Warframe, Positivity and Reputation

*extremely Vay Hek voice* THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY TO ENSURE PLAYERS KNOW THEY WON'T BE ABUSED BY A SERVICE GAME EXPERIENCE: REPUTATION!

I'm a fan of TieTuesday, he's a great streamer and a solid person who knows that part of what makes streaming the positive form of new entertainment that it can be, is genuine enthusiasm for what you're doing. You can have enthusiasm when you're playing a bad game for laughs in front of a live audience, at least until the shockingly unoptimized trainwreck that is Dynasty Warriors 9, witnessed the worst climbing animation not seen in a Steam Direct asset flip scam and then received a stiff 24 hit combo of character unlocks directly to the liver.  

It also means being being genuine about the things that you actually are positive about in this industry. If you've ever read something from me, you know that I can be enthusiastic about the stuff that I hate, probably because I was both introduced to Mystery Science Theater at a young age, and also understand the concept of suffering from inside it like, frankly, a lot of people in this generation. I'm a huge bummer sometimes, I know, but come on, I don't think you disagree that a combination like that is the recipe for ironic love of inept entertainment. But today, I'm not riffing on the latest Samurai Cop of games. I'm not going to mention devs that I love to dunk on, even though I came very close to typing one's name here before I realized, "no, man, that's just hurting yourself in this case." No, I'm going to talk about a game that I don't just like, it's a game that I love.

Warframe rules, folks. 

I mean, it's got problems, any work does, because perfection is an impossible concept to keep us striving to evolve, an imaginary number in the theoretical physics equation of creation. But in today's game industry, where once "AAA" meant big budget games, and now means "oligarch investors and executives, their wageslave devs and the Trojan Horses they put together to get at your wallet," Warframe isn't another decent free-to-play game that I like to play. World of Warships is that, and if I felt inclined to talk about that, I'd also feel obliged to point out their price points for premium stuff (my first and still opinion of which is "wait, seriously?")  and the underhanded moves its dev has pulled over the years as fair warning. 

Warframe isn't a good free to play game. It isn't even just a good game. It's an amazing piece of work, play and art, with an actual, above board business plan for a backbone. That last bit sounds cynical, but it's important, because not having that is what has ensured that Destiny 2 will last months instead of years. Warframe, now entering into its fifth year since its actual launch (not even counting its long running beta early access, adding another few years onto that), is only gaining momentum as it goes. It's a game that makes its missteps as it adds, not as it restricts. Perhaps the most important part? For once, "they'll fix that, eventually" isn't just a hollow platitude offered by a player hoping that their game experience will get better.

Folks, they fixed that. Already. I was playing when they fixed it, they even gave me a warning that I'd need to log out and log back in, and when I did, they fixed that. I'm being hyperbolous, of course, remember what I said about perfection being impossible, and more to the point, human error and bad ideas are all a part of the experience of being mortal. How does Warframe dev Digital Extremes respond when they make a mistake, mess with their playerbase's fun or otherwise require feedback?

Pictured: People who I can only assume love their work, judging from the game that they and their coworkers create.

Why, they sit down in front of a camera on Twitch and ask their players what they should do. In between addressing issues in person, they proceed to also show what they've been working on. This is the Devstream, and they not only advertise when they're doing one in-game, they actually give away stuff to players watching them- WF has Twitch integration, because why shouldn't it at this point? Other devs have learned the value of appearing on camera outside of being on stage on E3, like another of my favorites, Netherrealm. This does a lot of things, including putting a human face on games publishers seem increasingly inclined to make out are actually assembled by machines and nanotech in futuristic foundries. And please, tell me publishers don't think this, while I reflect on my own time in the industry, and how Crunch turned my mental illness from something latent and beneath the surface into something full blown and life affecting. People don't see you as a human on stage at E3, you're a Presenter; when you're in your place of work, on a couch with people you can smile and laugh and joke with, that shows who you are and what you're about. Mostly, what I get from Warframe devs, is that they're here to make a fast paced looter action-RPG and keep them and their families paid and fed from doing it. They have fun while doing this, and seeing them have fun makes you want to have fun with them, and together, we all form this weird, new symbiosis of ongoing game developers and the player community that gives them impetus to add and evolve.

