Warframe: Free to Play Third Person Coops Bizniz.

[Vendetta]

I heard about Warframe a while ago, but now it's gone into open beta, so I decided to give it a go. And I have to say, it's p. choice.

Structurally, it's a 4 player co-op third person shooter similar in idea to the Mass Effect multplayer, but the mission structure is more "run through a place shooting mans" than "stand in a place shooting mans", the missions I've played so far were both based on running through an enemy base, shooting up some locals, stealing or blowing up something, and then running out again a different way shooting more, and more annoyed locals. Levels are randomly generated based on simple room tiles, and there appear to be a couple of different sets at least in the early missions, though they are linear, there's no real path branching so there's little explorative element (though there are hidden nooks and crannies with space crates and boxes to loot).

The shooting is reasonably satisfying, early challenge curve seems OK, if a bit on the easy side, and the first couple of guns you get given do the job and don't feel too anaemic. At any one time you can be equipped with one main weapon and one sidearm, and there are the usual choices of shotguns, snipers, assault rifles, big pistols, fast pistols, balanced pistols etc. You also have a melee weapon equipped, and melee combat is satisfying and useful, with melee attacks doing quite a lot of damage and having a couple of variations (charge attacks by holding button, jumping attacks, etc)

The F2P progression mechanic seems fairly solid. You have a limited number of slots to own Warframes, which are your character classes, each of them are specialised around different things and have different default power sets (I haven't unlocked powers yet). Likewise you can have a limited number of weapons and equipment to spread around your characters. Getting new weapons and frames other than the basic starting gear appears to be based on a crafting system. In missions you can find crafting items and blueprints which let you build new business. You can also buy some blueprints in the game marketplace for credits (ingame money, find in missions) or buy items directly for platinum (for reals money). You also gain affinity with your various gubbins, improving your warframes and weapons levels by using them, and this allows you to fit mods to them which fiddle with the way they work. (For instance I've found one which makes pistols do +5% critical damage)

The game recognises and works well enough with an Xbox 360 controller, and it appears to be a totally viable option to use one (ranges aren't so long that the pixel precision of a mouse makes too much difference), and whilst you do get a damage bonus for headshots combat is pretty swift anyway.

The game supports solo play, and at least in early missions it seems to be totally viable, though I hear that the challenge curve ramps up and the game will start to expect that you actually play coops.

Performance wise, my laptop seems to cope with everything being turned on, and it looks pretty cool. There's a decent design aesthetic for the Warframes themselves, and the environments go in for lots of shiny brushed metal and specular reflections.

The only downside appears to be the menu system, which isn't laid out terribly consistently, intermittently some buttons stop responding, and I did get a black screen for some time at the end of one mission, but the game is still in very early open beta.


Overall, it's totally worth checking out.

[Stark]

I've actually been in the beta for ages because ford tricked me, but I've never played. It has a solo mode?!

[weemadando]

Yeah, there's the option to play solo but it's not a separate mode as far as I know.

[Vendetta]

Yeah, solo is just the same thing without other people. Haven't played enough to know how much the balance changes.

[KhorneFlakes]

I've heard about this. It sounds interesting, though I haven't seen too much about it. What's it like? I remember a friend saying it kinda reminded him of Planetside 2, but less grindy/annoying.

[Stark]

It's like a third person ut2004 mod. You shot mans and chop mans while grinding up f2p bars. The actual game part isn't bad, but the menus are horrid (Vendetta wasn't even told I sent him an invite, for instance).

[TheFeniX]

Ugh, I tell everyone this weekend "Get this downloading tonight, so we can play Monday." Did we play Monday? Fuck no because "I'm downloading it still. Let's play Supreme Commander with it's hilariously bad memory leaks instead." I'm fucking tired of strategy games. I want to shoot people in the face. So, it's on to Warframe with pugs (oh lord).

Warframe: you run around and shoot/stab what looks like Mass Effect Krogan while people Drop-in/Drop-out and hosts migrate (because fuck you, that's why). It looks shiny and has mad lens flares up in this bitch. As said, the UI sucks hard. The game feels like Lost Planet to be honest. Same default shitty gun, same on-demand over-powered melee, and some kind of parkour/run up walls bullshit that they totally don't explain to you in the tutorial. I have a love hate relationship with the tutorial. It doesn't make you feel stupid like the "here's how to zoom out" of Supreme Commander, but it really could have been "have you played a third person shooter before? Then this tutorial is not for you because a button map screen would accomplish the same goal." They explain literally zero about the "advanced" movement mechanics, which is fine because they aren't hard to figure out, but could you at least tell me they exist?

