Early last year we finished up our long-running family game session of Satisfactory, and as a follow-up we decided to give Warframe a try. Out of the three of us, Spud (my son) is the top-tier expert with all the goodies and lore and know-how. Nyx (my daughter) was a dabbler who had played the game a bit but didn’t have a lot of equipment, let alone much of the star chart (playable locations) unlocked.

Me? I was somewhere in the middle. I’ve played the game off and on for years, giving up a few years ago when I realized I was never going to have the kind of skill at navigating 3D space in a looter-shooter game that it takes to really tackle serious challenges. But… given a dedicated team to run with, maybe I could manage to at least pull my weight more often than not? I agreed to try it out.

And now, here we are, months later.

I admit, the game’s grown on me… with certain provisos.

I should be clear that we’re reaping the benefits of two major factors in this game run. First, Spud’s support and expertise are the pillar and the anchor of this entire experience. Is that metaphor mixed? Too bad. He’s guided us around the “origin system” with skill, helping us build our equipment to be functionally useful at the upper end of what we can currently do in the game.

Second, Warframe’s developers have built a lot more “quality of life” into the game experience in the years since I was previously active. Things that used to be excruciatingly tedious are now merely somewhat tedious. For the most part. I don’t (usually) feel like I’m “doing homework” just trying to enjoy the game day-to-day.

And so: We’re having a blast! For instance, last night’s session involved fishing in the near-frozen lakes of Venus (… I refuse to try to explain that statement) followed by taking a spaceship into “void storms” to “crack relics” in order to get parts to make a new warframe. We got so, so very lucky during that latter project, by the way: All three components to make the “Nyx Prime” frame, as random drops from “relics,” resulted from barely an hour’s worth of mission attempts. The odds against this happening are… staggering. (Each relic can give one out of six randomly-chosen results, and each team player’s relic result can be chosen by any or all other players on the team as well, which makes teaming up the best way to improve the chances of getting good loot. But the Prime frame parts have the lowest chances to appear of all the options.) As a friend put it later, “Why don’t you go buy a lottery ticket next?!”

With that said, there are a couple of things that I’m not fond of. First and foremost is that the bulk of the high-end content is gated behind having completed all of the main story quests. Every time they expand the story, the goalposts to reach that high-end content move that much further away for a starting-out player. And doing the story quests can be a gigantic pain in the backside: You’re often locked out of all the cool toys you’ve been accumulating, forced to use skills you’re new to, and in many cases you can’t do anything else in the game until you’ve completed however many hours’ worth of story quest you’re in the middle of.

This? This is when the game makes you feel like you’re doing homework. Or at least extremely tedious chores. Complete with “Do It Again, Doofus” gameplay elements. The Knights who say Ni with their “cut down the tallest tree in the forest… with a herring” challenge would find some of these quests a bit much. But… we gotta do ’em or we’re going to be stuck behind the “really cool stuff to do” wall.

I hated homework as a schoolboy and I have a hard time starting it as an adult, too.

The other issue isn’t really the game’s fault: I’m just getting old. My reflexes were never top-tier to begin with, my brain’s slowing down so I can sometimes lose track of where I was supposed to be going, and if the task at hand is too complex I’m likely to get overwhelmed. Never mind trying to navigate some of the twistier, more convoluted map tilesets in 3D space. There’s a minimap but that doesn’t always help, being a 2D overlay depicting one aspect of the 3D environment. So really, overall, what I’m saying is: Skill issue. And the limiting factor is this aging meatsack that I inhabit.

When can I get a [redacted spoilers] in order to [redacted spoilers] my very own hypertech space ninja? Hmm? There’s the future I need…