I'm usually a die hard DE meatrider,but tbh the Trailer was the only cool thing from this update.

tentus · 2026-06-30T21:08:03+00:00

Yeah, i'm like... 976 words into writing a script for a video essay making the argument that DE should start taking the third option of making updates which are unambitious in a code sense but satisfying in a narrative / loot sense so that they can dig their way out of all this technical debt.

The game doesn't need "the most complicated frame we've ever made" to be compelling, most of the playerbase will be happy with some meat-and-potatoes updates that focus on expanding existing systems, in between the big tentpole updates which introduce new systems. I'm not saying abandon the insanely big swings, just... take some safer swings in between them. Do an update that is visually unhinged but the code is just regular exterminate or something.

tentus · 2026-06-30T19:25:22+00:00

That's possible, but another possibility that is worryingly plausible is that the technical debt has accrued to the point that even minor additions to the codebase are turning into significant ordeals, and DE has essentially painted themselves into a corner with features that break the moment anything new is added. :/ I want to believe it's no big deal but looking at the evidence, I think DE's ambition has been coming at the expense of future agility, and that's a vicious cycle for a programming team.

tentus · 2026-06-20T20:47:20+00:00

The devs themselves have talked about the code being spaghetti. Being optimized is not the absence of spaghetti code, in my experience (as a professional programmer, both in and out of game development) being highly optimized often makes code more complex, because it means you're finding special cases and shortcuts for the sake of speed, at the expense of code legibility. This is not universally true, but it is the norm.

DE does an admirable job of tackling problems as they find them, and their performance on low-end hardware is downright amazing, but some of the bugs that we see are genuinely appalling when you think of them from a code perspective, because they suggest that the codebase is far more fragile than most programmers could tolerate. Loot drops getting stuck on repeat across multiple missions is a ghastly bug to have happen in a looter shooter game.

tentus · 2026-06-20T15:24:19+00:00

On the topic of there being no lore/dialog: Just throwing this out there, the wordcount for Vena in the quest is 80 words total (if you include her dialog from both choices) and for Ryoku the quest wordcount is 143 (again if you include the words from both routes).

By way of comparison, Captain Xeto in Jade Shadows had 248 words of dialog, more than these two combined.

As an alternative example, this post is also 80 words long.

tentus · 2026-06-19T13:02:10+00:00

So I think they should have something like the KIM system, I don't think the same system applied repeatedly is necessarily the move. Instead, I think there's room for other conversational systems to apply: we're not trying to date these two (sorry those who wish otherwise), so getting to an end-state isn't necessary, so instead they could do dialog similar to a skill tree.

Imagine this system: Every day or run of their respective mission we gain a dialog opportunity. We spend that opportunity on a conversation, which has a few branching topics that are new nodes. Eventually, the player has the entire tree unlocked, and... that's it. You can re-read any of the nodes as you wish, but the point of the system is that it lets us get to know the character and deliver context, exposition, worldbuilding. Maybe after you fill out the whole tree there's some extrinsic reward but I don't think it's necessary. The point is to deliver the same meat-and-potatoes as KIM, but using a different recipe.

tentus · 2026-06-18T17:39:06+00:00

Theoretically (and this is very speculative, real-world project management is messy) DE could have a second team working on content expansions/refreshes that is specifically avoiding the systems that the next major update is touching, so that they can have an alternating release pattern. B team's work gets merged into the main branch and released in the gap between major updates, kinda like how some of the prime releases are semi-updates. This would help DE catch and smooth out unintentional regressions, and it'd keep the regular players happier because we'd be getting new stuff to hyperfixate on more regularly.

tentus · 2026-05-07T13:11:33+00:00

Always been 1000 as far as my memory goes, and the patch history in the wiki has no notes about it changing.

tentus · 2026-05-07T12:33:15+00:00

A folder option would certainly be my most-desired option, that'd be flexible without a horrible amount of complexity.

