So yesterday's playdate was the first time I really spent some time looking at Warframe. Mahardy did a great job of breaking down everything and I got what I thought Warframe was COMPLETELY wrong. I thought it was more a competitive multiplayer shooter with AI(or creeps I guess if you want).

Spending some time watching the stream yesterday, I slowly started to wonder/realize, is Warframe just free Destiny with space ninjas, and seemingly more classes/variety?

Probably going to download this this weekend, before Sekiro comes out, and give it a real shot.

Only in so far as that both games have some form of loot. Warframe plays radically differently from Destiny.

I played a bunch of Warframe a few years back, kind of between Destiny 2 updates.

It was fun, though I found it kind meandered around and the story (at least what I remember of it) was sort of all over the place.

I also had trouble getting into the look of the characters, but I have that same issue with Destiny.

The shooting and encounter design isnt great but the mobility feels good. Ultimately if you want a game that plays okay and enjoy grinding you'll probably enjoy this, or pretty much any shlooter.

I mean... sort of... but not really. Clearly they both have some similarities, but it's two different vibes.

I positively love Warframe, but as others have said the loot model changes drastically. But if your goal is to just keep redoing procedurally generated content with a fun mobility model and an okay shooting model, it is awesome

What I recommend is to check out the opening quests. The early game is still pretty bad, but it is a lot better than it used to be. If you like it, consider more. If you don't, consider waiting until whatever online subscription services (Twitch/Amazon, Discord, etc) have a bundle of gear and try again. The biggest issue early game is that you don't have an effective way to grind resources and cash but ALSO need resources and cash to make new (and more fun) classes and weapons... which you need to unlock access to even newer classes and weapons. By early-mid game (probably Mastery Rank 4 or 5) that stops being an issue, but it is a huge deterrent

Also: Be very careful what you watch to learn the game. While the story is generally pretty light there is a particularly awesome moment 4-30 hours in that is best experienced without spoilers. It doesn't radically change the game, but it is a REALLY well done sequence that largely marked where DE started focusing on narrative content rather than just fetch quests.

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Personally: I love Warframe and have played a lot of it and probably spent more on supporter packs than I care to compute. But I also might be done with it. Finally got around to trying the new battle pass model (which replaced the alerts model) and it just feels like a job that is forcing me to go back to Plains of Eidolon (worst part of the game). Will probably keep playing as new story quests come out but I am in need of a new "trash game to play while listening to podcasts".

This and the stuff Mahardy hinted at is what ultimately sold me on checking it out. It seems like there is a lot more to it than what's on the surface.

Also, to clarify my "like Destiny" comments, I was more specifically referring to not only the loot loop, but also just the look/art of the game as well as the setting. The gameplay differs greatly, but the basic loot shooter loop and class based gameplay seems to be consistent.

Not really.

There's a list of artificial similarities you could make - they're both co op focused shooters with colorful environments and baffling stories. But both games are very different in feel, from gameplay loop to the ways you can interact with your loot to customization to any number of other things. I can see someone preferring Destiny over Warframe or vice versa.

They're both co-op sci-fi shooters that involve loot and your hero traveling around the solar system... that's about it. Gameplay wise, Warframe is most like Anthem. Both games are 3rd person, have flight, underwater diving, flipping through the air, and are power/ability heavy. Destiny is largely about your guns, not your powers., and it doesn't have exo-suits like the other 2 games.

I would like to point out that Warframe is older than Destiny. Some people online act like Destiny invented the looter shooter subgenre when Borderlands and Warframe are older and Division was just a few months later.

I have hundreds of hours in Warframe, I've played it since the open beta started 6 years ago. The shooting is not great. The melee combat, though just revamped again, is not great. The story only really got added in recently and outside of maybe two or three key moments, it's not great.

The movement is excellent, the monetization is excellent but unless you really like repeating the same missions over and over to progress towards something, you won't enjoy it as the gameplay isn't enough to carry it. I didn't like Destiny, but I liked playing Destiny for long enough to hang around, because it's shooting felt so good.

I liked Borderlands because of the guns and the endless treadmill of getting better ones. I thought The Division was ok, but only in a group. Warframe is something that I've been able to keep playing for so long because I have this little tick that enjoys seeing progress bars fill up and that game is nothing but progress bars filling up.

As someone who has also been playing Warframe since the beta and continues to play, Warframe is not a loot shooter.

It's a free to play horde based 3rd person action game. Loot is a constant shower but it's not randomized weapons it's just materials for making specific weapons or modification options for equipment. The gameplay revolves mostly around mowing down massive hordes of enemies that spawn indefinitely while piloting a super space ninja with multiple ranged weapons and a melee weapon. Each 'Warframe' (there are 39 not including Prime varients) has it's own stable of 4 powers unique to themselves and you will fight 3 enemy factions for control of the Sol star system.

Warframe boasts the most robust modification system of all the space powersuit games. This system can allow a player to essentially tune their weapons to any style of play they want or especially perform better in a given situation. Modding is where the real veteran meta of the game exists. Once you have gotten used to the fast paced movement of the game modding is your next step.

I will always recommend people try Warframe out. It's free so there's a very low barrier to entry and little lost for giving it a shot. Just be aware that the game has a very deep well of content and much of it is obscured in order to keep some of the more surprising lore aspects fresh and fun. There is more game to play in Warframe than virtually any loot shooter out there. Some of it doesn't even involve shooting!

I will also suggest you look up Rapid here on the Giant Bomb forums. He runs the Giant Bomb Alliance of Clans and they are a great way to get some help or guidance if you want to dip your toe into the game.

yeah i had the same experience as Jesus phish. Warframe is a really great free game with some awesome designs in there, but the moment to moment action never felt good to me and the missions were extremely repetitive. Once the novelty of 'wow you can really tell that Bungie took a lot of inspiration from this game' died down i felt like i had so many better playing games to spend time on.

