Ongoing: More Warframe. Mwarframe.
Jul. 21st, 2018 06:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xyzzysqrlI've been playing an awful lot of Warframe and it's time to write some more about it. Just some scattered notes, you can skip this post comfortably if you don't care.
--
At this point I'm partway through the planet Uranus (sigh) and still being pleased and surprised by the gameplay. Just when I thought I'd seen all the variation in mission types, the game takes the Archwing segments (your space-ninja space hang glider) and shows you that it works UNDERWATER. So you slowly sloosh about underwater exploring caves and stuff. I love this and I started wondering why it doesn't happen on other planets. (Like Earth, maybe.)
Turns out the entire playerbase except me deeply hates the Archwing underwater gameplay and won't stop complaining that it should be cut out of the game. As usual I am a fan of That Part No One Likes. yaaay me.
--
I've built a few frames and obtained a number of weapons. Since you get points for each weapon and suit you master, I expect to be cycling through a lot of them. I may as well write down my thoughts.
FRAMES -
Frame 1 was Mag, my starter frame. She's the master of magnet and also of getting shot and dying, although I freely admit that for the most part I did not understand her rather technical powerset.
You can pull enemies towards you so they slide across the floor, although I did not really understand tactically why I would want to surround myself with enemies. There was some kind of "wreck their shields" button which I kept using on enemies without shields, and a "attract all bullets to this enemy" button which never seemed to work. Finally there was the "just squash them" super-move button, which is usually what I hit. I didn't like Mag much. She's at rank 30/30 and I don't know that I will use her again.
Frame 2 was Rhino, who is nigh-invulnerable when he's blastin' or really any other time. He can ram into people with his face which appears to do nothing, make himself basically invincible, boost his attack power by like 25%ish I think, or stomp on the ground.
Guess which button I press most often. I'm trying not to get addicted. If I just stomp around invincible all the time I'll never learn to play correctly.
I've had that bright red skin since 2013, by the way. I made it in the Steam sale and thought maybe I should try Warframe. Now I finally get to use it. Heyyy it's a bit ugly but who cares.
Frame 3 was Trinity Prime, a support frame gotten by linking Amazon Prime's free trial to my Warframe account. I've colored her kind of like a Virtua-ON Fei Yen unit because I'm a pretty shameless dork.
Trinity will be important if I ever play this with other people, which I can't imagine I'll ever do but there you go. She can make enemies into health pinatas, link her safety and well-being to enemies so they take damage instead of her, make enemies into fountains of energy, or just straight up dump a shedload of healing and damage resist on herself and everyone around her. So, herself.
She feels like a very 'technical' frame to me. Sometimes the link move is very helpful, sometimes it seems to do nothing. I don't know enough to monitor why.
Finally, most recent and capping my roster for now is Frost, who specializes in freezing things, shooting ice waves at things, freezing a lot of things, or putting a giant ice dome enemies can't shoot into around important checkpoints.
Frost is... neat, I guess? But I still haven't gotten the hang of just using a power on something instead of spewing 69,105 bullets at it.
--
I'm still learning what to do with mod cards and whatnot, how to 'build' an 'effective'... no that's bullshit, what I'm doing is putting all the damage and attack speed I can fit on a weapon, onto that weapon, and just holding down the trigger. Occasionally I instead pull out the giant sledgehammer and mute the game music and run around listening to loud heavy metal and introducing enemies to the majestic glory of ragdoll physics.
I considered looking for guides, but there's really not much in the way of mid-tier beginner guides. Most of them seem to feel that by the time you hit Mastery Rank 2, you should be deep into the end of the star-chart. I look at my "I barely lived through Saturn" playstyle and go "uhhh."
Most of the guides I see are either:
1: Really, really trying to make sure you understand everything, but still managing to be relentlessly vague and unhelpful. "Okay, so Q is your SELECT ITEM key. What that does: It lets you SELECT ITEMS. Items are things you collect from the environment, they're like tools and they REALLY HELP when you use them, so you should be sure to get some items and then, here's the trick, USE them." This kind of advice just comes off as gratingly condescending to me, because it's often paired with casual offhand "Well surely you're mid-game by now..."
Do they really expect me to be THAT dumb and still get to mid-game? Because that's kind of depressing, moreso because I barely got there and I knew this stuff. So I'm actually worse at Warframe than the dude who doesn't know what an item is. God damn, man.
