I should play this game sometime.
Yes. But.
The gameplay is lots of fun. It's a very frantic space ninja wizard parkour melee shooter. It's definitely one of the fastest, most mobile PvE games around. Typically you pick a mission, load in with a squad of randos, then bounce through the mission at 30mph killing everything and completeing objects.
The but is that the game is extremely grindy. It's not at all jokingly refered to as Warfarm by friends. You're going to be running through the same tilesets doing the same objectives much.
Progression in the game is tied to warframes, which are basically classes, as well as weapons and mods. As you go through levels you'll get mods as loot. The mods give bonuses to your guns and frames. The mods level up using a resource you find by playing the game. A lot of the meat of the game is buildcrafting, coming up with effective combinations of frames and weapons and then modding them to do absurd amounts of damage. With some exceptions it's not a difficult game to play. even in the very highest levels a moderately prepared team is rarely in danger of loosing. it's more about the moment to moment thrill of blasting things and stopping every once in a while to level up yoru gear, or start building a new item, or whatever.
Re: Monetization - It uses a pay to skip model. Building stuff like weapons and pieces of warframes takes real-world time> I think buildfing all the parts of a warframe and the frame itself takes like three days real time. You can pay premium currency to skip the build times. They also charge premium currency to expand the number of frames an dweapons you have, or to get items that are otherwise rare and difficult to acquire through gameplay. You can get everything you neerd through gameplay but it'll be slow going. A lot of people trade extra weapon parts and whatnot to other players, in game, for premium currency to buy whatever bits and blorbs they need.
So, lots of fun, extremely time consuming, more focused on buildcrafting, farming, and gradually becoming absurdly powerful than tight tactical gameplay. the community is generally very friendly and helpful. The setting is utterly bizarre weird-fiction sci fi. The story is generally very well regarded, more for the characters than the plot, and there are lots of good performances ranging from serious drama to ridiculous scenery chewing villains.
A lot of people struggle when they first get started bc there's so much to do and little real direction provided, and the general advice is to pick something that looks cool and ask people for help on what you need to do to get it.
Like as a for instance, I'm at the end of the end game, I've been playing since the game launched a decade ago, and I spent part of the evening running a new boss over and over, tweaking weapons and tactics to see if I could more effectively take down the enemies. I think I've only been downed once all evening even though this is close to the highest level of normal content. So it's more about "well, if I combine this weapon and this weapon and these abilities, what will that do?".
Also, the real, real, real endgame is fashion. It's all about the drip.
It's the best game I've ever played where I still feel the need to really stress the downsides. The gameplay is fantastic, incredibly smooth high-mobility third-person shooter with melee and """magic""" powers, but you have to deeply love that gameplay because the grind for new items is eternal and unrelenting.
It's the ultimate power fantasy sci-fi action horde shooter, it's insanely fun. But it also has a steep learning curve because the devs refuse to trim the fat, there's a ton of features that aren't explained and a lot of new players don't make it past the first couple of hours. It's a very grindy game but because of how well designed the core gameplay is, the grind is actually a lot of fun.
Warframe is a very unique game in a lot of ways, but to get into it you either need to have another player explain stuff to you or you need to really like reading wikis.
Also, it might look like an AAA game at first glance, but the studio behind it is actually very cool. Here's Stephanie Sterling talking about them. If you're interested in trying the game, I can help you with figuring out what to do and where to go first etc.
Some things I find notable about plot and characterization
Has a trans woman, doesn't make a big deal out of it (Ticker). She's your contact for mutual aid with the Solaris, helps you hire crew for your gunship, and sonsors the Valentine's day event.
The current story arc is explicitly about two men who love each other but have a very complicated, fraught, and sometimes abusive relationship. They manage to mix softness and anger, betrayal and understanding and do a pretty good job.
An over-arching theme of the game that's been present the entire time is the horrific consequences of Imperialism. All the major factions are, in some way or another, the abandoned, unwanted children of the Orokin Empire. Created as tools for the selfish whims of the ruling class (who are immortal, blue, and nine feet tall. Not because they're aliens, that's just what they considered aesthetic), then thrown away in disgust when they showed independent will. One of the defining traits of that ancient, long dead upper crust is their overwhelming, monomaniacal need for absolute control over their subjects, and how that burning need for control eventually lead to their downfall and destruction. Thousands of years later the Orokin, their god like technology, and their horrible misdeeds still weigh over the system.
