Warframe - the amazing game that no one talks about

I watched the TennoCon 2019 livestream that aired this past Saturday and my jaw was dropped the entire time during the last hour of it. Seriously even though gaming sites like Gamespot and IGN have posted articles the comment sections are barren. Even in IRL people don't seem to know about Warframe or acknowledge it much. It's strange how Warframe is such a popular yet unpopular game at the same time especially with how good it is. It ranks as the 7th most played game on Steam and that's not including all the people that play the game on PC without Steam.

The new footage of Warframe's space ship combat and story trailers had me excited like a little kid and felt the magical of experience gaming for the first time.

Forget Destiny and Anthem at this point Warframe is now going after Star Citizen in rivaling ambition! Warframe feels like this weird anomaly in the gaming industry that so how manages to succeed and evolve but doesn't get much attention.

Warframe has one of the best if not the best F2P models in gaming and even makes $60 AAA games look bad. The amount of content this game offers and continues to offer for free is amazing and makes you feel like a thief for not giving Digital Extremes any money. Digital Extremes even gives out free premium items to everyone watching their streams and you don't even have to watch their whole stream to get the items just 30 minutes and you can tune out. Hell they even support the community artist by allowing their skins to be sold in the game and giving them a cut.

The story, lore and world building of the game has gotten significantly better over time. I'd like to explain it but it'd take too much time and spoil a lot that I believe you people should experience for yourself. I always wondered why it was an unspoken rule among the community to never talk about The Second Dream quest around beginners but after doing it makes so much damn sense and appreciate them for it.

The gameplay style of Warframe is very unique and only one or two games comes close to it. A third person Unreal Tournament is an accurate way to describe but also an injustice since it is more than that. The maneuverability in Warframe is second to none and makes playing the game like any other third person shooter incredibly boring. There is a wide variety weapons with uniqueness to them on top of all the customization you can do to them. Not to mention that you can now make your own modular guns and melee weapons how you want. The only game that outdoes them in the variety of fun guns is the Borderlands series. Warframe has fun melee especially the glaive equipped with a pistol in my opinion.

You can tell that DE really loves the game with each and every update and their interactions with the community. They're even giving the game a a big graphical overhaul when they really don't have to especially when they're running on a 7 year old engine.

The art for Warframe is very unique and interesting. Some of the art seems to even take inspiration from DOOM as the Grineer Ghouls strongly resemble some of the demons in DOOM. The new Sentient tile set also greatly resembles DOOM's hell. It makes sense since Digital Extremes has a history with old school shooters due to co-developing the Unreal games. They even stated in one stream they were experimenting with cinematic finishers that give you extra loot and they got the idea from DOOM 2016. The designs of characters, weapons, locations take influence from many cultures, mythologies and other works of art.

The Fortuna song "We All Lift Together" is highly addicting and I always play it at least once whenever I'm on Fortuna.

The Empyrean/Railjack game footage was even better than the first one they showed. Ships can have boss fights on them and we can even steal them. The squad link system manages to connect the open world segment of the game with its space combat part. Any random player in the open world can be a tenno operative that lends you planetary support in your space battles. Skip the last 2 minutes to avoid spoilers if you want.

People like to talk about how ground breaking Death Stranding and Hideo Kojima is with adsurdism but then Digital Extremes comes out with The Duviri Paradox trailer. Me and a lot of people were flipping out over one specific thing. The man in trailer greatly resembles Hayden Tenno. Back in 2008 Digital Extremes released Dark Sector which was suppose to be the original Warframe but they had to change things to please their publisher so it followed the trends of Gears Of War and Resident Evil 4. The gameplay was alright at best and the story was meh.

But what I thought would be really cool is if Dark Sector's universe/timeline was connected to Warframe's with Hayden Tenno playing a role in it. With the Duviri Paradox it makes that possibility even more of a reality. Warframe already has some similarities and connections to Dark Sector such as the origin of warframes, the infested in both games are refereed to as the 'technocyte virus' the glaive's description in Warframe talks about it being the weapon of the very first Tenno which is Hayden and the Excalibur and Nyx designs from Dark Sector are skins in Warframe. The proto excalibur skin's description even says that it possibly existed even before the Orokin empire. The design on regular Excalibur's head and right shoulder even translate to "Hayden Tenno".

Duviri is also the next open world segment of Warframe and appears to break the trend by not having Warframes in it at all and a new form of transportation.

The New War cinematic trailer is also shows how much bigger this quest is going to be in comparison to the previous ones and possibly effect the game for all players outside the quest.

They also made a cool new CGI trailer that first aired in select American theaters for the new Spiderman movie.

Seriously all this yet no one except the Warframe community ever talks about it. Why is this game not more popular?

Why aren't the people that whine about a lack of female representation in gaming praising Warframe? Warframe is a very matriarchal game as the majority of warframes are female and women make up the majority of leadership roles and big parts of the story in the game. For example the Grineer faction is ran by two queens and the most powerful Grineer enemy types you fight are all women.

