Well, I finally got around to trying out Warframe. Color me unimpressed.
The gameplay itself is clean and has a good pace, weapons feel good, melee combat is fair, graphics are excellent, very well optimized, story seems solid enough to keep you going through the missions, but...
Break out the credit card, this isn't a cheap game to play. Okay, okay, you don't HAVE to spend money on this, but it's not that simple. When you start up, you choose a Warframe (which is your character type, with its own abilities and style and whatnot), then in the first mission you'll pick between a melee weapon, primary firearm, and secondary firearm. I wanted to mix it up, so I went with a staff, longbow, and kunai. Enjoyable, interesting weapons, I don't regret my choices, but once I got to the point where I could browse between other weapons, other Warframes, etc, and I realized how limited the game is unless you pay up.
Unfortunately, 90% of everything in the game is bought with platinum, the cash currency. There were a couple generic looking machine guns and pistol available to buy with credits, but that's all I saw, and all of the Warframes must be bought with platinum. Warframes run around 200 platinum, and you can buy 170 platinum for $9.99 (you're given 50 platinum initially). Once you choose your Warframe and weapons, you better hope you like them, because you're stuck with them. So if you regret your Warframe choice? You've gotta cough up ten bucks to change your mind. You can only make one character, from what I can tell, and I don't think you can just start over (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about that), so... yeah.
Same goes for weapons. There are some cheaper ones (75 platinum or so), but that's still $5 for a single weapon, pretty much. That bow I chose in the beginning? It normally sells for 225 platinum, so it's a $15 weapon. The prices are really high. This wouldn't be a big deal if you got other weapons through gameplay, could buy new ones with in game cash, but almost ALL weapons are bought with platinum and platinum only. I can't call the game pay2win, because I can't say whether the starter weapons are any worse than ones you gotta pay for, but here's my problem with it.
The game is going to get dull, very fast, if you're limited to your original choices without coughing up a lot of money to change it up. Granted, from what I played, it's a really well made game with excellent mechanics, the limitations and focus on real money kills it for me. It's really uncool to lock players into things and forcing them to pay up if they change their minds. I always heard it had excellent customization, which it does, but that customization is pretty much entirely locked behind a pay wall. You can change your color schemes on things as well, which is awesome, but naturally 99% of the colors are paid content, and you're only offered a handful of pale color choices.
I won't give up on it just yet, and I'm gonna activate that starter pack that came with a recent Humble, but I know plinking off enemies with a small few weapons and using the same Warframe abilities over and over (which are likely inferior to most other paid Warframes) is going to lose it's charm pretty fast. Again, I'm not bashing the game, but from a CAG perspective, the cost to keep this game fun and fresh is way, way too high. I really dislike the cash shop model.
and coal for your mother 
