ign: Valadis (PC) @ophidian-bite - Tumblr Blog

theterribletenno

I keep rewatching the Warframe Tau demo and thinking "It's like SCORN and Disco Elysium had a hate baby"

#i literally said “what the scorn” outloud while watching tennolive

masters-of-void

"You know the Hunra's lapdog doesn't talk, but I'll bet we can make him whimper."

#god i really hope tau is good

harrow-v

the Lotus: "Would you still love me if I were a bug?"

aliennachos

gay-lotus

I think that warframe suffers from a complete disinterest in the concept of exposition. Below is a short essay about this.

Every open is a cold open. Loid doesn’t tell you what’s going on at all, halfway through the new war you don’t even know who you are playing as or what your objective is, and Stalker simply appears in the middle of the orb vallis and shoots some gun.

This works for the sake of quests like the arthur section of WITW or The Hex itself where a cold open allows for an extremely sharp contrast from what you’re normally used to.

It also works for The New War because the quest starts with a series of three separate cold opens that when stitched together actually form a long, slow burn opening showing the war itself and slowly establishing the stakes of the story.

Every bit of explanation or characterization is hidden away in places the average player won’t go, or triggered by a mechanism that you would only think to fund out by going onto the wiki.

Isleweaver requires you to go out of your way into places you probably won’t even be able to reach in time if you’re playing with a public squad for secrets you wouldn’t come across on your own.

Jade Shadows famously included a not so well written female character whose story and voice we only heard through a story hidden in relays up until the most recent quest.

If you want to find out literally anything about why alad v is infested and also amalgam and also normal as a new player without consulting the wiki, good luck because that’s almost all hidden behind events that already happened.

This severely alienates anyone who prefers to understand a game within said game by experiencing it themselves, let alone people who don’t like reading essays in the middle of action heavy games, let alone people who prefer dialogue and exposition over paragraphs.

Every quest is as short as humanly possible. I understand that this is on purpose so that players can get to the content faster, but it really hurts the quality of quests. Most quests leave players with one emotion; “okay but what the fuck actually just happened”.

Look at the responses to Angels of the Zariman, The Duviri Paradox, even The New War. It’s like they heard the phrase “show don’t tell” but forgot to show in a way that actually makes sense. It feels impossible to explain lore to people because I’m not even sure I know what the lore is.

KIM has helped a great deal with this, extending the length of exposition, but it can’t be applied to every quest. We need other solutions. Make quests that can be started after accessing related content. Make longer quests that have more exposition. Make more quests like The Teacher that give players a hint of exposition (although i don’t really feel that that quest specifically does its job well, but i digress). Do something, anything, because i want to understand what the fuck happens in my warframe game outside of hype moments and aura farming

sevastiel

I think if I had any suggestion that could be relatively easily implemented and have the greatest potential benefit, it’d be to do what The Hex quest did BEFORE release.

Put out a comic.

- They already work with artists a lot, which is fantastic. Comics are huge undertakings (as someone who dabbles- even one page takes me ~4-8 hours if I’m actually trying) so they could keep them short.

-All that needs to be done is introduce the characters/settings/whats going on.

-Have the comic be something that shows up on the quest tab after you’ve accepted it. It could show up like a little ‘whats happening?’ Button or a ‘intro’ button, and it’d just pop up like the wave rider comic does.

-It would directly bypass the in game limitations, and be insanely cheap compared to voicing/animating/etc a cinematic for every quest.

-It would allow players to have a MUCH easier time figuring what happens when and where, especially since the side/main quests are split up now and theres no ‘timeline’ that’s easily accessible.

-For event tied gamemodes, having the gamemode in the codex have a link to the related event comic with a similar ‘why is this a thing’ button would very neatly tell players wtf is going on, when it happened, and what they are/were doing.

-Gamers hate reading. Comics? Comics is not reading. Gamers look at beautiful pictures by artists and go ‘oh! Cool!!’ They dont even have to have dialogue if they’re done well enough. Dialogue would help, though.

