WarFrame | Impressions

WarFrame went into open beta recently. I've known about the game for a while and signed up for beta, but never got a key. And I wasn't that interested, the frames look really odd to me, so never tried t get a key like I normally do.

There is little lore in this game. All you know is that Earthlings have degenerated into mutants from over-use of cloning. They are expansionist and destroy other species in the Solar System. There is a robot faction. That's all you know. You play as a Tenno, a race that has been dormant, recently revived to combat the Earthling mutant invasion. That's about it.

The game is very shiny. The amount of bloom in this game is glaring, at times I had to turn my head away from the screen before turning it off. I don't see much point in having blur and DOF for a third person game. Their is also an option that allows skills used by other players to change the colors on your screen. For example if there is an Ember player, your screen will often go Orange. And whenever a lot of particles or objects move, there are lags and hiccups from PhysX. The PhysX demonstration for this game is laughable. It looks as awful as it does for HawX.

You level in this game by using your Frame and weapons, and also picking up affinity orbs. You can mod your weapons and Frame with mods, which are randomly dropped. The mods can also be upgraded by fusing duplicates together or using Fusion mods. It takes a lot of credits to do all of this, especially with Fusion mods. The game becomes a grind. It's not Pay2Win, but Pay2NotGrind. Or Pay2NotBeBored. Anyway, you can buy Platinum to purchase everything from credits, mods, weapons, Frames, alternative Frame parts and more. The cost of Platinum in this game is atrocious. The cheapest weapons are $5 and the better are $10-20. For your Frame, it will cost about $50.

The missions are randomly generated. But they are all predictable. You will either have assassinate a target, rescue, or capture a target. Or you can gather intelligence and upload them or bring them back. The AI in the game is very simple, if you die, it's not from them flanking you and being clever, just in swarms. The skills used by your enemy are also bland, either shoot you or swing a weapon at you. They don't have any of the interesting skills player WarFrames do, unlike ME3. Variety among enemies doesn't exist in this game, no matter what they look like, they either just shoot or swing something at you.

There are no talents or skill modifications in this game. All you can do is improve or mod your weapon and Frame with mods. The 4 skills you do have can only become stronger with Mod fusions. That means all Ember are the same and just as all Excalibur players are the same.

I will be giving this game some more time before I stop playing. I've found the game to be a grind, but I'll play it another week before deciding whether this game is worth playing.

 

WarFrame matchmaking impressions

It's awful. Truly awful. You can't talk to your friends or create a group. You can only join a session if your friend has room and already in a game. You can try and set it to private, but there still isn't any easy to use UI to manage your group and see who is in it. Also when you click on a mission, you just sit there waiting until someone joins. There is no browser to see what available games there are, so you just have to switch from planet to planet looking for an opening.

For an online game, this is something you want to get right. And it's awful in WarFrame.

 

Another good reason to get this F2P title off their main site or Steam if you got Nvidia hardware would be to showcase some PhysX usage.
Next gen particle effects. xD

 

Other than fireworks sparkly effects I'm having a hard time figuring out what the difference is. Also isn't it possible to run PhysX using only your CPU?

 

Personally i feel PhysX is useless in this title, all it does when you enable it in the options menu (Nvidia only!) is that it add really poor looking particle effects when enemies despawn and make the game lag extra much on AMD hardware.
Similar effects are on Hawken.

 

Waaaaaaahhhhhhhh (delete)

 

You level your frame and gear in Warframe with mods, which you get as random drops. This is what makes the game a chore and terrible grind. Here is how it works. You level mods with fusion, fuse mods together. This costs credits, lots of it. The higher the level you want to mod it to, the more it costs, both in credits and the number of mods needed to fuse. Exponential. Level 1 upgrade cost around 200+ credits. Level 6 will cost around 20,000 to 100,000 credits.

How do you know what to choose? You fuse duplicates. But, mods also have a symbol at the top left, that designate type, offensive, defensive etc. Matching symbols give more fuse power and cost less.

You also get fusion mods, sell those. Those cos atrocious amounts to use. Stick to duplicates and duplicate symbols.

How do you know how much can be upgraded? At the center left are dashes. Those tell you how many times it can be upgraded. As you can tell, to max one mod, it could cost up to a million credits and hundreds of modules. Very expensive. Very grindy.

This is why I believe WarFrame in the end will not be successful. Digital Extremes are too focused on making money. Yes I know, they are in the business to make money. But what I mean is, every aspect of this game is designed around making the game very time consuming, encouraging players to spend real money to cut down on time needed. Everything from items that increase the amount of experience you get for your Frame, and Weapons. Mod packs, so you don't have to grind for them. You can also use your platinum (real money currency) to buy in game credits. Of course buy weapons, frames, blueprints etc. It's incredible. Even after you grind for days to get all the blueprints to make your frame. You may have to grind days more to grind for credits and materials to make them. You'll need about 150,000 credits to make a frame. Get this... It takes THREE days for your frame to be built! Which is why they give you the option to use Platinum to not wait. This game is all about making money. It's too bad.

