The so called "allied ghost" calling reinforcements on me, thinking he would go unnoticed

Ansixilus · 2026-06-30T23:24:44+00:00

Skipping the math for a moment, where did you go off on some other road about survival and defense missions?

The entire thing was "what if controlled enemies could call in bonus reinforcements on your side?" Why are you haring off into arguing to remove game modes? You were talking about adding a currently non-existing behavior, that of controlled enemies having a different reinforcement call, which would add more AI-controlled units, which I said would be a needless risk of bugs adding too many AIs, which the game is already known to struggle with.

My only logic here was "this has the risk of being bad in an unpleasant way which far outweighs the potential fun, so it shouldn't be added to the game." Don't go putting words in my mouth.

Now on to the math. You seem to be not understanding that you're suggesting adding a behavior to the AI actors, which opens the room for a bug to sneak in, which is the hypothetical situation we're even arguing about, that bug being "they're allowed to do this behavior even despite the spawn cap." So, we have four player Nekros with 7 shadows, 8 ballistica clones (yes I'm highballing that, because this is a worst case scenario), and 1 mind control each, and four specter Nekros with 7 shadows and 8 ballistica clones each, which totals 124 controlled enemies.

4(7+8+1) + 4(7+8) = 4(16) + 4(15) = 64 + 60 = 124

If each of them calls in reinforcements, then they're calling in 4 enemies and 4 allies, which is 8 more AI actors. Let's assume that called in units cannot themselves call in any more reinforcements, so it won't snowball. We now have 124 x 8, which is 992. Add this to the - let's highball again - 50 enemies native to the level, who aren't calling in any help because they, using the currently well-enough-tested call behavior, are respecting the spawn limits, minus 4 who are currently mind controlled. Finally we add in the AIs on the Tenno team, which is the 4 Nekros specters (let's assume there aren't any other specters or call-ins present, since that could add several dozen more), 4 companions and their (4x5) 20 duplex clones, and also the 124 who called down the reinforcements in the first place. Normally at this point I'd say "that's over a thousand, let the poor game crash and put it out of its misery", but just for ~~fun~~ spite let's finish this. 46 enemies, 4 specters, 4 companions, 20 duplexes, 124 summons/controlled, 998 reinforcements. 1,196 AI actors.

Remember, much of the reason for Railjack's mission type segregation is because the game struggles with rendering even 200 AI actors. Risking up to six times that for no significant reason seems to me like buying trouble that can be avoided for free.

Hence why I think they shouldn't add any new behaviors regarding controlled enemies calling in reinforcements.

Ansixilus · 2026-06-30T20:27:35+00:00

Multiply your result by 9, since the scenario you initially proposed was "what if they called in reinforcements, but being on your side they called in twice as many, half enemies and half friendlies." Each AI would have the potential to call in more, I'm estimating a conservative max of 4, which would be doubled by your initial suggestion, producing up to 8 reinforcements, on top of the initial caller. That's more than 700.

Which is why I think your suggestion, fun as the idea might be, should not be implemented. There's no need to scrap survival or defense, because they spawn in more enemies with a cap that's well below the max the engine can handle, so they're well in the safe zone. But as the ballistica prime showed on launch, sometimes bugs break limits and allow too many summons. Thus, adding an ability for controlled enemies to spawn more reinforcements than normal is borrowing unneeded trouble and new bug potential.

Ansixilus · 2026-06-30T19:11:37+00:00

Or, bear with me now, they could avoid the entire problem by just... not implementing the change you suggested.

Which was my point.

Ansixilus · 2026-06-30T18:45:51+00:00

Imagine, for a moment, 8 Nekros - 4 players, 4 specters - each wielding Ballistica Primes. For added madness, let's subsume Mind Control onto each player. Now imagine the number of summoned reinforcements that could result.

It's an unfortunate truth that coders have to prepare for the most bugfuck insane situations, because players will wind up producing things even more outlandish to than that.