(I say this as a lore hunter and fanfic author who can never make themself read in games unless the words pop up at the Perfect time.)

-THE AMOUNT OF LORE YOU CAN STICK IN THOSE DAMN THINGS IS PSYCHO. The sheer amount of information we got out of the Hex comic???? And all the other ones too???? AUGH

-Same thing goes with character intros and information!! The characterization is wild and the better the artist, the more they can put in there.

-Spares the need for an exposition dump, because with a page of background context/tying characters to ones they already know BEFORE the quest, the players can figure things out for themselves.

-Comics would be easy to dub/id for folks who need visual assistance or would speak in other languages. No need to do 30 different takes for one line in 30 languages.

-Itd be so fucking cool like can you imagine.

Of course, itd be a massive undertaking to do a comic for every quest and side quest but…

Theres a big community. A very big community.

kingshai69

finished constellations. the quest was exactly what i expected, and i'm still left disappointed and underwhelmed.

i think DE should just consider making music videos instead of video games at this point. like that's the nicest thing i have to say right now. i genuinely do not understand how this is the current state of the game. the second you look beyond the superficial, flashy cinematics, low effort tearjerkers and scenes that were made with the sole purpose of becoming a meme or part of a tiktok aurafarming edit, you're left with nothing but some of the most shallow, sloppy and misogynistic writing. what is going on in the writers room.

agoddamn

the "void spark" thing was one of the subtly stranger plot elements

ok, so, does this mean that anyone can make a reality-altering deal with Wally at any given time by yelling WALLY I WANT TO MAKE A BARGAIN at the ceiling? cos that's...that's kinda the opposite of tension

or is it that anyone can make a bargain with wally at any given time so long as they have this sentient core first? and the "void spark" IS the model of a sentient core, and its dais is collapsed sentient limbs, so if it's supposed to be unrelated to the sentients they chose a strange way to communicate that. so what is this thing? where did it come from? where is it? why does hunhow know about it? why didn't hunhow feel like using it before? the genocide of his race or the suffering of his daughter or the slavery of his son weren't good enough reasons to make a deal with wally, but stalker's chud son is??? why doesn't hunhow care about his own family this much? he even goes on in his post-quest email about how families should be together. why doesn't hunhow's own family count in that?

riddle me this--what did hunhow's bargain actually do? yeah yeah it gave him alzheimer's it was very sad i cried every tiem. but what did it do for hunhow?? what did he get out of it? it...made a collective hallucination of a house? it made a new relay? it made sirion stop fighting for no apparent reason except the plot said 'stop making the bad thing happen because it's happy ending time now'? they never really had a reason to fight in the first place since neither of them had dialog; hunhow just says the Void did it with all the same gravity as the Simpsons' "a wizard did it," and that is not a narrative situation that involves any character depth or growth whatsoever. that is a completely arbitrary writer-driven 'conflict'

and if the Void DID do this all on purpose, for whatever whimsical reason it may do so, why would it then accept any deal to undo it? if engineering the stalker episode of space jerry springer was his goal, why would he accept any deal to undo it? he's not a fairy; there's no implication of cosmic lawyers where he's beholden to specific rules.

overall, these characters have no real personal reason to be doing any of the things they're doing. they are doing actions to create hype moment, to make cool advertising clips, to make goated tiktoks. it's continuously just a series of tantalizing clips that make you believe that oh sure this time they'll put all the plot in the next update, this time for real they'll circle back to all those plot hooks they set up before, this time for sure they'll explain everything from the last quest!

buddy, i'm starting to think that dad isn't coming back from that milk run

#i miss when de could actually write for shit

railjacks

the people will tell you, oooh, lavos warframe so fun, lavos warframe so versatile, lavos warframe so many button press, lavos warframe war crimes, lavos warframe non-LOS nuke, lavos warframe valence formation. and I'm not saying any of that ISN'T true.

but this is how you know the minds and hearts of the people are closed. for those who see with the mind and heart, instead of the eye, know the truth contained in the leverian: lavos warframe toxic transhumanist snakeman enemies-to-lovers prisoner-warden yaoi.