Warframe: The New Player Experience

>story is a nothingburger Here is me unironically playing Warframe for the lore and story.

Any money i spent on warframe is because i want to reward the people who made it, and I never payed for it, and i want them keep doing it.

0:58 "us experienced veteran warframe players" he says while still having the cyst on his neck

Dog. You forgot the other pet. CAT.

when you go against the murmur faction in late game the music becomes a banger

The biggest issue with Warframe's early story is it was time limited. A lot of relevant story progress was only seen during the time limited event that introduced new bosses. Which means most people never got to experience the conflict/story that resulted in bosses presence in their system. It's a huge flaw that I wish they resolved because they have the story there, they just never actually implement it properly after the introduction events conclude.

To say the Starchart takes only 100 hours is an understatement on its own. Not only does that mean you solely focused on missions, there’s a few that are locked behind story missions that, without proper time to grind out gear and items, will be incredibly difficult. If they don’t completely block you from doing them until you craft certain items, New War PTSD

DE's worst mistake with the story is that for the first 7 years or so (up until Plains) there's a lot of things they put into Events, which are just gone (if you're lucky you can read about them on the wiki). Alad V's story is the worst offender for this.

oh my sweet baby tenno. Good luck and may your soul rest in peace...

Random fact: Bullet Jumping through the game, the main form of movement, started out as a bug that players enjoyed using, so the devs decided to keep it in and make it a mechanic.

as a Warframe Veteran, the story is in this unfortunate place where some of the pre-Natah quests do actually tie together with the main story, but they're often spaced far enough away from those later quests that you forget about the specific pieces of dialogue in the earlier quests (looking at Stolen Dreams and Heart of Deimos here). Other earlier quests are simply related to a smaller part of the game and while interesting, not everyone is going to care about (Gara's quest, for instance, most people do the quest to get Gara, not to understand her lore). Once you hit Natah, things start falling into place as the quests from there are largely sequential and their cinematic nature (most of them) lends itself to make them more memorable before the next one. Heart of Deimos would benefit from that too if it wasn't so far back in the star chart comparatively that it gets forgotten between Mars and Uranus. Other than that, a lot of the other lore/story of the game is harder to find, hidden in little areas like in the Codex, Luverian, and other smaller spaces. Annoyingly some of it is also lost to old events, only to be found on the wiki or in a youtube video going over all the lore of the game. Some other parts are deliberately mysterious, not fully detailed, leaving some parts untold (yet, at least)

The warframe story is this Start : okay I’m a cool space ninja Middle : Idk what’s happening and tbh idc End: OMG THIS IS AMAZING

Warframe Veteran™ here: Yeah, most of the game's issues have always stemmed from the early game stuff, and it's been like that for years now. I do wish DE would spend a month or two overhauling the older systems and content, at the minimum. But! The stuff they've been releasing as of late has been banger after banger (at least, I think so) Welcome to Warframe, and enjoy your stay, Tenno!

the only real complexity of warframe is the shear amount of systems stacked on top of each overall working in unison. Mods, Arcanes, Focus Trees, Weapon traits, Companions, Ability buffs, external buffs, weapon types, statuses, critical hits, ect. So many systems are just thrown at you without much explanation. However youtube guides are everywhere.

my first 100 hours in warframe was just research and in my 200 hour i was leveling up my frame then in 300 hours i was grinding plat and the rest was just being AFK doing trades and survival missions.

I'm like 2500h in and have no fking idea what is going on in this universe or what characters are related to whom. Started in 2015, did all the quests and uninstalled. Reinstalled in 2017 and run the second dream quest which was just confusing as I was lacking context. Now one of the most important and emotional quests is 7 years ago and I can barely remember a thing of all the crap that happened back then. But it's still my favorite game, as I love to play around with gear and experiment. I've like 300h in the Simulacrum alone and love to play the hardest mission in different variants and frames. This game is truely special.

I could imagine if later on when they ever fix the issue of the game not telling you about the premium currency, Ordis just breaks the fourth wall and tells you all about where to farm the warframe/weapon, how to get the currency without buying it with real money, and other methods of farming said warframe/weapon. Though it might “break the immersion” it’s there to help guide players from buying platinum to buy a warframe they can easily just farm a boss for.

1000+ hours into warframe and I still don’t know the story 😂

I would add few more criticisms on the early game (new player experience specifically): - lack of gun variety - tons of weapons, but almost nothing is available at the very start/easily, most likely need a friend to taxi you to higher tier planets to farm materials for even MR2 weapons (thats how I was getting Vectis) - lack of slots for everything - if not for that said friend to just gift me dozens of slots when I started, I would've dropped it, because early on it is very predatory - "pay platinum to own more than 3 guns or else!" - lack of customization options - tons of color pallets, can customize every color on your frame... and you only have one ROW of a basic pallete. Everything else - 75p! And while yeah, that's just a decoration, but that creates this illusion of inaccessibility - where to have any choice of anything you would have to pay. Its only when you accumulate a huge inventory of prime junk that's worth way more than you thought and you start actively trading and get thousands of plat easily, you finally realize how petty those prices were and how tiny those barriers are. But until then, unless someone proves to you otherwise, you'd be under impression that this is yet another scammy predatory cash-grabby F2P title. Honestly its just sad how the game manages to misrepresent itself to the newest players and its only a loyal fanbase that is actively fixing that. Now I'm part of that fanbase, gifting slots to newbies left and right, sometimes even gifting prime frames (no MR restriction).

The second dream was the first real story mission. Everything before that had lore sure but it wasn’t a focused narrative. Warframe does actually have some amazing story and lore, and as you get to more recent content it’s a bit more woven in, but much like the new player experience, the “wanna learn about the story” experience involves a lot of YouTube videos and a lot of research through the wikis.