One robot ninja's noble journey to see how far they can travel across this great cosmos of ours without spending any money or exerting too much effort.
Part 2: Picturin' a Warframe
The first update chiefly covered Warframe's onboarding process, which I'll admit was well designed to acclimatize new players to what might be one of the more complex action games out there. Now that the tutorial quest is out of the way and I'm finally getting decent mods and rewards, there's considerably less direction for the playthrough save for a future quest log with a number of locked criteria. My current goals are to meet the requirements to leave Earth for Venus - I just need to upgrade one of the new mods I'm getting, which is simple enough - and/or explore the rest of Earth's locations, only about half of which were involved in the "Vor's Prize" quest chain.
This also means I'm dropping the "hour 1", "hour 2" conceit from now on. There's a whole lot that doesn't happen on an hourly basis in this game, and it becomes more about the destinations (see above) you're working your way towards. As such, I'll be broadly covering the more notable events and discoveries for this second episode in lieu of journalizing a dozen uninteresting (to read about, at least) sword-swinging soirees across the stars.
New Developments!
Trusty Patches
So I guess a 3GB patch went out between last week and now? I suppose with F2P online there's inevitably going to be a running theme of deleting random crap off the PS4's HDD so I can actually play the game again. No idea what was in this patch, by the way; I'm sort of on information lockdown until I get far enough in that big changes will mean anything. It did sound like a bunch of melee tweaks though, which is awesome because I wasn't too used to the old melee system yet.
Cetus, the Stacked Squad's Local (& The Plains of Eidolon, for plain ol' idlin')
I briefly checked out the busy vendor settlement of Cetus and realized there was almost an entire other game here - one that is mostly based around the persistent (as in, not tile-based randomized like all the regular maps), enormous overworld map of The Plains of Eidolon. Some stark Xenoblade Chronicles similarities out there, not least of which is the massive corpse of a "sentient": a colossal robotic lifeform that visited Earth at one point and then kicked the bucket. Nighttime in the Plains produces these scary looking robot things that kill you faster than you can blink, so it's best to get any business done (bounties from Cetus, mostly) before dusk. Between killing Grineer squads, fishing, hunting, and other more bucolic pursuits, it feels like players could spend a lot of time in the plains raising their affinity with Cetus's Ostron population and working their way through its many tasks and challenges. However, I wanted to keep going with exploring Earth and finding my way off the cradle of life eventually to see what else the solar system had in store, so this place isn't for me. Yet, at least.
Of course I say that and then notice the second major quest chain starts in Cetus, so maybe I'll be back sooner than I expected.
Around the World in 80 Melees
The rest of Earth's locales appear to be semi-randomized missions against the Grineer delivered in a multitude of mission objective permutations. There are maps where you defend a target against waves of enemies, maps where you defend a target while it uploads data, maps where you defend a target while it excavates valuable resources, and - I hope - maps where I don't have to stand there like an idiot getting shot at from every direction while I wait patiently for a mechanical equivalent of Natalya from GoldenEye's Control level to work its magic. I assume these are here not because they're building towards anything, but if I happen to want to continue fighting and scanning Grineer, acquiring resources that can only be found on Earth, or earning XP in low-level missions to get new warframes up to snuff.
That is to say, these places exist for farming and grinding and not much else, and the many mission variations (hah) are simply there to mix things up a bit. Still, as Galactus might say, I should probably finish my aperitif here before I move onto the entrée.
UPDATE: I can't progress any further through the Earth nodes until I've unlocked something called an "Archwing". A cursory glance of the in-game quest tracker reveals that I need to travel to Mars to see what that's about, which unfortunately means completing Venus and Mercury first. Looks like I'm going to be bouncing from the ol' pale blue dot for now.
Building a Warframe
With the recommendation of a commenter, I bought the blueprint for the Rhino frame as the next step in my long road to framemastery. However, I was not aware that buying the blueprint is merely the first step: you also need to have all the blueprints for its constituent parts, which I've now learned have to be farmed from a boss on Venus. Setting aside the issue where I have to complete the same boss fight potentially dozens of times in a row for all the necessary bits, there's also a considerate waiting period (not that it'll bother me too much with this "once a week" playing pattern I'm on) for each component and the finished frame. If it takes a week to make a single warframe I dunno how this game got the traction it did. Guess I'm stuck with you for a while, Excalibur.
Ah well, time to go find those blueprints. Maybe I'll find a bunch for other warframe blueprints along the way as I complete the various steps necessary for a jaunt to our closest neighbor (in a relative sense at least; there are times when Venus is on the opposite side of the Sun from us). I sort of prefer the idea of having fate and serendipitous boss drops determine what warframe I should use next; feels more organic in a way.
(Wait, where the fuck is Gallium? Mars? Why do I have to go to Mars for a single component when I can only find the rest on Venus? Stupid game.)
