Warframe’s Modding Quest is an Unfortunate Miss…

Warframe has just released The Vallis Undermind, a new update with a few introductions. Primarily, this came with Nokko, a goofy mushroom Warframe who I adore with my whole being. The other big addition was a quest called The Teacher, which exists to help introduce new players to the modding system.

Modding is the primary method of upgrading your Warframes, Weapons, and everything in between, but it’s always been an unfortunately complex procedure. At face value, there’s simply a lot of different mechanics at play: Forma, Catalysts, Exilus Mods, and more all make understanding modding a little awkward, and that’s without getting into individual Mod types and interactions such as Condition Overload and Status Priority. I’ve been lucky enough to have friends teach me how a lot of these systems work, but even after 350 hours, there’s still a lot I don’t quite get, so for those with only 5–10 hours, a tutorial quest sounded fantastic…

The problem I quickly discovered with The Teacher is that it teaches you nothing actually interesting about the modding system. You’re told you equip an Electricity Mod to deal with some shields, and then a Cold Mod, to create the Magnetic status, which comes from the combination of the two, and this is also used to destroy a different kind of shield. You’re then thrust into a small combat encounter and then made to equip a Vitality Mod, marginally increasing your health. And then it’s back to combat. And that’s basically it.

Upon returning to your Orbiter, you’re taught how to discard excess Mods and how to upgrade others, but never anything deeper than that. Realistically, nothing that this quest teaches is anything that couldn’t be discovered in a short few minutes of experimentation, and arguably, could even be seen as a touch more harmful in the long run.

In my experience, people don’t typically choose their statuses for specific enemy types and shields (outside of certain content). The benefits of other Mods often outweigh the ability to do a little more damage to a Corpo shield, and Builds will naturally introduce StatuS anyway, for an array of reasons. These Status Effects also have a lot of unique abilities that would be far more useful to early players that also weren’t explained. Corrosive can strip armour from armoured opponents, which is one of the most helpful effects in the game for players newly reaching Steel Path, and Electricity stuns enemies and has a chaining effect, which is information that I believe to be far more useful than the fact that they do a bit more damage to Shields.

I can attest to the fact that it’s near-impossible to aptly tutorialise a system like Warframe’s; it’s full of bizarre and quirky edge-cases and weird interactions that can’t easily be explained without taking forever, or overwhelming new players. In this case, though, I think there are most definitely options. Breaking a longer quest down into parts depending on the player’s progression could do a lot of work. Once players grasp the basics, introduce a new system or idea. This not only teaches them core systems at a comfortable pace, but also gives time for experimentation without hard limitations.

A more in-depth series of Codex entries for different Mods and their interactions would also be incredibly welcome. For example, Condition Overload is a Melee Mod that increases damage depending on how many Status Effects the opponent has. This effect is shared by the Galvanised Savvy Gun Mod. In the weapon’s case, however, different guns benefit differently. Some get the damage boost as an additive, but others receive it multiplicatively. The multiplicative boost can be incredibly strong, but there’s no way of knowing which weapons are affected by it in-game, so it’s either a case of googling it or mindlessly experimenting and trying to figure out which is which. This can entirely alter how weapons “should” be built, and I personally think it should be either explained in-game or at least have some form of indication.

I do want to give props to Digital Extremes for adding this; it’s a start to an improved new player experience, which I’ll never complain about, but I just wish it went a little further into explaining some of the more quirky mechanics.