It's the best game I've ever played where I still feel the need to really stress the downsides. The gameplay is fantastic, incredibly smooth high-mobility third-person shooter with melee and """magic""" powers, but you have to deeply love that gameplay because the grind for new items is eternal and unrelenting.
The gameplay is lots of fun. It's a very frantic space ninja wizard parkour melee shooter. It's definitely one of the fastest, most mobile PvE games around. Typically you pick a mission, load in with a squad of randos, then bounce through the mission at 30mph killing everything and completeing objects.
The but is that the game is extremely grindy. It's not at all jokingly refered to as Warfarm by friends. You're going to be running through the same tilesets doing the same objectives much.
Progression in the game is tied to warframes, which are basically classes, as well as weapons and mods. As you go through levels you'll get mods as loot. The mods give bonuses to your guns and frames. The mods level up using a resource you find by playing the game. A lot of the meat of the game is buildcrafting, coming up with effective combinations of frames and weapons and then modding them to do absurd amounts of damage. With some exceptions it's not a difficult game to play. even in the very highest levels a moderately prepared team is rarely in danger of loosing. it's more about the moment to moment thrill of blasting things and stopping every once in a while to level up yoru gear, or start building a new item, or whatever.
Re: Monetization - It uses a pay to skip model. Building stuff like weapons and pieces of warframes takes real-world time> I think buildfing all the parts of a warframe and the frame itself takes like three days real time. You can pay premium currency to skip the build times. They also charge premium currency to expand the number of frames an dweapons you have, or to get items that are otherwise rare and difficult to acquire through gameplay. You can get everything you neerd through gameplay but it'll be slow going. A lot of people trade extra weapon parts and whatnot to other players, in game, for premium currency to buy whatever bits and blorbs they need.
So, lots of fun, extremely time consuming, more focused on buildcrafting, farming, and gradually becoming absurdly powerful than tight tactical gameplay. the community is generally very friendly and helpful. The setting is utterly bizarre weird-fiction sci fi. The story is generally very well regarded, more for the characters than the plot, and there are lots of good performances ranging from serious drama to ridiculous scenery chewing villains.
A lot of people struggle when they first get started bc there's so much to do and little real direction provided, and the general advice is to pick something that looks cool and ask people for help on what you need to do to get it.
Like as a for instance, I'm at the end of the end game, I've been playing since the game launched a decade ago, and I spent part of the evening running a new boss over and over, tweaking weapons and tactics to see if I could more effectively take down the enemies. I think I've only been downed once all evening even though this is close to the highest level of normal content. So it's more about "well, if I combine this weapon and this weapon and these abilities, what will that do?".
Also, the real, real, real endgame is fashion. It's all about the drip.
It's the ultimate power fantasy sci-fi action horde shooter, it's insanely fun. But it also has a steep learning curve because the devs refuse to trim the fat, there's a ton of features that aren't explained and a lot of new players don't make it past the first couple of hours. It's a very grindy game but because of how well designed the core gameplay is, the grind is actually a lot of fun.
Warframe is a very unique game in a lot of ways, but to get into it you either need to have another player explain stuff to you or you need to really like reading wikis.
Also, it might look like an AAA game at first glance, but the studio behind it is actually very cool. Here's Stephanie Sterling talking about them. If you're interested in trying the game, I can help you with figuring out what to do and where to go first etc.
Some things I find notable about plot and characterization
Has a trans woman, doesn't make a big deal out of it (Ticker). She's your contact for mutual aid with the Solaris, helps you hire crew for your gunship, and sonsors the Valentine's day event.
The current story arc is explicitly about two men who love each other but have a very complicated, fraught, and sometimes abusive relationship. They manage to mix softness and anger, betrayal and understanding and do a pretty good job.
An over-arching theme of the game that's been present the entire time is the horrific consequences of Imperialism. All the major factions are, in some way or another, the abandoned, unwanted children of the Orokin Empire. Created as tools for the selfish whims of the ruling class (who are immortal, blue, and nine feet tall. Not because they're aliens, that's just what they considered aesthetic), then thrown away in disgust when they showed independent will. One of the defining traits of that ancient, long dead upper crust is their overwhelming, monomaniacal need for absolute control over their subjects, and how that burning need for control eventually lead to their downfall and destruction. Thousands of years later the Orokin, their god like technology, and their horrible misdeeds still weigh over the system.
There's an entire story arc about union militancy and how labor struggle and the use of violence and outright terrorism in support of workers rights is cool and good. Also features what I think is one of the best labor songs in the 21st century - We all lift together
There's a story arc about a young autistic man who is cast out because partially because he's autistic, but mostly because he sees and understands a problem no one else can. The player has to investigate his sacrifice and take on the burden, setting the man free and setting up the next chapter of the story.