I'm On Venus, Taking Fire (Not My Desire)
To complete the Venus Junction and activate the Venusian pathway, I had to first meet a set of four requirements: Complete "Vor's Prize", the tutorial mission chain; collect 20 mods; apply four of those mods to a single warframe or weapon (which also meant levelling up same until they had the juice to hold that many mods at once); and upgrade a mod to Rank 2 via fusion. I'd already completed the first three of those by the end of the last session, and the fourth was simple enough: I needed cash and a resource called endo (which is either found while playing or made by sacrificing mods you don't want), neither of which was in short supply.
The next step is to clear out a semi-tough "specter" enemy squatting in the relay station. He looked like another Tenno - that is, a vaguely robotic warframe like the one I'm using - and though I won fairly easily it was the first boss fight where it felt like I was taking on another player.
Between the other Earth nodes and the Cetus quest chain, I barely had enough time to poke into what Venus has to offer. I hope to reach the settlement of Fortuna and initiate the third quest chain of the game next time, and also figure out where to get these Rhino warframe components (chassis, systems, optics) to build myself a second buddy once I've mastered Excalibur. What I can say is that Venus is Corpus central: that's a whole new faction of enemies to scan and rob and kill, in that order.
Filling the Void
This may be a limited time event, but shortly after completing one of the Earth levels I was informed that there was a "Void Fissure" objective available in the same location, and I'd picked up some sort of relic that would allow me to attempt it. Now, I've not had a fissure on my void before, but I hear they're extremely painful. It didn't sound like anything I wanted to be involved with, but then I recalled that I'm playing this game for the elucidation of all my adoring readers, so I should at least try everything once.
The Void Fissure mission involved being in a permanent high aggro state versus many different enemy types who spawned endlessly across the level through the titular portals, each of which sporting an glowing coat of paint and the "Corrupted" adjective on their names. This effect also spread to the enemies already present in the area. Exacerbating all this was the fact that this was a Spy mission: one where you have to surreptitiously break into vaults and extract the data without getting spotted. Hard to do that without an enormous, PO'd inter-dimensional entourage following me around, but the game did at least tell them to wait patiently outside these vault areas.
A bit of a nightmare, but everything was level appropriate for the mission so there wasn't too much trouble running past them all once I'd acquired the requisite number of "reactants" necessary to earn the reward at the end. To my surprise, once I was out of the mission I noticed a few interesting acquisitions in my spoils: the blueprints for the chassis and systems of the warframes Harrow and Ivara, respectively. Hey, if all I have to do is run away from zombies for some free warframe blueprints, I might volunteer myself for a few more of these.
Mastery Mysteries
One important facet about Warframe that I encountered at the end of the last session but didn't have time (or really much context) to talk about in Part 1 is the Mastery Rank. Because the player spends a lot of time building and equipping new weapons and new warframes, all of which begin at level 1 and need some serious usage before they can compete with what they supplanted, there needed to be a more universal standard of a player's progress that highlights how far they've come and the privileges they've earned. That's what the Mastery Rank entails.
The Mastery Rank, in addition to activating new features, also determines what gear you're allowed to use. All but a handful of starter weapons require higher Mastery Ranks to unlock (and then, of course, you also have to buy their blueprints and build them). The rank also affects other privileges like how often you can trade with other players in a day; something I intend to do once I find anything of value, as it's the only means of earning platinum - the premium currency - without spending real money, at least according to most Warframe guides out there. (Aside: That suggests that there are players out there with tons of real-life money invested in the game willing to spend it on rare mods from other players. Like when I'm selling Steam Trading Cards, I feel like I'm taking advantage of people with poor impulse control. I can only hope that there's a lot of dev accounts regularly injecting premium currency into the marketplace to keep the bartering economy robust.) I can't access Syndicates until I hit rank 3 either, which might be something else to look into at a later date.
Far as I can tell, the Mastery Rank is something that increases in the background as I level up various warframes and equipment or complete nodes and quests, so it seems like my best course of action to earn them is to try a little bit of everything and change my loadout if anything should get maxed. These Mastery Ranks feel like big upgrades, so I'll be sure to mention them when they happen (and if any new features are available).
Lost and Foundry
Instead of fussing about warframe components this week, I've decided to build myself a companion. The Taxon blueprint was a reward for unlocking the Venus Junction, and while it will take 24 hours for the foundry to make (whyyy?) at least it didn't require much in the way of precious resources. Once the little guy arrives, he's going to help keep my shields up and blast enemies with some sort of matter deconverter. That'll be something to enjoy in Part 3.
To All the Dreamers Out There
I have no idea what the context is behind this radio lady who pipes up occasionally when you're idling in your ship, but her voice and frequent updates remind me a lot of Lynne Thigpen's "Greek chorus" of a radio DJ in The Warriors. Thigpen was also famously The Chief in the Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? TV show, but I don't imagine this operator will tell me where in the world I can find all these warframe component blueprints I need. How's anyone supposed to intuit this without an external information source, I wonder? Maybe there's a bunch of "where to look for parts" prompts I'm missing.
Or maybe the point of an online game with lots of players is for everyone to pool their discoveries together and learn the universe's secrets via a more communal approach. Hence everyone telling me to consult the thrice-darned wiki. Gimme a break: it's my first one of these.
On the next episode of Seeking Warframe & Fortune: More like Stabbeas Corpus.
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