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Saya’s Vigil being required for Venus slows down the progression from singleplayer into being able to actually play with your friends who are excited to play with you and help you unlock planets
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The quest is bugged for new players. When you return from your first bounty in the plains, it doesn’t let you talk to Konzu until you reload Cetus
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The quest is bugged for old players. The quest forces you to equip a codex scanner, and simaris scanners don’t count. If you try to run the mission with just a simaris scanner anyway, it adds a codex scanner to your gear wheel automatically.
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The quest contains spoilers. Sentients are a big deal! You’re not supposed to know who the Orokin fought in the great war until you reach Uranus and complete Natah. Mentioning sentients that early is fucky. Why explain them to brand new players?
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It doesn’t help with progression. While the story is fine, and it has some touching moments, it doesn’t help the player unlock anything except the codex scanner. It’s a lot of time to sink into a pure story quest when the first thing a new player wants is to power up and get out of the Newframe zone of progression and into the good stuff.
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It STILL doesn’t help make the new player experience less confusing. Yeah, it explains codex scanners, but my friend still needed a lot of help to get it started.
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It’s too hard to start. You can only start it by doing a level 5-15 bounty in the plains. That’s too hard for a brand new player who only just killed Vor!
To add some positivity and contrast to this post, I just played Call of the Tempestarii for the first time and it’s SO GOOD. Ghost ship, space shanty, going Moby Dick on a ghost and a burial at sea. It’s the perfect story centered Warframe quest.
I was just talking to my friend who played Saya’s Vigil right after they made it a requirement to get to Venus, and she’s dipped her toes into Duviri, but she says she had no idea that Duviri is full of spoilers. I had to pull a single sentence out of the marketing for Duviri paradox to show her. That sentence is “all Tenno can choose to begin at the ending and play The Duviri Paradox”. That’s all the warning new players get that Duviri hints at the Operator, straight up spoils the Zariman, lets you do Transference… Duviri isn’t a “quick-start” option, Duviri is Warframe 2. A whole other game, that anyone can get and start playing, with its own new player experience, but which assumes every spoiler from the previous is out of the bag and just tells you all of them to get you up to speed.
No arguments there but that is kind of why I said we are in Act 3 now.
Act 1 is largely the (mostly plotless) period between Vor’s Prize and Second Dream. It is setting the stage for the game, mostly, and is the kind of filler people would be told to “push through” if this were a tv show. The goal is to get us to the point of “Oh yeah, I vaguely recall that guy” every time Tyl or Vor or whatever show up.
Act 2 is where we have been for the better part of a decade. The Operator is a thing and their relationship with The Lotus is a driving force for a lot of the narrative. This probably ended with The New War, but we’ll need to see how Whispers plays out. This sets the stage for Albrecht and The Man In The Wall.
Act 3 is what we are in right now. The Operator and The Drifter are a thing, we are going to meet-ish Albrecht and Hayden Tenno, we are probably going to learn a lot about The Man in The Wall, and we are already fighting his minions as part of Zariman and Duviri.
I do think going in blind and playing The Second Dream is one of the top 100 experiences in gaming. But even DE have stopped considering The Operator to be a spoiler (and it is mostly just us players who still call it “spoiler mode”).
Which, going back to MMOs/Live Games. Cataclysm was a MASSIVE thing when it happened in WoW. And now it isn’t even the status quo that new players experience. Same with the Charr invasion in Guild Wars 1 or, probably, whatever is going on in Destiny at this point. Because “you have to play through 30 hours of content before we can even talk” is just not viable.
I forget if FF14 just gives level skips or also content skips to start in the expansions (and pretty much EVERYONE acknowledges A Realm Reborn is mediocre. And nobody can play the previous original campaign anymore). And Elder Scrolls Online doesn’t even start you with the original main quest at this point. You need to actively trigger that (which has implications for the game mechanics but…).
My partner just played the Second Dream for the first time, spoiler free, and it said the amount of plot and twists happening in a short duration was absolutely overwhelming. Some people might not care to experience Warframe’s story in order, but I think they should still be given an informed choice. DE needs to put a big spoiler warning in front of Duviri when you launch the game. And I think efforts would be better spent getting Natah and Second Dream closer to the start of the game than creating a new player experience for Warframe 2: Duviri. I’m sure it wouldn’t be hard to create a plot contrivance to let players visit Uranus for Natah before they’ve unlocked it, and then you can just push the quests to some earlier junctions instead of putting new quests in front of those junctions and slowing down the path to Second Dream.
Mild restructuring of the “standard” start would be nice… Considered some hypotheticals in prior drafts of this comment. Things like reducing grind between Mars & Uranus and giving limited access to Uranus early but… honestly it’s require some fine craftsmanship to make either work without some careful craftsmanship.