Things I don’t like about Warframe

For the sake of equality, after the Things I don’t like about Overwatch article, I’ve decided to do a few more of these. It is unfair for me to bitch about Overwatch, when other games have faults. I was going to do a Team Fortress one first but I need to refresh myself. Until I do, let’s go over things I dislike in Warframe.

Crafting Times

As well as space ninjas, Warframe is known for its need to farm. Warfarm after all needs you to get components to build everything. Pretty much everything important requires a handful of rare resources and a ton of common ones. Things like Niatin are tricky to get in large quantities. So when you finally get everything you need, you can get your new item, right?

Wrong.

Did you know it takes three real life days to build a new Warframe? And each component needed to build said Warframe takes 12 hours? Most weapons take 12 hours or a day, depending on what you are building. Unless you plan ahead, you could end up wasting a huge amount of time waiting for things to build. The day-long waits are fine, gives me a reason to come back tomorrow, but 3 and a half days, if you plan correctly, is silly.

Polarities and Weapon Ineffectiveness

Alright, I get it, taking an un-potato’d MK1-Braton isn’t going to go well against level 30+ enemies. But if you want any of your weapons to be effective in any way what so ever, you need to use Orokin Catalysts. These increase the amount of polarities you have and, thus, the maximum mods you can have. Unless you use Catalysts, your weapons will at best have one polarity slot, and your mod capacity will be 30, plus your current Mastery Rank. Great if you’re MR18, bad if you’re MR3.

Formas work as well, but they reset everything to level one in exchange for an extra polarity. This includes mod capacity. You need to then level everything up again. You need Formas to ‘re-polarise’ slots, generally to the V polarity, so you can fit in your Serration, which takes up most of your space when fully ranked.

The same applies to Warframes. This does improve if you get a Prime version, but not every frame has a primed version yet. Already though, my level Volt Prime has nearly as many mods as my level 30 Volt. Partially in thanks to my Pistol Amp aura (which is currently broken so I am only using it for extra mod space!) but mostly because I get extra polarities to put mods in without needing so many Formas.

Aura mods do give you more space, same with Stances on melee weapons, but again, polarities get in the way. Put a mod with the wrong polarity in the wrong polarity slot, and you’ll lose 2 capacity. Really for no reason.

Archwing

It’s a common opinion that Archwing isn’t very fun in Warframe. It’s a shame, really, because the idea behind Archwing is awesome – fly around in three dimensions and fight enemies! Destroy spaceships! Be awesome ninjas in space! Except it didn’t turn out that well.

First problem is that the controls are… awkward. Yes, I know, there is no ‘up’ in space, but for the sake of gameplay and not making your players dizzy, can we have a button that rights ourselves to our original positions? Weirdly, Archwing isn’t as headache-inducing as, say, Overwatch, but navigation is a real pain.

Second problem, you’re limited to specific Archwing guns, weapons and, worse, abilities. You’re thrust into the suit via a cut scene with no idea how to use the damn thing. Worse, you find you can’t use your abilities. The guns I get, throwing Kunais at satellites is of course going to be ineffective, but what’s wrong with using my Fragor, or the War, which is nearly as big as my gigantic Verticus sword?

And why can’t I use my Warframe’s powers? I get that not all abilities would work, especially ones that require ground, but still? Warframe abilities get changed for Conclave and Lunaro (PvP) so why not do the same for Archwing too? Abilities like Volt’s Speed would be so good in space.

The biggest problem though is that it’s hard gathering resources. One of the Archwings has a vacuum ability, but even then it’s still awkward. In a normal mission, it’s pretty easy to see where things drop, and even if it’s tedious, you can always go back and get loot. In Archwing though, in the vastness of space, you can barely see enemies, let alone drops. This actually causes a later issue – since you can’t see mods drop, you end up with very few modding options overall.

Anyway, those are my three major problems in Warframe. As I level up, I’ll probably find more, but oh well.