Devstream 32

Devstream 32 started on July 4, 2014, @ 2pm EST.
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==Summary==
HOUSEKEEPING
1) My goodness, Canada day was Tuesday, 4 July today! Weekend celebrations. Between NOW and July 7 at NOON, anyone signing into Warframe will get a FREE Grand Finale Fireworks! There may also be some celebratory Alerts happening over the weekend.
2) Vor… he begins his approach to the PS4 Tenno. July 7 it’s happening!
3) TennoLive 2014: Gamescom is coming! It will be a live audience devstream with official online applications for the audience. Stay tuned!
DIFFICULTY OF THE GAME
Frostosti: I would like to see the dev's discuss the difficulty of the game.
As a new player with everything unranked the game is VERY VERY challenging. Then when the player continues playing, he will rank up his items and find more and more different mods.
These mods are then used to fuse and upgrade the so-called 'essential' mods. All this time the player becomes exponentially stronger, while the enemy barely increases (comparing the first planet to the last planet). Since as soon as you have a high serration, you can slap it on every single weapon and can almost instantly beat every single mission, see the graph below for a rough indication the difficulty versus the time spend in the game.
The problem here is that for new players the game is too difficult (very high line in the top left) where for veteran players, that have invested a fair amount of time into the game, the game is way too easy (flat line at the bottom right). I would appreciate it if the devs could spend a minute of their time to talk about it and give their opinions. Because in a normal game it is the other way around. It starts easy and becomes more and more difficult the longer you play.
Steve: A lot of the feedback from veteran players on the last event was positive, and that should be proof that the difficulty is on the rise.
Geoff: It's definitely something that's on our minds. We don't want to just have meatbag enemies. Prosecutors were a little bit of that with the damage immunity, and the last events were boosting the bosses' damage, so you can't just speedrun it without being challenged. Two updates we redid the leveling curve of enemies and their damage, so that could be revisited as the game grows. T4 helped address this as well.
Sheldon: Nightmare even has some permutations that offer more difficulty.
Rebecca: A lot of people are asking for a rework of the Nightmare system.
Steve: The first quest we're doing for U14, Vor's Prize, supports difficulty selection. Once you beat it, you'll unlock harder difficulties to play it on. Difficulty is always on our minds. The contrast to us are those games where you get cool powerups, but then the enemies level up with you, so the difficulty curve is more of a flat line. We tried our best to speak to the difficulty with the last event.
U14
Steve: It'll come when it comes. We thought we could get it out next week, but I don't think we can. We've been crunching around the clock to get it out as soon as possible.
BEGINNER WEAPONS/MODS
Steve: The new tutorial quest is designed to prep the player as best we can. You'll even get to select from a few weapons, which is cool. Introducing new players through the quest ensures that you'll get the certain mods you'll need.
QUEST EXCLUSIVE REWARDS
Chibers: Any plans to incorporate rewards exclusive to completing quest lines?
Steve: Yes. I can think of several examples. We have the tutorial quest and a Kubrow quest.
Sheldon: I may even have one more that I haven't told you guys about!
Steve: These quests are going to increase your standing with factions and offer a unique reward when you play it for the first time. The higher difficulties will offer a bit more juice to collect, like more mastery. U14 is a big change to the interface and flow of the game, but I'm most excited for quests. Players say that the events are the most exciting part of Warframe currently, and I agree. We want to make those available to everyone, including previous events for new players.
CORPUS FREEZE RAY
Rebecca: Kary gave us three images: one of the model, one with Excalibur, and one for how it's going to animate. This is one of the guns that overlap with current Warframe skills...
Scott: I see it as complimentary. If you like to freeze things, use it with the Frost.
SHOTGUN/SNIPER BALANCE
Scott: After U14 goes out the door, if I have a few moments I'll take a look at buffs and balancing. Usually my free time comes right at the end of a major build.
