Sometimes, it’s Better When it’s Free — Warframe
By: Zegan Billote & Michael Goddard Buenaflor
Ever since I received consoles when I was young I was hooked into this thing called Video Games, I bought cartridges to expand the games in my collection and ultimately beat some of them.
After buying a PC, I had it installed with some popular games in 2007, Counter Strike was one of the games I had and still like till this day.
Skip three years and I found Steam, an online gaming platform that sells games and records data about the times you play on the games you bought. Not only that, it also shows games which are entirely FREE! Free I tell you, imagine how happy I was to get games for free, well except for -cough-pirates-cough-.
But — just because they are free doesn’t mean some of them was worth having. They were many games that are free but they have this stuff that is not obtainable using your free-edition, and let me tell you that stuff is either the most powerful weapon or object and you can only obtain it by using real-world money. And don’t let me get to those ones where you have to pay to progress and those ones where I call them F2P:P2W(Free-to-play but Pay-to-win).
Most of the F2P games are either: hard to complete, unpolished, unbalanced and sometimes utter garbage. But just because some of them are trash, doesn’t mean all of them are, right?
That’s when I came across a game 2 years later, called Warframe, an online video game created by an indie game development team called Digital Extremes, which is for free. The theme of the game was Space Ninjas, well I immediately downloaded it because, NINJAS! Not those ninjas who scream jutsus and summon toads, and especially where someone, who’s infact a ninja, wears orange clothes. Seriously, what kind of ninja wears Bright Orange Clothes! I’m looking at you Naru- err- I mean ninja who’s wearing Orange clothes. I’m getting sidetracked because of ninjas, sorry. Anyway, back to Warframe.
At first I was skeptical, since it was after all for free. After downloading I found it was still in closed beta and reaching its final stage of completion and considered playing it. After going through the first stages, only one word came to mind. It. Was. Garbage.
The graphics look decent, the controls were, Meh. Storyline? Lore?.. it has little as of that time. I can clearly destroy hoards of NPC and still have over a hundred bullets left. The overall rating I had in my mind was Garbage. So like most of the free-to-play games I had in my Steam’s Game Library I uninstalled it and never touched that game for a long time.
Skip many years, games like Borderlands and TES:Skyrim arrived at my Game Library. I was loving the hell out of it. Then my account got hacked, and had to redo getting those games again. Yay.
Then after making a new account and re-buying those said two games, I got hooked into RPG like games where the main concept was looting. I considered buying Destiny and Tom Clancy’s the Division, but I don’t have money so I Wishlisted them… for now.
After so, I searched for more games like them and came across the game called Warframe, again. The same game as I played before. I was left thinking, ‘How the hell did this Garbage of a game get here in my Recommendations list?’ seeing as this very game, many years from that day I uninstalled it, has many downloads and had Very Positive reviews, one does not simply have positive reviews, so I tried installing it and giving it a go, again.
In the midst of installing, I visit their wiki and noticed that tons of things had been updated since they got out of closed beta. So I was a little hyped on how this one game progressed over the years and what I can expect… aside from being utter garbage.
After it finished downloading(for THREE days!), I created a new account, hit PLAY button and… update…
(Angry incomprehensible sounds)
After the long update(Three hours), I found out I was in the middle of a big update, so hence why it took so long. Then, I pressed the play button again and played it in, 1080p, 60fps, maxed settings.
The graphics was different from before(because I now have a better PC rig and Maxed settings but those are trivial matters), the upgrade in graphics was phenomenal and comparable to those of Triple A games now-a-days. The controls was somehow almost the same as before, but somehow more responsive and polished. The story… oh don’t get me to the lore, it was really rich! It was really mouthwatering to have this Lore Rich game I was almost moved to tears, keyword ALMOST.
Either way the community in this game was somewhat nice, I guess. They are quite helpful to any newbies like me, but still strict if the question is where even a child can answer.
The overall mechanics of this game was very new and refreshing for me. I get to control how I play, and how I contribute to my squad with the Mods I install.