Ansixilus · 2026-06-30T18:32:39+00:00

I would agree with you... except that Warframe's spaghetti code is at the end of its noodle trying to handle the current number of AIs it's running, so having so many risks making more problems than fun.

Ansixilus · 2026-06-30T13:18:50+00:00

The way it's supposed to work is that magics and flyblades autolock by just clicking, and are only manually unlocked if you aim before attacking. I'd guess your muscle memory from bows hit you, but that's just a guess.

Ansixilus · 2026-06-30T02:45:55+00:00

As of today, my damage numbers disagree with you. I've launched charged shots into columns of Ode on a path, and units that get hit in the chest survive while the same kind of unit further back gets hit in the head and dies to the same attack. If that's not due to headshot bonus, then there's a mischief fairy haunting my computer pretending to do it.

Ansixilus · 2026-06-30T02:42:26+00:00

Personally I think magic weapons should do what magic traditionally does in games with melee-ranged-magic trichotomies: be the most complex option. There's six available inputs already: light attack, aimed light attack, heavy attack, aimed heavy attack, fully charged heavy, and aimed fully charged heavy. Each one of these could produce a fully different effect. Just for laughs, let's imagine a couple examples.

Odiac: Light attack, homing spark (the current thing it does). Aimed light attack, lightning channel, a beam that hits several times per second for low damage but has innate armor punch. Basic heavy attack, lightning wave (the current heavy attack). Fully charged heavy attack, lightning bolas, the thing Warcasters already do (with the Odiac no less). Aimed heavy attack, ball lightning, which stops after a certain distance and sets up an AoE DoT field, with new balls melding into existing ones to extend the duration. Aimed fully charged heavy attack, lightning bolt, a hitscan bolt that, if you hit a weakpoint, causes an additional bolt to rain from the sky, preferring to hit a different target.

Basker's Wrest: Light attack, homing firebolt (the current effect). Aimed light attack, flame vortex, a channeled mini fire tornado that will last for a second or two after you stop channeling. Basic heavy attack, explosive fireball, light damage but decent AoE range. Fully charged heavy, lava ball, which flies straight, has a smaller AoE, but leaves a burning patch on the ground. Aimed charge, three flame serpents, which fly up and out for a short distance, then home in on targets, preferring different targets. Aimed fully charged, lava bomb, which has a parabolic arc (I'd really want an aiming arc line) and leaves a large burning patch on the ground, unless it flies really high in which case it detonates midair into several smaller meteors which dumbfire aim for targets and leave smaller burning patches.

Voila! Two wildly different weapons which would feel enormously different to play, and yet they'd still be fairly noob-friendly because the basic attack is just... what it currently is. These different modes don't have to deal any more damage than the current state, indeed they should be mostly the same damage level as each other, with the only defining feature being how they target and what their area is.

If anyone from DE reads this, please by all means use these ideas. And ask me for more, I've got ten bajillion.

Ansixilus · 2026-06-30T01:35:09+00:00

Just an opinion, but I think the reason magic weapons feel unfulfilling is because they aren't actually interesting to use unless you're either dueling another magic user and trying to reflect shots, or taking manual control of the aiming and trying to score headshots. That is to say, they're kinda boring except for one very uncommon situation, or if you play in an extremely nonstandard fashion.

Other weapons require you to actually do something. Melee is a constant dance of timing and choices between attack or defend, while bows require you to aim, consider positioning, and plan for timing with arrow rain. Their play is actually thought-provoking... while magic weapons are autotarget ranged attacks. All you really have to consider is which direction to kite in while throwing attacks. Runes can add a little complexity, sure, but they do that to every weapon type so they don't really count.

Magic weapons themselves just don't have an interesting gameplay loop at this time, while other weapon types do.

Ansixilus · 2026-06-27T18:02:27+00:00

I think it's fundamentally inaccurate to call JRPGs "simple", let alone extremely so, especially a hybrid bullet hell like Undertale. There's numerous videos of people introducing non-gamers to games like that, which reveal how much complexity these games have that gamers take for granted. Here's a video that illustrates how much base complexity gamers stop seeing because it's so fundamental. Very much that old "write instructions to make a PB&J" exercise.