The above wouldn't be so bad if the gameplay was really exciting. At first, the thrill of using guns, your powers and being a space ninja is fun. But it gets repetitive. No matter how much harder the encounter gets, it's the same, either rescue, sabotage, or exterminate, or collect intel. That's it. The boss fights are pathetic. No strategy needed, just shoot more ammo or swing your sword more at it than a normal enemy. The AI are not good either, fun to kill, fun to see nailed to the wall, but behavior is far from interesting.

For now, the game is fun, but I know, in a few weeks, maybe less, I will be sick and tired of the game and will have no desire to return to it. It's too bad, this game has some really great potential. Instead, Digital Extremes have just put together a series of ideas that are all about making the game more of a chore, more of a grind, more of a time sink to make money.

They really should just sell he game for $40 and be done with it. So they can focus on making the game fun and interesting.

 

WarFrame Update:

So I've played this game some more. Since going open beta on Steam, Digital Extremes claims they have now reached 1 million registered users. That's the stupid thing about Free To Play Games. They always like to tout how many registered players they have. Reality is... I have no idea where these 1 million players are, because 80% of the time I play this game, I'm soloing. Actual concurrent players? My guess just a few hundred from US. Puny numbers.

Next is the player mastery. It's ridiculous how much you have to grind for that. That goes up to I think level 20. I've only seen one level 6 and one level 8 so far. That is the player rank. You rank that up by leveling new weapons and new suits. Those two players I've seen? Yeah they have played a few hundred hours combined with paying $100 for the Master Founder, the other paid I think maybe $200 or more. Yeah Free to Play right? Pay to Win? No, but it sure saves you grinding 5000 hours though. So they just bought all the weapons and frames to level.

Trust me it takes forever to create a WarFrame.

Anyway, there is very little reason to try new weapons and warframes in this game. Actually I can't think of any, other than you are bored and just want to try something slightly different, but doesn't matter. And so there is very little reason to level your mastery, to prove you have mastered the game.

With 40 hours played, I guarantee you will agree with me. You will find it's the MODS, not the frame or weapons that make you strong. Leveling up your mods to increase your shield, health, weapon strength, armor piercing and so on. Taking the default weapon frame you start with and with the default you gun you use, with maxed mods, I guarantee you can destroy anything as fast as anyone with the "advanced" warframes and weapons. Little incentive to waste hundreds of thousands of credits in creating new weapons and warframes and farming for materials. Just do missions, farm credits, some mods and that's it.

I do plan to quit this game sometime, I see no reason to keep playing it after I'm done clearing all missions from all areas/planets/whatever you want to call them.

And of course they use PhysX. To anyone who wants to try this game, do not give them a dime for this decision. There is a ton of particle effects and objects flying everywhere in this game. Even Nvidia players who with PhysX options turned off, framerate can drop to single digits. And they are using 660Ti and 670. Do not give them a penny, just try out this grind fest and move on is my verdict. PC game that slaps the face of all PC gamers, asinine, truly asinine.

 

Why'd you grind for 40 hours if it's so terrible? You already made up your mind about it a few hours in, right? I couldn't put that many hours into a game I disliked so strongly, even if I were being paid to do so.

Edit: Just finished the first level. That was... bad lol. I can't even begin to evaluate the gameplay because of how flawed it is technically. My GPUs should make mince meat of this game, yet is only runs at 20-40fps, with random dips into the single digits. I think travesty is a word for it... I haven't seen a game run this badly since the early days of Enduro with my old 7970m.

 

It's called PhysX. Majority of PhysX is run on your CPU, regardless if you have Nvidia or AMD, doesn't matter. That's why using PhysX is a slap in the face to all PC Gamers, it's not an issue of being Nvidia or AMD fanboy. It's just the worst tech introduced to PC Gaming. And i keep playing because I want to clear all the missions. Already said that. I am not spending any money or changing warframes etc. Once that, I'll quit. Why? Cause I want to. I don't mind grinding, my impressions are just honest. I really don't think this game gives any incentive to keep playing for those who don't like the grind.

 

Every other Physx game I own runs great. Even if it were running of the cpu, I've got a 3920xm... it should handle it

I'm pretty sure this is just a badly-optimized POS. Perhaps the Physx implementation is to blame, but it shouldn't bee running so badly.

 

It ran terrible when i did a quick test as well, i cant believe how much my 680m struggled with this title.
Uninstalled for now, think the devs should fix the game first before making it a cash grab.

 

Completely agree. From what little I saw it seemed to control and play pretty well, but it's ridiculous for a game to run this badly on high end hardware.