Sheldon: We're kind of just touching everything periodically, but after U14 it will be a whole new game.
TRINITY BALANCE
Archwizard: Last month's Suspicious Shipment alerts have caused some concern regarding Trinity’s ability to maintain team survivability in high damage content, especially in light of Blessing’s mitigation becoming reactive. Do you feel this is a valid concern for healers, more of a statement about enemy damage, or an intended outcome?
Sheldon: I sometimes wish I knew that my team was losing health a little bit quicker. Possibly a little indicator in the HUD of when shields drop, more apparent than what we have now. T3 is probably the highest I run. Some people just drop in health so fast... I'm at my best when playing with headphones and talking to teammates.
Steve: It's strength becomes this elastic ball of being too easy or too difficult. When I was playing T4, even Iron Skin is gone like that, and you as a player have to adapt.
Sheldon: It becomes this management metagame where I'm looking at my team and scouting for energy orbs.... It's exciting.
Steve: I wouldn't say that any changes are coming soon, but the feedback Sheldon gave is definitely something we can address in the future.
PLAT GIVEAWAY: NyxOOX
CREDIT REWARDS
Brahmastra: Why not replace EXP and credit login rewards for 0.5 / 1 hour boosters?
All: Why not?
Steve: We do have XP rewards for the first mission of the day.
Sheldon: We can take a look. Coming next week, we'll be cracking open the vault. The Gorgon is on the vault, but also the login rewards... So maybe it's time for a cycle of rewards?
Steve: The login reward system is definitely showing it's age.
PLAYER SHIPS/COSMETICS
Brahmastra: Will there be cosmetics for the ships and or kubros?
Steve: We should show this.... the Liset redesign. (screenshot)
Steve: For U14, we may not have the colour customization in the UI yet, but it is coming. Different parts of the ship will open up to maneuver it, which is really cool. On the inside of the ship, here is what it looks like orbiting Saturn. We would love for you to be able to customize this and make it your own. The cool thing about the player ship is that all the region backdrops are correct, so when your friends are there, you'll see other ships flying around. There's so much more connectedness between the player's ship and the missions you run.
Geoff: When you're in a party, you'll see all of your teammates' ships flying around the planet.
Steve: In U14.0, there won't be any social hangouts on the ship, but that wouldn't be that difficult for us to add in. The cool thing about U14 parties is we've redone the lobbying system for matchmaking. The party is still in a persistent menu while you're on the ship. It's gonna be awesome
Geoff: Here is the new Liset in context then you're used to seeing. There are these really nice details in the ship; we'll try to find different reasons to show you all the parts. Here is your home base, which you can dock onto.
DOCKING
Steve: the ship is in two parts: The Liset is your cramped dropship for mission, but it connects to a larger assembly where you will manage all the things on your ship's deck.
Rebecca: Will we be able to dock our Lisets onto the existing Dojos?
Geoff: That'd be cool.
Steve: We want to put a docking system in there, because it makes sense.
Rebecca: Will the player ship make dojos less useful?
Steve: Absolutely not.
CARRIER VACUUM
–CMHunter-: Are you going to add the Vacuum ability to other sentinels? or maybe make it a default Warframe feature?
Scott: I've definitely read the feedback, and it's something I've thought about, but I'm not sure. For instance, Carrier would need a new power to make it unique. Figuring that out is important, because people have invested time and money into Carrier already, and yanking it's power away and giving it to everyone isn't very fair to them. It's on the radar, but not being worked on.
SENTINELS vs. KUBROWS
Steve: We've been talking about ways to keep sentinels relevant, so we're toying with the idea of giving them personalities. We definitely have some stuff in the wings for that, but for a while, it'll be Kubrow-mania
LOBBY HOSTING/NETWORKS
Steve: I know Glen is investigating something with our NAT punch-through, which may have affected quality over the last month. One thing is that we've separated the squad from the host, so you're not locked into one person controlling everything. Don't expect any immediate changes, but the potential for this change is favourable to all players.
