Kill Yourself To Progress

Throughout my gaming life, I’ve always been told that dying is bad. This thought was amplified whenever I played Team Fortress 2, because I am a Medic main at heart and Medics dying is generally considered a bad thing. As far as I was concerned, my staying alive to heal people and get Uber was vastly more important than literally anything else. If I died, my team would be in trouble and they’d die as well. Death meant failure, that my team would suffer without me. And of course, the dislike of dying carried over into pretty much every other game I played.

When I started playing Warframe and actually getting into it, I was pleasantly surprised to find that there’s loads of ways to avoid dying. A Capacitance build on Volt kept me alive plenty of times, and most of the time I could always just run away, catch my breath and come back with full shields or a health pad. But the whole issue of dying was still quite sore to me. If I died, that meant I fucked up. Death meant failure and it’d be my fault most of the time.

Consequentially, I’m not a fan of dying.

So when this big new nemesis system comes out that REQUIRES me to die to proceed, needless to say, I’m not taking it well.

Literally the most efficient way to kill a Kuva Lich is to throw yourself at it, using brute force to find out what the three symbol combination is to kill the Lich permanently. You’ll be guaranteed killed almost every time until you unlock all three murmurs or stumble across the combination on your own, and even if you DO have all three symbols discovered, it’s STILL a 50-50 chance to get killed again.

They don’t even properly beat you. Okay, sometimes a Lich WILL murder you properly with its weapons, but 90% of the time you die because you don’t have the combination right. I don’t feel like I was properly beaten, that I was overpowered by this enemy or had a fair fight, I didn’t die because I made a non-guessing-game mistake or I brought the wrong gear or whatever. I got killed because the game says I have to be killed.

But it’s more than just death. It’s forced death. You have no choice in the matter, you get the combination wrong and you’re murdered in a cutscene. To get back up, you waste a revive. You can’t be saved by anything, not by playing tanky frames, not by playing frames that have invulnerability, not by self-revives like the new Vasca Kavat, not by Phoenix Renewal which is supposed to stop you from dying. You can’t stop dying in any way, nor can you be picked up my team mates, you just flat out die and have to spend a revive to get back into the game.

What makes this even worse is that OTHER PLAYERS will ask you to kill yourself. Because if your Lich spawns, it will not go away unless you kill yourself or you get the combination right, and this gets in the way of other people’s Liches which they want to spawn. YOU have to die so that other players progress. What sort of ass-backwards design is that?

You can’t avoid dying either, because you HAVE to go into Lich-controlled territory in order to be able to earn murmurs to find out what mods you have to use. While farming murmurs yesterday, my Lich spawned in six missions in a row, one of those times being glitched and invulnerable so I couldn’t even attempt to get rid of him. And if I ignore a Lich? Well their influence spreads and you find more and more loot being stolen. So you have a choice of not doing missions on planets the Lich controls and leaving them alive forever or getting your face kicked in repeatedly while you try and work out what mods you need to kill the Lich.

Really, the Liches aren’t even Liches. We don’t kill them the first time we see them, they get magically teleported away and upgraded and then we kill them once and that’s it. It’s us Tenno who are the Liches, as we respawn and come back stronger and more knowledgeable each time.

So yeah, I’d like an option to be able to deal with Liches that doesn’t involve me running at them and dying repeatedly. Because it’s not fun. It’s tedious and repetitive and based on nothing more than a silly random puzzle.

It sounds like I’m complaining a lot, but it genuinely annoys me that the ONLY way to defeat a Lich is to be killed by it. Repeatedly. Or hope that you get the 1 in 336 chance that you kill it on the first try with completely random mods.