Five Game Challenge Day 13: Learning Things You Already Know

…Because you forgot. Not a little bit forgotten. But completely forgotten. Ejected from memory. *sniff* Poor knowledge-memories.

This time, I’m talking about the occasional rise in ambition I feel to really dive deep into knowledge sharing and guide writing for a particular game. I started this whole blog with an initial intent to create a really useful set of content. Analysis of stats and systems, build advice, guides to tougher missions.

“You mean like a Wiki?” … Well, yeah. And that was one of the things that eventually stopped me. I still wrote a couple of guides, but nothing on the scale I initially intended.

The bug to write ‘useful’ content struck up outside of Anthem, though. The Transport Fever guide on getting started (and that God awful ‘unable to find path to stop’ error) being one such example that is still remarkably popular even now.

But those were more standalone style posts, and what I probably prefer to do more in reality. It doesn’t stop this occasional increase in ambition though. I didn’t end up publishing any of it — but I’d started the page structure that would form my Asheron’s Call in 2019 guide not all that long ago.

Now, I’m considering something similar all over again for Warframe.

There is just so much to Warframe. It comes by its reputation as a dense, difficult to penetrate game honestly.

To such an extent that if you asked me to give advice or otherwise create a guide for a brand new player I actually don’t think I could do it. Not in any coherent or useful manner, at least.

Giving advice to such a player would require a pre-answer survey to find out exactly where they are right now and what their goals are.

I suppose if I was going to offer one insight to a new player to Warframe, it would be this:

If you’ve ever experienced that sense of decision paralysis in an open-world game — where you have just so many choices in so many different directions, you’ve felt what it can be like in Warframe. You will have options every which way.

As is the case when this happens in an open-world game — the answer is just to push through. Don’t worry about the ‘best’ decision you could make. Just play. It’s how you bust through in open-world games and even though Warframe isn’t one — it’s the same story here.

But having said that… There will come a time when you will want to know how to create a powerful build for a given warframe, weapon, or warframe + weapon combination. In the course of researching this, you’ll discover the mods you will need. Mods that you likely will not have.

And so becomes the more targeted chase portion of the game. :)

I recently entered another bout of that myself. I have become quite a fan of playing Saryn — enough so that I was motivated to look out beyond the mods I currently possessed and at what would really amp up the experience of playing her to the next level. How could I push it just that little bit further?

I’m probably not going to embark on a whole process of creating a redundant wiki. The wiki exists already. But in fitting with my strengths and interests around more standalone style guide content, I could do something on sharing learnings about Saryn or other frames and things I’m finding compelling.

While I’m writing daily, this is probably the sort of content best served by waiting for the weekend. But I think it’s likely I’ll do it. It just struck me as odd that the fact I prefer writing stand-alone content, not rewriting entire Wikis, is something I keep having to relearn.

Surely it should have sunk in by now??