There's an entire story arc about union militancy and how labor struggle and the use of violence and outright terrorism in support of workers rights is cool and good. Also features what I think is one of the best labor songs in the 21st century - We all lift together
There's a story arc about a young autistic man who is cast out because partially because he's autistic, but mostly because he sees and understands a problem no one else can. The player has to investigate his sacrifice and take on the burden, setting the man free and setting up the next chapter of the story.
Self-discovery defines one of the earliest story quests and for warframe fans is generally considered one of the most impactful video game plot arcs. A lot of people cry.
There's an entire arc about a deeply alienated, traumatized family recognizing how they have hurt the people they love and re-building their relationships. It's not sappy; At the end they still have real problems and disagreements, but they've also built understanding and compassion.
There's an entire arc about survivor's guilt and redemption, as people come together to remember both the villainy they participated in, and their attempts to help people, and the disaster that ensued. It ends with a commitment to take a second chance to be better.
Found family is another consistent theme throughout the story. If you wanted to sum up the whole plot you could say that it's about your family being who you choose, and who shows up for you when you're in trouble.
One of the major enemy factions is, explicitly, capitalism. They have a religious devotion to profit (I'm the prophet of profit!) that their foot troops are indoctrinated in to and are consistently depicted as just disgustingly evil. The stock market is re-imagined as a winner-take-all blood sport.
Features a faction based, broadly, on indigenous people resisting imperial occupation and violence. Doesn't go in for noble savages, shows them having their own sophisticated culture, religion, and technology. There's an indigenous tracker and naturalist who avoids the typical "magical Indian" trope by combining a deep knowledge and connect to the land with the language of naturalism and conservation ecology, and being your contact for conservation efforts to protect endangered species from the environmental destruction wrought by the imperial invaders. The indigenous people are shown to be spacefaring traders and travelers instead of some isolated, "primitive" people living far from civilization.
There's an entire mini-game where your ultra-deadly magic space ninja wizard trades in their swords and assault rifles for a animal lures and tracking devices to try to remove endangered species from harms way and get them to conservationists who can help preserve and grow the species.
In a lot of ways the game is a mess of poorly meshed systems, power creep, and grind. But it also has some amazing story beats. If you don't feel l;ike playing it there are plenty of enormous lore vidoes that can walk you through the story.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Depends how much you like farming. The movement and combat are top notch, but unless they and the modding system can keep you entertained for literally hundreds of hours you're not gonna get very far. The new player experience can be pretty overwhelming and using the wiki is pretty mandatory.
That said, there is a huge variety of frames and weapons to keep you entertained, and the modding system allows you to drastically change individual play styles. If you're math focused you can waste close to half your play time just trying to squeeze a few extra points of damage into a weapon.
CW: Rant about the entire plot of Warframe over the last like ten gd years.
spoiler
Yeah. The Sentient's Causus Belli with the Orokin was totally legit. I really didn't like where The New War took things - The idea that the Sentients showed up with a genocidal sun killer machine? Where did that come from? Why are they even still angry with us millenia after we very personally and definitively killed the Orokin? They won. It cost them a lot, but they wiped out the Orokin and saved Tau from invasion. So why are they still trying to destroy everything? I was really hoping there would be some kind of reconciliation between the Sentients and the Tenno bc we're both the Orokin's unwanted children. The Orokin were disgusted with both groups, we were both created cynically as tools to be used and disposed of. We both wanted the same thing - The Orokin removed from the Origin system so we could build something better.
And after a decade we still know almost nothing about the Sentients. Like I don't even know if a battalyst is a person or some kind of self-directed gun. We've only ever met, what, Hunhow, the Lotus, Erra, Nira, the owl dude, the wolf dude, and maybe Pazuul? Sorta? Hunhow and the Lotus both seem to have massively powerful minds; The Lotus seems to be able to be many places at once, coordinating activity all over the system as though she was personally present, while Hunhow seems to have some degree of direct control over all of his fragments or drones. Erra? I have no idea, he just kind of shows up out of nowhere and no questions are ever really answered. And the Archons are just totally inexplicable, I have no idea who came up with them or how they're supposed to fit in to the story, doubly so since they're all recognizably based on animals when the Sentients kind of famously don't look like humans or animals or really anything else.
