Warframe: free-to-play done right

Back in 2012 Cevat Yerli, former CEO of Crytek claimed that free-to-play will be the future of gaming and that all of their future games will be free-to-play. At that time Crysis was working on Warface, a free-to-play first-person shooter. He envisioned free-to-play titles that can not only compete with AAA titles, but even provide a better experience. This statement was quite bold for the time and I guess even a bit controversial, since back then free-to-play games were hated amongst gamers for many reasons, mostly because you can buy unfair advantages with real money and so the game is not about skill anymore, but about who is willing to spend the most money (pay-to-win) or the most time to grind his way up to the top. Apart from that, free-to-play was in general associated with rather unremarkable games, most of them are either mobile- or browser-based. But now looking back, he was actually not that far off: games like DotA 2, League of Legends, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, Path of Exile, Warframe, Mechwarrior Online, ... are really keeping up with AAA games and some of those games have a very high production value, just like AAA games. Although it was not Warface, which is the flagship of free-to-play games (although I heard it was pretty popular in Russia, which is not really surprising, since it was co-produced by Mail.Ru), it is different game starting with “Warf”: Warframe.

Warframe is a very unique game and in this post I will tell you why. I started playing this game at the beginning of this year now, eight months later, I spend almost 100 hours playing this game which is a lot for my standards nowadays. But still after playing it for 100 hours I haven't seen all of it, and even more surprising: I still haven't understood all of it and what it has to offer. As comparison: I finished the only other game I played this year (Shadowrun Returns) in roughly 12 hours, I saw most of it and I understand the game quite well. In Warframe this isn't the case after I spend almost ten times as much time playing it. Yeah, it is not really the most accessible game, even though it does have a tutorial the game, only teaches you the basics of the core gameplay, which is only a fraction of what's going on in the game. In the beginning the Warframe Wiki is your best friend. But before I come to that, I guess I have to tell you what kind of game it is. Warframe is a third-person loot shooter about space ninjas, think of it as the weird cousin of Destiny. As if the scenario alone isn't odd enough, Warframe also does things differently than your average (third-person) shooter: it starts with the movement, the movement is done in a parkour fashion, meaning that you can do a lot of cool tricks like double jumping, wall running or sliding that not only look cool, but also give you advantages like faster movement or bonuses for melee attacks. And speaking of melee: even though Warframe is a shooter, it puts heavy emphasis on melee. It is not only something you use when you out of ammo, but is very useful and as effective as using guns. Movement and combat are fast paced and one of the highlights of the game, I remember when I started playing that just plain running around in the levels was incredible fund and that I was blown away how smooth and stylish just the “simple” movement is. When I got into my first combat I was thinking: “Oh my god, that's a free-to-play game?!” Saying that I was impressed might be an understatement.

The name of the game comes from the exosuits the player controls which has certain stats and abilities. You can think of a Warframe as a class, while writing this Warframe has 58 of those classes, which is a lot compared to similar games like Destiny (which has 3) or Borderlands (which has at most 6 different classes in a game of the series). The Warframes play all very differently and changing into a different Warframe can alter your experience a great deal. Luckily the game takes that into account and so there are different types of mission and different types of Warframes have different strengths and weaknesses in those different mission types, but basically any Warframe can do any mission type, it's just easier with some than with others. A good example is the mission type “Spy”, here you have to infiltrate an enemy base and retrieve some information, preferably undetected. This mission is less about shooting and much more about stealth and quickly finding a way to the target location. I always sucked at it, stealth isn't my biggest strength, but finding the right path (under time pressure) even less. But then I got a Warframe called “Limbo”, that wasn't all that great in combat, but has the nice ability to switch between different plans of existence, so I just switched to a different plane of existence and now even though I suck at stealth, I could easily bypass sensors and cameras. This is also a nice example for the complexity and the creativity (some may call it weirdness) of the game as such.

The open beta of Warframe was launched in early 2013 for PCs and later that year as a launch title for PS4. Being a free-to-play third-person shooter with procedurally generated levels, the initial reception (especially from journalists) was rather reserved, as I wrote above free-to-play was synonymous with shallow games and procedurally generated levels was yet another red flag for some. Personally, I love procedurally generated levels, since the gameplay is more or less the same, give me at least different levels to play in. Even though really like this kind of game design, I have to admit that making good procedurally generated levels in 3D is very difficult. The best example I can think of is Hellgate London, yet another game that I really loved and enjoyed playing. It wasn't really a shooter, but pretty close (especially for actually being an ARPG like Diablo) and it had procedurally generated 3D levels as well and that got repetitive after a while (which is ironic, since in theory those levels should be different, but they all feel the same, well that's the difference between math and human experience, mathematically speaking 10000 generated bowls of oatmeal are all different, even though for us humans they all look the same), I would say this was even one of the points why Hellgate London didn't turn out to be the huge success that it could have been: levels that all feel kind of the same combined with a lot of backtracking. But back to Warframe: it also has mostly procedurally generated levels (there are a few exceptions, but nothing compared with the vast majority of the rest of the game) and they are all very good. After almost 100 hours of playing I never had the feeling that the structure of the levels got repetitive or boring, even though they look similar (since they are of course made out of the same building blocks), I never had the feeling of seeing this type of level for the 100th time. It's really nice to see how procedural generation for 3D levels has advanced in the last 10 years. This procedural generation also allowed the game to steadily grow and nowadays it is huge. Since I didn't play it back in 2013, I can't say how much it changed, but looking at old gameplay footage gives me the impression that it changed a lot: the rather small and humble third person shooter developed by Digital Extremes grew into this behemoth of a game that's packed with so much content that it now gets envy looks from its cousin Destiny. And unlike another potential monster of content (I'm looking at you Star Citizen), it is actually fully playable now. And speaking of Star Citizen, it looks like in the future Warframe is not only going to compete with Destiny, but also going after Star Citizen and allowing huge space battles