Well here are the reasons why I think this is happening.

Warframe is basically a PC game despite being on the PS4, Xbox One and Switch. I remember at a New York Comic Con they stated that PC had the largest playerbase. Every Warframe youtuber and streamer is on PC too. It seems the only time Warframe ever got a noticeable amount of popularity on consoles was when it first launched on PS4 which was brand new at the time and lacking games to play. A lot of playstation fanboys just latched onto to it because it was a "console exclusive" at the time and then just disappeared once it came to Xbox One shortly after.

The play style of Warframe is very different from what console gamers are use to. A lot will try to play it like a standard third person shooter and then leave the game because they don't see the appeal of it because they weren't playing it right. Warframe plays a lot like an arena shooter which console gamers in general don't like so that repels them and if not that it is because the limitations of controllers severely limit them. A lot of people I play Warframe with on PC have said they use to play the game on consoles but then jumped ship to PC because the PC version was so much better. Warframe also lacks a big PvP community which a lot of console gamers seem to want.

Top it all off with Warframe it doesn't have huge marketing campaigns like that of Destiny, Anthem, The Division and Borderlands have. So most console gamers won't know about it and gaming media won't cover it much since there isn't much money being pushed for them to do so. Games like Destiny and Anthem are made by much more prominent game developers so even if their games don't meet up to the quality of their previous work the game gets a lot of attention just because of the name behind it. The most popularity Warframe got outside of its community was over Destiny and other AAA games screwing people over with their practices and DE actually taking away a method that made them a lot of money because they found it to be unethical. It is far more popular to bash on Destiny and other AAA games than to talk about how great Warframe is and it seems Warframe is ever and swiftly brought in one of these bashing rants. But then these youtubers go back to playing the games they whine about.

The only other time Warframe got some popularity was with the Fortuna and railjack reveal and a bunch of fake fans/gamers that tried to hop on every bandwagon first like Downward Thrust and Cleanprincegaming and end up parroting others and/or giving it a poor review because they barely played the game and rushed it just to get those youtube views first and then never talk about the game again.

The game isn't beginner friendly as it takes a few dozen hours to actually get a good idea of the game. A lot of new players are mislead into believing it is a pay to win game as when they look to see what weapons and frames they can buy they see the Platinum price tags which is the games real money currency and leave not realizing that if they click on the items they can buy the blueprints with credits that can be earned by simply playing and build the weapons, items and frames as the point of the game is to encourage resource collecting and building. This is a definitely a turn off for a lot of people so Digital Extremes are working on their new player experience. However it seems even their upcoming Empyrean will require that the player have been at least 100 hours into the game. So Warframe is definitely a game that can't just be dropped in and out of casually and give you instant gratification and access to everything.

Warframe is a game that definitely requires you to use a Wiki to optimize your experience with it as there are barely tutorials or guides in the game to tell you how to do things. So it appears despite all this amazing stuff the weakness of the game is its new player experience.

We get it

You really like warframe

@jeezers: What Warframe is to me is what DOOM 2016 is to Ghost4Ever :P

It just looks so average to me. Repetitive and.. boring. Don't like the artstyle at all. Hated Dark Sector. Never been interested in this. That goes for most free to play games.

Not sure why no one talks about it though. Maybe because it's mostly chinese who play it? Fortnite took over?

@madrocketeer raves about the game all the time. I haven't tried it yet, but I already have more than enough games to play.

I got stuck after I beat the first set of missions.

The gameplay itself is good, but it has horrible menu design and doesn’t explain what the hell I am supposed to do next. I need to google everything to figure out how to unlock the second set of missions etc.

It’s poorly laid out and I don’t have the patience to figure it out so I deleted it.

I love Warframe. Iv been playing it off and on since early Beta, its one I always come back to.

I tried playing it a few years ago, gameplay wasn't bad but the game was so repetitive and boring after a few missions I just gave up.

Kinda interesting how its tied to Dark Sector, even though that game sucked so so bad.

And don't forget @AdobeArtist who also raves about Warframe as well. I played Warframe very little but I haven't been back to playing it for almost a year now. Warframe puts all the "live service" games to shame and it's come so far since 2013 it's crazy to think about how good it is now cause it all comes down to support you're community and you're community will support you. I remember when it first came out, I played it when it first came out and no one at the time knew where it would go until now. Warframe has the advantage over both Destiny & Anthem is that it's a free-2-play.

Edit: I'm going back to Warframe soon.

I saw this on the Switch eshop as a free download. Whats the catch?

