Ideas To Spice Up Missions

The Acolyte event in Warframe has ended, and the Ghouls event is slowly ending too. The basic gist of it was that the Acolytes, a bunch of edgy friends of the Stalker (last seen in the Second Dream), are roaming around and need to be killed. Each one would hide on a node somewhere on the star chart until someone stumbles across them in a mission, which helps pinpoint the Acolyte’s location. Once they’re found, people can do the mission and search the map to lure an Acolyte out of the shadows, fight them, defeat them and get some rare event mods. The Acolytes all have large health bars and, this year, they all stuck around for three days before disappearing once more.

Now, the appearance of these Acolytes got me thinking. They’re not normal enemies. They’re actually all Warframes, with a custom Stalker helmet, in a white, black and red paint job and a variety of powers each. Violence for example is a Limbo Warframe using a fencing sword and a single Venka gauntlet and does charging attacks, while Torment is a Mesa with a random piece of Equinox attached to her, and she occasionally turns into a wave of water to dodge attacks. They don’t mindlessly shoot at you like every other enemy in the game.

The interesting thing was that each Acolyte made what would have been otherwise rather boring missions more fun. Why can’t more people invade my missions and make me do things a bit differently? Alright, you’ve got Stalker, Shadow Stalker, the Gustrag Three, Zanuka and enemy Syndicates, but the latter are somewhat common, the Stalkers are both old and overdone and the G3 and Zanuka don’t really feel threatening despite how rare they can be.

We need more changes in missions. More things to shake other things up.

Thing is, we can’t just add more enemies like the Stalker. Actually, we could. After all, we’ve probably pissed off a lot of people in our time. What’s stopping the Hyena pack from coming for us directly while we’re in a mission? After all, Ambulas can randomly appear in outdoor missions on Pluto. The same goes for the Grineer, perhaps an Executioner from Rathuum, dishonoured from losing to the Tenno, wants to settle scores personally?

Not every random thing in a mission has to be an enemy though. A mission could change its type. We already have two examples of missions becoming Exterminates, either randomly during Capture missions or when you trip the alarms in every vault of a Spy mission, but why can’t we have other mix ups? There’s a single Mobile Defense that has a normal defense at the end, but what’s stopping other missions from becoming Exterminates? Or, heck, you could have Sabotage, Mobile Defense and other missions turning into Capture missions.

And on top of that, not every encounter has to be a negative one. Why don’t we ever stumble across any allies? Those Lone Tenno Operatives that the Lotus mentions for Survival missions, perhaps? We could also have a chance to bump into Syndicate operatives that we are allied with. Heck, we could even bump into NPC Tenno, doing their own missions, with an option to complete both their mission and our mission for extra rewards.

There’s loads of little things that could spice up missions a little.

The only problem is, there’s a fine line between something being too common and too tedious, and something being interesting but overly rare. As we stand, we’re at the latter in Warframe, we’ve got some cool scenarios but they’re rather rare. It would be nice to move towards slightly more common little events, especially since we’re often repeating the same missions over and over…