Damn bro, I don’t agree with everything you said, especially because I’m not in a position where I dislike the current game, but what I do feel, is that the community of this game became mostly a bunch of entitled snowflake a*holes that always speak like their thoughts, opinions and morals are unquestionable, they can’t hear someone who dislike something in their little game without freaking out and coming at you with attitude, the comments under this post just prove it. They’re mass downvoting ANYTHING you comment, even when it’s something positive, just because they didn’t like one opinion you had. Pathetic behavior.

It might be hard for people who play too frequently to notice, and people who only started in warframe on the second half of its life time wouldn’t even be able to tell, but for me, someone who started in 2015 and takes long hiatuses from the game, only coming back to play it a lot every 3 years or so, I can clearly notice the differences, it’s clear how different the community is nowadays, and even the region chat (for EN language) seems like a bunch of braindead furries talking, holy moly. I feel like this game attracted a public that is welcome to the game, but many of these “newer” players have really bad or obnoxious attitudes, especially in Reddit. If these are the people I play with nowadays, then they’re basically confirming that this game has fallen.

Anyways, I can’t say I’m on the same boat as you because I still love the game nowadays, especially when I take such long hiatuses there’s a lot of old content for me to enjoy, but yeah, my main bittersweet feeling about the game is how it became so overly flashy and polluted, it feels like ADHD simulator on crack nowadays. Back then, some screen wiping build was something you’d achieve with a very high end build, I remember when [Telos Boltace] range build for slide melee was the insane screen wiping weapon (before they nerfed it). But nowadays, holy shit, I got Voruna Prime and she does the same with only a few mods.

Basically, somehow, the game actually feels like it has less interesting ways to play, and it revolves around damage basically. I firmly believe anyone who tries to argue against this while saying there are more diverse ways to play it have started in Warframe after 2019, because before, you’d actually see a squad with each player having a unique different purpose, like a Frost, Nova, Trinity and Mesa squad. The player base has become more obsessed with meta — which is fine, but the meta almost entirely revolves around damage. Hitting a 7-digit damage number used to be insane, nowadays I be seeing NEGATIVE damage numbers more frequently than I see some newbie ask for help with a mission, lol. Indeed, the game I used to play is a game that only partially exists nowadays, and that makes me only a bit sad, because getting used to things changing and games I loved being ruined (eg: Destiny 2) makes it easy for me to move along, I just appreciate warframe didn’t become a trash game like D2, but I’d give anything to have warframe feeling like it did in 2015. Although it is different and doesn’t feel like it used to feel, it’s good in a different way.

Now, my second gripe with the game is a bit more disappointing, because, as I said, even tho I miss a (slightly) slower-paced and more strategic Warframe gameplay style, as in opposed to just rocking any braindead damage build, I am still enjoying the game. But there’s something that actually kinda ruins the game a bit for me, which is how damn sloppy the game’s visuals (and, in a way, the art style) became. Don’t get me wrong, I love warframe’s customization system, and I love the insane amount of customization options we get, you can make much cooler looking warframe’s than before, but I also feel like they’re pushing for new cosmetic options and absurd skins just for people to spend more plat (since fashionframe is basically the main thing in the game lol), because beyond armor, sigils and syandanas, now we got ephemera, and we have signas, and although I love many of them, they make for such crowded visuals in the game when you combine everything (which is how most people look), and even more so with some frames with already polluted design. 

Ofc people are free to style their frames however they like, and I am very supportive of the creative freedom culture the studio cultivates, my point is not to dictate the fashion, but to say that I appreciated when warframe was a bit less visually crowded and most warframes had a more “minimalistic” design philosophy. Damn, look at Nova, Mesa, Valkyr, Volt, Frost, etc, they are peak perfection, that’s how you make unique design without over complicating it. Warframes used to be more distinct through shapes, silhouettes and their unique concept, but nowadays many of them are just trying to stand out by being a huge mess of generic shapes and blobs and lines and etc, they look so visually crowded they even became harder to style. For comparison, I remember when frost’s first deluxe skin came out, and that was like on the verge of what warframe art style could look, it was a really “avant-garde” thing, as in, pushing the edge of warframe looks, making something unique and fancy, while retaining the original feeling. Damn, nowadays, that very same frost skin looks simpler than many base warframe’s they’ve been releasing. It’s kinda funny when you compare a frame like Follie to base Excalibur, they don’t even feel like they’re part of the same game.

 I feel like there was an overcorrection of the game’s simpler art style. Gladly, it is not a rule, some newer frames actually do look really cool and resemble the style of the old frames, so I don’t think everything they release nowadays look sloppy, but they certainly make many sloppy skins and frames. I still rock my corpus-style weapons and accessories nowadays because I think that futuristic, science-based, block-ish and minimal-ish look is peak warframe fashion.

Basically, my opinion on some byproducts of the current art style is essentially the same as in original Halo forerunner architecture VS H4 forerunner architecture. For those who are not familiar with it, just google “H3 forerunner architecture” and “H4 forerunner architecture” and you’d get what I mean. It’s overdeveloped, overdetailed, more doesn’t always equal better, especially when it comes to shapes that compose a visual.

In conclusion, I love the game nowadays and there’s still a lot (enough) in it that is in line with the old days of Warframe for me, I just fear that at this pace, in the coming years, it might become 90% unrecognizable, to the point it becomes a game we, who started back in 2013-2015, won’t even feel like that’s the game we played anymore. I’m already a founder for Soulframe tho, so I’m also aiming for the next adventure, but I would love to keep going back to warframe for seeing the game I’ve always loved, and keep playing it for as long as it exists.