Getting hooked to Warframe

I expect a lot of Free to play looter shooter kinds of games to be just grindy and pay to win but Warframe really shocked me on this front. This game has been around for more than 10 years now and I wanted to give it a shot. But I didn't realise I would get addicted to it.

I don't remember what I expected from it but one thing is sure I didn't expect it to be that fun. I have played games where you grind for centuries without any real story or fun. But this has a lot of story elements to it. Sure, there are a lot of things (a lot) in this game to unlock and grind for but the gameplay and quests are well done.

You wake up in a world divided into factions and fighting over the control of power. The player controls Warframe, a bio-mechanical suit with special abilities and completes quests guided by the voice of a mysterious Lotus. Warframes are space ninjas and you will be assigned different missions to unlock different planets. You will defeat bosses, take down hostile enemies and much much more. It is a fast-paced third-person action shooter with an amazing storyline (so far).

I did my fair share of them throughout this week. You can see all the quests in the Codex. Each one is unique and has its characters, NPCs, rewards and storyline.

The Duviri Paradox that you can see above is completely different from the rest of the game. Very cool though.

Even for a ten-year-old game it looks beautiful and has amazing smooth and fluid motion.

The controls feel good and very responsive. The load times are very minimal and missions start quickly. They have optimised it well for sure.

I like a lot of things in the game but there are a few which make no sense. Well technically it does make sense, being a free-to-play game, they would have a monetization policy which will make them do stuff like this.

Massive wait times for weapons and frames to build. 72 real-time hours is a lot for any game. It feels like a Clash of Clans research thing again. But these are not as aggressive as the likes of COC. You can run as many things simultaneously as you want and it is just a one-time thing, not every time you are upgrading your weapon or frame.

Which brings me to the ranking. The game has a Mastery Rank mechanism which is your overall level and that unlocks a lot of new stuff. This rank can be earned after you achieve a specific amount of ranking points which can be gained through various methods. One easy method for me is to just level up my weapons and frames and the other is by doing missions.

I am already at Mastery Rank 4 (forgot to take ss of MR4 so sharing this one instead). These get harder to level up as the points required increase exponentially. You can unlock everything in the game by reaching Mastery Rank 16 only.

There are a lot of things to talk about in this game: Weapons, Companions, quests, farming in-game items, orbiters (spaceship), syndicates and factions, mods, warframes, builds and so on. And I still don't understand half of the things the game has to offer.

My current goal is to unlock all the planets slowly while gaining enough points to rank up quickly. The first few ranks were easy but now it is going to take a lot more. But the missions and quests are quite fun to do.

It even has open-world sections on some planets where you can farm resources, kill enemies or do missions.

It is a lot more fun with a squad. I would say it feels much easier to do these missions with one, two or three other players than doing them solo. But you can't find online players playing all the missions all the time. But if they are the game gonna let you join the session automatically and it is a good aspect of the game.

I joined a clan too and all the community seems to be quite helpful. You can ask any question in the game and there will be some random person trying to help.

I feel addicted and blame the game for being this fun. The urge to get more powerful is quite strong and motivating. I shall not stop until I become the best SPACE NINJA!