Warframe: The War Within is Not Enough

Warframe is this amazing underdog story, where developer Digital Extremes has approached one publisher after another with their idea for a futuristic game about space ninjas. Nobody showed any interest in that game until DE settled for a compromise, a somewhat military-flavoured cover shooter titled Dark Sector. The game had fairly little to do with their original vision and scored mostly mediocre reviews.

They still couldn't find a publisher for their original idea. It didn't help that DE were involved in the notoriously awful Star Trek (2013). The studio was small, lacked funding and a publisher and all they had was an idea. So they crowd-funded their game, offering a bunch of founders' packs in various flavours to their small fan base, which helped them release a very unfinished, early version of the game - Warframe.

For a Free2Play title in 2013 it looked rather stunning.

At the very beginning, Warframe only had one 'tileset', one environment which was procedurally generated from a handful of hand-crafted rooms. There was a small selection of playable characters, the Warframes, shooting and slashing their way through a bunch of space marines. There was no story, bosses were placeholders and the selection of weapons was very limited. But Warframe's unique artwork, the mix of 3rd person shooter, hack'n'slay, stealth and parcour gameplay, as well as copious amounts of blood and gore made it unique. There was absolutely nothing like it at the time.

Today, Warframe follows a deep storyline, features dozens of playable frames, the amount of weapons is in the hundreds and there are several unique boss battles, many of which require the mastery of certain tactics and attack patterns rather than simple DPS. People breed and level up their own pets, customize their starships (read: personal hangout), build their own clan dojos and enjoy a community of over 26 million players spread across the PC, Xbox One and PS4. Warframe has turned into a behemoth - one that frustrates newcomers and veterans alike, one seeming too massive for the developers to maintain.

Archwing levels look great, but they're hated by vast parts of the community.

One problem with Warframe's myriad of features is how they completely overwhelm newcomers. I have dragged over a dozen people into this game, most of which have given up on it during the first two weeks. It goes a little like this:

Very early on, Warframe tells you to put modifications in your weapons to make them stronger. Simple enough. However, said mods are fairly weak until you upgrade them. Doing so requires Endo, which you can randomly find as you play the game. Upgrading mods with Endo causes them to cost more mod points. Gear only has limited mod points, which can be doubled by installing an Orokin Catalyst (or Orokin Reactor in some cases). If you still run out of mod points, you may also install a Forma, which will reduce the cost of an installed mod by 50% (rounded up) if the mod matches the Forma's polarity. Forma can only be installed on level 30 gear, causing its level to drop back to 0, meaning you have to level it up all over again. And if you didn't understand any of this, well... that's how people trying to get into Warframe feel.

You can breed space cats in Warframe.

Weapon modifications, upgrades, dojos, syndicates, reputation, mastery, pets - Warframe piles one system on top of the next one, making the game about as easy to get into as rocket surgery. One of my friends grit his teeth, stayed around long enough to get the hang of everything while we helped him through the toughest bits. Then a quest told him to breed his first pet, an adorable space dog, which permanently died when he didn't log in for a few days. Yes, Warframe kills your pets if you neglect the game for too long. He could have saved his puppy by putting it into cryostasis, but again - the game just sicks a million features at you and it's difficult to keep track of them all.

On the other side you get veteran players, who have been starving for content for over a year now. The last huge chunk of content arrived in late 2015 in the shape of a cinematic quest: The Second Dream. It featured fantastic voice acting, incredible cutscenes and blew absolutely every bit of previous story content out of the water. It didn't just raise the bar for Warframe, but for Free2Play games in general. Check out some of the video if you don't mind spoilers:

And then came a whole lot of nothing. Yes, they added a few more playable warframes to the dozens that already existed. Added more weapons to the ridiculously massive arsenal. There was also Lunaro, a pvp mode in the spirit of Rocket League, minus all the fun. An odd choice, considering only a tiny fraction of the player base ever shows up in pvp to begin with. A boss battle received an overhaul and took veteran players all of ten minutes to finish, if that.
Finally, they announced to continue the story with another cinematic quest, titled The War Within. They got people hyped up with teasers, trailers and a new website, aiming for a release in July 2016.