Self-discovery defines one of the earliest story quests and for warframe fans is generally considered one of the most impactful video game plot arcs. A lot of people cry.
There's an entire arc about a deeply alienated, traumatized family recognizing how they have hurt the people they love and re-building their relationships. It's not sappy; At the end they still have real problems and disagreements, but they've also built understanding and compassion.
There's an entire arc about survivor's guilt and redemption, as people come together to remember both the villainy they participated in, and their attempts to help people, and the disaster that ensued. It ends with a commitment to take a second chance to be better.
Found family is another consistent theme throughout the story. If you wanted to sum up the whole plot you could say that it's about your family being who you choose, and who shows up for you when you're in trouble.
One of the major enemy factions is, explicitly, capitalism. They have a religious devotion to profit (I'm the prophet of profit!) that their foot troops are indoctrinated in to and are consistently depicted as just disgustingly evil. The stock market is re-imagined as a winner-take-all blood sport.
Features a faction based, broadly, on indigenous people resisting imperial occupation and violence. Doesn't go in for noble savages, shows them having their own sophisticated culture, religion, and technology. There's an indigenous tracker and naturalist who avoids the typical "magical Indian" trope by combining a deep knowledge and connect to the land with the language of naturalism and conservation ecology, and being your contact for conservation efforts to protect endangered species from the environmental destruction wrought by the imperial invaders. The indigenous people are shown to be spacefaring traders and travelers instead of some isolated, "primitive" people living far from civilization.
There's an entire mini-game where your ultra-deadly magic space ninja wizard trades in their swords and assault rifles for a animal lures and tracking devices to try to remove endangered species from harms way and get them to conservationists who can help preserve and grow the species.
In a lot of ways the game is a mess of poorly meshed systems, power creep, and grind. But it also has some amazing story beats. If you don't feel l;ike playing it there are plenty of enormous lore vidoes that can walk you through the story.
Depends how much you like farming. The movement and combat are top notch, but unless they and the modding system can keep you entertained for literally hundreds of hours you're not gonna get very far. The new player experience can be pretty overwhelming and using the wiki is pretty mandatory.
That said, there is a huge variety of frames and weapons to keep you entertained, and the modding system allows you to drastically change individual play styles. If you're math focused you can waste close to half your play time just trying to squeeze a few extra points of damage into a weapon.
is this game good?
It's the best game I've ever played where I still feel the need to really stress the downsides. The gameplay is fantastic, incredibly smooth high-mobility third-person shooter with melee and """magic""" powers, but you have to deeply love that gameplay because the grind for new items is eternal and unrelenting.
Yes. But.
The gameplay is lots of fun. It's a very frantic space ninja wizard parkour melee shooter. It's definitely one of the fastest, most mobile PvE games around. Typically you pick a mission, load in with a squad of randos, then bounce through the mission at 30mph killing everything and completeing objects.
The but is that the game is extremely grindy. It's not at all jokingly refered to as Warfarm by friends. You're going to be running through the same tilesets doing the same objectives much.
Progression in the game is tied to warframes, which are basically classes, as well as weapons and mods. As you go through levels you'll get mods as loot. The mods give bonuses to your guns and frames. The mods level up using a resource you find by playing the game. A lot of the meat of the game is buildcrafting, coming up with effective combinations of frames and weapons and then modding them to do absurd amounts of damage. With some exceptions it's not a difficult game to play. even in the very highest levels a moderately prepared team is rarely in danger of loosing. it's more about the moment to moment thrill of blasting things and stopping every once in a while to level up yoru gear, or start building a new item, or whatever.
Re: Monetization - It uses a pay to skip model. Building stuff like weapons and pieces of warframes takes real-world time> I think buildfing all the parts of a warframe and the frame itself takes like three days real time. You can pay premium currency to skip the build times. They also charge premium currency to expand the number of frames an dweapons you have, or to get items that are otherwise rare and difficult to acquire through gameplay. You can get everything you neerd through gameplay but it'll be slow going. A lot of people trade extra weapon parts and whatnot to other players, in game, for premium currency to buy whatever bits and blorbs they need.
So, lots of fun, extremely time consuming, more focused on buildcrafting, farming, and gradually becoming absurdly powerful than tight tactical gameplay. the community is generally very friendly and helpful. The setting is utterly bizarre weird-fiction sci fi. The story is generally very well regarded, more for the characters than the plot, and there are lots of good performances ranging from serious drama to ridiculous scenery chewing villains.
A lot of people struggle when they first get started bc there's so much to do and little real direction provided, and the general advice is to pick something that looks cool and ask people for help on what you need to do to get it.
