Back on the Zariman Ten Zero
While grinding out Nightwave, I’ve had to go to the Zariman and do some missions there. Every so often there’s a Nightwave task to do “x Void Y Missions”, and none of them are particularly fun. But off I go, off to the Zariman in order to get 4500 standing for Nora. Honestly, I don’t like any of the Zariman stuff. I find it all annoying.
Lore-wise, the Zariman is huge. This is the ship that got stuck in the Void, where all the adults became crazy monsters and the kids had to kill their own families. It’s where the Tenno were born, where we made the deal with the Man in the Wall, given powers to protect ourselves. The story is that the Zariman is currently plugging a massive hole between the Void and the rest of the universe, and the Void isn’t too happy about that. Seems like an interesting place to go, yes? So its unveil as a place you can actually go is pretty cool.
But what the Zariman is, it’s kinda weird. There are a bunch of normal nodes on the Zariman, but it’s designed to be, well, almost an open world. There’s a central hub where you have all your basic syndicate stuff. We have a guy that gives us bounties, a guy who sells us weapons and stuff, a woman interested in Void quills and some guy in the basement that sells you decorations for your ship or dormizone. The decorations guy is important because you get your own personal apartment which you can decorate. The Dormizone is also how you get to Duviri, if use the Dormizone, which is mostly for decoration. It’s way easier to get to Duviri via the navigation panel though, as it lets you pick between the Circuit and Duviri proper. However, you don’t see the Archimedian who sells you stuff for Pathos clamps if you go via navigation.
The Zariman though is a stopgap between the New War and the Duviri Paradox, so it has not just normal Warframe enemies, but weird Void ones as well. Well, mostly the Thrax and the Void Angels. You end up with absolute chaos, with Grineer or Corpus everywhere and the Void enemies generally leaping out at you while you’re busy doing something else. Each mission is similar, with an emphasis of stopping the Void and protecting the Zariman Ten Zero. The five missions are all different at least.
Somehow, in this mess, you also need to find various objects, namely Void Plumes. But there’s not really much time to do that in these otherwise insanely chaotic missions. The Exterminate mission is the only one in which you have a chance to stop and look for void feathers. Luckily, there are spirits that will help you find some plumes, but others can be very hard to find, and there are many secret areas. To make matters worse, there is a HUGE amount of debris scattered across the ship, making it even harder to find void plumes. Which is annoying because you need a lot of them to rank up.
What annoys me the most though is that you always have to go back to the hub area, there’s a lot of extra steps to get around. Sure, a portal appears before or after a mission, so you can teleport back to Quin the bounty-giver, but getting around is a bit of a pain in the butt. The hub area is huge and open, but the missions can be tight corridors and awkward to navigate.
Frankly, getting around the Zariman is kinda what put me off playing more of the area. Especially since you have to find void plumes to rank up. I’m not a fan of any of the game modes except for Exterminate, finding plumes is tedious and fighting Void Angels is annoying. Which is a shame because the lore here is pretty damn good. I just wish everything wasn’t so tedious.