A little while prior to the new quest's planned release, data miners leaked the entire script. DE claimed the leak showed only a very early draft of the quest and the finished version would be bigger, better, all new. They also delayed the release. It is now November and The War Within still isn't here. It's supposed to be released this month, four months later than it should have been, and a whole year after The Second Dream.

My human body is ready.

And then what? People have waited a whole year for this. The War Within could be masterfully crafted from angel labia and it won't live up to the community's impossible expectations. It'll take all of two hours to complete, if that, and then... again, what? Wait another year for the next bit of story?
They have raised the bar impossibly high and the game cannot sustain itself to keep veterans interested in between the story updates, which are already being drip-fed to the players as it is.
There have been no new events this year, pvp is still dead, some new weapon variations can hardly be considered content and The War Within will leave veterans wanting more but deliver nothing.

One big problem with developer DE is that they promise everything to everyone, up to a point where they simply cannot keep up. A whole new type of Warframe, 'Umbra', has been announced last year and is still nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, they already told fans they'd look into Umbra weapons at Tennocon in August. Fixes for certain broken abilities, entire Warframes and the focus system have been promised and proclaimed to be 'on top of the priority list' months ago. The divisive Archwing gameplay, which is completely detached from the rest of the game, was allegedly enhanced with a more realistic flight model, which gives players motion sickness, causing many players to ignore Archwing altogether.

Other features, such as a promised overhaul for the weapon modding and damage system are no longer being mentioned at all, whilst Warframe's frustrating mastery system has been in desperate need of a fix since its introduction to the game. Much of Warframe's content is gated behind a so-called mastery rank, which can only be raised by upgrading as many weapons and warframes to their maximum rank as players can manage. People purchase gear solely for the purpose of raising mastery, immediately discarding their new items once they reach the level cap.

Players exploit the levels and game modes which provide the highest amount of experience for their play time, causing DE to either slow down progress in these levels or straight-up removing said levels entirely, thus fixing the symptoms, without ever touching the actual problem.
Meanwhile, there is no interesting new content, special events only happen every other month and they're all rehashed versions of previous events and there is simply nothing to do for people, who have already maxed out all their favourite gear and warframes.

I'm long past the point where upgrading my damage would still help.

On top of the many outdated, overly complicated features and the promised fixes, which never seem to happen, there's also a bunch of smaller problems, which have been around since day one. There's the incredibly stupid AI, which will get stuck in corridors and doorways during defense missions. You're supposed to defend a target, but you'll really end up searching the entire level for stuck enemies, who are simply too dumb to ever reach you. They don't even understand how doors work.

There's a bug, which randomly causes your melee hotkey to do precisely nothing, making your melee weapon completely useless. This bug has come and gone since early 2013 and is particularly fun when your build of choice prefers melee to guns. Sometimes the servers will become unresponsive, causing you to receive no reward at the end of a mission, which is particularly frustrating after you've spent an hour or more in an endless survival mission.

Warframe is still a fantastic game. It's not simply one of the best Free2Play games out there - it's one of the best games, period. But instead of releasing more and more underwhelming weapons and even more Warframes with four semi-identical abilities each, perhaps it's time to focus on some of the game's core aspects and finish them. How about giving each planet a unique tileset? Or giving all the bosses complex patterns and a story instead of having a mix of detailed boss baddies, bullet sponges and placeholder models? How about fixing broken, borderline unplayable Warframes instead of releasing new ones? How about a new player experience, which doesn't require a college course to understand and enjoy? How about giving Archwing the same amount of love and polish found in regular Warframe? Alternatively - fucking remove it! It simply isn't that good and adds very little to the game in its current state.

And maybe let me invite people to my ship, so I didn't decorate it for nothing?

DE need to get their shit in order. I have no doubt that The War Within will be incredible. But even if it took an entire day to complete, it won't be enough. Infinite game modes no longer provide interesting rewards. The mastery grind is longer and more boring and tedious than ever. Some of the most powerful weapons and warframes are being sealed in 'The Vault' to create artificial scarcity, causing nothing but unnecessary frustration to the player base. These problems need to be addressed.

Some people have ridiculously high expectations for the new story content. That's what you get when you keep them waiting for a year, constantly teasing them and promising nothing but the best content, ever. You better keep them entertained after that final cutscene plays. Because they're not gonna sit and wait another year for the next two hours of content.