An Aging Game-Player’s Perspective
I just finished Warframe’s “The New War,” the monumental game-changing quest from a few years ago. I don’t have all that many thoughts, but I have some:
Right at the outset I’ll say… yes, I get it. I understand why you’re locked out of all other game content. There would have been no way to seamlessly cram everything going on in that storyline into a “business as usual” environment because business is very much unusual during the quest. That doesn’t mean I enjoyed being stuck with limited capabilities and equipment, let alone as “random bystander #1689” like you do a couple of times early on. But it did drive home the story beats remarkably well.
Honestly, that’s the strength of the entire quest chain: Story. It’s a grand several-hours-long cinematic with a bunch of sometimes-frustrating puzzle-solving crammed into it so that you remain just that bit more engaged than you might have otherwise.
Digital Extremes, the game developer studio, held absolutely nothing back when it came to writing, acting, map design, overall plotting, and so on. They did hold back on one aspect, though… bug fixing. At one point I got locked out of further progression through one task due to a bug that’s been around since the quest was introduced several years ago. C’mon, y’all! I shouldn’t have run into something like this, today, after all the chances you’ve had to squash the bug! Can we have a little QA, as a treat?
For all that it’s well-crafted, The New War is also exhausting. If you don’t enjoy certain kinds of puzzles (like, oh, stealth missions, choosing an example purely at random, ha ha) well too bad, you not only have to do them, but you cannot skip or avoid or go do something else (in game) then come back later. “Git gud,” or whatever the kids say these days. Ugh. I’m too old for this. Were it not for streaming my game to our Discord chat for the kids to help talk me through certain parts, I’d probably still be playing the quest now instead of writing about it after the fact.
My skill level for this kind of “looter shooter” is firmly dialed in at “good enough, probably.” Note that I hit adulthood at the time Wolfenstein 3D was making the rounds, and I put ridiculous amounts of hours into Doom, Quake, and various sequels & variants thereof. Never mind all the hours the kids and I put into Unreal Tournament (’99) back in the day. But I’m slowing down. My reflexes aren’t what they used to be, nor is my eyesight, nor is my ability to track everything going on at once. This isn’t the game’s fault, but it is a limiting factor for my personal enjoyment. Them’s the breaks, I suppose.
I’m reliably informed that nothing else in the game’s main quest chain is this much of a back-breaking slog. “Good,” I say, because I’m not sure I have it in me to slog through this kind of thing again.