My partner has been playing Warframe for the past few days, with me occasionally looking over his shoulder to see what's going on. There was loot, everywhere. The ability to craft things. New skins for your alien. The ability to play as melee, not just as a shooty-shooty.
It looked fun!
And since it's completely free, except for the hundreds upon hundreds of mostly-cosmetic microtransactions, I caved in and downloaded it.
As I said before, I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing.
I'm running around, hitting things and shooting them with arrows, doing a fancy whip-around-with-an-entrail-of-my-enemy move every now and then, and following the navpoint that tells me where to go.
Apparently I can get reputation -- or standing -- with a few faction type things, and then I can get cool stuff, but I have no idea how to go about it. Apparently Cetus reputation is easiest to get via fishing! I love fishing in games.
Unfortunately, I need rep in order to buy the dang fishing spears to get more rep.
Luckily, whilst failing a bounty, I managed to get just enough reputation so I could buy a fishing spear so I could fish! (Good to know that failing gives you at least a little of something also, coz dayum.)
And then proceeded to sell all those fish to replenish the reputation I just spent in order to buy a mining pickaxe thing.
Reputation -- or standing, rather -- seems pretty hard to come by. Good thing I enjoy grinding in games.
Now I can mine all the things!! ... Which I think isn't quite the actual purpose of this game, but, soon I shall have all the materials and I can make all the equipment! I assume this ore will be useful for something, anyway.
My alien creature looks very bland and boring compared to all whom I come across.
And I refuse to spend real money on cosmetics -- yes, I said that about Path of Exile as well, but that was different. Currency stash! -- so, I need to craft the in-game cosmetics myself.
Plus, I want a different "warframe." I want one of the more feminine-looking ones, but one of the ones that are also more suited to melee. I only chose this guy because he was melee oriented and the only female you could choose at the start of the game was more... jedi, biotic, use the force, etc. Not my style.
So, I guess I know somewhat what I'm doing. But I feel very inept.
I found this warframe blueprint which is for Gara, and I'm not entirely sure if she's acceptable for melee or not. That's an issue I have with this game. They don't actually tell you what the things do. You just have to guess, gather materials to build each component -- spend three literal real-world days building it -- only to find out that you hate it and the abilities it has.
Or you could google, I guess. But I shouldn't have to. That information should be readily available in game instead of a vague description.
While my partner was at work yesterday I managed to catch up to where he is in the game so now we can play together. 😁
Hopefully the loot system is decent for co-op. I assume it is since it's supposed to be a multiplayer game, but who knows. I'm not finding much on Reddit or anything else about it; there were a few topics years ago but these things tend to change.
Only one way to find out!
All screenshots in this post are courtesy of me, 