But that's just the value in seeing a face, a genuine face, presenting a modern videogame and impacting that game's community through direct interaction. The fact that they're willing to source their players as both feedback on features, as well as the impetus for new ideas and features, is sort of unheard of in the current dev climate of big games. This lies in stark contrast to what we've being seeing from AAA, the people who assure us are the end all, be all of this whole "game" thing, where producers are beholden to the whims of publishers, who are in turn beholden to the greed of their investors, who in turn think "we've heard your feedback and are listening to concerns" boilerplate is a salve to players who dropped $60 on a game, only to learn getting the full experience of that game will require an ongoing and undisclosed further monetary investment.

Yes, Warframe is free-to-play, and with that, comes the fact that it supports itself with microtransactions facilitated through a premium currency. While premium currency in and of itself is something of a bugbear with me (keeping a currency in game that rapidly increases, only to turn out to be totally worthless because the stuff that you actually want is paid for with premium currency, is an example of what I like to call Microtransaction Tantalus, and I'm against that general sort of thing), Warframe does something a little more interesting than most. That is, by giving players the ability to trade it between each others, thus making all the stuff that you can't actually buy from the store and Digital Extremes directly- parts for Prime frames and weapons, prettier and stronger versions of more commonly gotten stuff, the majority of which can't actually be bought from directly DE themselves -stuff you can sell to support your own play, and continue to keep it a free venture. I haven't, because I'm the type of person that, if there's something that can hold my attention and keep me having fun for around 20 or 30 hours or so, I can't actually keep playing it without needing to put some money in the hand of devs. There's also the fact that they keep the randomization rewards to the stuff that doesn't actually cost this premium currency. It's not accurate to say there aren't the equivalent of lootboxes in this game, at least in that there's items which become one of a few specific items when you open them in one. These are called Relics. There's a few crucial differences, though. One, there's four tiers of them, and each tier is further broken down into a vast number of individual Relics, of them are broken down into alpha-numerically denoted variants, each of them with only six possible things they could turn out to be. Two, each of those six things shows their probability as a little bar on their icon, with the first three items being the most probable, the last one generally being a much rarer item with the single lowest probability. Three, you can upgrade these with in-game resources to alter these probabilities, and while the rarest rewards still won't become a gimmie, they become a much greater chance than normal. Four, and this is important: you don't buy these with real money, and in fact, you can sell the things you find in them for premium currency as well, to other players.

Which sort of flies the face of this whole Bright Engram nonsense we've been hearing about.

(This is the point where I stop in to say, hey, it's me, your pal Doc Destructo, certified mentally ill person and advocate of others with similar issues. I'm here to say, if you're a person that has trouble with keeping money in your pocket, I need to be above board and say- be careful with Warframe. You will want to buy stuff, and because it's free to play, they don't make it hard not to, and unlike a lot of other F2P games, Warframe's stuff is cool and desirable in that distinct loot game way. I don't bash DE for this, because money is unfortunately a thing people need to make in this world, and they put out, in my opinion, good stuff at good prices, but still- maybe consider Monster Hunter: World if you're looking for a hobby game and tend to have impulse buying issues. Monhun World is utterly fantastic, and a single $60 purchase with a planned end of life as the next sequel looms, with free updates all the way up until then, and it may just scratch your itch without having to welly yourself to resist an urge to spend. Thanks, back to this other game I have enthusiasm about, but felt obliged to warn folks with a specific vulnerability about.)

But all this has been a ton of talk about how the devs are cool, and their business plan is sound, fair to the consumer, and, as it turns out, doing quite well for them. All of this has been dancing around the question, 'is this game actually any good to play?'

This gif is sped up, but not as much as you probably think.