Like as a for instance, I'm at the end of the end game, I've been playing since the game launched a decade ago, and I spent part of the evening running a new boss over and over, tweaking weapons and tactics to see if I could more effectively take down the enemies. I think I've only been downed once all evening even though this is close to the highest level of normal content. So it's more about "well, if I combine this weapon and this weapon and these abilities, what will that do?".
Also, the real, real, real endgame is fashion. It's all about the drip.
...Dunno.
It's the ultimate power fantasy sci-fi action horde shooter, it's insanely fun. But it also has a steep learning curve because the devs refuse to trim the fat, there's a ton of features that aren't explained and a lot of new players don't make it past the first couple of hours. It's a very grindy game but because of how well designed the core gameplay is, the grind is actually a lot of fun.
Warframe is a very unique game in a lot of ways, but to get into it you either need to have another player explain stuff to you or you need to really like reading wikis.
Also, it might look like an AAA game at first glance, but the studio behind it is actually very cool. Here's Stephanie Sterling talking about them. If you're interested in trying the game, I can help you with figuring out what to do and where to go first etc.
Some things I find notable about plot and characterization
Has a trans woman, doesn't make a big deal out of it (Ticker). She's your contact for mutual aid with the Solaris, helps you hire crew for your gunship, and sonsors the Valentine's day event.
The current story arc is explicitly about two men who love each other but have a very complicated, fraught, and sometimes abusive relationship. They manage to mix softness and anger, betrayal and understanding and do a pretty good job.
An over-arching theme of the game that's been present the entire time is the horrific consequences of Imperialism. All the major factions are, in some way or another, the abandoned, unwanted children of the Orokin Empire. Created as tools for the selfish whims of the ruling class (who are immortal, blue, and nine feet tall. Not because they're aliens, that's just what they considered aesthetic), then thrown away in disgust when they showed independent will. One of the defining traits of that ancient, long dead upper crust is their overwhelming, monomaniacal need for absolute control over their subjects, and how that burning need for control eventually lead to their downfall and destruction. Thousands of years later the Orokin, their god like technology, and their horrible misdeeds still weigh over the system.
There's an entire story arc about union militancy and how labor struggle and the use of violence and outright terrorism in support of workers rights is cool and good. Also features what I think is one of the best labor songs in the 21st century - We all lift together
There's a story arc about a young autistic man who is cast out because partially because he's autistic, but mostly because he sees and understands a problem no one else can. The player has to investigate his sacrifice and take on the burden, setting the man free and setting up the next chapter of the story.
Self-discovery defines one of the earliest story quests and for warframe fans is generally considered one of the most impactful video game plot arcs. A lot of people cry.
There's an entire arc about a deeply alienated, traumatized family recognizing how they have hurt the people they love and re-building their relationships. It's not sappy; At the end they still have real problems and disagreements, but they've also built understanding and compassion.
There's an entire arc about survivor's guilt and redemption, as people come together to remember both the villainy they participated in, and their attempts to help people, and the disaster that ensued. It ends with a commitment to take a second chance to be better.
Found family is another consistent theme throughout the story. If you wanted to sum up the whole plot you could say that it's about your family being who you choose, and who shows up for you when you're in trouble.
One of the major enemy factions is, explicitly, capitalism. They have a religious devotion to profit (I'm the prophet of profit!) that their foot troops are indoctrinated in to and are consistently depicted as just disgustingly evil. The stock market is re-imagined as a winner-take-all blood sport.
Features a faction based, broadly, on indigenous people resisting imperial occupation and violence. Doesn't go in for noble savages, shows them having their own sophisticated culture, religion, and technology. There's an indigenous tracker and naturalist who avoids the typical "magical Indian" trope by combining a deep knowledge and connect to the land with the language of naturalism and conservation ecology, and being your contact for conservation efforts to protect endangered species from the environmental destruction wrought by the imperial invaders. The indigenous people are shown to be spacefaring traders and travelers instead of some isolated, "primitive" people living far from civilization.
There's an entire mini-game where your ultra-deadly magic space ninja wizard trades in their swords and assault rifles for a animal lures and tracking devices to try to remove endangered species from harms way and get them to conservationists who can help preserve and grow the species.
In a lot of ways the game is a mess of poorly meshed systems, power creep, and grind. But it also has some amazing story beats. If you don't feel l;ike playing it there are plenty of enormous lore vidoes that can walk you through the story.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Depends how much you like farming. The movement and combat are top notch, but unless they and the modding system can keep you entertained for literally hundreds of hours you're not gonna get very far. The new player experience can be pretty overwhelming and using the wiki is pretty mandatory.
That said, there is a huge variety of frames and weapons to keep you entertained, and the modding system allows you to drastically change individual play styles. If you're math focused you can waste close to half your play time just trying to squeeze a few extra points of damage into a weapon.