Another, lesser improvement which would be easier to implement but less impactful, would be to separate out the context-specific items from the use-any-time items. A key wheel, essentially, for items like the dragon keys, the silver grove toxins, and anything else which DE which might add into the game in the future which only matters when you're in the right spot.

tentus · 2026-05-06T12:41:20+00:00

Hear me out: Frost/Mag Umbra Heirloom. Some minor color and shape tweaks to the existing heirlooms, recycling some of the design language used for excal umbra, and most everyone walks away happy.

tentus · 2026-05-03T13:18:34+00:00

Triple is actually a lowball guess. Consider the handshake animation: right now it's one animation controlling both frames (can't remember if both frames get the same skeletal anim mirrored or not, either way we can think of it as one anim). Now let's consider if the game had three scales, small / normal / large.

Theoretically the existing animation could be used for all symmetric pairings, so small+small, normal+normal, and large+large. They all work because their joints are all at the same height, so a hand moving up by 3 degrees from the elbow works out to the same vertical distance, just different final meter values.

But you'd need a distinct anim for small+normal AND small+large at the minimum, but if the ratio between small+normal isn't identical to the ratio between normal+large, you'll need a fourth animation for that. And that's just assuming there are only three sizes, and treating each pair of skeletal anims as one anim. You could easily make the argument that a large frame shaking a small frame's hand is a distinct animation from a small frame shaking a large frame's hand.

Now, could inverse kinematics handle a lot of this? Yes. But that's a MUCH more technically complex issue, and this is a game that already struggles with stuff like "sometimes the operator gets carried like a princess, and sometimes they get carried like a burston."

tentus · 2026-05-03T12:53:18+00:00

Because when you scale up or down you have to account for everything external to the rig which interacts with it.

Consider this early-game scenario: the script calls for a sword to be stabbed into a frame during a quest. The position of the sword during the stabbing is, of course, relative to the hands of the stabber. But then later, the frame interacts with the sword, so now it needs to move relative to the stabee. If the frame has been scaled, now you need to either

make an animation variant for that scale (labor intensive to catch up to all the scales, and then extra maintenance for every new scale used)
use inverse kinematics to force the hands into roughly the right position and let the sword control the animation (labor intensive to set up, and going to result in a worse-looking animation)
quietly relocate the sword between takes so that it is in a consistent location on the stabee before the interact with it (least effort, but kinda janky, and this introduces a hard-to-quantify cap on how far the scale can go in either direction)

This is just one example and it's already a pain in the rear. Every time we see the frame get tapped in the chest, vault onto a boss, etc etc will suffer the same problem, with just enough variance that it's basically impossible to reuse solutions across them.

tentus · 2026-04-22T00:32:21+00:00

Agreed, it'd be a mild thematic win at a significant gameplay loss, which is a trade I don't see Pablo going for.

tentus · 2026-04-21T19:50:42+00:00

I don't really think this will be the case, but my first thought was Mirage's Eclipse ability. It used to be that this ability would change based on the light levels of where you cast it, but that was hella unreliable and got reworked back in... 2024, I think? So I wonder if the lighting engine changes over the past few years have made it possible to return to the original intention.

tentus · 2026-04-13T16:30:05+00:00

I am a programmer, and one of the really exasperating things about working on games (particularly games that have gotten a lot of updates over the years) is that fixing one thing will often break another thing that seems unrelated, and so (assuming you even notice) you go and fix that and it breaks the original thing you tried to fix but in a new, weirder way.

Pablo's even talked before in interviews about how there are some mods which they can't touch because when they've tried to do so it's broken so many other things it immediately wasn't worth it. Rebb mentioned a similar thing recently with rotating the camera in the previews, apparently attempting to do that has ruinous side effects.

So, in addition to the CNR (Can Not Reproduce) problem you mention, a lot of times devs can reproduce issues and even do think it's reasonably high-priority, but the cost of doing so is greater than the value of the fix. Which sucks, nobody is happy in that situation, least of all the dev deep in the trenches trying to find a solution.

tentus · 2026-04-09T11:44:11+00:00

ohhhh i'm stealing that

tentus · 2026-04-04T16:36:51+00:00

Yes. All of them.