Yes, Warframe is good to play. Warframe is, in fact, great to play. There's a lot of things that I could talk about, like its baroque, at first daunting layers of systems upon systems that somehow all come together without the moving parts getting stuck on each other. I could talk about how this game handles weapons, that rather than being incrementally more powerful things that undergo incremental changes over play time in both gameplay handling and aesthetics, they're less disposable things, having their own specific strategies and use cases. I could even go into the fact that this game is an aesthetic treat, a game that stays entirely within the Sol system, yet feels genuinely alien in ways other games haven't come close to. There's a lot I could talk about, because there's a lot to talk about, and so much of it is good, going on better, going on great, that I kinda just have to narrow things down to two points, and then I'll be on my way.

The first is movement, where Digital Extremes shows its legacy as a developer. Modern game design, I feel, got hooked on a number of really terrible ideas it has yet to work out of its own system. One of them is that slow is real, and real is fun, and that's why we've accepted for years that limited sprint is a good thing to have in games. Especially when they're supposed to be special forces hardcases. Don't put me in the shoes of an ultimate badass that can't sprint to the end of a block. I'm just a regular badass, and I can move like a wolf compared to some of these virtual tactical chumpstains.

Compared to what a lot of games think you should move like, Warframe knows what you need to move like. Because this is a game that literally wears its core fantasy as its sizzle line- "Ninjas Play Free" -it damn well knows you better move like a space ninja. And you do, because this game's sense of movement is slick in two senses, both because it's a well crafted suite of tools to get you where you're going, and also because its momentum builds like it's been well oiled. Don't let that seem like it's ice physics all around, because that's not the case. The sense of precision and accumulative velocity in Warframe's movement feels like a game that was focus tested by competitive Quake players from the late 90s and speedrunners. It feels like you're exploiting the physics; you're not, because after years of tweaks, it can only be that it was exactly designed to be like that, and it actually feels too good the first time you play it, like something's up, something nonstandard is going on. The base move speed is another game's sprint, and the sprint is faster than that and also infinite.

Then you've got a dodge roll that I can only describe as "incredibly live." You touch the button and a strafe key, and you practically spindash to the side. Just out of the blue, in a twitch attempt to gain some distance from an enemy that I was in melee with and getting my ass kicked by, I dodgerolled backwards and found myself doing pretty much the same back handspring Piccolo did fighting Android 17. Tenchu's double jump is in this game. I know this, because I played Tenchu, and I remember what happened to that series. I'm glad it's double jump survived the sinking. Speaking of movement gimmicks, so is Megaman X's kickjumping, which feels similarly great, but with the added perk of being able to 'wall latch' by blocking or aiming down the sights of your equipped weapon while on the wall. You can slide, which not only makes you a low profile target, maintains your momentum and carries you down inclines, you can also aim your weapon and shoot while doing this, as well as perform a melee attack tornado. You can leap and balance on high wires; sliding on them causes you to grind, because if this game's got all this other stuff, it might as well let you grind while tightrope walking.

Then there's that thing that you do when you jump while crouching, sliding or grinding. I better just show it off.

This goes where your crosshair is pointing. It can be as much a dive as it is a superjump. Oh, and just as an aside, that's one room in my dojo, my guild house. You get another house that's a spaceship, your lander. So, really more of a house that you fly, actually.

This is one move in the game, one move shared between all playable frames. It is one of the single most useful movement options I've played in a game, basically flight, except faster than most games do flight. It's more accurate to say that Warframe gives you a gun that allows you to shoot yourself where you need to go. By the way, if you hit crouch while you're doing this, or at any other time while you're in control while midair? Red Hot Kick. And you land sliding. This game, with all of its movement tools, routinely allows me to move so fast through maps, I cause the "falling at terminal velocity" sound effects to trigger and mix into the soundscape, and more than that, I actually feel in total control as I'm doing it, because this game goes where you point it. In this twitch game, your twitch reflexes pay off, because you're not playing a game where your ultimate badass moves like they're waist deep in water. They move like a damn space ninja, which means if you've got time to react, they've got time to react.

Then there's that other thing I wanted to talk about. The fact that this free to play game did a thing I didn't think a free to play could do: it hit me emotionally.

