Devstream 27

The stream started on April 25th, 2014, @ 2pm EST.

Recap
Credit goes to DERebecca on Warframe forums and BuildMyPaperHeart on Reddit.

On The Couch
From Right to Left:

Design Director | Very Large Scope Interactive: Scott!

Community Manager | SIDEBALL! Rebecca!

Statue | Stargazing: Excalibur!

Creative Director | Yer A Wizard: Steve!

Animation Director | Biceps: Geoff!

Associate Producer (PS4) | Tickling! Pat!

Studio Manager | Switch Teleport! Sheldon!

Update on PS4
Pat: U13 is coming to PS4 very soon! We’re going to cert on Monday/Tuesday at the latest. It’s basically 13.0.7.1 and Dark Sector changes that have been brought over as well. I'm excited because it has a lot of PS4 goodies. PS4 players didn’t get the Shamrock or Easter color picker so we're going to do a PS4 exclusive color picker. We've updated the Companion app to match our Warframe nexus app so it will contain the usual Alerts and codex entries. Now down the road we’re looking at remote play and fully customizable remote play bindings! Performance is always number 1 on my list and Update 13 will bring some awesome fixes. We’re going to town and fixing 3D Transmission Animations, lighting, and optimizing assets to improve that.

The issue of dying and having your frame rate reset is being looked at right now.

We're working with Sony to determine policies for Account Migration. We have to go through many people who have to agree on terms for migrations. That’s all I can say about that right now. Our Sony team is amazing with daily conversation. We have to come up with Policies that work with ALL SONY territories (SCEA, SCEJ, etc.).

Steve: We’re pushing for Account Migration and we’ve got everything set up. It’s about policies and legal issues across the world.

We read the forums! Please let us know what's wrong so we can fix it! We can't hotfix as quick as PC, but we fix them!

PS4 Events
Steve: A user was saying how great it would be if they could have events at the same time as PC. Which is something we’ve absolutely talked about and are planning on doing. Our idea is to launch an update from a code side, in tandem with PC so it matches up.

PS4 Load Times
Steve: We had a conversation about PS4 load times and we've got some ideas to help it. Glen even identified one of the problems: every time we do an update on console, it increases the fragmentation of the Warframe data files. So now we can look at those and get some faster load times.

Cloth Physics
Geoff: It's harder on the Generation 1 frames because of how they were modeled. The model needs to be updated first by the artists before skirt physics (Trinity) can be fixed. All the newer frames have the cloth physics because they were shipped with it.

Dark Sector/Solar Rail
Steve: How the solar rails, specters work is what’s ‘2.0’ right now. We're growing from there to create more strategic options for the Tacticians in the alliances/clans. We need to add more destabilizing forces to conflicts so we don't get a monopoly. Also fixing things like racing to press the Deploy button when Dark Sectors open up. We've seen some sweet community suggestions as well.

Solar Rail Battlepay
Steve: The problem is clans/alliances not allowing enough reward reserve to pay the battling Tenno. We’re working on fixing that!

Crafting Specters
Sheldon: You're going to be able to craft your own specter. Being able to populate a Dark Sector Defense with your own guy you've created will be awesome. If you don’t have a good Tactician right now you’ll need to get tactical.

Focus/Proxy War/Dark Sectors
Steve: When the dark sector levels are in conflict, we have multiple prototypes to battle cooler specters or players. If a player isn’t interested in that type of conflict they go off and craft a specter and help build armies for the tactician to deploy.

Scott: Players have been asking for others to raid their Dojo and have to defend, so I think we’re going to add that into your Rails.

Steve: Warframe isn’t just about running Extermination missions or Defense, there’s a lot more stuff you can do in the game. Solo or lore hungry players are going to love Proxy Wars.

Steve: A really powerful Solo player, can go into a quest and build an ultra specter that goes into the alliance inventory where other players now create an army around his specters conclave rating.

Scott: Focus is in progress. We have a working prototype in the development build but it's a matter of priorities right now. Dark Sectors are the big hot topic right now that we have to fix first before we divert efforts.

Stealth/Rescue Missions
Reb: N7snk asks- Stealth Missions, When?

Scott: Stealth 2.0 is down the block. It's really close! We're tweaking and polishing as we go. Rescue is being completely reworked! The new update will have leaders or wardens that will guard and create a stealth challenge for players to rescue targets. The first one that will ship will bring a couple new rooms to the Corpus and Grineer tilesets. If you manage to sneak by the Wardens and rescue the prisoner without them seeing you, they won’t set off the alarms and execute the prisoner. It will have a hardcore stealth vibe in it.

