Nora’s Choice Nightwave is Fine
In Warframe, we have a system called Nightwave. Really, it’s a season pass. You do these chores, you level up and get stuff. Not always good stuff, sometimes the rewards are kinda crap, but that’s the basic pattern. It keeps people coming back. I’ll be honest, the rewards aren’t always amazing. In fact, some rewards from past Nightwave events have been somewhat mediocre. But as you go along and level up, the rewards do definitely get better, and give out rare resources like Umbral Forma.
Tasks of Many Flavors
To be able to progress in Nightwave, you have to do various tasks. You get daily, weekly and elite weekly acts, and the harder the task, the more credit you can get to increase your Nightwave rank. Daily tasks last for three days before disappearing for good, but they’re only worth 1000 standing, and are generally something simple like “kill 150 enemies with heat damage” or something similar. Weekly acts are generally a tad more complicated, asking you to do various missions like “take part in 9 invasions” or even something as easy as “do 3 capture missions”, “kill 500 enemies” or “open x relics”. Elite Weekly acts can range from anything, like doing more of a weekly task (e.g. kill 1500 enemies), to defeating bosses like the Eidolons and the Ropalolyst, to opening 10 relics. They’re all very varied. The available acts reset every Monday, and if you miss some tasks from previous weeks, if you do all of a week’s worth of tasks, old ones you missed can be recovered.
Stories
Now, here’s the thing. The first few Nightwave seasons actually had stories to them. We battled the Wolf of Saturn Six, we did an investigation on people turning to glass and we actually did get a brand new boss battle in The Emissary, that you can still play. Heck, you can sometimes buy a beacon from Baro Ki’teer which will summon the Wolf to fight. However, all these stories quickly died out, mostly because DE was busy working on bigger things.
What about now?
These days, we just get “Nora’s Choice”, which doesn’t really mean anything, it’s just a season pass with various rewards. But that doesn’t really matter, the rewards are enough to bring people back. Heck, most of us weren’t even really playing for the story, we just wanted to get closer to the decent rewards at ranks 25 to 30. People need those Umbral Formas. So what we’ve ended up with is pretty damn simple.
Is Nightwave bad without any substance? I don’t think so. I think it’s good enough. Sure, there’s no story or anything, and we’ve been stuck on Nora’s Choice for ages now, but that doesn’t really matter because the rewards are good enough. Plus, you can’t really miss anything, because a lot of the cool rewards in previous Nightwaves often reappear in upcoming Nightwaves. Sometimes really early on. For example, the Waveform Ephemera was a rank 30 reward in a previous Nightwave. It’s now the reward for Rank 5 in this current Nightwave.
And for those who, like me, have pretty much everything? We instead get Nora Cred, which we can spend in her little shop. So everyone wins.
Sure, this is all just a season pass. But it’s a completely free season pass, something that’s less and less common these days…