Being Saleh: Lagging Behind Expansion (Warframe)

Warframe and me got in the wrong foot, for years I always thought that Warframe is a team based shooter, not a co op shooter (a.k.a shooting aliens with friends -- and/or other people who might left you alone to die in a mission), a month ago I rectify that mistake by actually playing it. That's why it falls into lagging behind expansion category, warframe as it now is on update 23 and some people said it's a different game than two years ago.

Warframe is actually quite simple, it's an instance based shooter where every mission is take place in a random/scripted (huge) instance, you are called Tenno, a superpowered being clad in a superpowered armor called warframe, you also equipped with superpowered guns and melee weapons, in some case you are accompanied by superpowered pets and can put a superpowered wingsuit that made you fly in the void of space and take down capital ship with a big final fantasy styled superpowered swords. The story of warframe is also simple at best, the entire milky way galaxy is warring on each other and it's up to the Tenno to restore peace (by shooting aliens, mutants, altered humans, magical beings, and other Tennos).

Yeah!!! SUPERPOWER!!

THE GAMEPLAY

There are total of 57 warframes for you to decide how to wreak havoc on them, it's like your class, some warframe uses pure strength to destroy things, while others uses elemental or psychic powers, some can summon allies and mirages, buff friends, going invisible and backstabbing things, also fly and raining destruction from above, for short:it is an equivalent of a space ninja, you can run, shoot, wall running, double jump, slide, glide, performing melee combos, and in some cases stick to the wall, combined with wide variety of guns and melee weapons you'll have a good times choosing your way to kill things IF you can bypass the reality that Warframe is a free to play title and microtransactions is bound coming for you sooner or later.

You'll start with choosing from three initial warframes, the Excalibur is the melee type with decent shield and armor, the Mag uses crowd control and pick enemies off from afar, the Volt is the assault type with it's electrical and shield powers. After you complete the initial story you'll begin jumping planets (from mercury to void beyonds) if you follow the story you'll be decked with initial guns and melee weapons, also an auto turret at the end. Whatever you choose you can obtain the other two on a later time.

Yep, most people picked it first

On every planet there are nodes, on each node: a mission, you'll begin unlocking nodes one by one, each node have a set path and level, when you complete the mission on that node the next one unlocks, there are  branching path sometimes, at the end of planets there are junctions guarded by a shadow warframe, you can only access this junction if you complete the planet's requirements (what level are you, how many enemies killed, how much resource you have, etc) then you can access the junction, kill the guard warframe and open the next planet (with it's own set of nodes and requirements), Story quests are scarce and sometimes it requires you to unlock several planets or areas

Your warframe, weapons, pets, and other combat tools have levels, every mission and almost everything you do on a mission will contribute experience to your arsenal, leveling them up, you can slot mods (cards contained stat modifier) to everything making them stronger, the higher your weapons/warframe/tool level the more mods you can slot them although equipments are capped at level 30, mods also have levels where the higher their level, the more capacity they will take, thus experimenting with mods and arsenal is a fun thing to do between missions.

Your operator level is called rank, it determines what warframe and weapons  you can wield, for example Lex Prime,  a very good pistol requires you to be rank 8, you don't automatically level rank, instead when you raise an equipment level to max you gain something called affinity, you can also farm affinity from missions, when you die on a mission you have a chance to revive 4 times, each cost 10% affinity. When your affinity is high enough there will be a popup message said you can take a test to level up your rank, you can only take this test once a day, upping a rank also gain some benefit, like increased mod cap, reputation gain cap per day, and how many resource extractor you can place at a time.

Enemies on Warframe never dropped a warframe or weapons, instead they dropped resources, mods, and equipment blueprints, missions also reward blueprints and components, you can then craft your own equipment provided you have enough resource and  components, crafting on warframe is both extensive and vital, every warframe requires components and every components required abundant resources, crafting a warframe takes days and each components take half a day, it makes gaining new warframe or weapons a significant achievement...

Or not...