2: Assuming your character was created at max level, but hasn't unlocked their true potential yet. ""So the thing you need for your build, which you don't know you need yet and you don't know what your build is gonna be but trust me it's gonna be this, is the Reflexivity ability. It's absolutely critical you should NOT play the game until you have it. It's on the endgame Clown planet, it's sold once a year by Fucko the Clown, and to get it you need ninty seven million Fuckodollars which you can only get by grinding Nightmare Mode Stabbity missions against the Dingus Faction. I so often see new players and they're trying to play without Reflexivity and it's like, WHOO, what are you EVEN DOING, why would you DO that, am I right guys?""
This kind of guide often just likes to tell you to do things without explaining why. Why is the part that's important. Knowing Why helps us make informed choices. It also helps us not, for example, use magnetic damage against the enemies heavily resistant to magnetic damage. That would've been cool to know about. I may be bitter.
--
In spite of what it sounds like, though, I'm having a really good time. My average playsession is a jumble of:
A: running around with a space camera taking space pictures of things in space.
B: flying around with the Archwing and occasionally flying headfirst into a meteor and exploding.
C: Working through the star chart missions.
D: Deciding that OBVIOUSLY WHAT I REALLY NEED is (a thing) and throwing all my resources and effort into collecting/building the thing.
E: Low-level sledgehammer heavy metal mission.
F: Trying different mods on things.
G: Losing to boss fights.
H: Winning a boss fight!
I: Losing the boss rematch. Oops.
J: Changing my suit colors around and taking photos of them in Captura mode.
K: Oops I need stuff to make my thing. Go get some more.
L: How far can I slide down this hill on Earth if I get a sprinting start?
M: I should go fishing since I'm here.
N: Wait, why is it morning already? How long've I been playing? Crud.
SO YOU KNOW. It's the MMO experience, except I'm soloing.
Good game so far.
I could not tell you what the plot is.
I'm shooting a lot of lumpy space russians and dudes with Alienware computers on their heads. Also the Flood is here. Does Bungie know the Flood moved out? No one tell Bungie. Shh.
If the plot shows up I'll make a spoiler post so everyone knows what it is, okay?
Okay.
--
At this point I'm partway through the planet Uranus (sigh) and still being pleased and surprised by the gameplay. Just when I thought I'd seen all the variation in mission types, the game takes the Archwing segments (your space-ninja space hang glider) and shows you that it works UNDERWATER. So you slowly sloosh about underwater exploring caves and stuff. I love this and I started wondering why it doesn't happen on other planets. (Like Earth, maybe.)
Turns out the entire playerbase except me deeply hates the Archwing underwater gameplay and won't stop complaining that it should be cut out of the game. As usual I am a fan of That Part No One Likes. yaaay me.
--
I've built a few frames and obtained a number of weapons. Since you get points for each weapon and suit you master, I expect to be cycling through a lot of them. I may as well write down my thoughts.
FRAMES -
Frame 1 was Mag, my starter frame. She's the master of magnet and also of getting shot and dying, although I freely admit that for the most part I did not understand her rather technical powerset.
You can pull enemies towards you so they slide across the floor, although I did not really understand tactically why I would want to surround myself with enemies. There was some kind of "wreck their shields" button which I kept using on enemies without shields, and a "attract all bullets to this enemy" button which never seemed to work. Finally there was the "just squash them" super-move button, which is usually what I hit. I didn't like Mag much. She's at rank 30/30 and I don't know that I will use her again.
Frame 2 was Rhino, who is nigh-invulnerable when he's blastin' or really any other time. He can ram into people with his face which appears to do nothing, make himself basically invincible, boost his attack power by like 25%ish I think, or stomp on the ground.
Guess which button I press most often. I'm trying not to get addicted. If I just stomp around invincible all the time I'll never learn to play correctly.
I've had that bright red skin since 2013, by the way. I made it in the Steam sale and thought maybe I should try Warframe. Now I finally get to use it. Heyyy it's a bit ugly but who cares.
Frame 3 was Trinity Prime, a support frame gotten by linking Amazon Prime's free trial to my Warframe account. I've colored her kind of like a Virtua-ON Fei Yen unit because I'm a pretty shameless dork.
