-
Saya’s Vigil being required for Venus slows down the progression from singleplayer into being able to actually play with your friends who are excited to play with you and help you unlock planets
-
The quest is bugged for new players. When you return from your first bounty in the plains, it doesn’t let you talk to Konzu until you reload Cetus
-
The quest is bugged for old players. The quest forces you to equip a codex scanner, and simaris scanners don’t count. If you try to run the mission with just a simaris scanner anyway, it adds a codex scanner to your gear wheel automatically.
-
The quest contains spoilers. Sentients are a big deal! You’re not supposed to know who the Orokin fought in the great war until you reach Uranus and complete Natah. Mentioning sentients that early is fucky. Why explain them to brand new players?
-
It doesn’t help with progression. While the story is fine, and it has some touching moments, it doesn’t help the player unlock anything except the codex scanner. It’s a lot of time to sink into a pure story quest when the first thing a new player wants is to power up and get out of the Newframe zone of progression and into the good stuff.
-
It STILL doesn’t help make the new player experience less confusing. Yeah, it explains codex scanners, but my friend still needed a lot of help to get it started.
-
It’s too hard to start. You can only start it by doing a level 5-15 bounty in the plains. That’s too hard for a brand new player who only just killed Vor!
To add some positivity and contrast to this post, I just played Call of the Tempestarii for the first time and it’s SO GOOD. Ghost ship, space shanty, going Moby Dick on a ghost and a burial at sea. It’s the perfect story centered Warframe quest.
- Bugs: Yeah, those should be fixed. Although, they are also kind of a proper introduction to Warframe…
- Slows down progression: Eh, I think this IS progression. By the time you are finishing Earth, you should at least have high 10s, if not 20s, for your starting gear. And it is no longer mk-1 which helps a bit. That is enough to do a Tier 1 or 2 bounty. And now that we have the bus stop system, getting to the objectives is viable without an archwing launcher. More on this at the end
- Spoilers: Are they really? Players won’t know what an Orokin even is by this point. Hell, I was at Tennocon this year and it was fun to listen to how many people did not realize that “we” are Orokin or what the deal was with the 1999 teaser.
- New Player Experience: This ties into progression, but I think it is good because it gives players an option and shows there is stuff to do when your mouse finger gets tired (fishing and mining. Nobody captures).
So about that progression. One of the things I HATED the most when I was going through the progression was shit like the Mote Amp. It is genuinely bad in every possible way. And the way you move past it is to build a real amp. Which CAN be obnoxiously grinded by running out at night and grabbing the fuckers who fly away and so forth. Or you can just do a few Eidolon hunts. And while you won’t be the main damage dealer, you should be fine in a tier 1 pub so long as somebody is.
And that is what the bounty and quest teach you. Maybe you do star chart on solo to start out because you want to learn the game rather than spend the entire time jogging to the green extract while some obnoxious vet is whining that you aren’t fast enough. But this teaches you that you do want to be ready to pub because it lets you do content you might not be geared up for. Because 5-15 bounty is hard for a solo player with poor modding at level 10-30. It is still trivial for a group of newbs. Or trivial for the MR25 player who is doing a Nightwave.
I don’t think it is sufficient for it. But it is clear that DE is teaching people that the best way to get better at doing an activity is to actually do it. Rather than wait until you are “ready”.
Also: I “love” how Duviri and now the heads up of a fast forward are bringing everyone out of the woodwork to get angry that new players might not have the exact same experience they did. Like, I think the paid skip is kind of scummy. But Reb was totally right to point out that most MMOs already do this either with a level skip token that comes with an expansion or just sunsetting content entirely. It needed a lot of work to provide MR progression but I still think the Duviri start was an awesome idea (reminiscent of Guild Wars 1 having a different start with a lot of the smaller expansions).
They need to accelerate the new player start, way more than Duviri did. Getting through stuff needs to be like 4x faster (or skippable). There are so many stupid, grindy parts of the game like the mote amp, progression speed bumps that make things take longer for no reason.
(I hate Saya’s Vigil too though.)
Agreed. Although I think the star chart/junction “fixes” will probably help with that. Get most of the side quests off the main path and steer people toward the path to The New War
Was chatting with a friend and I still think Duviri was the answer.
- Circuit with more resource drops (so you can build the BPs) gets players frames. This is something available to everyone and most new frames come with a new resource or two at this point so there aren’t too many concerns over “ruining” the game for anyone but the gatekeepers
- A new NPC who will allow you to “take out a loan” for the grindier stuff. Imagine getting your Railjack NOW but basically having the equivalent of a lich taxing all your missions for a week or two after while you pay it off. Would need some balancing (imagine getting an amp for zero wisps…), but uses existing mechanics. And you can obviously expect to have a plat rush for this.
