Picked this up again after a very long hiatus. I feel like the biggest boomer running around with my Sancti Tigris and my old Saryn, while everybody else is using Warframes that I have never seen before and using weapons that fill up 3 rooms with AoE per shot.
The amount of content and systems added over the years made re-entry very confusing at first, but if you focus on just one thing and how to get it, the journey there can feel pretty nice. I'm trying to unlock the system where you can replace on of the skills of your Warframe with the skill of another.
The new open world areas look impressive at first glance, but I always thought that the regular maps were already pretty big and interesting looking. The lack of corridors in the open world areas makes you feel slow. Good thing you can deploy your Archwing, it makes traversal much more enjoyable. But then it also negates the whole purpose of the open world design. The subterranean layers are pretty cool though.
One thing that is a downgrade is the visual design of the open world areas compared to the old tile sets. Especially if you go from an "Orokin/Infested" mission right into the boring Planes of Eidolon with their generic hills and trees. The only area that comes close to the old tile sets in terms of visual design is the one on Deimos, but even that one suffers from the same issue the other two have: it's too much of the same shit.
Mining and Fishing is ok. It's not aggressively boring like the typical implementations from typical MMOs. You still aim and shoot at something. Thematically they make no fucking sense. You're a space cyborg ninja. You should be mining people and harpooning flying warships.
The writing is horrendous. I left right around the time they introduced the faggy kids that pop out of your Warframe and wasn't inundated by it too much. Trying to do these quests without the ability to skip the dialogue is just torture. It's like at the level of a kid's tv show, except even the low production value shows from my youth had more likeable characters than these and also funnier dialogue. The writing combines some of the worst shit western games are known for nowadays:
- ancient deities sounding like modern day people
- wahmmin = good // men = bad
- typical lefty propaganda themes of "muh invironment" "muh greedy people are ebil" "muh incloosivity" and so on
- no Stoicism or proper classical virtues or examples of mutual respect anywhere to be found
- every allied character is soy af and the only somewhat interesting characters are the enemy ones (Eudico vs Granum for example)
- zany = funny
- including memes into the writing
Out of the new(for me) content, I really like Railjack the most. It has that "ad-hoc filling in a distinct role" type of gameplay which I love and is IMO one of the best things you can do in an MMORPG. WvW in Guild Wars 2 offered something similar. Upgrading your Railjack also feels much more like classical RPG progression compared to the regular Warframe upgrading.
