After a few months of not playing much Warframe, I’ve gone back to this old haunt after having taking a bit of a jaunt through Path of Exile and Diablo III again. It’s really quite remarkable how sticky these PvE games are for me - I think there’s a bit of the power fantasy that appeals to me.
Warframe has been through a few poorly received updates recently - generally this has been the addition of the Kuva Lich system, Railjack and then most recently, the Scarlet Spear event.
Kuva Liches
Fortunately, I did not engage the original version of this system - which involved several layers of RNG, a little bit of fantasy-shattering and many hours of grind through everything. They have since reworked this slightly allow us to better farm specific weapons - given that defeating a Kuva Lich is a 2-4 hour investment.
The rework probably helped get farming times for a specific weapon down to similar times to a prime weapon in Warframe, this is pretty good. However, a few gripes remain:
Having a Kuva Lich active is quite annoying, and making ones means committing the 2-4 hours to defeating them.
Kuva Lich appearances are RNG: as an endgame ready player, I want them to show up all the time because I want more murmur progress.
Getting lucky with requiem guesses can really cut the time required significantly. I got really unlucky with my first Lich and needed to pretty much farm out every single murmur which I think got me close to the upper end of 5 hours (combined with my inexperience as to which missions are efficient for farming murmurs. And then I had one run where I got lucky with two guesses, which quickly led my Kuva Lich to being defeated in under 2 hours.
Kuva Lich scaling definitely feels wonky - a Level 1 lich is a pushover, while a Level 5 lich is a total bullet sponge - what’s the hell is going on here?! I’m guessing they are trying to enable newer players to avoid fighting the Liches altogether, but if they are a new player I think they’re honestly more likely to create a Lich that’s too powerful for them to fight, not knowing the mechanics in the first place.
Farming up Requiem mods honestly just feels bad - it took me close to 10 hours to farm up every Requiem mod to start with, the rewards while farming them are honestly terrible if you don’t get the mod. I think there’s an argument to be made here for giving you a set of Requiem mods to start with (maybe they cover one use) so you don’t have to do as much farming just to begin engaging with the content.
I do like valence fusion - it gives us a good reason to continue engaging with the system.
Railjack
Railjack has its moments, but there are so many terrible moments it honestly is very unfun, especially compared to the standard Warframe gameplay loop, especially for endgame players.
Archwing feels like crap - it takes forever to get anywhere in an Archwing, it’s difficult to actually hit anything without Amesha’s Warding Grace. Your hitscan weapons are no longer hitscan. It just feels bad to have invested any time into Archwing and find that it is somewhat gimped in the new game mode which feels like another natural home for Archwing.
A lot of Quality-of-Life inherent to playing Railjack is hidden behind grinding Intrinsics. In addition, some of these “abilities” honestly feel necessary for Railjack to not feel like a kludge - this means you are grinding a fair bit to even get the game mode playable.
You have to grind for Avionics (mod) capacity - in addition to the Avionics.
Why does everything need Titanium and Asterite?!
I really like the idea of parts, but honestly having both a Mk0 to Mk3 scale as well as the “3 houses” for components feels excessive for something like Warframe - especially since presumably that as the mode grows, so will the number of weapons, railjack parts and everything else. (And unfortunately, yes, there is a single best part, so I’m not sure this system really helped since the build / repair costs aren’t different between the three houses anyway. This just feels like shallow depth - probably an attempt to hide the fact that there are really only 6 railjack weapons.
(Recently, it’s been reworked to be a lot more fun to play - at least with an endgame railjack and archwing. If you are still flying around in a paper airplane however, it’s going to take a while before the mode feels fun.)
Honestly, by far my biggest complaint with this mode is just how buggy it can be and how lacking we are in terms of options to fix the brokenness. So far, I’ve run into:
Being teleported outside the ship by entering a railjack turret, and then being unable to go back and even locking my teammates out of leaving the mission.
You can somehow get into a state where leaving crewships puts you in the middle of nowhere and you have to teleport back (if you even have that option) to the railjack.
You can still end up in the wrong mode (Archwing mode within a ship, on-foot mode within space) switching between areas.
The Omni fixes a lot of these issues if you are off the railjack, but if you are on it (or the game thinks you are on it,) you are probably SOL.
Sometimes you don’t get your player camera back after cinematic sequences (entering and exiting ships, usually) - I’ve had cameras stuck in the darkness, cameras stuck on the floor, cameras in god knows where, and nothing I could do would fix it. The game would literally be unplayable outside of Archwing in this case.
We used to have /unstuck for these, but as time has passed and the game got more complicated over the many years, the command never really got updated to actually get us out of sticky situations and it’s particularly noticeable in Railjack, being a new mode with tons of bugs.
Scarlet Spear
Honestly, the biggest issue with this event were the bugs. Once all of these were fixed together with the near-doubling of points gain, the event felt very okay to grind.
The ground part of the mission was OK - there was a trade-off that you needed to make between having a good way to deal with a lot of enemies and the single-target damage to the Condrix. This actually made me revisit my loadouts and build out a new set up for the mission. It also meant that each additional different utility Warframe in the mission made a massive difference - with Limbo being the standout for enabling people to essentially carry the entire team to full completion.
The space part was always plagued with issues - people not getting kill codes required to progress the mission. Railjack was always problematic when you dropped any packets, and de-sync issues got exponentially worse when you got into a second game with the same host. I think what would have been great here was a way to check the ground-to-space mission ratios while in mission. Once a lot of the connection bugs were fixed, many times we found that the actual issue was that there were way more space teams than ground teams.
It would’ve also been good to not lock bonus points to the best total score of either half - this gave players a massive disincentive to when they found that they already spent 40 minutes in a space mission and then would ideally switch to ground to help send more kill codes.
The space mission was significantly more boring - it was essentially old school defense, but with very annoying Sentient enemies. I suspect there was going to be a bigger Railjack / space battle element to this, but currently level 110 enemies are nigh unkillable in Railjack, which made this untenable - I’m guessing the next time this event returns, this will no longer be a problem (being either that Railjack will now have weapons that scale to be able to fight level 100 enemies or that said enemies will become more killable by current enemies.)
Frost needs a rework to keep up with Gara and Limbo. Seriously.
Defense targets should have scaling health. Having a mission get to the point there the defense target cannot be hit even once is ridiculous.
Rewards were… very good. Essentially this event gave us a full sets of any Arcanes of your choice - adding a lot of new options and powers to our Warframes. (I strongly suspect all this means is that the energy economy will just be thoroughly broken via Arcane Energize though.)
Other Miscellaneous Things
Some guns need to be redesigned for knockback in mind (or have knockback removed) - there are some short range weapons like Staticor which are just unusable now because they weren’t designed with knockback in mind - short range + knockback is a terrible design.
There are definitely frames that require a rework or rebalancing - a lot of Warframes don’t really work or aren’t any fun to play any more - Nyx and Ash come to mind.