Rebecca: What about ticking a box that says 'do not host'?
Steve: We haven't gotten there, but the sentiment is correct; we should be ticking that box behind the scenes. We tend to do livestreams about new stuff, but we are always working on the core of the game. We don't have hosted servers for Warframe, but the hosting-lobby system is gonna be the first step towards fixing the situation. I often feel like we make excuses for this stuff, but our best engineers are working on it constantly.
PLAT GIVEAWAY: NelsonF1993
DARVO
unknow99: Where is Darvo?
Scott: He pops up here and there.
Geoff: He has a role, but the Corpus ARE trying to kill him.
Rebecca: Will he be making a return?
Steve: Absolutely. If you're a fan of Darvo, you'll like the first quest in the game.
COMMUNITY WEAPONS/ENEMY TYPES
Evers: What is the status of the Community Event Melee Weapons / New Enemytypes
Geoff: We've shown the sword and board a lot, and that will be coming out soon. We've also got a render of the tonfa, ready to show here. (screenshot) You're going to dual wield them, and it's going to have a brand new stance. It turned out pretty great.
DOWNSIZING CLAN TIERS
Steve: Glen and I have been talking about this. There's nothing to announce, but it is on the radar of things to address.
EVENT STATUES
LordBerwick: I'd like to ask a question regarding event statues.
This was brought up in a previous thread by Xylia (<a href='https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/249708-event-rewards-stone-statues/?hl=%2Bevent+%2Bstatues' class='bbc_url' title=>https://forums.warfr...+event +statues</a>) about how the top 3 clans in each tier receive a shiny statue for an event, however, other clans receive nothing.
What do the devs think about awarding stone statues to every clan that participates in an event so that every clan can commemorate and display their participation?
Geoff: Everyone's a winner! Kids are too soft these days.
Scott: Not everyone can have a trophy.
HIGH LEVEL ABILITIES/UTILITIES
Scott: Wait until U14.
SKILL TREE vs. MOD SYSTEM
TheGreatZamboni: Abridged points: The current Mod Card system is not a sustainable one. Meaning, you cannot continually release mods and use them as a crutch for content. The Corrupted Mods were already scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of ideas. But to think you can keep the system interesting with a flawed foundation is foolish . . .
Having 300 Warframes and 1000 weapons cannot make up for bad design. Especially when said Warframes and weapons fall victim to the very problem at the core of the game: The Mod Card system. Because the effectiveness of your Warframe and Weapon are not tied to your skill or interaction with said items but to the mods you have equipped, the game becomes one of drops. You play to max Serration, Redirection, Focus, Primed Chamber.
R: What do you think mods offer to the base of the game? And are there any plans to go back and revisit the entire system?
Sheldon: Isn't that what we're doing with different tiers of mods? You'll have a graduated approach to what mods you're using, where the quality will increase. Just from a new player perspective, this is a good thing.
Steve: I think it's laughable to say we have a game about progression, where the progression has no bearing on the outcome. And the idea that mods replace skill in the game is simply untrue. Since the original roleplaying games, there has been an intersection between the value of items you acquire and your ability to use them in the right situations. The variety of builds available in Warframe tells me that there is skill in both play, as well as the design of your build. Through the mod system, you can make any build you want, and the choices offered to players will only grow. There are years of ideas in our backlog, and the time required to make things is all that holds us back. I think a big part of his issue is the required mods, which the new update will address. There are a lot of false assertions in that post.
Rebecca: I think our players are asking for something that will never be in the game, and some people may not like the mod system, but we think we can work with it and make the game fun
Steve: We could do that skill tree with a thousand different options, but the mods are what gives Warframe it’s depth. It’s different than the trees that people expect. We went through this already in U7. The possibilities for energy and slot balance is orders of magnitude higher than any tree system.
Rebecca: I suppose the frustration is what more mods can we make? We get complaints about mods like Handspring and Warm Coat...