Rebecca: Will rewards scale for the different difficulty levels?

Scott: Yes, we're kicking around tying game types that you do early into the high level end game system. So for example, if you rescue the guy he gives you the piece of a component that allows you to create an item to upload your Specter. In order to do that, you have to play other mission types or low level clan members can contribute to the bigger clan war by playing those missions and then donating their items to the clan.

End Mission Screen
Reb: Sturg13 asks- I just would like to see my score at the end of a game. Everyone quits out early when the score comes up and I never get to see it.

Scott: Our end mission screen has shown it’s age.

Reb: The end mission screen is going to be completely overhauled! You'll even be able to go back and see what your end mission stats were.

New User Experience
Steve: The feedback comes in 2 parts of endgame/lore with some new player experience. Dark Sectors is addressing the veteran player and we're working more on the new user experience for their friends that they might want to bring to the game.

Scott: Those improvements kind of trickle into the rest of the game. Hopefully we’ll have the systems/tutorials in place that will help pull new players into the game.

Concept Art (New Tileset and Player Ships)
Player Ships: http://youtu.be/xqNEVpoElAA?t=20m24s

Players will have their own ships.

Star Chart 2.0

Corpus Ice Planet: http://youtu.be/xqNEVpoElAA?t=20m55s

Inside Corpus Ship: http://youtu.be/xqNEVpoElAA?t=21m30s, http://youtu.be/xqNEVpoElAA?t=21m44s, http://youtu.be/xqNEVpoElAA?t=22m2s, http://youtu.be/xqNEVpoElAA?t=22m23s

Steve: This tileset will be coming after the Infested ship preview.

Shipyard Expansion: http://youtu.be/xqNEVpoElAA?t=22m42s, http://youtu.be/xqNEVpoElAA?t=23m

Inside Player Ship: http://youtu.be/xqNEVpoElAA?t=23m18s, http://youtu.be/xqNEVpoElAA?t=23m58s

Steve: The inside of the player ships will have some kind of dimensionality like the Tardis. They’ll be some transportation costs to fly this ship into new regions or upgrading the ship. Those costs will plug into Faction ratings and the type of people you’ve allied with. This will tie into making the game less disposable and more systemic.

New Infested Tileset

Scott: They'll be returning with their own proper art set. This new version will show the actual ships being pulled apart and morphed. It’s hardcore in progress! Besides the Shipyard expansion this will be the follow up.

Steve: I've gotten some tweets about how players miss J3-Golem and I'm excited to say he is coming back completely reworked. It’s being designed to be a proper boss battle.

New Army Types
Reb: Ssfsx17 asks- how much work is currently being put into fleshing out the army lists of the Corpus and Infested?

Scott: Enemy types are definitely on the radar. New infested ideas are being tossed around and soon we'll be doing a Design Council thread for some redesigns on enemy types! The community is full of great ideas and we want to take those ideas and make something awesome.

Stance vs. Stance Mods
Scott: In our eyes it’s a default stance that has no combos. But when you work with the data it’s still called a Stance. We apologize for the confusion, but in our eyes it’s the base stance that ships on every weapon and then there is the combo stance that is manifested as cards.

Steve: When we introduce new systems we keep in mind how it will feel in a year. We added it in with the expectation that there would need to be some gameplay for you to get those mods.

More Stances
Geoff: The volume of animations/hooking up was a lot. We realized we didn’t have time to fill up all the slots of every stance card. But we're updating them to add more today! The Glaive, Scythe and Bo Staff stance cards are going to have ‘option b’, and there is a brand new Katana stance card where you can hold it with 2 hands.

Katana: Decisive Judgement http://youtu.be/xqNEVpoElAA?t=42m36s

Scythe: http://youtu.be/xqNEVpoElAA?t=43m12s

Bo Staff: http://youtu.be/xqNEVpoElAA?t=43m34s, http://youtu.be/xqNEVpoElAA?t=44m

Glaive: http://youtu.be/xqNEVpoElAA?t=44m26s

Kubrow
Reb: Senketsu_ asks- I would like to know the status on the Kubrows if we don’t see them today.

Enemy Kubrow: http://youtu.be/xqNEVpoElAA?t=46m7s

Geoff: Their 90% content completed. The AI guys are polishing right now. They will have a pack mentality.

Friendly Kubrow: http://youtu.be/xqNEVpoElAA?t=47m14s Barking, sitting, jumps on top of zipline. Kubrow anims will match player emote

Sentinel Slot being renamed PET SLOT

Geoff: I think it’s safe to say this will be Update 14.

