Warframe

Diablo for Ninjas.

Warframe is a fantastic example of games that constantly update themselves. It had quite the pre-launch into launch that was less than stellar. Over the years Digital Extremes have put out update after update to make it one of the most popular, possibly one of the best free to play games out there.

Let’s go back in time. There was this old Korean game called GunZ: The Duel. The original intention of the game was to provide players with stylish gun combat. You could run up walls, run on walls, dash, roll. There were swords! Like how the original Street Fighter established combos accidentally by having animations be cancelled by others, this game was made by its jank. It is terribly hard to explain but I’ll do my best. You wanted to be blocking at all times with your sword because it soaked all the bullets negating damage from the front. However, you also needed to kill the enemy with bullets. Dashes could be cancelled into dashes, jumps. Sword swings could be cancelled into blocks. Wall jumps could be cancelled into dashes. Basically anything could be cancelled into anything. You would climb walls fastest by cutting it. The game was terribly janky. But to make it look the most janky and do the most damage a player would have to demonstrate an obscene amount of mechanical skill. The gane was truly a blast to play and was PvP focused. A true test of skills.

I brought GunZ up because it made the player feel powerful mechanically. You had an urge to improve your skills and beat everyone you met in duels. Warframe accomplishes something similar. Though not as quite mechanically intensive, yet still requires some Player skill to touch the proficieny ceiling. We assume the Player has competency aiming, all the competency do with movement. In fact, you do not need to aim at all with this game since it also has melee combat. It’s fine that the game uses relatively simple inputs to let the player move quickly with style. It just feels a bit off to me, slightly janky.

My gripe with the game and why I stopped playing has to do solely with progression. The primary “level” is your Mastery Rank which grows from ranking up equipment. Any equipment; warframes, melee weapons, sidearms, primary weapons, pets; these all contribute to filling the mastery bar. Just do missions and it should fill naturally. Each piece of equipment has 30 levels of progress to go through before capping out. Anything done with that particular piece afterwards is wasted mastery experience. The loop of the game is apparent now. Level up fresh equipment to cap, obtaining all the mastery available from that piece, repeat with fresh equipment. Only by the time I had my second gun I didn’t have any more slots for new equipment. I would have had to pay real money or jump through several gameplay hoops to obtain more slots to get more equipment and continue progressing. After we realised this, the friends and I that were together just quit.

Some things the game does well. It really makes the player feel powerful, speeding through missions with style and lethality. Everything is customisable, from the player’s ship to the colours on your Warframe. Apparently the story gets quite epic at its main points, but I didn’t get that far.

GunZ was mechanically intensive as it was Player Versus Player, you needed to be skilled to win. Warframe is a Player Versus Environment game, feeling powerful, teaming up and taking down cannon fodder. It rewards players investing their time. It takes awhile to manufacture anything at the Player’s forge. It ticks different sort of boxes. Planning where to farm, having enough slots in the forge. Being powerful makes the player feel good, even if superficially. The player was always going to be more powerful than the monsters they fight. Warframe is tuned so that the player just has to aim in the general direction to kill everything.

If grinding and being depressed by the progression is your thing, this game is for you. Some guns are really a blast to shoot, pretty sure there’s something out there for everyone. I think it’s funny that I spent more time writing about a whole different game than this one, but GunZ was a lot more fun to play for me.