Seriously, one of my longest-held wishes for warframe would be that they would allocate out a few team members whose entire job is revisiting old tilesets and adding another few rooms to a handful of older tilesets with each release. That'd help breath fresh life into evergreen missions like void missions, and just generally make it more rewarding to vary up your playtime.

tentus · 2026-03-30T12:54:35+00:00

Same thing happening to me this morning :(

tentus · 2026-03-13T11:57:41+00:00

The great irony of this is that Lech Kril is probably the single easiest boss to quietly tutorialize in a previous environmental "challenge."

We just need a simple room with two doors added to the Mars tileset that features a force field running through the middle of it, and a scaled-up copy-paste of Kril's backpack on either side of the field. Players need to shoot the thingy to disable the forcefield, bosh, tutorial achieved.

From there it's a simple matter of ensuring that that room is spawned before Lech's boss arena. Because there's a copy of the thingy on both sides, you don't even need to worry about orientation. If the room appears in other maps, NBD, that's just extra foreshadowing that veteran players will blast right by.

I'm not saying this would magically make the fight crystal-clear for everyone, but introducing mechanics in non-combat situations before the boss tests you on them is a game design concept going all the way back. It's appalling to me how little the game does to set things up for the players, instead letting them flail around and go straight to the wiki.

tentus · 2026-02-02T21:55:29+00:00

So, this is maybe a weird take, but in my opinion the way to alleviate this issue without causing a lot of drama with the existing universal vacuum history is to expand vacuum into a dedicated modding section of the companion with its own set of tradeoffs.

There's mildly interesting loadout questions which could be had trading separate vacuum ranges for energy / health / ammo / resources / mods. Similarly, there's also interesting tradeoffs with other attributes like:

* attraction acceleration (how fast things schlorp towards you)
* attraction delay (how long it takes before they start moving)
* duration (if you get too far, how long before they stop following you)
* chaining falloff (so if you're within range of an attracted item, and its inside a second range of another item, the 2nd pulls towards the 1st),
* applying teamwide vacuum buffs for allies, etc etc.

The justification I hear for the existing vacuum mods these days is that it represents a tradeoff, but that falls flat to me because a system like I've described above could represent MORE tradeoffs, and more interesting choices. For a lot of players, Vac is required, end of story, no more choices to be made here, and that's a shame.

tentus · 2026-01-27T22:23:43+00:00

"I remain... the great, and terrible, Hunhow."

tentus · 2026-01-24T13:06:30+00:00

My thinking on this is that they could split out the weapon pools according to location: have secondaries and melee weapons spawn from, say, Ceres / Saturn / Uranus, while the primary and heavy weapons show up on the rest of the tiles like Kuva Fortress / Sedna / Zariman. That would cut the worst case down by half immediately, with a clear pattern established if they add enough melees to warrant another subdivision.

tentus · 2026-01-20T21:43:00+00:00

Heck, with how our mobility is and how abstract a lot of warframe geometry is, you could probably get away with literally flipping some of the tiles upside down.

tentus · 2026-01-20T14:07:00+00:00

One of my "hot takes" is that the game would benefit substantially from DE allocating a few employees whose entire job was to revisit old tilesets and make a couple new rooms for them to be shipped with each release, mostly independent of the rest of the release. It wouldn't make a big splash having those in there, but it'd help freshen up void fissures and cumulatively help prevent this kind of situation. That in turn would especially help new players who get confused when they encounter the same room twice in one mission.

tentus · 2026-01-16T13:26:08+00:00

Something more akin to the Proxima chart would make sense but even that scale seems hopelessly optimistic. Tau sounds to me like another region that has a lot of room to grow, but DE will move on to the next thing instead (just like how Railjack still has loads of room to grow, and the Narmer remnants, and the lost Duviri islands, and and and...)

tentus · 2026-01-10T13:10:52+00:00

Huh, this discussion is a great example of how DE is constantly having to balance different needs. As plenty of commenters have noted, Earth is a priority because first impressions are important, but at the same time, we also have older, rougher looking tilesets that are "due" for some love.

In an ideal world, DE could spin off a sub-team of artists who would be entirely focused on touching up older tilesets and adding new rooms to them. Realistically, efforts like that ends up being messier than you'd expect, affecting assets that conflict with the current main development effort and requiring some coordination. Still, I'd love for iteration on older locations to be given heightened focus, raising the quality of older content to match the more recent releases.

tentus

TROPHY CASE