WAD. And that’s unfortunate, because it sucks when the hype train derails. :(

In any case, just be forewarned about Skywing. It’s intended for limited use, and it sounds like it takes a crafted consumable to be able to fire it up. I don’t know how steep the material requirements are, so it might not be onerous if you’re looking to get to Cetus quickly, but it doesn’t seem like we’ll be spending the majority of our time in archwing.

Was discussing this with clan mates. Apparently the AW will be a consumable that uses Plains resources, and lots of them.

Again, apparently, this was, as DE Steve said, to avoid Plains gameplay turning into a “helicopter game” where you just rain death down on the mobs. Of course it will turn into that anyway for the real fanatics who play 24/7 and gather a bajillion resources, but for filthy casuals like myself it sounds like it will be just a handy thing to get from one end of the map to the other quickly now and then.

I think more than AW, it’s the less popular but speedy frames that will become more popular on the Plains - Volt, Nezha, Zephyr, Octavia, possibly Titania. (Clan mate was saying that Zephyr really shines re. travel fun.)

I’m seeing a fair amount of negativity in the clan and on the forums, but I think more players are positive about it than negative on the whole. I think it’s going to be a much more successful form of alternative progression than AW or Lunaro. Third time lucky :)

The really big sticking point for many players is that they just don’t like the Operator gameplay. It’s such a come-down from the zippy movement of the Warframes that it feels like trudging through sludge. Hopefully the Focus trees will do something about Operator mobility (I believe Naramon has some nodes that speed up the Operator’s base speed and also his dash speed).

I’m in that boat, at least initially. I’m going to work on my operator and see how they feel in practice, but in theory I’m pretty sketchy on the focus. The patch notes do state that they’re open to feedback on how to proceed with the Focus system, so hopefully if it does out to be a bust they can tweak it to be more Warframe oriented.

If they managed to get Operator gameplay engaging and useful, I think it could be pretty cool. That’s a big question mark for me right now, though! I’m just trying to keep an open mind until I can really play around with a geared up and customized operator. :)

According to reddit the AW implementation in PoE is really, really bad. It uses consumables (which force you to fish to get materials to make them), has super weak scaling, pretty low height cap and you have to leave the AW mode to loot stuff on the ground.

This update is sounding better by the minute.

Got a resource booster as my login reward yesterday so I spent my time running void fissures and excavation missions. Only took a brief look at Cetus before I logged off. I’ll get into POE this weekend.

Warframe is #4 on Steam, behind PUBG, DOTA2, and CS:GO. Peaked at 115K today, that’s gotta be a record by far.

Oh man, I’m so glad I spent the time farming for Titania before the update. I started it before I heard Archwing was going to be available in PoE, so I was a little worried I “wasted my time” (although I really like the frame anyway, so it wouldn’t really have been a loss in any case).

Damn, she’s a beast out in the Plains. With Zenurik as my Focus and an efficiency build, I can fly for a good portion of my time out there. It’s great!

Titania is the Queen, and Volt is the King of the Plains - at least for me so far. It will probably even out a bit more once I get the Skywing charges up and running. But Razorwinging around with my beastly shotgun-modded Dex Pixia is a sheer joy, and whizzing about on the sweeping inclined planes with Volt never gets old either.

After a couple of deeply immersed sessions getting my head around all the things, I’m REALLY into it now, settling into a rhythm with it, both day and night. Grouping is in a lamentable condition at the moment (it’s all buggy and things aren’t connecting up properly in terms of info and feedback), but solo out of the box it really is tremendous fun, both day and night cycles, and I’m warming to a nice, longish term grind ahead.

I was surprised to find that using the Operator to hunt the little sentient thingies with a “Lure” (which you can find and activate at Grineer camps by night) was very enjoyable. First time I’ve actually enjoyed using Operator mode. And now that I’ve unlocked the Quills (wanted to say Whills lol) I’m really into the idea of powering the little dude up, and considering the Focus trees more deeply.

The Saya quest I thought was really excellently well done btw, they’re getting these quests down to a fine art now, blending story/VO with the basket of mission modes they’ve got.

Mining and Fishing are fun too.

Top tip 1: using Helios as my sentinel got things to start making more sense - as I started scanning I noticed the things to collect.

Top tip 2: for the annoying cache missions, both Helios with Animal Instinct is handy, as well as the method of spiralling inwards from the outside of the circle listening for the cache “singing” sound. Now those missions aren’t so annoying.

Top tip 3: If you’re running a potato, try the new Dynamic Resolution option (under Display), it really smooths out and ups the framerate. I remember now what this is - a guy did a mod for Skyrim using the same technique. Basically it lowers the resolution when you’re whipping the camera round, so it’s pixellated when you don’t notice it, and looks normal when you’ve got the camera still, or are just moving it around to look at things. Very clever trick.

According to Reddit, the previous record was a little shy of 70,000, I believe.

That is extremely clever. At the same time, I’ve always been extremely impressed with how well Warframe runs and how good it looks anyway.