Steve: I agree and hear that those are bandaid mods, but those are few and far between. I think there's a lot more interesting things done with mods, like tradeoffs or channeling efficiency.
Scott: If you go to the forums to find your best build for anything, there's often a giant thread of people comparing and contrasting. There are those common mods that you feel like you have to have, though.
Steve: The biggest flaw is the lack of tradeoff for buffing up mods other than increased capacity. The kind of thing we did with corrupted mods or channeling stances is something we could work on over time.
PLAT GIVEAWAY: The66Monkey
IN-GAME UI
Silentsintheday: We've seen some UI teasing for the new UI that is coming, but we have only been shown the non-mission UI (ex star map, arsenal, market, etc. etc.) Does this mean that the in mission UI is staying the same/not being worked on? Or is there just nothing to be shown at this time?
Steve: It's definitely changing. We can't show it because it's not done.
Rebecca: Will it change to show loot received?
Steve: Yes.
Rebecca: Will you be able to check it mid-mission?
Steve: Not yet. We've redesigned every single UI for U14, and it’s still not done. In-mission is changing, the pause menu is changing, and being unified with the squad changes. Being able to know what you collected mid-mission is a very useful feature.
MARKET PRICES
Othergrunty: Any chance someone is finally forced to sit down and clean up the market *cough* 150 plat for a Skana *cough* so prices make any damn sense and people might be more willing to pay you money for something?
Sheldon: Nope. Market's staying the way it is. We might roll out some progressive disclosure, but the prices are good the way they are.
CORPUS/GRINEER GUNS
Othergrunty: Why are there suddenly so many weapons developed by Corpus and Grineer that aren't used by them? If you want to expand lore why do you break it so much with that?
Scott: Usually when a new AI type is created, we go through the vault of weapons that are available. I’m not saying we’re going to randomize it because it’d be unfair, with new AI coming into the game, we definitely have some more choices from our arsenal. When we started out, a lot of the weapons were given without reason, but now that we've got more themed weapons, we had to go back and tweak who uses what.
Geoff: We’ll have to give them new grip options, because right now they all use rifle grip.
Scott: I think the weapon changes are just a lack of time and focus on that part of the game.
MISSION TAXIS
eprstt: Why not disable the ability to unlock the mission if the previous not completed? it will give the opportunity to run these missions are prepared Tenno only and reduce the number of complaints about the "unnecessary heaviness" of the game.
Geoff: That's a great question.
Steve: That's going to change in U14. You can play a mission with your friend, but you'll have to unlock the mission nodes yourself.
SHARED ANIMATION SETS
Fezalion: In an early destream it was said that we would be able to use the animation sets from one warframe on another. I'm not sure if anything has been said on this but it would be nice to get an answer and even the possibility of more animations sets for warframes.
Geoff: Although the UI guys are busy, we would just need some menu support to put that in. We decided to hold it for U14, but we should get to that.
Geoff: we've talked about 14.1, so as soon as we can.
ANDREWOFDOOM: What's the likelihood of something akin to Player Studio that SOE currently does? Albeit there will need to be a bit of discussion of whether the players would be earning real money (a pretty big legal hassle) or just platinum (less legal hassle to deal with but less incentive) from people buying it. This would allow resources to be diverted elsewhere.
Steve: We have a contest we're going to be doing for weapon skins.
Rebecca: If you know how to use Specular Maps/Diffuse Maps in Photoshop, you'll be able to participate.
Steve: We’ve seen what Valve does with their Player Content. We're thinking of Weapon Skins and sharing the Platinum share. If that's successful, we could see it being implemented in the future. It's a super involved process to give creators their money like through steam workshop. But the quality of the fan art is absolutely stellar, and we want to give you a way to implement those designs in-game.