Trading is, per usual, like any other games. Although Platinum, the premium currency in game, can be bought using real money but also can be simply acquired by trading the best stuff in-game, Prime Gears, Rare Mods which you can get if you dedicate your time on it.
Warframes(pseudo mech-suits), which you will be mainly be using, has their own unique abilities and their own stats. You can customize it’s appearance, it’s colors(You can make a manly Frame covered in Pink and still looks so normal at the same time) and add costumes on it. As of now, there are 52 Warframes available for the player to get each with their own quirks and uniqueness.
This game was unlike any other games I played before. Not only is it story rich, it has almost-to-realistic graphics, it is community driven, a Looter based game, you get to be A True Space Ninja! You can climb vertical walls, run horizontally on horizontal walls, you can sneak through an entire army of enemies and also slice-and-dice said enemies, etc. And most of all you design your own Frame that describes who you are and how you play, with the weapons you equip, mods on those specific weapons and on your warframe.
This game by far is the greatest game I had played in quite a while. It was hard, especially the times where you should gather all the materials and each blueprints in order to get to build components for your ideal weapon or Warframe and wait a long amount of time for it to finish, you can use Platinum to make it finish or receive it instantly but it is entirely optional, and the satisfaction of getting said weapon or Warframe(and sometimes cosmetics) is really satisfying especially thinking back on how you obtain said materials and blueprints.
Clans in this game have giant Dojos, large space station-like objects floating on space where you can customize the hell out of it for you and your members, and you can decorate and build functional facilities on it too! What other games have a system like that?
I watched reviews of this game recently in YouTube and I found one YouTuber, named SkillUp, quote this after playing the initial parts of the game. And Since I’m a kind guy, I’ll link his video at the end of this article and a word of warning though, the whole video is over 30 minutes.
Which sums up most of the first parts of the game. And as for the later parts of the game, is for you the player to find out, you can mainly be a tank, a support, a trader, or a clan master, a master assassin, or someone who wants to dominate the whole map.
If you’re wondering what it’s like playing Warframe, you should give it a try for yourself, I can’t properly tell you how most of my experience in there be like. Because it is you, the player, to find out for yourself.
And lastly FashionFrame is the true endgame.
About the history of the game is the spiritual successor to Dark Sector, as mentioned by the developers, since Warframe had fused some of Dark Sector’s Lore and the main character of Dark Sector was officially the first “Tenno”, the faction of Warframes’s Operators.
Warframe now is a free-to-play third-person shooter, placing the players in a position to play solo or co-op against multiple enemy AIs or in PvP(Player-vs-Player) in the Conclave.
The main storyline is that the players must take back the Solar System from the Grineer Empire(Armies of cloned human-like beings), the Corpus(human-like enemies that heavily rely on technology), and other various enemies. It is available in Steam for free for players in PC, and on the respective stores in PS4 and Xbox One.
The main point why I am doing this review on said game, was how the developers made the game from an utter garbage, for me at least, into what it is now today. The sheer love and care given by the developers in this game is almost transmitted to you when you play it from the past to the present, or in my case from the past, skipped 5 years, then to the present.
To us gamers, a video game are created from the hearts and minds of the developers themselves. Games aren’t something that people use just to gain money then abandoning said games just because it lost it’s purpose to monetize. Games aren’t something you just take out from out of nowhere then slap it into one unbridled mess.
To some of us, games are just a form of entertainment, a form to relax from to have fun either with someone else or by yourself. But how can we appreciate or gain any entertainment if its only purpose was to gain money when it can be there for everyone to access?
Sure, some may find enjoyment on its content but there others just love to see the effort, the sweat and blood used to create a single masterpiece of art called video games.
Either way, let’s get back to Warframe before I went too poetic.
Not only is it free, but the game they gave to you was comparable to games you have to buy to get to this awesome video game, and you can either dedicate your time on finding the materials, blueprints, and resources or use real-world money to get it instantly if you don’t have time to do it, respecting the players choices rather than force it down their throats on one single option.
Since I was a gamer when I was still a child, never had I seen this kind of development of a single game in the span of 4–5 years. This game is truly awesome, and I love to give props to the people behind it, and for more people to be learning from it.