Trinity will be important if I ever play this with other people, which I can't imagine I'll ever do but there you go. She can make enemies into health pinatas, link her safety and well-being to enemies so they take damage instead of her, make enemies into fountains of energy, or just straight up dump a shedload of healing and damage resist on herself and everyone around her. So, herself.
She feels like a very 'technical' frame to me. Sometimes the link move is very helpful, sometimes it seems to do nothing. I don't know enough to monitor why.
Finally, most recent and capping my roster for now is Frost, who specializes in freezing things, shooting ice waves at things, freezing a lot of things, or putting a giant ice dome enemies can't shoot into around important checkpoints.
Frost is... neat, I guess? But I still haven't gotten the hang of just using a power on something instead of spewing 69,105 bullets at it.
--
I'm still learning what to do with mod cards and whatnot, how to 'build' an 'effective'... no that's bullshit, what I'm doing is putting all the damage and attack speed I can fit on a weapon, onto that weapon, and just holding down the trigger. Occasionally I instead pull out the giant sledgehammer and mute the game music and run around listening to loud heavy metal and introducing enemies to the majestic glory of ragdoll physics.
I considered looking for guides, but there's really not much in the way of mid-tier beginner guides. Most of them seem to feel that by the time you hit Mastery Rank 2, you should be deep into the end of the star-chart. I look at my "I barely lived through Saturn" playstyle and go "uhhh."
Most of the guides I see are either:
1: Really, really trying to make sure you understand everything, but still managing to be relentlessly vague and unhelpful. "Okay, so Q is your SELECT ITEM key. What that does: It lets you SELECT ITEMS. Items are things you collect from the environment, they're like tools and they REALLY HELP when you use them, so you should be sure to get some items and then, here's the trick, USE them." This kind of advice just comes off as gratingly condescending to me, because it's often paired with casual offhand "Well surely you're mid-game by now..."
Do they really expect me to be THAT dumb and still get to mid-game? Because that's kind of depressing, moreso because I barely got there and I knew this stuff. So I'm actually worse at Warframe than the dude who doesn't know what an item is. God damn, man.
2: Assuming your character was created at max level, but hasn't unlocked their true potential yet. ""So the thing you need for your build, which you don't know you need yet and you don't know what your build is gonna be but trust me it's gonna be this, is the Reflexivity ability. It's absolutely critical you should NOT play the game until you have it. It's on the endgame Clown planet, it's sold once a year by Fucko the Clown, and to get it you need ninty seven million Fuckodollars which you can only get by grinding Nightmare Mode Stabbity missions against the Dingus Faction. I so often see new players and they're trying to play without Reflexivity and it's like, WHOO, what are you EVEN DOING, why would you DO that, am I right guys?""
This kind of guide often just likes to tell you to do things without explaining why. Why is the part that's important. Knowing Why helps us make informed choices. It also helps us not, for example, use magnetic damage against the enemies heavily resistant to magnetic damage. That would've been cool to know about. I may be bitter.
--
In spite of what it sounds like, though, I'm having a really good time. My average playsession is a jumble of:
A: running around with a space camera taking space pictures of things in space.
B: flying around with the Archwing and occasionally flying headfirst into a meteor and exploding.
C: Working through the star chart missions.
D: Deciding that OBVIOUSLY WHAT I REALLY NEED is (a thing) and throwing all my resources and effort into collecting/building the thing.
E: Low-level sledgehammer heavy metal mission.
F: Trying different mods on things.
G: Losing to boss fights.
H: Winning a boss fight!
I: Losing the boss rematch. Oops.
J: Changing my suit colors around and taking photos of them in Captura mode.
K: Oops I need stuff to make my thing. Go get some more.
L: How far can I slide down this hill on Earth if I get a sprinting start?
M: I should go fishing since I'm here.
N: Wait, why is it morning already? How long've I been playing? Crud.
SO YOU KNOW. It's the MMO experience, except I'm soloing.
Good game so far.
I could not tell you what the plot is.
I'm shooting a lot of lumpy space russians and dudes with Alienware computers on their heads. Also the Flood is here. Does Bungie know the Flood moved out? No one tell Bungie. Shh.
If the plot shows up I'll make a spoiler post so everyone knows what it is, okay?
Okay.