FIGHTING UNARMED
RazorTip: Will we ever be capable of fighting unarmed? As in situations like after we are captured by the Harvester, and need to reclaim our gear, it's almost a waste that we Tenno, martial artists that we are, are unable of disarming our enemies or turning their own weaponry against them, in a 'use and discard' way, or in perhaps some flashy finisher move. Wouldn't this add a little more combat diversity and uniqueness to the game? Also related, shouldn't there be more missions where things don't go as planned and we are knocked out, captured, and must escape?
Geoff: We talked about what kind of combat setting you should have when harvested. We're not sure how often within the game that context fits. But right now, I don't see a system being implemented. Fist weapons are already pretty close, so we wouldn't really have to change much. We like the idea of melee and focusing it on a weapon.
Scott: They are looking for more of a grappling/finisher style.
Geoff: Oh, well we kind of have a lot of scaling in the game to make enemies feel more imposing size wise. There are already some issues with this in game with finishers. Grappling would be cool if we can get a more graceful way of dealing with enemy size scaling.
FREERUNNING/PARKOUR
Geoff: We definitely want to 2.0 that system. Daniel is our AI programmer but also our animation programmer. When we can find the time to work on it, we will.
Scott: From a design perspective, we have to figure out a way of doing it without affecting the level layouts. Also we don’t want the controls to be too complex.
Geoff: Things like moving horizontal on ledges would be cool, but the art sets, they don’t even speak to that.
Scott: Now, going back and modifying all those sets for new movement ideas would be a question of ‘will new movement ideas exist for new art sets’.
Steve: I think there's a lot of room for polish in the presentation, like the camera pops.
Geoff: It feels pretty rigid right now.
Sheldon: The Grineer Galleon has a lot of cool stuff, like the ping-pong wallrunning section.
Geoff:We definitely wanna get back to that eventually... Maybe after August.
Scott: We have thought about state-based options. We've even talked about a quick get-up animation for when you're knocked down...
Geoff: We did experiments with sliding under things. We definitely have animations for that somewhere. A lot of that stuff is already on deck.
Scott: We’ve talked about knockdowns having skill based recovery to recover quicker rather than a mod that is a bandaid mod. We have test animations.
Geoff: Yes, we have test animations for that.
Scott: It goes back to adding skill to the game.
Geoff: We’ve tested spin-kick get ups also.
FOCUS/PROXY WARS
Rebecca: People are asking about End Game systems.
Steve: Dark Sectors are changing a lot. Focus is post U14.
PLAT GIVEAWAY: ItsNexusDecay!
PS4 UPDATE PROCESS
Steve: We need to go through Sony's cert process whenever we touch the executable. We do spent a lot of time worrying about how timely the updates are. The events add fun surprises and advance the lore, and we're not making any promises, but we're trying to implement some back-end server unlocks to run things on both platforms at the same time.
Sheldon: We're going to open the vault on Wednesday next week.
Steve: If we touch the executable, we go through the Cert process.
MORE LORE
Steve: Vor rhymes with Lore!
PC TO PS4 MIGRATION
Rebecca: Last word on this is when U14 is on both platforms, but we will update everyone if that changes.
NEW MODS
Sheldon: Yup, Tethra’s Doom mods will come back like Cicero Crisis.
WYRM PRIME WEAPON
Steve: Yes! We will give people the Prime Version of the Burst Rifle.
U14
Steve: We wanted it to happen next week, but we have a lot to cover still. Upgradeable immersive ships! Better UI for squads! New Kubrows/Genetic Foundry! New Weapons! Quest System (which will feed into Proxy Wars).
FINAL VIDEO… VORS PRIZE TEASER
http://youtu.be/znFhYiqbvGE?t=1h12m50s
==Media==
Freezegun.png|Corpus Freeze Gun
Freezegunwexcal.png|Corpus Freeze Gun
Lisettint.png|Tintable Liset
Playership.png|Inside a Liset
Tonfa.png|Tenno Tonfa
Category:Livestreams
Category:Videos