I played The Teacher quest a while ago, and I think I have finished organizing my thoughts on it.
Considering it's purpose, and where in the timeline the quest was inserted, it's damn near a perfect fit. The foreshadowing is subtle, but it's not confusing, and the amount of lore we get is just enough for taking our first steps into the world of the game. It teaches the bare minimum of how mods work because that's all new players need to know at that point in the game — though I wish they pointed out the autobuild, it was a game changer when I was starting out and it took me way too long to realize it was there.
This quest wasn't made for those of us who have already finished most of not all of the other quests, it's for fresh new players, and we were an afterthought. That's not a bad thing, warframe's early game experience has been severely lacking for years, it deserved to be the main focus. High mastery players who are up to date on all the quests and factions all get to enjoy new content straight away, in a sense, every update is for us first. We already know enough to be able to digest big updates with tons of lore, and yes, it's fun to explore when there's plenty of new content, but smaller missions are not less important to the game just because we finish them faster than what we're used to.
I do, however, have some very lengthy criticism on the subject.
The quest itself is fine, but it was at best a band-aid on what I believe is warframe's biggest problem, the game's learning curve. They've improved a lot of things over the years, but we're still losing most of the new players because they simply don't know how to play, and don't know how to learn.
I truly think new players after this update will have an easier time than the ones who came before, but it does not actually teach what we were begging for it to teach. Warframe's fresh start has been improved greatly, but the midgame is seriously neglected. Players who enjoy the early learning stages become lost as soon as their warframes hit the level cap.
Their fears about a more comprehensive tutorial are understandable. I myself have gotten incredibly frustrated with games where all of the systems and buttons and functions were explained to me in a series of boring instructions that felt like would never end. Warframe is a game dense enough to warrant a full blown manual, and sometimes, as you go deeper into the game, you kinda wish you had one. But that huge wave of information and the drugery of a time consuming tutorial is just as likely to turn new players away as what we already got.
The game started much, MUCH smaller, and as it grew beyond anything we could have imagined, it became too much for its own tutorial. With the growth of the game, also came the growth of the community. The collective efforts of veteran players have made up for what's lacking in the tutorial, but leaving the guidance of new players to older player means there are many who slip through the cracks, who never reach a point where they feel confident to reach out and discover how welcoming we can be.
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Warframe's community is a delight, and it was veteran players who taught me how to navigate even the most basic systems of the game, like the market — and I'm not even talking about the plat market, I mean the regular one — or where to level up warframes and try them out. But most new players don't know that. Many come from other multiplayer games whose communities either bully new players or ignore them entirely.
Most other multiplayer games don't change as drastically just by changing what "character" you're playing with, or allow this much customization of playstyle. Most other games dont cap you at level 30 while your enemies go up to the hundreds. Most other games that block, or severely limit, special abilities in early game don't have those very abilities, that you learned to use sparingly, as the main focus of the combat while the melee and range weapons we got used to during the starting quests are at best second most important, even in weapon focused warframes.
Warframe does a lot of things very different from most multiplayer games, it's part of what makes it special and it's part of why I LOVE IT.
The customization means I get to play however I find the most fun, the level cap and mod system mean that becoming stronger comes directly from the work I put in, not from just getting a stronger weapon or going up another level. And the abilities are just plain cool, that's reason enough, I feel like an all powerful demigod and it's fun as fuck. Each warframe's abilities are so unique, it almost feels like a new game just by trying out a new frame.
But all of those wonderful things mean Warframe is not intuitive AT ALL. Hell, people stop playing, thinking it's pay-to-win, because the market only shows you the blueprint option after you click on the thing you want, and you start out with very few inventory slots, buying more cost plat, and the concept of a battlepass — nightwave — that doesnt cost money is apparently unthinkable to non warframe players.
I didn't even realize that requiem relics were what I was missing to kill the Kuva Liches until last month! Like I said before, it took ages to find the automod button, and the same thing happened to my friend who I lured into the game. Most of all, the difference a different warframe makes is so much greater than we realise, we're used to all the chaos and nuance by now, but for me as a new player, it was the difference between dropping the game and becoming obsessed with it.
