Pablo Alonso, Design Director at Digital Extremes on Warframe shed some insight on why Warframe is not likely to release another raid, or more correctly named "Trial", and the development process behind them.
Responding to a question on devshort, Alonso laid out a multi-part case that boils down to a single premise: you can't have a good raid without real challenge, and you can't have real challenge in Warframe without balance changes the community doesn't actually want.
Pablo pointed to historical engagement data when Trials were removed, their weekly player count was close to Conclave numbers despite costing, in his estimate, 100x the effort to build and maintain. Yeah, that's a lot of time to add in content that isn't hitting play expectations...
Ultimately though, Alonso summarized everything perfectly: "a raid without challenge is just a mission with more people".
Quote From @PabloMakes Got asked on devshort why I don't think raids work on WF, so sharing my thoughts. tl;dr I don't believe you can have good raids without challenge. And you can't have challenge without balance changes.
Bit of history first. Back when trials were removed the weekly players doing them were pretty close to conclave numbers, but trials took 100x the work to make and maintain.
You can try to Morbius me and say "oh we were all busy last time trials were around, but THIS time we will play them!" but I'm doubtful.
I used to raid on WoW, farm materials non stop for flasks and enchants, study the strats and then you and 39 people bash their heads on the same boss over and over for 4 hours straight. It was great! But I don't think the wider Warframe community is interested in that tho
Our current hard bosses are meant to be optional challenges for those who want to push it, we kept the rewards cosmetic so you never felt like you HAD to do them, and even so, I still requests to nerf them, so I really don't think our community is thirsty for harder stuff
In a game with lots of ways to hit cap damage and immortality, true challenge is just not possible. If as a community we want challenge, then we need to emphasize balance and I think we all know that is just not what most Warframe players want
So if challenge isn't possible, what is? Well we could do puzzle based things like we have done for some bosses and in old trials, but puzzles get boring after you do them a couple times, they don't have the depth that our combat does, so that brings us back to Morbius
So if not raids, then what? Well Deep/Temporal Archemedea were born of my desire to make something challenging that you had a reason to do every week, but also didn't get stale or hyper optimized like tridolons. And at that, I think they succeeded.
Do you get the highs from completing it that me and my raid got from defeating Nefarion after trying over and over for months? No. But that sort of high requires a looooot of lows and I just think that is a different game, not Warframe.
Warframe shines in variety and power fantasy and I think these pillars are just not compatible with grueling challenge. And a raid without challenge is just a mission with more people. Thank you for reading mah rant.
How do you feel about raids/trials in Warframe? Would you be okay with game balance to remove the ability to become invincible in order to have harder content?
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