It's called The Second Dream, and I have to be very careful what I say here. I will let you know front and center that I'm not someone that cares much for spoilers, because I'm affected by experience, not knowing how a story ends. This isn't me saying I'm going to spoil it, because spoiling The Second Dream is not a thing this community stands for. This is me saying that I looked at it, just to see what was ahead of me, for the sake of preparing ahead of time. I knew what was ahead of me.

Except that I actually didn't, because as it turns out the wiki walkthrough I looked at didn't prepare me for the sharpest and most well executed rug pulls I haven't simply seen in games, but in media. And I don't buy into gimmick media with gotcha crap in it. The Six Sense was Shyamalan's spent nickel that he tried to respend, over and over, Momento was an interesting concept for a story marred by having little else beyond its gimmick hook, and Inception was ephemeral nonsense layered on top of contrivance. We all remember these movies, we remember our reactions to them when we first saw them, because wow, rug pull, but as time goes on, we find the tingles of that experience have been replaced by wishing instead the media that effectively was the bomb casing was itself better. The Second Dream rose above those films, rose above its station as a quest in a free to play game, and instead became something that I will probably never forget for the rest of my life. It was so affecting, that even thinking of ways that I could describe it without letting details slip, the tingles came back and I legitimately started getting red-eyed. Because it's not just every day that, after playing a game for 100 hours and thinking it's one thing, it lays down it cards and blows you under the table with what it's really about.

I want to say that it shattered me, that it destroyed me, that it ripped my heart out, but those are all things that are too negative in their connotation. It reached in my chest and pulled up. A game gave me a feeling of hope, of being loved and at peace with a world where I could be loved. Videogames don't do that, let alone free to play ones. People like to think they do. Certain people. Who happen to use 'emotion' as a ward-word for when they get caught wrist deep in their own ridiculousness and filth. I can't actually believe I'm saying this genuinely, not because of DE's efforts, but despite so many other miserable hacks' efforts to the contrary, but they achieved a moment in a game worthy of being a cultural touchstone. They made something that was less a thing that you did in a game, and more of a shared experience between players that went through it. It was amazing.

And then it put the sword back in my hand and said, "now that you know, get back at them, harder, faster than before." I did. 

For the next week, I could not shake the feeling that I had not only witnessed someone's masterpiece, but that the masterpiece was a secret, held in reserve for those that were in for the long haul. What game holds back material of that caliber for literally 100 hours? What game doesn't frontload that in an attempt to obfuscate all the cruft that clogs up their lategame?

Also, what sort of game isn't into the late game when you're 100 hours in? Because, after all this, I still feel like I've played only a drop in the bucket of this game. It hasn't been a perfect experience, in as much as no game is a perfect experience. There still are areas for improvement in Warframe, absolutely no doubt. The playerbase agrees, and the thing is, so does Digital Extremes, because I think they actually realized that people can only get scorched so many times before they have enough, so they've just decided to actually be that company, with that level of credibility. You think it's not a big thing that you see these people playing their own game, streaming their own game, having fun with their own game, in its own community. But it is, it's very, very big, because it shows an investment in a game that's more than simply a need to see return on money spent. This is the value of having a good reputation. This is not having a stock response about "pride and accomplishment" when asked about predatory microtransactions and limited ability to achieve without spending, this is actually putting money where your mouth is and being accountable to the people who are keeping this whole thing running, the players. 

This is what I have come to view Digital Extremes as, one of the few game companies run by honest adults that understand that money is nice to have lots of, but reputation is what keeps you connected as part of a community. They are in this to make money making a game, and rather than trying to suborn you with irresistible but ultimately worthless shiny objects sealed in virtual grab bags, they'd rather meet you in the middle to amicably sell to you, so that you actually feel good about coming back after putting it down. It's like having a sub or a pizza place that you know, that isn't a chain, and even if you don't know the people inside as friends per se, they're nice to you as they take your money and hand you something you're going to eat and enjoy. Because they don't fail you, even when they make mistakes. They don't tell you that you're the problem, and also, give us more money. They work to make it better, to ensure you come back, because they don't say they value you, they show they value you. That is the power of reputation, and it's probably the mightiest weapon that Warframe wields.