Also, slides are fun but protip, holding W and Shift then pressing Ctrl to power slide overloads my left hand. This is why, if you bother using Shift for anything, your default crouch button should be C (or something else on that side). Oh yea, and you can run up walls, which would have been nice for someone to fucking tell me because I got stuck in a room I dropped into from a vent shaft for like 5 minutes before I figured out how to get out (no Google, go me!).

The game plays ok. It doesn't brutalize you when playing it, but it's kind of right in your face with the "buy currency or fuck off" because there literally isn't anything worthwhile to buy with the starting 50 platinum. I would think they'd at least throw a shitty parallel-upgrade gun or two at the freepers. Actually grinding the gear in-game is likely to be atrocious (no surprise there), but if they keep up this work, I'd rather just drop like $40 on the game to buy everything out instead.

Hopefully, I'll play with some non-pugs tomorrow because solo play sucks. Obvious beta is obvious, but I'm honestly surprised this game is as good (at least from the 5 missions I've played) as it is. Oh yea, Borderless Window support: it should be mandatory on everything, produced ever, everywhere. Instant 5 point bonus to Warframe in this category.

[Stark]

The game appears to simply not deliver any invites or messages cross region; Los and I got in fine (with a notification in my screen, amazing) once I set to NA-E like him.

But it seems the only progress route that isn't spend money is buy a blueprint and (I imagine) troll for ages to get the xyz bits you need. This is probably why every pug I've played has everyone simply ignore the low-lethality badguys and run around opening chests instead.

That said it isn't a walking microtransaction popup like Blacklight so I've seen worse. :V

[TheFeniX]

The game appears to simply not deliver any invites or messages cross region; Los and I got in fine (with a notification in my screen, amazing) once I set to NA-E like him.

First thing I told my buds was to use US-West when they got it installed, so we likely would never have figured that out.

[Stark]

Being a crazy person I expected MMOs to work across those kind of regions... but since Defiance is region-locked on 360 I guess I should have known better!

[PREDATOR490]

Weapon wise - Bolter is just insanely awesome for most fights since it nails targets to walls with a healthy refire rate to make mass swarms of bad guys pin cushions.
The Fang swords are equally brutal at close range due to their high refire rate and ability to shank multiple enemies.

Mech wise - The Founder Excalibur was ok for a bit but I quickly switched to the Banshee and loved it. Apparantly the Banshee is the hardest Mech to acquire if you try to go the free route and after using it for a bit I found it more than worth the price.
That said, Loki is the Mech that I see the most due to its ability to move fast and screw around with bad guys.
The Decoy ability essentially allows them to mass taunt a group of enemies then charge past shanking them all from invisibility or sit at range dropping them.

Gameplay wise - The game is effectively a copy paste of Mass Effect, you have three types of enemies so far which break down to Infested (Reapers), Corpus (Krogan / Cerberus), Robots (Geth). So far the Corpus are the easiest to fight against because the others have irritating gimicks. The maps are generic and reused in almost every level with variations in where you have to go.
The best missions for getting mods and experience end up being the defence missions because its just a case of survival against waves of increasing difficulty. So far most people tend to ditch after wave 10 for reward vs. effort.

UI - Utter shit, things dont tell you what they do or what upgrading them actually does or why its needed.

Overall, the game is rather simplistic and rough in a lot of areas but I am enjoying it. After a bit of play I bought the highest founder package since it offers quite a good bang for the buck.

[Stark]

You paid money to be better... at a coop game?

[Vendetta]

It's an odd reaction to F2P, where some people just go "ah, fuck it I'll just buy all the things", especially if doing that is in the ballpark of a normal videogame price and the progression system is otherwise slow and/or irritating. IIRC Tribes put in that mechanic not long ago where you can just pay a normal videogame price and skip all the F2P bars.