Like I really wanted some kind of plot where the Tenno and the Sentients sit down and are like "Yeah I know there's bad blood but look we're really on the same side here, we should coordinate our efforts to dismantle the Grineer and the Corpus so we can liberate the Origin and then have a nice picnic."
There isn't even any real explanation of where the New Wars sentient fleet came from. Did they travel from Tau? Have they been in the Origin system since the end of the war and were hiding in deep space or something, and returned when Tyl woke Hunhow up? Wtf? Why was Erra ever putting up with Ballas' shit in the first place? What was with all the weird Narmer shit? That seems very on point for Balls-ass, but not for the Sentients. Like what could Erra, controlling a massive and completely unstoppable war-fleet, gain from Ballas? I don't think they ever out-right state that Ballas had a back-door in to Erra's systems that could take over his mind as seems to have happened with The Lotus. And where the fuck has Ballas even been for thousands and thousands of years?
idk, the new Wally stuff looks neat, but I don't really care about it. Wally is just another boring "oooh spooky eldritch abomination wants to eat our souls because it's made of evil!" baddy. I wish they'd have stuck with the political side of things and the overall state of the Origin system. Or like the Zariman? Wtf? That was something that happened a long time ago as an establishing plot device, it didn't need to come back, and it certainly didn't need to come back for absolutely no clear plot purpose. Same thing with Duviri. Just what the entire fuck was Duviri? Were they just bored and wanted to do it for fun? idk. And like everything else it's a total content island that doesn't seem to relate to or bare on the story at all.
And now we're in the Entrati's basement taking orders from a fish. I guess I'm just not as excited about the story anymore. The New War was kind of the payoff of the whole arc with The Lotus and Hunhow, but aside from the culmination of the Tenno's and Lotus' story and kind of Lotus' arc of becoming a "real person" in her own right, and the relationship between the Lotus maturing from that of a tool to actual friends and allies, the actual story parts just didn't do much for me. Erra's goals just weren't explained, we still know almost nothing about Sentient culture and society. We don't know anything about Tau or if the Sentients in the Origin system are even in contact with Tau. idk what the hell is going on with Hunhow. And again, the Wally stuff, while visually cool, just doesn't interest me. "Magic hell demon invades our reality which is bad for some reason but no one will actually say why" is so over done. I never found the Void interesting or needed it to be more than the excuse for our bullshit magic powers. i also don't like hwo the story has been drifting hard away from weird sci-fi in to space fantasy, with more and more emphasis on spooky magic stuff and less on, like, laser beams and robots. Not because there's anything wrong with fantasy, but because they're not tying the fantasy in to any actual material realities. Like the grineer and the corpus have clear understandable motivations in seeking wealth and power as quasi-fascist capitalist empires. The sentients almost make sense in that there was a real, concrete slave revolt where the slaves were trying to over throw the distant imperial power to protect their homes. But like Wally? Well, as near as I can tell he's lonely and bored and you can't really get much out of lonely and bored. Duviri's problem is that since it's a story book, even if the people of Duviri are actually sentient and have some measure of will, they're still trapped in teh context of their story and haven't moved beyond it. Like Duviri hasn't made contact with the Origin system at all afaik. And we know Teshin is in there but we haven't done anything to pull him out of there. It's not like its hard we should be able to just fly there with the railjack and pick him up, Duviri is in some kind of contiguous space with the Zariman.
It also bugs me that the void has always been empty prior to the Duviri stuff. There was never anything there, it's jkust a big swirly blue place where Orokin towers are stuck and that we fly through. Like I know it's because they've been writing and re-writing the story as they go, but why didn't we ever run in to any of this shit in the Orokin towers? Vor showed up to yell at us sometimes and that kind of fits, but that was just Vor being a crazy dickhead. All the other Corrupted units are supposedly being mind controlled by the Orokin Neural Sentry protecting the tower. But then why do void storms zap random people in to corrupted?