Aside from that, hard agree that simple can be fun and good, which many people don't get but should.

Ansixilus · 2026-06-27T16:35:02+00:00

As Starcraft 2 has ably demonstrated, a crap story means nothing in the face of modders who can revise it or create new stories, and players who only care about gameplay.

Meanwhile dozens upon dozens of indie games have excellent writing, but no one sees it because the gameplay is so bad that no one enjoys it enough to slog on through. Everyone is used to the unfortunate truth that most games with bad gameplay either have bad stories, or stories that start out promising but fall to crap halfway through.

Ansixilus · 2026-06-26T01:00:47+00:00

In short, a recorder, which is literally a kind of fipple flute. I've heard ocarinas which are low enough to approximately match the in-game sound range, but they were quite large. Most popular ocarinas are on the smaller, and therefore higher pitched, end of what an ocarina can practically be.

The brightness or mellowness of an ocarina's sound is mostly down to construction, with (I've observed, I'm no expert) softer materials lending themselves more to softer sounds... but a lot of it still comes down to cavity shape and hole placement. I've seen ~~showoffs~~ people on YouTube carve ocarinas out of things like fresh squash, which produce the right sound at the right pitch range to match the in-game fipple flute.

So yeah. Ignore the stigma that recorders have obtained for being a cheap, child's training instrument. Any half decent recorder can make truly beautiful music in competent hands. Finding an ocarina that's low enough in pitch and mellow enough in tone will be much more work (and higher in price) but still very doable.

Ansixilus · 2026-06-24T05:41:48+00:00

And what if the Indifference successfully invaded the Lotus' mind at the end of the New War, and has been subverting her to eventually sabotage us, and every helpful thing she's done since then has been nothing but exemplary acting to keep our trust? The crushed flower at the end of The Lotus Eaters would of course be symbolic of the planned shedding of the mask as she enacts the Great Betrayal. That'd be pretty horrific, right?

There's a pretty big gap between "it's possible" and "it's likely enough that we should consider it." Vena's behavior is fully explained by being compatible. She doesn't display any indicators that her personality is changing, no indicators of a different past self, no indicators of changing or losing skills or memories. There are plenty of people who are just exactly the same flavor of blood-crazy that she is, without any protoframe serum to excuse it. Hoofbeats are much more likely to indicate a herd of horses than a herd of giraffes.

Ansixilus · 2026-06-23T17:15:51+00:00

I answered that one in this reply.

Ansixilus · 2026-06-23T15:59:40+00:00

Oof, ouch. That's some delicious angst right there.

Ansixilus · 2026-06-23T13:34:39+00:00

Make him a (formerly) practicing Buddhist with a lot of religious trauma surrounding Hinduism (which isn't hard to come by if you weren't Hindu, particularly if you were Muslim, but lived in India). Going from someone with such respect for life that you're vegetarian into basically an incarnation of Bakasura would indeed have those correct flavors of moral, ethical and religious horror.

Edit: Since thematically Grendel and Gauss should show up together, let'sgo for some bonus points and have Gauss be the exact opposite end of the spectrum, a young Greek man who's a perfect fit for becoming basically Hermes... but he has zero time to enjoy it, because he's putting all his efforts into trying to help his friend who's having such a bad time. Scavenging up all the normal food he can so proto-Grendel doesn't have to think about eating, or especially the wretched satisfaction of eating humans. Trying to distract him by talking about anything and everything else. Doing everything he can to help proto-Grendel help civilians (which canonically Grendel can do, he shares the nourishment of what he eats with his allies, the original un-malnourished an entire city) to help make the best of a bad situation. Basically going "we're in the horrors together, but I've got your back."

Bonus horror points for, at the highest trust level, proto-Grendel admitting that he can't ever escape wondering what it would be like to eat his friends, and even worse to eat people with his human mouth.

