Warframe=Nopeframe

I played a few minutes of Warframe like 8 years ago and then set it aside.

Now I've come back. This game is now 11 years old and going strong with updates.

The Good

It's just beautiful, which haunted me because I remember the last time I thought this. It was Destiny 2. There are A LOT of parallels between these two games, and this one came first. We know who was copying from who.

And then I discovered the setup for this game: cities and bases populated by tons of players and then you go out and play together or solo in instances. This is how Guild Wars I, my favorite MMO of all time, was set up.

The depth of this game is profound. It is what I found most compelling: that I could play a bazillion hours and still have more to do.

The Mediocre

The repetition and grind. It's kind of to be expected, but I'm too old to grind unless I'm absolutely in love with what I'm doing.

The lack of proper tutorials. I would put this in bad, but it's so common nowadays in gaming. Devs don't bother writing extensive instructions and how-to content because they are spoiled by their communities doing it for free.

MMOs where you cant talk to people in missions are another thing that I find contrary to the MMO experience. I think the reason they're created like this is to reduce the need for moderation because some idiots will inevitable say the most vile things (Black Desert, I'm looking at you). I still don't like it. Didn't like it in Destiny. Yes, you can use Discord, but then you can only talk to certain people.

The Bad

RepetitivestressinjuryFrame. The finger gymnastics you have to do in certain parts are absurd. It made me think that it was ported from consoles, but OMFG it's not.

You get a hoverboard, which is fun...until you have to do the hoverboard quest, where you have to do things like jump a hundred feet in the air and land your board on people's heads. Then you get to jump and shoot people while you're in the air. It is overly difficult, but I finished it. By the time I finished, I deeply wished I could lock a Warframe executive in a room and force him to do this dumb shit 100 times. Now, if this were a new game, I would understand. But this game is eleven years old. They have no intention of fixing this quest.

And it was while I was doing this quest that I came across a video with a list of things that will doom your warframe account... There are certain resources that will set you back if you spend them on the wrong things. You are given premium currency at the beginning that can only be bought with money or through trading. It's natural for you as a new player to experiment and try using the resources you were given. Is this the end of the world? No, but a game where the premise is 'don't use most things because you need them later' is problematic. You receive all matter of garbage. Who knows what it does, but you better not do anything with it or else you'll regret it. No, this is where I became deeply pessimistic.

And then there was the last bit. Watch out for X mission because people who start it too early will get stuck in it and be too undergrunned to complete it. They have to create new accounts and start over. THAT is just dickish. Can I avoid that mission now? Yes, do I really want to play a game where the devs consider getting trapped in a mission and being forced to start a new account a feature and not a bug? Hell no.

And that's the end of Warframe for me. It's a beautiful game with deep flaws and devs who put out new content but don't bother fixing some fundamental issues with their game.