HAHAHAHA that's a screen from when the game was being pitched. Gj
oh man you sure showed me, i forgot it became acceptable to show something completely unpolished for a pitch, i thought you'd want to you know, make it look good
The game has promise, it's just in a very mediocre state right now and in the hands of lazy, incompetent buffoons who would much rather slap a stuffty band-aid mod on an issue instead of actually fixing the problem. Here are the biggest issues I have with this pile of mediocrity.
Melee is shallow and borderline non-viable. For a game that calls itself ninjas in space it certainly is trying its hardest to discourage you from getting up close and slicing away at your enemies. Whether it's toxic infested harming your health through your shields, ancient disruptors knocking you down and stealing your entire energy pool with their Mr. Fantastic limbs, or practically half of any Grineer force with their ability to instantly knock you down if you step close, it will almost
always be a better option to keep your distance and shoot them to death. All this in spite of the fact that most of the weapons in the game are melee weapons (which, by the way, mostly feel very,
very samey). I completely understand that heavy units should not be able to be dispatched in melee as easily as lighter infantry, but at least the Shockwave MOAs allow you to dodge their knockdown that they telegraph the hell out of. A better option overall would be allow the heavies to pull out a melee weapon and duel you or something, so they're still a tougher target to take down, while at the same time not being cheap.
Stealth is not an option. I don't even need to go into much detail on this. Unless you have access to invisibility, you are almost certainly going to be spotted. It'd be great if you could go around and stealth-kill everything and make it out without anyone even having seen you, but right now on higher levels a stealth attack on an unalerted enemy won't even kill them, they'll just turn around after you finish the animation and start shooting you. Then again, there's no incentive to even go for a stealthy approach anyway, so it's not that big of an issue. In my experiences whether or not you trip an alarm makes almost no difference. But then why even have this half-assed stealth function in the game? Why advertise warframes like Ash and Banshee as "stealth" frames when ultimately you are going to be running and gunning your way through every mission?
Which brings me to my next point. Missions all feel too samey. You go in, you kill people until an objective has been completed, you leave. This works fine for Exterminations, Defenses, Survivals, and Mobile Defense missions, they're all fine as they are right now. But Spy, Deception, and Rescue are all in need of assistance. What comes to mind when you think of "spying"? Is it charging through gunfire and leaving a trail of blood in your wake? Of course not. Spy missions is where a functional stealth mechanic could actually be put to good use, but alas, there isn't one. Deception is flawed for similar reasons, though not to as great an extent. If you go and shoot your way through an entire ship to plant some sort of listening device or navigation data, people are going to see you and make an effort to undo whatever you've done after you leave. Both of these missions seem like they would be conducive to stealth gameplay, by perhaps rewarding the player for planting/stealing the datamasses while not tripping any alarms, or allowing the enemy to report your presence, or even not being seen (although in its current state that would be incredibly difficult).
The way ammunition works is forgeted. No matter which weapon you choose, you will always have the same amount of ammunition, regardless of how they function. 210 ammunition works fine for semi-automatic fast-firing pistols such as the Lato, Sicarus, or Bolto; but that much ammunition is far more than you would need for heavier guns like the Lex, Vasto, and Seer; and nowhere
near enough ammunition to get any worthwhile use out of the Spectra or Dual Vipers without piling mods on them. Machine guns like the Gorgon and Soma tend to get ammo-starved incredibly quickly too, though this is really only an issue with the Gorgon because it is stuff. And though I haven't built either of these yet, apparently the Ogris and Torid draw from the Assault rifle ammo pool? Seriously?
Corpus and Infested suffer from an incredible lack of variety among their units. I'm assuming this will get changed eventually, but the recent event really brought how nonthreatening Corpus are into the spotlight. People going up against the Grineer had to deal with staggering rollermines, the colossal AoE of the Napalm's projectiles, Scorches stripping away shields and health in a fraction of a second, Shield mooks carrying around a slab of impenetrable steel (without the proper mods anyway) who will bumrush you and slap you on your ass, and the ever-tanky heavies; all of whom benefited from their strong armor. That's fine. People fighting the corpus had to deal with three different reskins of men wearing toasters and pajamas wielding three different kinds of flashlights, a handful of ostrich reskins, and maybe a shield drone or two, which are really just floating chain reactions to any mag worth her salt and all of which got annihilated by allied napalms. That's not fine. That's not challenging in the slightest. Lotus talks about the Jackal (or was it Hyena) being troublesome for Tenno in the field. Is that so, Lotus? Because there aren't any. Which is baffling me because they would make a neat addition to the regular corpus menagerie, scaled to be more of an elite mob rather than a boss.
Grinding for materials is still frustrating and boring. I am sick of having to fight the same boss over and over and over again only to wind up with 10 helmets, 8 chassis, and 0 systems. Not to mention how tedious it is to gather materials like plastids or neurodes. There are games that can do grinding well. Warframe is not one of them. It's as though Digital Extremes' idea of creating content lies in artificially elongating the game through grinding materials instead of actually adding new and interesting things to do. "Here's a new Warframe!" They proudly announce. "His name is NEKROS the BONEDADDY and to get him you must travel into the new zone we've created! To get to the new zone, you must first farm for navigation coordinates found in crates for normal levels. Then, once you have those, create a KEY to go to the Derelicts, where you must break more boxes to find special navigation coordinates (only found here) to make another KEY to fight the BOSS who you must beat multiple times to get all the gubbinz for BONEDADDY. What's that? You have all the parts? Great! Now go do even more missions to get the 100,000 credits to buy the bluepri- oh you're going to go play Battlefield 4? Ok thats cool. By the way mutagen samples are only found here because forget you."
Invasion is a fun gamemode, I'll give them that. I had fun with it for a few runs and would like to see it become a more frequent mission type, supplementing or maybe even replacing Alert missions. However, the latest event was grossly mishandled, especially that bit where a "hacker" allegedly managed to instantly convert several nodes to Corpus control simply by loving with the client. But hey, at least the loot tables are encrypted so we can't have any nasty dataminers telling players where they should go to find what they want.
Poll