So I love matrixy action-oriented shooters. While compared to the hardcore crowds my time with Quake and Unreal was barely reasonable, I did spend years playing GunZ1 and nowadays I actively play GunZ 2. Those two games are some sort of a standard for this type of third-person gunplay, as many, many people have first experienced it there. I always loved those games and started playing Warframe in the beta once I've heard it's going to have some similarities.
Yet after all this time I come to realize that I never enjoyed the agility in warframe and I still hate the PvP gameplay. After a lot of careful tough I arrived at a few conclusions on why that might be. This post might not teach you anything new, at best make you realize some thing you just didn't actively think about. I did throw in a few potential solutions though.
First off, the map design. It's hard to me to put the segments of this post in any more or less helpful fashion, but since maps feel bad to me in both, PvE and PvP I decided to start off with them.
To being with, they're beautiful but not well designed. They're big which should allow for a lot of movement, but most usually you only end up sprinting from one end to another. Because all maps are designed for your enemies, with a lot of boxes and pillars to hide behind it seems like they are natural and it is a logical decision to design them as such. However there's simply no way to utilize the movement of the warframe on them. It is something the last parkour fix kinda fought with.
The PvP maps themselves are just badly designed. They're often too big, with unnecessary rooms and windows and hell knows what, making movement only harder and enticing you more to hide behind corners and boxes to jump from instead of actually dodging around. I guess some of them are all right, but none provide especially intriguing ways to play on, no special map-based strategy. They're just places and they're all fairly annoying.
The basic fix to that would be to change perspective. To not make levels thinking about people who according to the storyline live there, but by keeping in mind what the player will encounter when he arrives there and what he will want or should be able to do. For example, put less holes around and more platforms, so that the player may move around. There's not much reason for places that require to respawn player on the ground.
Then there's the weapons. It's especially important in PvE. There's no point in dodging a gun that's going to hit you anyway. As long as any of the npc's use hit-scan weapons there's no point to do anything except hugging chest-high walls. Absolutely all enemies should use either projectile or melee weapons. It is also important to note that if a projectile happens to be homing, it should be slower than the average warframe's base running speed. Phorid is a good example why. Dodging is difficult so there needs to be a reason and a reward for performing it. If sitting behind a box will be easier and save you more HP, you will keep doing it.
Edit: There was a big concern in the comments that I declare dodging ineffective against hit-scan weapons. That is not true. I do know that it does work. Moving makes the AI hit you less. The problem is that if you don't see the bullet but instead a bunch of opponents with muzzle flash on their guns you do not know who is hitting you and you cannot react in real-time. Hit scan weapons are unresponsive from the target's point of view. With projectile-based weapons you can see the bullet going forward and you can react in real-time not to the shooter but to the projectile by getting out of the way. Dodging a hit-scan weapon requires you to constantly move and have a lot of hopes. That's why we don't see anyone doing that. It's not much about being effective but being aware of the effectiveness in detail.
Then there's the movement itself. It's....too Realistic. It might sound weird and it took me a while to realize that. But then it came to me. In unreal, you bounce off the wall like it's rubber, in GunZ you don't jump to the side, you are pulled towards it as if all the water and blood in your body pushed it from the inside. It makes the movement sudden, so that a basic short dodge is enough to avoid a decently fast projectile. In warframe, your character behaves like a human would. Every move is an actual parkour move. Because they're less sudden, you can't really use them as reactions to occurring events. Instead the only way to make use of them is to be in move at all times, which the maps won't help you with, or to dodge before your opponent actually performs the attack. I really think that faster animations would fix most of that but I fear that they could look slightly unnatural. It's definitely something harder to fix and won't happen until parkour 2.5 or 3.0 besides, the system isn't bad. It could still work quiet decently if there would be enough reason to engage into it.
Lastly, FoV. To dodge around and keep yourself moving you need to know what's going on and where you should move. At this moment the game barerly provides you enough information. I do understand that it might be impossible to increase the FoV range on consoles, but it doesn't mean that it should be limited on PC as well. The current FoV slider is a sham. It's a lie that at best goes from 80 to 90, but feels more like 70 to 85. It's honestly unacceptable. Personally I never play warframe for longer than a few hours a day. It's just too taxing on me.
I think that's all...for now. I feel like there's something that I missed. I let you know if I realize what it is.