User:Rastanari/Initial Game Login & Warframe Selection

This guide is intended to give a new player advice on some of the initial choices they must make after logging into the game for the first time, such as whether or not to buy platinum and which initial Warframe to choose, along with some environmental settings they may want to alter.

Platinum: To Buy Or Not To Buy
Digital Extremes is the company that produces Warframe. When logging into the game from a new account for the first time, players may be presented with a deeply-discounted offer from Digital Extremes to buy platinum, which is one of the fundamental currencies in the game. This guide recommends taking them up on the offer.

Warframe is advertised as a free-to-play game, but while the game may be free to play in terms of real-world money, it is not in terms of time. The old saying "Time is money" rings especially true in Warframe.

Players build new, more powerful warframes, weapons, components and gear while progressing through the game. Building these items requires resources that can be farmed while playing the game. However, most if not all the resources required to build an item can also be bought from the in-game market using platinum.

The choice given to players is one of time vs. money - whether to save real-world money and farm resources themselves in the game or pay for those resources with platinum to speed up their build cycle and game progression.

There can be a balance between the two choices, farming resources as needed but buying a resource on occasion when it is not currently available. For example, building some items require resources from a planet the player is currently working their way through in the game, but that item may also require a resource that is not available to the player until they have progressed further in the game to another planet or two. If a player wanted to build that item, their choice is to either buy it from the in-game market with platinum and build the item immediately or wait until they progress further into the game and reach the planet that supplies that resource.

This guide recommends a balanced approach, buying platinum with the deeply discounted initial game offer and then farming resources in the game, as needed. If/when a particular resource is not available yet but is needed to build a specific item, having platinum on-hand to buy that resource and then immediately build the item is a major time-and-effort saving ability.

Warframe Selection
(Work in progress)

First Mission: Set Up Your Environment
After choosing a Warframe and watching a short cut-scene you will find yourself in your first mission with people shooting at you and an entity named Lotus giving you instructions on what to do next.

Before attempting to do anything, adjust your environment settings. For now, ignore the people who are shooting at you and enter the main menu for all the game functionality by hitting the Menu button on your XBox One or PS4 controller or hitting the Esc key on your keyboard if you are running the game on Windows. For environment settings, select Options.

There are a large number of options you can change to configure the game as you like. As you progress and get more used to the game interface you'll probably be fine-tuning these over time. But initially running the game there are a few you may want to adjust immediately.

The tabs you may want to select and use to adjust your environment are listed below. After making any changes, be sure to click the Confirm button at the bottom right of the Options menu.

Controls
Invert the X or Y axis, as desired.

Note: If you make this change for your controller or keyboard at the top of the screen, scroll down and make the same change under the sub-section titled "Archwing."

Video Resolution
XBox One and PS4 users may not need to adjust their video resolution but Windows users probably will. The game currently does not query and use your current Windows screen resolution settings but defaults to a relatively low resolution. If you are running Warframe on Windows, select the Display tab and change the Video Resolution setting to your desired value.

Heads-Up Display (HUD)
XBox One and PS4 users may not need to adjust their default HUD settings but if you are a Windows user you probably will, especially if you adjusted your video resolution. Warframe appears to currently use pixel-based text, so increasing the Video Resolution on Windows to a high resolution results in the HUD and game text being very small (and almost unreadable on a 4K monitor because it's so tiny).

To increase the scale of the HUD text, select the Interface tab, scroll down to the bottom of the window and increase the value of the HUD Scale. Initially it is set to 100. Windows users on high resolution monitors may want to try increasing it to a value in the 200-300 range.

Chat
Like the HUD settings, Windows users will probably need to increase the size of the Chat window and text. To make this adjustment, select the Chat tab and increase the Chat Scale value as desired (again possibly in the 200-300 value range).