Warframe’s Simulacrum Could Be So Much Better

The Simulacrum is a room unlocked by buying a key off Cephalon Simaris. Located in the Tenno relays, you can go there and test out various things. For example, you can go and test out how well Corrosive does on an Ignis against various factions. In fact, you can test pretty much every weapon and ability you own, and the room is supplied with infinite ammo, energy and health. But the Simulacrum could be vastly improved in a lot of ways.

You need to unlock everything about it.

First off, you need to actually unlock the Simulacrum. To do that, you need to get 50,000 standing with Cephalon Simaris. That’s not too hard, since he gives daily Syndicate tasks that give about three to four thousand standing per day. It’s slow but doable. And you can just scan enemies in the mean time to get extra standing. Once you’ve unlocked the room though, you need to do more work.

If you want to test a weapon against an Arid Heavy Gunner, then you need to get 20 scans of an Arid Gunner. You want to see if a Corpus Tech hates toxin or magnetic more, you need to find 20 Corpus Techs and scan them. Every enemy you want to test against has to be unlocked by scanning them.

The weirdest thing though is that the level of these enemies is tied to your Mastery Rank. If you want to test on a level 150 enemy (common at the end of Steel Path), you actually need to be Mastery Rank 24. Level 100 enemies (i.e. level 3 sortie enemies) require you to be MR14 of all things. I find this incredibly strange. Why can’t we just, well, have enemies as high as we want?

There’s no simple test dummy.

I think the one thing the Simulacrum is really lacking is an actual test dummy. Sure, you can test all you want on Bombards and Grineer, but it’s not toggle-able. And only really applies to Grineer.

What would be really useful is a test dummy that you can tweak the values of. You can set it to any level you want, set it to any armour or health type you want and whether it’s alerted or not. This dummy doesn’t even need to look good. It could just be a t-posing Excalibur. But it would be easier to test exactly what you want.

The base Simulacrum sucks and has too many edges.

The normal, standard Simulacrum, also known as the Citadel Simulacrum, isn’t actually very good for testing. All the enemies tend to spawn along the edges of the map. Which means they can very easily be knocked off the map. There’s also lots of tiny little gaps that things can fall through, and the overall design just isn’t very test-space-y.

Sure, you can use the Ballroom Simulacrum, but that’s basically gone now. It was a reward for Scarlet Spear, and Scarlet Spear is no longer around. Of course, like most of these modern events, it may come back, but goodness knows how long that will take. So, in the mean time, we’re stuck with the Citadel Simulacrum

Not enough variables.

There’s actually a lot of things you can’t test. Even if you play around with the handful of settings you have, you actually can’t test against Steel Path enemies in the Simulacrum. In fact, you can’t even test against sortie-level or Nightmare-level conditions either.

What we need are some additional toggles. Not just ones for different enemy types (Nightmare, Sortie, Steel Path) but additional ones for whether allies are aware and alerted or not, can move around or not or are allowed to shoot.

You can’t test potential builds, only what you have.

The biggest issue is that you can only test whatever you already own and have unlocked. If you just got your Chroma and want to test it out, you have to max it out first. But the Simulacrum should offer the freedom to test EVERYTHING! Since everything is reset once you leave the Simulacrum, I see no reason why you couldn’t allow players to use ‘temporary Forma’ and ‘temporary Affinity’ to test out builds without manually having to forma, re-level and reforma elsewhere. Heck, allow players to have infinite mod slots, so they can try some really wacky things.

And all of this should be easily record-able. It should be easy to get logs of what you do in the Simulacrum, so you can get more accurate numbers, rather than just guessing. We already have Captura, which allows us to use free cam, so the same could be applied to the Simulacrum too.

The Simulacrum should be a real place to experiment, not just a place to spawn Heavy Gunners and chuck stuff at them.

Alas, this won’t happen.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the developers of Warframe see experimentation the way I do. They’d much rather you conduct your experiments out in the open, in actual missions, rather than in a safe, enclosed space…