THE MONEY

You see, every warframe and weapons in this game can be instantly purchased by platinum ( the real money currency), so there I dropped the bomb, Your Oberon Prime warframe? gained by months of extensive random mission farming for resource and opened random relics until you have those components blueprints? Your friend can just shell 20 dollars and he's all set (they even gave you bonus mod for each purchase), you can also subscribe to twitch prime and they gave you prime warframes each months, running out of inventory slot for warframes (default is two)? Just purchase them from the plat shop, tired waiting for your Bronco Prime to finish at your foundry (crafting table) just finish them for a little plat.

I'm not going to the pay to win debate here but I'll tell you something for a little taste of warframe: your max leveled Volt warframe is not on par with say: a max leveled Volt Prime warframe, while you can craft the Volt Prime you probably won't survive to see it's blueprint drops, which is from opening high level relics, which can be found from running a high level missions, which can be accessed if you already unlocked the high level planet nodes, which is almost impossible to solo on your initial and story-gained warframes.

I crafted Limbo, Oberon, Nyx and none of them, my weapons, and my collection of mods can survive a level 25-30 mission with ease, I limped through  Planet Neptune but then I failed repeatedly on a main quest because I can't kill fast enough. I returned to earth to farm my Gara warframe components in order to gain an edge on Neptune (it probably won't). It's still have three days to complete as I wrote this, but still... crafting warframes, guns, melee weapons, pets, and combat tools provided on each rank should give you a feeling of becoming more powerful each rank gained, instead it's just changed your playstyle with miniscule power level change. Why solo? Well I am a solo player and since not much group will help on just a random node unlock you pretty much did the story quests solo, unless the nodes have special traits like 20% increased drops or whatever.

Gold can't buy anything, platinum can!!

I love free/freemium/b2p to play titles because I can point exactly what made me stopped playing (work points on Archeage, hard dungeons on Wildstar, my inability to jump on the right time on Destiny 2 and Guild Wars 2), in warframe going from the initial pre-playing feeling of "I want to be a xxxx warframe" to "Yeah I only got a Nyx component at the moment, it's probably cool too" should be enough for me to uninstall this game, going from "what you want to be" to "you can only be this for now" is a major irony of this game, especially when combined with the statement "you can be anything if you pay". But the fact is I'm still playing warframe because the side missions are fun enough and always crowded with people queueing, the void missions are also fun provided you have a relic which in my case -- almost depleted (I'm dying on missions), invasions are always good for farming resource and components, also seeing other people with their colorful warframe and devastating skills/ techniques are always fun (since they did all the work and I just picked up after them) =))

THE VERDICT

In short: if you're not picky of what you want to be in a multiplayer game warframe is a good fast paced stylish third person shooter, although it does have unhelpful tutorial and most knowledge you gain from this game came from asking people on general chat and wiki articles. On the contrary if you do want to be a specific thing in game I recommend you to buy them (warframe, weapon, etc) since the farming can be quite tedious. Also bring a friend or two, I'm not calling them shooting with friends for no reason.

It also made me regret buying this

Review: The Labor Age

Let me tell you something about ArcheAge....

It's good and surprisingly enjoyable

Except for one thing: Labor Points, Labor Points is your other resource in Archeage beside your usual MMORPG coins and points, and since EVERY activity like crafting, building, gathering, farming, buliding (did I said that twice? I lost track since economic based things is plenty in this game) and also recover XP when you're dead requires labor points it's quickly becomes a ridiculous gate, for free player it replenish slowly, every 5 minutes the game gave you 5 of it, only if you logged in, if you logged out or disconnected the game gave you nothing, yes nothing, none, nada, ZERO LP baby!!

Wants more LP? Only $15 a month!!! You know other game with time-based-self-replenishing resource like this? No? Let me refresh your mind

This

Also this

I don't remember whether it has it but I'm just gonna leave it here anyway

Please stuff your argument about balancing the economy here, I know Trion needs to make money, but this?

