How I’d Improve Nightwave

Nightwave is Warframe’s equivalent of a season pass. Do each week’s challenges and earn standing towards your next rank. It’s not the same as a normal season pass though, as it is completely free and has no ‘premium track’ on it. Whether you’re MR0 or MR33, whether you’ve spent hundreds or nothing at all on Warframe, you can jump into Nightwave, do some missions and get rewarded. However, there are some things that we could have to improve Nightwave. Here’s how I’d do it.

More Warframe and Weapon slots

We do get some very nice freebies in Nightwave’s rewards, but the one type of reward I wish they’d give out is slots. Preferably weapon slots, due to there being so damn many weapons in the game. I know that slots, for Warframes, weapons and otherwise, make a lot of money for DE, it’s one of their main avenue streams, but getting just two weapon slots or a single Warframe slot seems a little cheap. If you want to make people work for the slots, then that’s fine, just stick more of them further along the rewards track. As they’re one-off rewards (and aren’t sold in the Nightwave shop), it can’t hurt that much to add a few more, right?

Add some interesting rewards after rank 30

Once you get to rank 30, there’s not really much else to do. You can grind harder for extra levels but it’s all just Nightwave creds to spend in the shop. It would be nice to have some evergreen rewards in there, instead of nothing but creds. You don’t even get a lot of creds, it’s about 15 per rank.

Luckily, after you reach rank 30, farming further is completely optional, but it would be nice to have a reason to keep going. Maybe give different amounts of creds, or stick some Forma blueprints in there or something. Or, maybe, we can give creds more of a use. Allow people who are over rank 30 to buy hidden items in the cred shop.

Make the shop a tad more interesting

Creds have little value to older players, and the shop rarely has anything interesting. It does change weekly, with different Warframe helmets and aura mods, but these are mainly geared towards growing players, rather than veterans. The only stuff in the cred shop that I have any desire to buy are Kuva and the odd Orokin Catalyst or Reactor. The Kuva is fine, but everything else is kinda meh. Then again, this only applies to veteran players, who have all the helmets and blueprints from the past. For normal players, they should stock up on Nitain before they do anything else.

Give it some sort of story

Originally, Nightwave actually had stories tied to it. We had the Wolf of Saturn Six, Glassmaker and The Emissary. These were all pretty cool, but the stories in them were cutting into the development time of other things. So pretty much every other Nightwave season has completely lacked any story. But the thing is, Nightwave doesn’t have to have cinematics or stuff like that. It could deliver us information the same way the Leverian does. Or even just some voice-overs on a panoramic scene. That’s mostly what the early Nightwave seasons were like, with the odd mini-event inside normal missions. Skip the in-mission bits and just have a panorama. Or even a black screen and someone talking, like the Naberus Hand decoration from Halloween.

Honestly, none of these are particularly big requests. Surely we could try and have some of them. Either way though, at least Nightwave is a pretty fair system…