Anyway, before I end this, my friend here did some research before hand, about Warframe’s game engine.
The game engine the game development team Digital Extremes used, is neither CryEngine nor the more popular Unreal Engine, and no, it is not Godot. It has been one of the rarest of game engines and it is only exclusive for the GameDev Team. It is called, Evolution Engine. Try searching in Google if you can find about it and if you can download it. The search results is nearly negligible or the results you get are mostly Engines for automobiles. It is rarer than downloading Unreal Engine 4 and it is kinda an old game engine which can basically run on old computer set-ups, Yes I am talking about you Computers with Windows XP Operating System, absolute primitives.
Evolution Engine is Digital Extremes’ proprietary game engine. The engine made its debut with Dark Sector; and was again utilized in The Darkness II. 2013’s Star Trek featured use of the Evolution engine; and the engine was also used for the 2013 free-to-play online title Warframe.
Digital Extremes’ Evolution Engine launched at GDC 2009, with a series of private showings in a suite. Clearly Digital Extremes has a long history of technology excellence, having been involved in the development of many versions of the Unreal franchise as well as the gorgeous BioShock, so there was excitement about the availability of their engine for licensing. Aside from the great look of the engine and toolset at the conference, Digital Extremes focused highly on their software engineering expertise, emphasizing test-driven development and automated build processes.
In the past year, Digital Extremes has been working on improving the engine’s performance, making the engine more relevant to a greater variety of games, and improving the tool chain. For example, moving level and texture decompression to the SPUs on PS3 has improved run-time performance; on the other hand, a project to accelerate skinning by using the SPUs proved less useful — however, source code to even their research projects is available to licensees, so if a technology proves more useful for your particular game, you can benefit greatly from work they’ve done which hasn’t been incorporated into the core.
Another graphics research project this past year involved deferred lighting and deferred rending. While creating an impressive look for some types of games, other games are suited more toward traditional forward rendering. As a result the forward-rendering pipeline will primarily be supported going forward, but the deferred rendering code, again, is available in their latest source-code drop and could prove useful for some titles.
In the tool chain, updates to the Lua integration and user interface systems this year have resulted in efficiency improvements. The most significant addition to their Lua system is a fully-functioning script debugger with breakpoints, variable inspection and crash handling. For in-game user interface, the Evolution engine now incorporates Flash playback and ActionScript (negating the need to purchase other middleware for this purpose). All the Lua functionality is exposed to ActionScript and vice versa, allowing the developer to implement game logic in Lua and UI code in Flash/ActionScript, without having to worry too much about compartmentalization.
Aside from the engine technology itself, the Evolution engine continues to have a heavy focus on software engineering and reliability. This year there has been a renewed focus on build times, one of the banes of many a games. Digital Extremes claims incremental build link times under 20 seconds on all platforms, which is almost unheard of.
Unlike Unreal Engines or CryEngine, Evolution Engine has been a problem for both the programmers and the players. These comments comes from users that we’re able to use Evolution Engine. “Sometimes it crashes at certain times”, “it has issues with tiles that are too big”, “Some things that shouldn’t be are bound to FPS”, “there’s some wonky behaviour while you’re in the Orbiter”, “Lighting is pretty bad, objects and maps are affected by different light sources”, “forced shadows and skyboxes are not affected by the normal fog”, “syandanas(Capes) have pretty bad physics (let alone sugatras)”, “motion blur is also tied to fps (I have to disable V-Sync to have an acceptable motion blur and play with 200fps on a 60z monitor, because with 60fps it’s blurrier and it looks horrible)”.
Now though, with the new biggest update released, “Plains of Eidolon”, Warframe took another big step in the gaming industry. With giving the players the freedom to explore one of the planets location in an open-world or freeroaming style, where one can try mining, fishing, and hunting for resources while enemies lurk at every corner. And it comes with it’s own day-and-night cycle. As expected, even when I just recently joined the community this game never cease to amaze me.
Anyway that is it for now, good luck, have fun! Bye-bye.