Warframe Balancing
Scott: Definitely old frames and news frames, buffing/nerfing is on the mind. I am not committing to this but here is where my head’s at: some frames need work. Hot topic on my mind is taking a look at frames and giving older frames love, and new frames. Hydroid’s powers require a complete finish before you can recast- ramifications of multicast. Trinity’s Blessing giving her and team invulnerability - I get requests from players to change it and how it removes all challenge from the game. Nova is always a hot topic. Ash/Banshee: probably need a buff. We need to figure out where those are going to land.

Valkyr Work
Geoff: We're working on Valkyr with a lot more function to her fourth power. She's going to have new combos and combo chains. With the parrying system she'll have multi finishers and she’s even going to have a unique movement set. No more hover punch! She'll have a new idol with a spin flip jump, wall run; just beef it up.

Universal Ability mods
We argued about that! We're working on it.

Weapons
Scott: We need to look at the guns - which guns? We hear Snipers are a category of weapons in need of a buff. They’ll probably get a look and a buff to make sure they stay a viable weapon.

The Dual Daggers of Change are coming! -ish

Jacque is working on allowing instant Glaive throws again!

Trading/Platinum Sales
Reb: Steeletheshow asks- Now that you've had time to collect some data, how has the introduction of trading to the game affected platinum sales?

Sheldon: We've seen that Platinum has moved out throughout the player base to those who didn't have it before. It's been a success so far and a ton of players now have plat.

Steve: I see a lot of questions of how awkward the trade channel is and a way of asynchronously performing trades. And what about an Auction House? Not necessarily, playerbase seems like it could be split. It’s an exploration of improving that system.

New players no longer locked with Warframe/Weapon slots! Old players getting what they need!

Players can specialize content, or trade out things they don't need.

Trade channel does need improvements; will work on filtering noise.

RNG
Reb: Calayne asks- What are your plans to reduce RNG and grind? Particularly in the void for Prime parts and the stance mods. How about ability and stance mods being shifted to the market?

Sheldon: Right now the void is in a good place that we'll keep improving.

Scott: It'll always be adjusting as we add stuff to the game. We’ve talked about adding room with another tier in the Void.

Sheldon: We have a lot of room to grow where drops can go.

Scott: We sprinkled the stances across enemies and we've gone back and looked at the drop tables. Even the specter suggestions shows that there is ways to move things around.

Region-alize Leaders for different drops?

Clan Tech Weapons
Reb: theMatherson asks- Quick & short question, why is every weapon after U12 clan tech? It's really frustrating having to wait three days for every weapon that get's added. I would love it if you guys went back to putting new weapon blueprints in the market, or alternatively, reduce the research time to at least one day.

Scott: It's about players who wanted more reason to have the Dojo. We felt the Market was getting overwhelming.

Sheldon: That's not to say we'll never put them in the Market. It's a balance.

Day of the Dead skinpack: Prime variants don't work!
That was a bug, we'll fix it!

Dark Energy Colours
Steve: Jeremy is putting in support for Dark Energy Colours!

Rewards
Reb: Se05239 asks- Are you planning on making rewards a little more rewarding? As in Orokin Cell at 40 mins T3 Survival, RNG tweaking? Why doesn’t Defense rewards stack yet? Defense is THE MOST unrewarding gametype in Warframe.

Scott: We don’t know when they’re going to stack.

Steve: I agree, we should get on stacking rewards fix.

Clan Downsizing
Steve: That isn’t in the queue right now, but we can definitely look into that.

Note: We have never allowed it before, to still be discussed.

Bugs?
Reb: Gigatron-Prime asks- What’s the top bug in the game you’d like to see fix?

Redtext : one "bug" that drives me nuts EVERY time I play: the extraction room for some Grineer maps has a pipe that drops you onto a narrow-ish platform which is immediately followed by a pit. So run out of the pipe -> roll -> fall into pit. Every. Single. Time. Auto-Roll Control!

Steve: There’s a hitch!

Geoff: Autoroll!

Sheldon: All performance bugs on PS4/Low end PC

Player Studio for Warframe
Reb: PS4dukezap1 asks- will there ever be a Player Studio (Planetside 2) like deal for Warframe? Where users can create their own camos, 3D models (Helmets, Sentinel Skins, etc) and have a separate market for player created items?

Steve: There should be. The art/ideas players generate are mind blowing. We want to add alliance badges in right away and let clans/alliance build some aspect of the dark sectors attack/defense system.

Each Polarity represents an old Tenno order

Platinum Prize Winners
Spafbi | Excal94 | Homzi | Dlgrave | Dimzdes