Warframe has one of the best tutorial setups of all time. Seriously. The first mission is great, and it immediately throws you into a questline in which you are exploring several tilesets and struggling to not die. It is a great ride. And immediately after that, the game throws you to the open map with a shrug and a general statement of “well, have fun.” That would be bad enough in and of itself, but the official guide on the official site is… the same thing.
This is terrible because this is the moment players quit. It is absolutely the moment people decide that this makes no sense. I cannot fix this, as I have absolutely less reach than the game’s official site, but I can at least do my part to make it clear how you actually get started in the game without feeling like you’re hip-deep in confusion. Maybe knee-deep. Shin-deep, if we’re lucky.
So you’ve completed the tutorial. This means you understand the barest elements of what mods are, how to point and shoot, and so forth. Now… you are still ages away from character creation, as I noted in the prior column, but we’re just going to have to wait for that because the first thing you need to do at this point is actually choose your warframe, even though the odds are very good you cannot get it now. Odds are basically absolute, even. That’s fine. That’s by design.
What criteria do you use to pick your warframe? You pick something that sounds fun and looks cool. There are 59 separate warframes, and I assure you that there are ones you will probably enjoy out there. You can go ahead and browse all of the different warframes available on the wiki, or you can consult with friends or the community to figure out a frame you might enjoy. (This is very much a game where having a friend to guide you will help.) But the point is that you should have a goal.
So what do you do then? You backfill.
Warframe is not a game in which you have so many resources that you are, inevitably, going to be flush with everything you need and never have to make choices. It is also not a game in which you are never going to have to decide between a few things you want. Rather, it is a game with a lot of overlapping goals that will force you to figure out what you need to do, and by deciding “I want to do this,” you can create a structure for yourself.
For example, let’s say you see Ember and think, “She looks like my preferred playstyle.” That’s great because it means now you have a goal. First, you are going to need to get to Saturn. That requires some progress through quests and so forth. You are also going to need to do some resource farming to get what is needed to make her. Then you need to run the assassination mission to get her drops, assemble her, and then you have your new warframe! Simple as.
“Wait,” you might be saying. “So I have to play with warframes I don’t want to get the ones I do?” And the answer is yes… but that’s not actually a bad thing, because that’s kind of the point of the game. Literally everything in the game is about leveling something, even something you don’t intend to use permanently, because that’s going to make an impact. That covers everything from other warframes to weapons and so on and so forth.
That’s because everything contributes to your Mastery Rank, which isn’t the same as a single unified player level but does gate a lot of your progress. For example, one of my favorite weapons is the Fulmin, but you don’t actually get access to that until Mastery Rank 8. Warframes are not gated by Mastery Rank, but weapons are, and while you might think “how different could individual weapons be,” the answer is actually “a lot.” You get some for free, some as drops, some from reputation, and not only will you want to experiment to find the ones you like, but you will also just want to experiment to raise your Mastery Rank in the first place.
So if you’re going to be experimenting a lot, why do I say that you should start by setting yourself a specific goal? Two reasons. The first is that having a specific goal is a good litmus test for whether or not this game is going to stick with you, just like I said about the story. There’s no real debate over whether or not the shooting and combat in Warframe is good; the question is whether or not you are going to find all of the bits around the shooty-jumpy bit to be fun, and “time to unlock the path to get the mission to farm the drops to make the frame I want” is a good test of that.
But the other reason is that setting a specific goal gives you the big thing the game lacks at first: structure. If you know, for example, that you want to play Lavos, then you now have both a goal of getting to Deimos and a structured thing you need to do. You need to raise your reputation on Deimos to get the parts needed to build Lavos. Then you need to build Lavos. That is a structured activity you can work toward. And since some of that is structured in a daily sense, you can mark time or get a pattern going and a reason to explore.
I say this because while the game has tried to highlight more of the quests after the initial tutorial, it still feels unstructured and rudderless, and while it isn’t, not really, you need to learn what the game wants you to do and how it wants you to play. And if you have a framework to follow, it’s also much easier to then move on to your next goal after that.
Obviously, some players are still going to find this too loose. Or they’re going to be annoyed that you have to wait this long to get yourself a new warframe you want, and let me be clear: Some of these do take a really long time. (You want to use Hildryn? Get ready for a long grind even if you do manage to get her off the Circuit, and that’s another discussion altogether.) But it does at least give a foundation to start with, and I think it would make the game a lot better if you did actually have better guidance toward this in the first place.
Although for some frames, the path to get them is basically “do everything anyway,” so maybe that’s only a halfway solution anyhow. Regardless.
Pick a ‘Frame, any ‘Frame! The Warframe galaxy is in danger, Tenno, and Space Mom needs help to combat it. Are you in the right Warframe of Mind to join in? MOP has enlisted; we suit up in our favorite ‘Frames to fight the good fight, blasting the Grineer and Infected into smithereens.