Blow me

Alright now that I let it out from my system, onto the review

Archeage is a sandbox/themepark hybrid MMORPG created by Korean developer XLGAMES two years ago, they localised it on Russia a year later, and then Trion picked it up for North American publishing last year, it's already entered beta phase now, and since it's freemium I treated it as it is, just between hype and anti-hype (or something)

And... I'm quite enjoying it, if I can describe it: Archeage's PVE battle aspect surprisingly played quite like RIFT, I rolled an Occultism mage coupled with Auramancy and Songcraft, and it played surprisingly similar as my Warlock-Pyromancer-Dominator spirit on RIFT (before I got bored and killed everything up close and personal with my Harbinger-Archon-Domi), I have a vivid imagination that two years ago a Trion employee played this game and said to the management, "Hey look, it's looks like our game RIFT, let's bring it to the state", and then magic happened

Spawning a galley in the city is pure magic

I don't know about the main story quest but it kept me intigued and wanting to quickly unfold it, the quests on Archeage is a part of your leveling process where you learn to battle, craft, gather, trade, build, climb, glide, explore, even rowboating (just keep your eye on your Labor Points). It's also quick, in just under 12 hrs I reached level 25, the PVE quests stopped at 30 where the sandbox element begins and you level through those thing you've learned before until you reached the cap (level 55)

Beside those thing I realized that I barely scraped what Archeage has to offer, but I also don't really know how deep it is, it's a good game, and it's free so I can check it out anytime (at least until the community become toxic and PKer started killing newbies, Trion stopped replenishing f2p player's LP, and destroy the population altogether), one of the most memorable thing on Archeage is when I snatched people's crops and raised my larceny level, but hey it was unprotected, and no one's there, and the game allowed me to do that, so I grabbed it (and run), why did I do that? I don't know, I probably just liked potato very much.

My ticket to jail

Read more about Archeage and their sandpark features here

Being Saleh: Twenty Four Days in Tyria

I'm on vacation and typed this on my buddy's Ipad, i'm not going to complain that after i used the thing it makes my smartphone screens looks small and insignificant, damn you Apple!!! =))

Trying to grasp the immensiveness (that a word?) of Tyria can't be achieved by zooming your way to 80, it can be achieved by slowly exploring all nooks and cranny in a zone or just wandering yourself in every random Dynamic Event encounter that might happen in a zone and what the... i just leveled up!!!

If there's something i want to add in Tyria it's the stop experience button, i know, i know the scaling make sure no mob get one shotted on levels below me, but i just can't help feeling something off when i saw my 60ish level wandering around in the 40ish zone, i guess it's the residual habitual experience from my past MMOs. i'm an explorer so I tend to open up all the maps just like what i did on WOW (stop experience ftw!!!)

In Guild Wars 2 you leveled up fast (for a casual) but if you're the person that blinked to your experience bar every three seconds you might thought it's a little slow (btw WWW is your answer). every time i logged in I simply picked a map that several level belows me and run through it, completing dynamic events and heart quests also uncovered some vistas and point of interests, and when i completed that map i just simply run around following people and helped them out in DE or meta events, or just gathering stuffs and by two or three hours I probably leveled up once or two.

For crafting disciplines i picked up artificer and tailoring, leveling a discipline is much easier now since the trading post is up and running. I forgot to add that one of my reason to roam around low level area is to gather tier 2 crafting materials, leveling disciplines are somewhat a bittersweet thing, the problem with the materials is that it's just too much of it and sometimes the drop rate are abysmal, i can grab 15 small claw on a dynamic events but on another DE that features mobs that dropped vial of weak blood i probably only obtained 5 of them, but one thing I like is that loot bag dropped from humanoid mobs can contain random stuff (although they contain mostly butter now), occasionally i just go hunt out there and come back on later day to level up my crafting, still a long way for 400.

My crafting stuffs are way below my level although some of the masterwork items are fine looking and can be used as skin. Thing is: in Tyria I tend to chase vanity items like crazier than ever. I stylized my character by previewing every single armor i came whether it's from crafting or dropped items, and since I rolled a charr it's so tricky to stylized him, and of course being a mesmer makes it a double trouble (especially the pants and shoes that made him look like a skinny cat, and the cloth caps that always turn him into a big hooded walking head). Some of the neater stuffs are in the Personal Story which are littering my bank and using the transmutation stone is somewhat becomes a requirement =P

Of course after runnning around, crafting, and stylizing a character there is nothing more fitting than show it to a group of friends.... In dungeon =))