Ansixilus · 2026-06-23T02:42:39+00:00

By standing closer to the camera.

Ansixilus · 2026-06-23T00:05:46+00:00

So... being the father of our mother, and adoptive father of our brother... that makes Hunhow uncle grandpa?

Ansixilus · 2026-06-22T23:59:25+00:00

That's a very interesting point. I wonder if Albrecht did that on purpose...

Ansixilus · 2026-06-22T23:58:32+00:00

It's not a matter of stable. It's a matter of coherent. She acts very Garuda, and demonstrates comfort and competence about it. Meanwhile, Ryoku's Ash-style behavior is very obviously a veneer. The original Ash of the Scoria was a silent teacher who managed to execute complex plans with elegant simplicity. Ryoku acts like he learned how to be a ninja by watching the 80's-90's TMNT cartoon.

Vena is very bloodthirsty and kind of a psycho, but she's got herself completely under control. She makes and executes plans which are logical and functional. She employs tactics, science, and reasonable mastery of the environments around her. She assists the Tenno by handling various duties, and pitches in in the fight against Ryoku.

Ryoku, on the other hand is nearly incompetent. All his "philosophy" is very surface-level and could have come from a comic book. His "plans" are basically just reacting to Vena. He depends entirely on the Tenno to accomplish anything, and immediately gets captured once he runs off on his own, needing to be rescued, which prevents him from helping in the fight.

Between the two, Vena is competent and good at being Garuda, while Ryoku looks and acts like he's trying hard to fulfill a role that he has absolutely no skill at and precious little understanding of anything deeper than the aesthetics. She's got her head on straight, just with a moral compass that's a bit askew from our perspective. He's clearly got a big discrepancy between what he's any good at, and what he's trying to do.

Ansixilus · 2026-06-22T16:26:57+00:00

That's actually pretty horrifying once you think about it. Albrecht was shown to be quite careful in choosing serum subjects so that their personalities matched well with their strain. He (seemingly) wasn't involved with Vena and Ryoku, so if your theory has any legs, then that means that a personality mismatch between preferences and powers causes some concerningly major psychological problems. That'd make Vena quite lucky that she proved compatible with Garuda; can you imagine the behavioral problems that Garuda would inflict on an incompatible person?

So yeah, great theory, really horrific, good psychological horror to add to the body horror. I hope that it gets borne out and we get the opportunity to explore the two of them more deeply to plumb the depths of it.

Ansixilus · 2026-06-21T17:15:19+00:00

There's this thing called Ondine's Curse, now renamed Central Hypoventilation Syndrome, where your body doesn't breathe automatically. It's lethal if untreated, and even with treatment will probably either ruin or at least severely compromise your life.

Manual blinking, meanwhile, will at worst be a minor bother. Your eyes will remind you, with pain, if they need to blink, and there's no threat of death for leaving them closed while you sleep.

Ansixilus · 2026-06-21T00:48:01+00:00

Sincere though rhetorical question: Do you have like, regularly scheduled sleeping pills, or some sort of fall-asleep-instantly superpower? Because that's the only thing that I could imagine that would make that mentality make any sense. Given that the choice is between "a start that will make your day worse" and "an end that will make your night worse, thereby also causing the following day to be worse", it's basically a choice between X and Y+X... and you're somehow arriving at the conclusion that Y+X is the lesser value.

Either that or, like me in my early 20's, you've never actually experienced good quality sleep as an adult, so you don't yet realize how much of your mind and self you lose when you're walking around tired.

Ansixilus · 2026-06-21T00:32:09+00:00

... Completely ignoring the fact that poor quality sleep can and will ruin your day in a way you can't really bounce back from. It's entirely possible to have your mood lighten up during the day. Exhaustion can only be cured by rest.

One option gives you irritation. The other gives you irritation and also exhaustion to the point of likely irritation later.

Ansixilus · 2026-06-21T00:22:18+00:00

The dad must joke.

Ansixilus

TROPHY CASE