The game was actually a huge risk to make for its developer Digital Extremes, but it was their last shot to save the company and luckily (for them and for the gamers) it paid off. There is a great documentary on YouTube about the creation and the direction the game has taken since:

I mentioned earlier that it is a loot based shooter, similar to Destiny (that comparison is often made, as you probably noticed by now) or Borderlands (or the upcoming Anthem from Bioware), but still didn't say anything about loot or the progression system in general. I have to state one thing clearly up front: Warframe is a very grind heavy game, in order to progress or to get an item you want, you have to play it a lot (or buy it with real money, but later more on that), but since the core gameplay is great and the levels have a nice variety (even though they always consist of the same building blocks), it is actually fun to grind your way up. But of course you have to have some patience. You can also craft your own equipment, actually that's the way you'll get most of your new equipment since you mostly only get blueprints of a new weapon or a new Warframe. For crafting you need resources and Warframe has a lot of them, as well as many other things you can collect and which are for sure useful at one point, and if it's only for being sold. Speaking of selling: like many free-to-play games there are two different types of currencies: an in-game currency (Credits) and a premium currency (Platinum). Credits are earned during missions, as reward for completing a mission and for selling items (similar to Diablo, where you sell stuff you don't need to a merchant). Platinum on the other hand can only either be bought for real money or gained through trading with other players. Every player starts with 50 Platinum (which I spend most on useless stuff, since I had no clue) and you will need it sooner or later, at least for buying more slots for your weapons and Warframes. But before you scream “pay to win!”, no it is not, everything, even the premium currency can be obtained only by playing. As I said you can get it from trading with other players, so you need to have items or parts that are valuable for other players. Warframe has some trading zones and a trading chat, but both get confusing very quickly, so if you want to buy or sell something, your best bet is to use external websites like warframe.market. The game's economy isn't controlled by the players, but mostly run by the players. But what get's this economy running? The loot of course. There are so many different types of items that the game throws in your face and of course you can always try to get a better one. I'm not going to describe everything in detail, but I'm going to mention two special types of items: mods and prime equipment. Mods are items that you attach to your weapon or Warframe and that gives you some bonuses. It is not only a nice additional element, it is pretty necessary in the later stages of the game since your weapons and Warframe levels up, but only until level 30, enemies however don't. So if you want to proceed you need to have mods that boost the stats of your weapons or your Warframe. And as always of course mods come in different rarity levels and different levels, so there is plenty of stuff to grind for. The other type of items are primes. Primes are a better version of a weapon or a Warframe, unlike the regular version those are much more difficult to get and thus much more in demand. The way to get them is through Void Fissures, which are just like regular missions, but the player has to equip a Void Relic that determines the potential rewards (mostly prime parts) and collect “Reactant” through the mission to open this Void Relic. Different Void Relicts have different potential rewards (each Void Relic has 6 different rewards, again with different rarity levels aka. there are items that you are more likly to receive as a reward than others) and are acquired through playing missions. As you see it is quite complex and the game doesn't tell you most of this, you have to either figure it out yourself or find it on the Wiki.

Warframe is a very complex game with tons of content that sometimes feels like it's more work than game (I wanted to quit playing the game several times because of this), but it always rewards you, not only in terms of loot, but also in being an unique experience and a game that has a lot to offer for its players (that's why I always kept coming back), given of course that they are willing to spend a lot of time learning and well, a lot of time in general. There are so many more things which I haven't touche: the different syndicates you can join, the lore and the story, which is very deep for a game that's all about loot, the pets, a necessity for every MMO, ...
But since it's free I will give you to following advice: just download the game and try it for yourself, I guess you'll find out quite quickly whether you like it or not. I played it for almost 100 hours and I still can't get enough of it, I'm even thinking of buying some Platinum, not because I need it, but to support the developer and thank them for creating such an amazing game.

PS:
The game also runs smoothly on Linux, thanks to GloriousEggroll. The best way to install it is via Lutris. Lutris is a great game launcher for Linux, if you are gaming on Linux go and download it, it is a great piece of software that allows you to manage all your games (native, wine and all kind of emulators you can think of) in one convenient interface. This is an article about Warframe, but since I always launch it from Lutris, those two are inseparably connected for me (and I really love using Lutris :D )