Nothing plays like Warframe and it'll potentially make all other shooters seem slow and bland.
The shooting is actually fantastic, the movement is beyond anything else, and it's stylish to boot.

Destiny can not compare - it's a completely different game. One that might put Warframe fans to sleep before you finish the droning tutorial. But hey, some might like the slower, controlled pace of Destiny. It's all good, enjoy your thing, Warframe is free and trying it won't hurt anyone - except maybe yourself and your spare time if you get super into it.

There is a lot more content and things to do than in destiny, I haven't played it in years but I liked it alot more. (than destiny 1 haven't gotten to into destiny 2 at all). I also haven't played since they changed the controls around which supposedly makes it play a lot better than before. It is one of those games you're probably want to get a guide or find somebody who knows alot about it to figure out what to buy, what to grind, etc.

As other have already mentioned they are very different games all told with the main similarities being laregely superficial, being technically shooters and "persistent" game. That's pretty much it.

Warframe is not really a "looter" game either, like a Diablo or Destiny or Anthem or Borderlands, not in the same sense, you're not after random gear drops with stats. 99% of the time you are just collecting very abundant resources with little to no randomness involved, and then using said farmed resources to craft your gear from blueprints that can be just gotten for a pittance from the main marketplace, or copied from a clan or obtained some other way. There is some randomness to the drops but for the gear that you use it's very limited, like say a boss will drop parts of a frame and he always drops one of the three required pieces. All weapons and frames and gear is static, they are the same for all players (there is one exception to this tbf), the difference is in how you mod them.

As for gameplay, it's shooting is serviceable it's not stellar like Destiny and it's not bad either, varying wildly depending on the types of weapons and mod setups you use. With a lot of preference on area of effect weapon currently that can wipe out hordes of eneies at a time. Oh ye, WF is a horde shooter most of the time, ie you are killing enemies by bucket loads, in that way it's closer to the Diablo way of thinking, to make a player feel powerful make them able to kill billions with little to no effort at extreme speeds and then occasional fight bosses.

Shooting is also just one of the parts of WF (there is a fairly robust melee system as well). It's a much more ability focused game. It does not use cooldowns to limit your ability use, unlike games like Destiny or Anthem, instead it uses energy, think Diablo mana, if you have it you can spend it how you wish as much as you wish. Someone once said: Warframe is kinda like Destiny if you were using your ultimate all the time. Which is very much true with most semi competent builds and frames, you are constantly using your powers that are laying waste to areas, all the time. A frame like say Mesa for example has an ability that is like a directional version of Overwatch Reaper's ultimate, except she can turn it on/off at will, keep doing it for minutes at a time, at a massive range. It's kinda left up to the player how much you want to rely on your shooty wepons your melee or your abilities.

It's also can be very fast paced game as the stream has shown, and in all honesty Mark (who did a great job btw) is kinda still starting out. So ye it gets faster and crazier, both in terms of numbers of enemies, pace of movement you can achieve and the amount of things going on. But sometimes you're also just sitting around guarding an objective for minutes at a time, killing enemeis streaming at your from all directions.

Speaking of fast pace, it's movement systems is one of it's most universally praised features by anyone who got into it. But you do need to get the hang of it in order to enjoy. The "floatiness" that Jeff talks about is definitely there, but it's there for a purpose, because it enables sliding and transitioning smoothly from animation to animation, keeping up a constant flow without stopping or uncomfortably stuttering your character. Watching a player proficient with this movement system traverse levels with varying obstacles and terrain at breakneck speeds is a a thing all on its own and there are many extra methods to this madness too. It's also unfotunately not well tutorial by the game, and outside sources are kinda required to figure it all out.

Actually this is applicable to most of the game too, it's not gonna hold your hand and eventually it will get harder and you will start feeling squishier and enemies spongier, at which point it's usually time to start learning how it's more indepth mechanics work that aren't well explained by the game itself at all. Which is where all the streamers and youtubers come into play. It's rough on boarding is one of it's glaring weaknesses (but also in a way weirdly it's strengths, but i'm not gonna get into that design philosophy here). Part of it is because it's a city build on the ruins of an older city that was built on the ruins of an older city still, to be poetic about it. A lot of systems go layer on over time.

There is also no "leveling" progression in a sense, you aren't really leveling your character up at least not on an overall scale. Frames and weapons do have levels but they aren't traditionally done, weapons for example only get more mod capacity slots they dont gain any power in and of themselves when leveling up. These "levels" of items are also only a familiar sense of progression early on, later a frame or weapon can be leveled up from 0 to max in one mission. There is no ilevel, or power level, or light level, or gearscore. You are what mods you put in and combine on your weapon/frame. Because of the way it does things it a system that encourages you to "level up" as much of a variety of items as possible, going from one to another. This is why there are so many frames, you aren't expected to stick to one all the time, rather trying out new ones constantly and then selecting a suite of them comfortable to you and the tasks required of them. You do have an overall MR (mastery rank) but it gives no inherent statistic benefits, rather quality of life ones, as it is essentially a measure of how many frames/weapons/items you have used overall.

It's very much a what you put into it kind of game, kind of like Path of Exile in that way. You put in a lot you get a lot. You put in very little and you'e gonna get very little out of it. You can fiddle around with it level up a couple frames do some missions try a few weapons and think it's bland and bounce off, totally understandable. Or dive deep and loose a few thousand hours, being a biomechanical space ninja that spreads the plague to a whole zone while traveling at mach 5 while killing a dozen or so enemies at a time with a weapon swing while doing cool slides, glides, flips and spins.