I've not really played enough of Warframe to see where their pay incentive is and how far you can get without ponying up. I have noticed that a few missions in it starts draining your revives more efficiently if you play solo. (F'rinstance, Tanks puts the pay incentive in the relatively late game, you can play all the way up to tier 7 easily without being tempted to spend real money, so by the time people get to the credit sinks they're already committed to a degree, whereas War Thunder appears to be experimenting with looking at where most people are playing and dropping the monetisation incentive there, which has annoyed lots of people because it comes in quite early and they're unlocking loads of shit they can't use for ages unless they're willing to spend for reals.)

[PREDATOR490]

You paid money to be better... at a coop game?

I paid money to make a Coop game better by becoming a Founder.

[TheFeniX]

I have to say, I'm not too broken up about money being spent on non-PvP games. My brother played some browser based space RTS with a pay to win option where he built up a sizable fleet without using real money. Some kid had it in for him and kept getting destroyed, but just kept buying new fleets instantly (according to my brother) and finally overwhelmed him through the power of his parents credit card. For myself, I got dragged into some F2P Korean MMO (I can't even remember the name, but I still had my Athlon 64 at the time) where you had to buy (with gold, not money) a PvP sash into order to even duel. However, actually dueling had you instantly losing to people half your level with super-sparkly gear. I uninstalled after a day or two.

If we get a 4-man team in this game, I honestly wouldn't mind buying that tank warframe (because that's what I do), but I'm afraid it would be terrible and I would have just wasted my money. At least LoL lets you test-drive heros if you play long enough. But I'm afraid it will be like Borderlands 1 where I was all about playing Brick, then I played him and he was garbage (Roland for life).

[Stark]

Since the only long term attraction is filling bars, even knowing someone paid to fill all the bars has already reduced my desire to play the game to zero. It'd be like paying $100 to unlock all the tanks in WoT; now there's just the masturbation of winning for no reason at a not very good game left.

At least I've been saved a great deal of time.

[TheFeniX]

Invites are all jacked. JS got one and joined, then he left for a bit and couldn't get a second one. RB couldn't get one at all. I ended up just setting the game to "Online" and had them both join my session through the Contacts menu. But make sure you right-click directly on the player's name otherwise the box just closes. Which makes sense because..... it doesn't make sense. Still besides the UI and the stupidly high cost of in-game monies, the game is pretty damn good considering it's F2P. Like... it has no business being this good.

Considering the fun we had with 3-man co-op tonight, this is likely going to stay installed for a while. So, good call.

[Stark]

I loved how if you have a pending friend request and left click on it, it closes the contact menu. Brilliant!

[TheFeniX]

Yea, the UI seems to do weird things and they made some strange choices when it comes to navigating it. Like, to upgrade my Slash attack, I have to pull the mod first, then upgrade it, and put it back. I assume this is so players don't find a way to upgrade installed mods past the items mods limit. But it is annoying. Oh well, Beta.

Latency was a small problem last night. Player movement seems to be handled all client side because rubber-banding and teleporting is not an issue. The game however gets finicky with NPC placement. Rather than the models teleporting, I think there's a delay, depending on latency, where the models/hitboxes aren't where you happen to be shooting, but the game will still give you hits with a gun, but melee gets pretty finicky at times. I've never had the problem of shooting an enemy and him dieing some time later due to lag, but I've ninja sliced more than a few NPCs that then explode into gore a second or two later.

This also causes issue with Excalibur's slash ability which can one-shot like 6 guys, but will often leave one or two alive because it didn't hit them, even though they were in range.

Oh, and if you want to fly through the map without ever running out of Stamina, just sprint, jump, then crouch for the "waaaa Jedi" flying kick, and rinse and repeat because your stamina recharges during the kick animation. You can also outrun anyone sprinting with this method. Works for Sprint > Crouch > Jump as well, but that gives you more air-time than travel distance.

Can Commanders teleport you? Last night, I would get teleported back to the same area, with some kind of blur effect and my character doing the "jump + melee" downstab. It only seemed to happen when commanders were around but it was weird as Hell and no one else was having it happen to them.

[DireApostasy]

Yeah, Grineer Commanders will teleport you about the place. I'm not sure if they swap place with you or just move you elsewhere, but it's definitely them doing it. Confused the hell out of me first few times it happened to me.

[TheFeniX]

Server crashed tonight: ALL IS LOST!

