Warframe went into open beta yesterday, after being in closed beta since October. This is an upcoming third-person action-shooter "F2P" MMO that reminds me a lot of a modern version of Phantasy Star Online in that it's an "MMO", but you can only have four people in a mission at once, there's no overworld or any areas to speak of other than your hub/map and any mission rooms.
The game seems pretty barebones to me, there's nothing outside of the missions, and item drops are just blueprints for equipment, materials needed with those blueprints, and mods for your weapons/armor. There does not appear to be any inventory for healing items or any of that, any healing you do in-game is via picked-up health orbs every so often. It looks like it's aimed for people who want a multiplayer game they can jump in and out of really quickly. Since the game is already in open beta stage I don't think there will be much to flesh it out, and that the gameplay/missions will likely remain the focus.
That said, what's there is pretty polished to a presentable state, outside of some minor UI inconsistencies. The game was only a gig to download and I wasn't capped even though I downloaded it the day it opened. It installed into my appdata folder to avoid needing admin rights for updating later and did not appear to install any draconian DRM, which shows a modern engine and development train. The game looks pretty nice for using up a relatively low amount of disc space, though the bloom and motion blur can get pretty annoying. Loading times are fantastic for a modern game, in fact I was sometimes waiting a few more seconds for the other players to finish loading the level before the mission started, and I'm on a pretty standard 7200RPM desktop setup.
There's three modes of gameplay. "Online" lets anybody join anybody else's game, and people can hop in and out even in a mission. It's rather seamless, I was often not even aware somebody had joined midway until they ran across my field of view! Loot and drops are generally shared (parts are rewarded at the end of the level and money is divided up among the players), so more people makes the game easier and from what I've seen most people have no problem with randoms jumping in. The private mode only lets people on your friendslist join. The Solo mode is what it says on the tin, nobody can jump into your game.
Gameplay is pretty simple, usually consisting of "get through the map and kill this guy/machine" or "get through the map and lead the hostage out", with the maps being piecemeal RNG-created, like the Diablo series does. The view is third-person, and a mix of gunplay and melee, depending on your class ("Warframe") and play style.
Being "F2P", the game does of course have shortcuts you can buy. If you don't want to buy/find blueprints and materials in-game, you can spend real money to buy them outright. Most things you can buy with real money are things you can obtain in-game with a lot more work, except for cosmetic things like skins and color pack unlocks, and EXP/money multipliers. My first thought was that being able to buy your way to higher weapons would actually give people a leg up... but a lot of equipment is level-locked anyways, and the game isn't competitive so one player's advantage over another is not actually something that's rubbed in your face, unlike many other games. In fact, I often found myself welcoming the sight of stronger players entering my game since it simply meant faster missions and less dying for me... but it remains to be seen how this model will pan out for them, because it's one hell of a slippery slope.