Unless you pick the duviri paradox as a starting point, you have to pick a warframe without trying it first. You don't even get to play it how its meant to be played until you max its level, and unless you play the same nodes from the first three planets again and again and again, you'll end up doing many of the starting missions and even some junctions without a fully leveled warframe, which means the gameplay is completely different to when you reach level 30, and realize your abilities are not supposed to be saved uplike health potions in an RPG.
And that's only if you get to play at all. If you play the early missions on public, the veterans, who are just after resources or doing challenges, speedrun the whole thing faster than you can read what you're supposed to do. After a point you gotta decide between having a hard time playing alone but understanding the game, or breezing through missions but having no idea how the different missions work.
Lore wise, the Duviri Paradox as a starting point makes things very confusing, but when it comes to gameplay, it's the best way to learn how the main part of the game is supposed to feel. And you can try all sorts of warframes and weapons that are already leveled and built. That alone is incredibly valuable for people just getting to know the game. On top of all of that, it's the best ftp way to get warframes locked behind late game plot points or map expansions.
So even if it makes the narrative all confusing, I still reccomend it as the best starting option.
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It doesn't mean the original start can just stay the way it is though. Or that it makes up for the oversimplified, shallow, and overall insufficient "guidance" available in-game. And it's not like there aren't simple fixes that couldn't have been implemented ages ago.
The codex entries on the different missions are as short as the explanations during the mission, anyone who went there looking for a more detailed explanation would be sorely disappointed.
Warframes with story missions are neatly packaged into a nice little present for the player who completes it, and once you figure out that many warframe's blueprints can be found if you just dig a little deeper in the market, it's easy enough to farm for them.
But there's still warframes that you can only get the main blueprint by getting lucky when doing side objectives or putting hours into infinite missions, and even if you know what rotations are, figuring out what is what is still confusing!
That sort of information could be unlocked as "stolen info" proportional to how much of each planet is unlocked! It could be part of the junction rewards, like secrets left behind for only the tenno to find! You could even sprinkle in rumors about what warframes we could find more about and build in each planet! It could be a great way of building up the lore of older warframes that didn't get the cinematic quest treatment and making it easier for casual players to find surface level lore!
So many times, I had doubts about what's going on in this game, I figured the "training" section might have something, ANYTHING, to help me understand the missions and the mods better, instead I got a slideshow with some very vague text that explains even less than the actual mission.
So much of my warframe journey has been reading through the fan made wiki, even the most basic information about the planets, the factions, the missions, modding, and acquiring more warframes, had to be done through an external source. Even now that I'm very comfortable with my favored warframe and gleefuly unlocking the last few nodes of steel path, I still find myself occasionally playing with a cellphone open on the wiki page because this game is confusing and the information isn't in the game.
The game has grown so much and it still uses the wiki like a crutch. Im not saying the codex should be as detailed as the wiki, I'm saying a new player shouldn't have to leave the game to learn how a mission works without scrambling to keep up with the fast pace of warframe missions.
Something as simple as improving the explanations available in the codex, taking the explanatory aspects and letting it be more than just cataloging enemies and resources, and adding explanations that are actually helpful and would reasonably be available through it, could make a world of a difference for new and even old players. It would give the codex relevance beyond giving out story missions as a place to condense all the bits of lore across the game, even if it was just as a quick peek to remember how a certain assassination works, revisiting a conversation with an npc without having to redo the whole mission, or to double check if a certain mod works the way you think it does — additive vs multiplicative mods have been haunting us for a long time — having a place that explains what we already know in more words would make so many things so much easier.
The quest was good, but it's far from fixing the source of the problem. There needs to be a way for new players to access more detailed information as needed, in a way that feels intuitive and doesnt require an external source or the help of another player. We don't need to be told what story mission we should do next, we need the game to be capable of teaching us its main mechanics, to the level of an average player, by itself.
