Warframe Breakdown: Making Crowd Control Fun

Crowd control. CC. Stun your foes, drop their accuracy, throw them back or interrupt their attack. Anything that can control a crowd. It's an essential part to Role Playing Games, especially turn based ones, MMOs, and, more recently, online shooters.

Here's the thing. Most crowd control will reduce stats, or freeze enemies, or throw them back. And as much as that is fun, it doesn't (in my opinion) have the same satisfaction in those action based games. Sure, in the stuff of my childhood like Paper Mario and The Thousand-Year Door, it feels great! But in action games, it's just feels like another extra layer on top of my perfectly timed button presses.

Introducing Warframe, free-to-play online third person shooter in which you fly around the battlefield like a jet plane infused monkey, rain death on your enemies, and grind so hard you lose a third of your fingers and your ass is most likely fused to your computer chair by the time you reach the last few planets. In Warframe, you pilot strange, cyber-organic suits (aptly named warframes) which have a small set of abilities, in addition to a passive. Limbo is one of these warframes, and he has the ability to push himself and his enemies into a slightly different plane of existence. Only enemies on the same plane of existence can harm you, and vice versa. The only thing that can damage both planes at once are another warframe's abilities.

The ability to separate a crowd into two groups is a vastly different crowd control technique compared to what we normally see, and it only gets better from there. Limbo can stop time in this "rift plane." When using this, your enemies freeze and so do your bullets, but you don't. This means you can banish, freeze, set up, then when the time is right, release the time stop and destroy a crowd instantly.

The main point: "setup, setup, setup, and release" is a brilliant and satisfying way to kill a crowd, and my fingers are crossed to see more of it in action based shooters.

P.S. Before you mention the Dishonored series, yes, I know, the same argument applies. However, should any other game do this well, please tell me about it.