Okay Maybe The Zariman Isn’t So Bad After All…

For ages, I’ve been putting off the weird area and syndicate known as the Zariman. I should have really wanted to jump into this place, since it’s where a scared child made the deal with the Man in the Wall and the Tenno were born. The ship got stuck in the Void, the weird space between spaces, but has suddenly reappeared at the end of the New War, plugging a gap between our universe and the Void itself. It seems that the evil within the Void wants to escape, and the Zariman is the only thing stopping it from doing so. That and, according to Whispers in the Walls, a missing finger.

But I’ve been avoiding this place. I have no interest in it. I find the whole place annoying. I’m not really sure why, there’s no real one reason. I suppose the first is that I don’t really care about the Holdfasts, the random NPCs that ‘run’ the place. I say that because they have basically no control on the situation, and the Zariman is swarming with Corpus and Grineer. Frankly, I have no idea how they’ve managed to keep anything together, since, in their quest, they immediately lose someone and have them turn into a Void Angel. Someone we then kill. That quest was dumb anyway, it was just an introduction to each of the mission types and that was it.

Lately though, since I’ve needed Zariman materials to level up with the Cavia on Deimos, I’ve HAD to go back to the Zariman. I was missing 10 Voidgel Orbs to level up to rank 2 with the Cavia, so doing a handful of missions was required. Luckily, I was playing with a friend, so it wasn’t too bad, but it’s still tedious. We ended up doing Mobile Defense of all things, because it was the most accessible mission available. There was an exterminate mission, but the bounty for it was to literally not use Warframe abilities. At level 100, that is tedious as heck. When Mobile Defense is the most relaxing mission, there’s something wrong.

What I doubly dislike is how you don’t get standing for doing bounties, you get Voidplume thingies. The only way to get standing is to trade the Void Angel feathers in for standing, and at the same time, those feathers are used for everything. You need large amounts of certain ones to level up, and getting said feathers is often random. Sure, you can trade feathers into higher versions, but you can only do one per day. Not fun when you need 10 of a specific type to rank up and getting them is random. And you always have to complete a stupid side mission to finish the bounty as well, like traipsing around for a specific key and shoving it into a specific vendor. The Entrati/Cavia bounties are similar, but they give you a guaranteed amount of standing straight away, there’s only three types of item you can trade in for standing and the bonus tasks are generally things you are already doing anyway, like shooting weak points off enemies or destroying things.

Still, I guess the place is alright. It’s cool-looking but very run down. Which I wouldn’t mind if 1. it wasn’t so maze-like at times and 2. I didn’t have to pixel hunt for Voidplumes. Still, it often kinda doesn’t feel like anyone lived there, especially when it’s all randomly generated. It’s simply too unclear just how many people were expected to live here. The scale feels completely off. And the random lumps of silver void stuff are also weird, especially when later void stuff is all sorts of colours.

I still don’t like the new game modes though. I find them all rather annoying. I mean, Void Flood, probably the most acceptable of the lot, involves jumping around catching blue balls and feeding them into machines. Void Cascade is a bad tower defense with a bunch of dumb turrets that don’t seem to do much. And all these modes are filled with annoying enemies that throw spheres at you that kick you out of your Warframe. What annoys me more though is that these missions just all start straight away. It’s like doing a survival mission but the life support starts draining as soon as you spawn in. That’s no fun, especially with slower loading times.

I guess I have no choice but to do more Zariman stuff though. I’m still missing Gyre. While I will eventually get Qorvex via the Cavia, and can do so with standing alone, Gyre can only be gotten through bounties. AND she requires SO MANY RESOURCES to build After a good 7 missions, WITH a resource booster, I still don’t have enough Thrax Plasm to build a single part of her!

Maybe I’ll just buy her with Platinum. Because the Zariman isn’t that bad, but it’s still not amazing…