I’ve heard of Warframe, but I never took the time to play it. With a very positive rating on Steam, it promises that you will “awaken as an unstoppable warrior and battle alongside your friends.” I spent around a week playing it to see what it’s all about. All I learned was that i don’t understand Warframe.
How to Play
When you start playing Warframe you are first asked to create an account. It seems that you will always have to be online when playing this game, even in single player. At least creating an account was as easy as choosing to use Steam to login, which made the process a lot smoother.
After an intro cinematic that introduces the three main characters, you are asked to “Choose a Warframe”. At this point I know very little about the characters, so I decided to go with Mag as I liked the idea of having electromagnetic powers.
You are then thrown into your first mission and introduced to the controls. This is the best part of the game to me. Within minutes I was switching weapons, using powers, and slicing enemies up with my sword. It all just flows well together and gives you a strong sense of control.
After playing through the tutorial areas I was excited for this game. With smooth controls and smooth combat I was expecting a fun gameplay experience.
Mingleplayer
When I started working at Splash Damage they were just about to release Brink. They introduced me to the concept of mingleplayer, or multiplayer as singleplayer. Essentially that means that there is a single player campaign, but it’s played as a multiplayer game, with all your enemies being other actual players.
In Warframe they seem to have a similar concept, except it focuses on cooperative gameplay. As you play through the campaign, you will be joined by other players on missions and play through them together. It’s an interesting concept, but it’s one that doesn’t really work.
There’s never any explanation or need for other players in a game. The missions and enemies are so easy to kill that actually losing or dying in a mission is a challenge. Levels become a slog of moving through them and button bashing until everything is dead.
So when you have a more experienced player join you (as most players will be when you start), they just speed through the mission leaving you to pick off any enemies they missed. This damages your progression, as you don’t net any kills and miss out on experience and bonus resources. I ended up hating missions where other players joined me, since it basically meant I would have nothing to do for the mission.
Unchallenging
This brings me to the games biggest flaw: there is no challenge. I played through around half a dozen questlines, completed dozens upon dozens of missions and slayed literal thousands of enemies. Yet at no point did I feel like I had to think. Just run toward red dot, see enemy, mash random buttons until everything dead.
The boss fights are the most underwhelming. They don’t have any strategy and don’t do enough damage to be any threat. I beat every boss I encountered by just running up to it and slashing at it with my sword. No preparation or strategy was needed.
I tried to get into the story, and I can recall vague things about trying to liberate a robot race and fighting genetically modified monsters to prevent an outbreak. Stories in video games can be simpler, but when you don’t feel there’s any actual stakes, it’s hard to get invested in.
So. Many. Things.
I haven’t talked about the biggest aspect of the game. Building weapons, upgrading them, and upgrading your character. To start I will mention that there is an in-game store but it’s not the most egregious store I’ve ever seen. Though there are still items that cost $30+ which seems excessive.
Rather than focusing on the mission gameplay, the game actually seems to revolve around upgrading your Warframe and its equipment in order to become more powerful. The way you do this is by finding random items, building new weapons using blueprints (taking several real-world hours to complete), adding upgrades to your weapons/armour, and gaining experience by fighting enemies.
There are various different in-game currencies that can be used for each type of build or upgrade or to purchase new weapons or make things build faster or to upgrade your upgrades oh and you can pay for new things with real money as well and it’s so overwhelming that I just don’t want to even try and get my head around this overdesigned system.
In other words, I don’t like it. It might have been something I could find myself getting invested in, were it not for this game’s fatal flaw: I don’t need to upgrade my character. I’m already killing everything the game throws at me with ease. Even the boss fights are over in less than 2 minutes.
I can’t see a reason to try and wrap my head around this overly complex system so that I have higher numbers in some stats when I don’t need those higher number to make progress. To me, it just means the game boils down to a pretty spreadsheet simulator.
Conclusion
I came, I played, but I got bored. I guess this just isn’t a game for me. Some people do enjoy just collecting resources and making the numbers attached to their characters go up. If that’s you then you’ll probably enjoy this game.
But I’ve never been drawn to MMOs precisely for this reason. I don’t like grinding, and I especially don’t like grinding if there is no clear goal in sight. Perhaps if there was more challenge in the actual missions, or if there was a clear goal I needed to prepare for I’d be more invested in the game. Unfortunately, Warframe is a pure grind which makes it a game I’ll be putting back on the shelf.
