Yep, that’s pretty much it. The grind + unique movement system is the game, and maybe the appeal isn’t for everyone. I had a clan mate who came from D2, got maybe 800 hours into Warframe, but ultimately would always go back to D2.
The grindy pieces can be fun, especially with the amount of meta builds to make things easier (like Eidolon fights), but a bad team comp can make a mission harder (via a vis the medallion thing you’re talking about).
I had a hard time in the beginning, and I put the game down several times, too. I agree that it can be very confusing. And yet, it still called me, and I wound up putting in 1000 more hours; having a very active guild helped with that, too.
But if it’s not for you, that’s totally fine. It’s visually very pretty, and the fact that you can earn premium currency with some sweat equity is unheard of in F2P games, but you are right that how combat works is pretty much the same for every mission. What makes things different is the frames and mods.
I’ve played both, and they’re fundamentally different kinds of games. Warframe is all about movement, mixing shooting with melee, and collecting mods and frame parts to boost your utility and lethality. D2 is more of a standard FPS with class-specific magic abilities.
D2 has a decent intro level to get you up to speed with how to play, but you don’t really grasp what Warframe is about for maybe 20-50 hours, and you don’t grasp the meta until maybe 100-500. There’s a lot going on. Joining a clan is an absolute necessity, because that unlocks pretty much the rest of the game for you.
I had a fun time with it, and it’s probably one of the best F2P models out there, but I don’t have any plans to ever pick it up again.
I don’t care how cheap it is or how amazing it allegedly is. I clawed my identity back from Zuckerberg, and I don’t intend to go back to that abusive relationship.
For anyone unaware, you can get a Slate kit for the GBA SP for about $100 less (provided you have an SP lying around), and it can play GBA, GBC, and original Gameboy carts. If all you’re looking for is the form factor and general retro gaming, there’s other options out there.
Furthermore, there’s no shortage of people who sometimes decide to support indie devs over giant AAA studios. Maybe I’m a bit snobbish, but I wrinkle my nose a bit whenever the next “super mega ultra open world souls-like Metroidvania rogue-lite dungeon crawler battle royale” from Faceless MicroTx Corp comes out, even if it winds up being decent.
As long as people can discover these indie games, people will buy them.
NMS is survival in space, insomuch as planets are in space and you can fly around in a ship, but you start on a planet. I was thinking more like having to survive in space by building the ship in space, building a station in space, etc. Space would be your primary sandbox, rather than planets (at least initially).
The normal NMS experience isn’t quite what I’m envisioning. Maybe if you started on one of those abandoned freighters, though…
The way Breathedge got around it initially is the starting area is a ship crash, so you collect broken bits of the ship(s) (which includes water and food).
But space is vast. Why couldn’t there be space fauna? Or a way to travel to nearby system planets? Its fiction, after all. We don’t need to be constrained by reality.