Like look, I don't want bullshit star trek technobabble, but i do want some explanations. What the hell was Erra's war goal? Where were Erra and Ballas all this time? Why the fuck didn't anyone know there was all this goofy shit running around in the void the whole time when we're in and out of the void constantly? Like Lua was buried in the void for thousands of years, why isn't it all weird and freaky? idk. I just feel like the plot holes and the inconsistencies and the changes in direction have really derailed the plot. Now we're going back to 1999 for some reasoon? I always really liked that the Orokin Empire was an unknown distance in to the past and we had no idea at the relationship was between the modern day and the Tenno era. We were just in this undefinable far future era where the nigh-unto-magic technology of the ancient and long dead Orokin Empire could still maintain a breathable atmosphere on FUCKING CERES which definitely should not be possible, to say nothing of open-air habitats in the insane hard-radiation deathscape of Jupiter's upper atmosphere. I can't imagine anything at all being added to the story by tying in to the 90s.
I just want to go back to the "helping the people of the Origin System" plots where we were good guys pursuing an understandable goal of beating back the space fascists using our magic ninja bullshit. : | Now we're taking orders from an asshole fish.
spoiler
I do kind of wonder if it'll turn out that Albrecht was right, that he didn't escape, and that the Albrecht that did escape is a void construct that ended up being a better human than Albrecht ever was. And Wally is the real Albrecht trying to escape the void because he's a high ranking Orokin and therefore a completely vile asshole. Idk. I hope it turns out to be more than just "yeah he's evil because he's evil and just wants to kill everyone for no reason" plot.
I feel like Warframe has a huge problem with just not knowing what the fuck to do. They need to create a specific design document for plot to direct the one zillion loose ass threads in a direction to where one could conceivably even create something that could tie them together, instead of it just being content islands and story islands.
They had like 5 people independently writing story that had little to no tie-in to bring it together, and now they're all working on Soulframe. MAKE IT MAKE SENSE!
Warframe is a bloated mess and that's never gonna change, its design decisions are made entirely based on "hey wouldn't it be cool if...?"
The story is similar, it's all vibes and you kinda have to just accept it for what it is. I love the game and I like DE because as messy and nonsensical as the game and its story are sometimes, you can feel the sincerity behind it. Warframe's story chapters don't really form a coherent story, but they all have things to express for themselves. That's more how you gotta look at it. I have no idea why or how exactly the big statue caressed the cheek of the other big statue at the end of Whispers in the Walls, but it made sense in terms of vibes, it felt like a satisfying conclusion to the scenario.
Funny enough that moment is actually a callback to the Excal Umbra quest.
"And it was not their force of will - not their Void devilry - not their alien darkness... it was something else. It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing-- And take away its pain."
Yeah. I was just thinking -
spoiler
Wally gave us void powers to murder our own parents after driving them mad in the first place. But we're the ones who looked at the warframes, at their pain and madness, and saw kindred spirits we could aid and be aided by. We don't know what Wally's game was yet, and the Orokin despised the Tenno and wanted the Warframes as mindlessly obedient warrior-slaves, and we ended up subverting both of those plans.
The real super-power is, again and again, compassion (well, compassion and blowing shit up).
Some of my friends expressed hope that with the old guard gone to work on Soulframe the folks who are in charge now might be able to clean things up, but I guess we'll have to wait and see.
I think Duviri was the last major thing headed by the old team, so WitW is the new guys. And I gotta say whatever happens with the lore, I really like the direction the gameplay is is going in.
Yeah. I've been experimenting in whispers - Turns out the Culverins will detonate a few seconds after you destroy both their arms. This deals significant damage in an AOE. The stone blocks with legs or arms? The stone block the arms and legs are attached to is their weak point. There are security terminals that the Culverins will use the summon enemy Voidrigs to fight you. You can find Apple computers scattered aroudn for summoning your own voidrig. There's really a lot going on in the whispers in the walls levels.
tbh I just let it all wash over me, hell yeah fishman I'll run your errands because your dad's bodyguard's brutalist flak cannon looks dope as hell
hell yeah fishman I'll run your errands because your dad's bodyguard's brutalist flak cannon looks dope as hell
I am legit laughing this is awesome. : )
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