Anyways, worked on Mars to get the mats for my dual heat blades. Just need 20k creds now, but I burned loads stacking up mods for future use as I level. Man, fusion on ability mods will hit you hard. That and my (awesome) new baseline shotty needed sweet mods for laying waste to dudes. It's a huge upgrade over the base rifle. If you can aim straight and for the head, rock on.

JS wants to hit Earth up so we can start farming blueprints and mats for warframes. From reading, he said you have to craft 4 items which take 12 hours a piece and then craft the Warframe which takes 3 days to craft. Factor in LOADS of credits. Yea, fuck and that, I got weapons to make. TBH, if we get to that point and I'm still enjoying the game, I might just outright buy Rhino because at that point, the game would be worth the $15-$30 I'd have to spend to get that much plat, so they could consider it my purchasing of the game. But Excalibur is turning out to be awesome. I've been stacking shield and vitality and just bum rushing everyone with my shotgun. Dash and Slash (or whatever) is stupid overpowered making most of his other abilities worthless. Don't care though.

[PREDATOR490]

The Trinity and Nyx are good in a group, the former allows folks to replenish their health and energy by attacking a designated target and she can make everyone invulnerable for a short bit.
The Nyx on the other hand can mind control enemies to fight for your side - Very good against heavy soldiers since you can mind fuck them then kill them while they dont fight back. The big ability for the Nyx is basically an AOE of that ability so it can turn a massive crowd of enemies into a cluster fuck of them killing each other. Additionally, it is extremely bugged so that once an AI is flagged hostile to another AI it will not revert even with the power duration finished.
Apparantly this is one way folks are managing to get to wave 30ish in defence missions by simply turning the enemies against one another.

You could throw in a Banshee for an added Crowd Control - Support role since they have an ability which exposes the weakspots on the enemies and anyone who fires at the spot does bonus damage. The initial scream is pretty effective and knocking things on their ass so you can either get out of a corner or perform some quick kills. Killing things as quickly as possible and / or making it easier to do pretty much carries all the missions.
Spoiler

However, there is a rather hilarious random encounter feature which will spawn a 'Stalker' which will teach you to buff up your tank mods quickly enough

There are a bunch of Crash Course clips on Youtube which demonstrate the abilities of all the frames which can make it alot easier to select what you might want. The game is woefully lacking in telling you what stuff actually does or that some mods do not work with some weapons even though you can slot them with no indication of this.

Weapons - The Latron is extremely good if you want to be a sniper and has a huge ammo capacity because its classed as a rifle. The game dosent mention that the Bow and Sniper rifle use Sniper Ammo which is exceedingly rare in the game compared to the standard rifles which can quickly see you out of ammo in defense missions or later planets.
Pistols - Akbolto is brutal but the projectiles are kinda slow however the ammo count is large enough that you can effectively use it for a good chunk of the map and still be happily nailing Infested puppies to walls.
Blades - The Amphis and Fangs have been my favourites so far. The fromer is pretty powerful with the stun effect but the sound and screen shaking can be a real pain in the ass. The latter are a pair of daggers that are the fastest hitting weapons in the game.

[Broken]

Messed around a bit with this, seems enjoyable but I have only gotten to Earth and just maxed out the Excalibur starter frame. Fallen-Grey in game if you want to try some team play, but my play times are somewhat random.

[TheFeniX]

I'm still playing around. Built Rhino and Trinity. Since the buff to money (it scales with level now) I've been just buying BPs and making stuff non-stop because I have loads of mats. I still need a hundred or so more Alloy to make Hek, but it's no rush as Strun is still blasting everything.

My dual Vipers should be done by tonight, so I'll probably level them while I try and get the last part I need for Frost.

I've been playing this game for about 3 weeks solid. I'm only now starting to get a bit bored of it, but that's just because I've had to pug since JS is back on his shitty Internet and RB disappeared again like he always does. That said, I still found the game worth dropping $30 on, but I've only used the platinum to buy slots and Orokin Reactors because everything else isn't that hard to get at all.

[Vendetta]

Anyone remember this?

It's only halfway down the front page, after all.


Well, it turns out there is news hereabouts. Warframe will be appearing on the PS4 at launch, apparently. It's the second free to play PC title currently announced for the console, alongside Blacklight: Retribution. Both will be available at the console's launch.

Whilst this is obviously just a release of games we already have on the PC, I think it shows that free to play on consoles is going to open up the way it has on PC.