As anyone who can see my steam stats can tell, 2021 is the year I played warframe.
Like many people, I started playing because a friend of mine suggested it - they stopped, but I continued, so I though it would be interesting to reflect on why warframe grabbed me the way it did.
Firstly, there's the movement, which is just amazing. Even now, after having gotten decent at it, it's still incredibly satisfying to chain a bullet jump into an aim glide into a roll to cross a large gap, or bullet jump to the next level up rather than finding the steps, or roll out of a heavy landing from a long drop. It's fluid, it's fast, it's fun and there's really not much else out there with the same range of options.
Second, the game makes a lot of concessions to solo play, which is rare in multiplayer games in my experience. Everything can be done solo, and solo play allows pausing in most situations.
Third, the mission design. There's a good range of different options, and you can choose to play them differently depending on mood. Do a stealth spy run where you kill no-one, or bull ones way through killing everything and tripping all the alarms. Do a quick capture run where you only tough the target, or kill everything because you're looking to find every nook and cranny in the map. The different reactor sabotage choices and their trade-offs. And so on and so forth. Of course, so of this flexibility goes away if you're playing multi-player, since most people are focusing on speed of completion, but it's still a good feature.
Then there's the endless missions. I find the "play as long as you want", with the increasing enemy levels a really interesting option. It can be a quick mission, just to get the first reward pool and some resources/credits, or you can choose to go long because you want to get something from the high tiers and/or test a build and/or level something up.
Of course, there's also the variety of weapons, warframes and so on. Different frames feel different. have different strengths and abilities and can be more or less fun in different situations. Different weapons can be very different in behaviour, and the range of options is quite fun.
Then there's the modding system, with it's multiple different layers of multipliers and the various damage types and combinations. It's a great space for someone who enjoys theorycrafting , although it does suffer from how weak some of the elemental options are (blast, for example), which ends up reducing the viable solution space one has to play with significantly.
Lastly, there are the open world areas. There's a certain enjoyable silliness in chaining a bounty mission into some "quiet" fishing into a Tony Hawk series of K-drive tricks into some mining into another bounty.
Ultimately, it comes done to really fun movement and enough variety in what is quite a simple loot collection game loop to keep me from becoming bored. I haven't mentioned the lore, which is an enjoyable convoluted mess with some fun (and some admittedly not so fun) quests, because, while entertaining, it's not central to the basic game play and so isn't a key part of what hooked me and has kept me hooked.