- The Duviri start exits you out AFTER The New War with a limited subset of star chart nodes unlocked. This is more or less “fair” since everything up to that is very much The Operator’s story and it is looking like Zariman and Whispers In The Wall and 1999 are “act 3” as it were. But starting Vor’s Prize puts you on The Operator’s path and culminates in The New War. And same main quest oriented Junction requirements to encourage players to do the main quest.
- Duviri allows you to get up to rank 20 on any frame/weapon whether you own it or not. This gives players a chance to generate MR but still requires us to grind and “own” an item for the full benefit. This also makes Duviri more “worth it” for existing players who aren’t “ready” for Steel Path and Incarnons.
- Plat unlocks for starchart (but not junctions) if people really don’t want to do Second Dream/New War.
- And, as we already have, plat unlocks for Necramechs, Archwings, Railjacks, and whatever else ends up being needed for main quest missions.
And this more or less continues for the year 20 update or whatever. Either continue with the idea of Eternalism or do something with Hayden Tenno in 1999 (since I doubt The Man in the Wall is going to be the big bad for more than a few years). Obviously The Operator is a MUCH heftier “start” but it also already comes with some really nice rewards like (Broken) War, Paracelcis, and Naturak. Hell, add one or two more goodies as retroactive “Hey, thans for being a tenno for this past decade” to make people happy. Gotva Prime has already shown that DE know how to give some pretty insane stuff “for free”.
And Operator Path is pretty fast if you are not stopping to grind, doing the god awful Silver Grove bullshit.
I was just talking to my friend who played Saya’s Vigil right after they made it a requirement to get to Venus, and she’s dipped her toes into Duviri, but she says she had no idea that Duviri is full of spoilers. I had to pull a single sentence out of the marketing for Duviri paradox to show her. That sentence is “all Tenno can choose to begin at the ending and play The Duviri Paradox”. That’s all the warning new players get that Duviri hints at the Operator, straight up spoils the Zariman, lets you do Transference… Duviri isn’t a “quick-start” option, Duviri is Warframe 2. A whole other game, that anyone can get and start playing, with its own new player experience, but which assumes every spoiler from the previous is out of the bag and just tells you all of them to get you up to speed.
No arguments there but that is kind of why I said we are in Act 3 now.
Act 1 is largely the (mostly plotless) period between Vor’s Prize and Second Dream. It is setting the stage for the game, mostly, and is the kind of filler people would be told to “push through” if this were a tv show. The goal is to get us to the point of “Oh yeah, I vaguely recall that guy” every time Tyl or Vor or whatever show up.
Act 2 is where we have been for the better part of a decade. The Operator is a thing and their relationship with The Lotus is a driving force for a lot of the narrative. This probably ended with The New War, but we’ll need to see how Whispers plays out. This sets the stage for Albrecht and The Man In The Wall.
Act 3 is what we are in right now. The Operator and The Drifter are a thing, we are going to meet-ish Albrecht and Hayden Tenno, we are probably going to learn a lot about The Man in The Wall, and we are already fighting his minions as part of Zariman and Duviri.
I do think going in blind and playing The Second Dream is one of the top 100 experiences in gaming. But even DE have stopped considering The Operator to be a spoiler (and it is mostly just us players who still call it “spoiler mode”).
Which, going back to MMOs/Live Games. Cataclysm was a MASSIVE thing when it happened in WoW. And now it isn’t even the status quo that new players experience. Same with the Charr invasion in Guild Wars 1 or, probably, whatever is going on in Destiny at this point. Because “you have to play through 30 hours of content before we can even talk” is just not viable.
I forget if FF14 just gives level skips or also content skips to start in the expansions (and pretty much EVERYONE acknowledges A Realm Reborn is mediocre. And nobody can play the previous original campaign anymore). And Elder Scrolls Online doesn’t even start you with the original main quest at this point. You need to actively trigger that (which has implications for the game mechanics but…).
My partner just played the Second Dream for the first time, spoiler free, and it said the amount of plot and twists happening in a short duration was absolutely overwhelming. Some people might not care to experience Warframe’s story in order, but I think they should still be given an informed choice. DE needs to put a big spoiler warning in front of Duviri when you launch the game. And I think efforts would be better spent getting Natah and Second Dream closer to the start of the game than creating a new player experience for Warframe 2: Duviri. I’m sure it wouldn’t be hard to create a plot contrivance to let players visit Uranus for Natah before they’ve unlocked it, and then you can just push the quests to some earlier junctions instead of putting new quests in front of those junctions and slowing down the path to Second Dream.
Mild restructuring of the “standard” start would be nice… Considered some hypotheticals in prior drafts of this comment. Things like reducing grind between Mars & Uranus and giving limited access to Uranus early but… honestly it’s require some fine craftsmanship to make either work without some careful craftsmanship.
About 2, are you sure that’s still an issue? I did not encounter this during the two times I played the quest on the current patch. (both times fresh account)
Yeah, we ran into that one the other day. Maybe not if they updated it in the last few days. But it was still very frustrating to my friend who already has frustration issues with Warframe. (These issues have been alleviated with the addition of crossfriends)
