I found out about Warframe after playing DarkSector and hearing that the two were related. The reviews seem generally positive with the exception of one massive negative spike.
Is there much in the way of grinding and micro transactions?
I have over 2000 hours in it, in that time I’ve spent $100 on ingame currency. I an honestly say it’s one of the best games I’ve every played, or technically 6 of the best games I’ve every played because Digital Extremes has this habit of making a whole new game and just building it into Warframe. They’ve got skateboards, spaceflight, mech fights, small game hunting, fishing, horse races, and street fighter. You can decorate your house and your giant clan hall, you can customize your gear for peek fashion, you can customize the little spaceship you fly in loading screens.
Easily the best thing in the game is that the paid for currency is tradeable. You can trade valuable in-game assets to oust players in an open market for it, effectively meaning that if you can’t or don’t want to spend money, you can still get the cool cosmetics through grind. Moreso, while you can buy most things with money, the only things you need the money for is cosmetics, everything else is pretty easy to earn in-game and it isn’t until you get to the late-game content that it becomes a little grindy.
Lastly, it’s co-op. You don’t play against other players, so you never run into those feel bad moments where some whale or an ancient like me cleans house, instead we’re more likely to pick up new players and Sherpa you through later content to get frames or gear. The community is just super nice.
I came here to type almost this exact comment, down to the number of hours played and money spent. And all that money I spent was on 50% off or higher discount tickets, too. Anyway, while I have gotten tired of the grind and quit a while ago because I didn’t gel much with the new systems introduced, it was still a great game I have many fond memories of playing.
Grind and premium currency aside, the story is fantastic and there is a new major story/content update coming out in a few months.
For a 14 year old game, the devs and community are still very much active
The game is incredibly grindy, as other have said, but honestly I’d argue that’s kind of the point of the game. It’s kind of made for the grind, you’re always farming for some new thing or trying to get the perfect build for your Warframe, it’s just how it is.
What is kind of cool on the micro transaction side is that people can trade the premium currency. So there are a lot of things you can’t just buy from the in game store with platinum, but people can farm for it and trade it. So you can farm for desirable blueprints and parts and such and then sell them to other players for premium currency. It’s a very cool system, I think.
its a good game but verry grindy and to fast paced for me,
its a looter shooter with incredibly fast movement options.
there is a sea of content but the game has terrible onboarding so you dont quite know where to get started.
if you try it out your first goal should be to unlock the solar system.
make a stop on venus to unlock rhino,
hes imo a good frame for beginners and you’ll learn how to farm (non prime) frames.
if you start to struggle with damage or defense,
look into the mod system, its very important and the game barely explains it.
there is a premium currency called platinum.
but you can trade it between players,
so it became the trading currency.
you can think of it like the path of exile economy,
except the currency cant drop and is sold by the developer instead of third party websites.
With Warframe, the grind is very there but it’s not the point. The point of Warframe is to learn how to slide and float around the level like an anime protagonist with everything falling to ribbons or exploding into gory mist around you, and to look good doing it. The unlocks and currency and quests all serve to open up different places and ways to do that. I saw someone saying the story is great; I dunno, it didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but that just means you can ignore it if you want. I put in over 800 hours because that bulletjump traversal feels so damn good (and I hate grind, WoW made that happen years ago). My wife has over 1000 hours; we didn’t have a clan, we only played together.
That’s a lot of hours, for free.