@vfighter: Despite being repetitive the game manages to still stay fun at least for me and many others because of all the different frame and weapon combinations changing up your play style. If you're very early in the game you won't get to experience it since you only have one frame and the beginner weapons are the least fun and have not progressed far enough to participate in the things such as Eidolon hunts and Orb mother fights. At this point it is hard to lump warframes into classes such as tank, healer, infiltrator and etc because they all do their "class roles" very differently, some even overlap into others and others are just hard to lump into a standard category. The game has more variety in the mission types and designs now than when you last played it especially with the upcoming Empyrean and Duviri Paradox.

@ajstyles:When was the last time you played Warframe because it got another UI overhaul about a month or two ago. Yeah the game is not very beginner friendly which is why they're revamping the new player experience. Once that comes out you should give it another go.

It's alright, but it is a grindfest that doesn't hold my interest. I am finding I am enjoying these live service games less and less these days.

Lots of people talk about it. It got a huge push when everyone was pretending to be anti-Destiny.

Also, notice how little press Destiny now gets with Bungie no longer having the support of Activision.

Lmao!!

Ive played some warframe but im not far around lvl 20 or something, its fun i just have alot of other games im trying to play, definitely worth downloading, it is free after all.

It's a free-to-play game with some grinding and micro transactions. But many people say is free-to-play done right. Probably in top 5 of the best FTP games.

It was a good show. Last year's TennoLive was my first, and I remember thinking how this tiny little dev team from Canada and their oddball little free-to-play game beat out most of the mega-publishers at E3. This year's was no different. Time will tell how all of the stuff that were shown will pan out.

Not really. Warframe is more of a quiet hobby for me. I just sometimes like to rant and rave about my (mis)adventures with the game, like how much I still hate Neo relics after the last Unvaulting.

But yeah, Warframe has to be the most wildly ambitious free-to-play game of all time - which has its pros and cons. There's lots of different things to try, unlike most AAA shooters that hew almost religiously to their core gameplay. On the other hand, the game often feel more like a mad science experiment than a focused, polished experience, and there is an ongoing opacity issue with how many of the game's core mechanics work. Luckily, the devs do like to revisit and rework things from time to time, like the recent Gas City and Wukong reworks, so hopefully the upcoming new player experience rework will change that.

Still, yeah, it is not a game for everyone.

More like "pay-to-skip." What you don't pay with money, you pay with time and/or by playing the game. Grind requirements do vary wildly, from easy-peasy like Dojo frames and boss fights to butt-numbing like Ivara and Hema. Most of the time, however, I would say it's not much more grindy than your typical AAA looter shooter, and has the advantage that you always have an endpoint to that grind; once you have the blueprint for that item and the resources to build it, you're done. The devs also do listen and "de-grind" stuff from time to time, like the relatively recent Mesa requirement nerf. Except for Hema. Let's not talk about Hema.

For the record, I've only spent plats on one of those progress boosters; when I desperately needed Void Traces for an Unvaulting. I quickly recouped those plats by selling Primes, and have since come up with a simple system to ensure I always have that on hand, so I'll never buy another one again. Those same boosters can also be earned in-game for free, through login rewards, Sorties and Baro Ki'teer offerings. I still have about 60 days left on my Affinity (Warframe's equivalent of XP) Booster, which I bought from Baro and didn't pay a single cent for. Again, I instead paid for them by playing the game.

Not trying to sell you on the game or anything, just giving perspective from a regular player who knows the ins-and-outs of the game. Use this information as you will.

Played it for two hours a couple weeks ago and it was boring to me. Nothing about it stood out to me

I enjoyed it for awhile.

I think my problem with it, is that the content is too easy... and you end up with yet another endless Online RPG that is more about dolling out your aesthetics than achieving anything special.

Galmour-Frame or whatever.

@ivangrozny:

Maybe ill try it out. Curious, what are the attempts to throw microtransactions in your face?

@heirren:

It's kind of everywhere, but also very unintrusive. Just that everything that can be bought with plats will have a tiny plat price tag on it. For example, you'd go to your arsenal, and every weapon you don't own has a plat price at the bottom.

Everything else is in the in-game Market console. There are no pop-ups that ask you to buy stuff or anything - unless you've run out of certain items and tried to use it anyway, then there would be one telling you "hey, you've run out of this stuff, wanna buy it for x plats?"

Why has this game been out since 2013, and I've known about it's existence almost the entire time, but never bothered to watch a video? It's fucking Vanquish meets Mass Effect. Jesus.

Hahahaha. I play Warframe. I bet there are quite a few good/excellent games that we don't talk about on here. But I agree, let's talk more about great games.

I can't edit my posts anymore for some reason XD Oh well.

I've downloaded it twice. Played for an hour both times. Then deleted it. Something just felt off about it. That was a long time ago so maybe things have changed. I'll download again now and see if it grabs me.

@NoodleFighter

Gallery

We can play together if you wish.

@anthonyautumns: @KungfuKitten: Nice pics if you guys want to play with me my username is SinPunisher. I'd share some new pics of my frames now that I got a couple of new ones and the gamma color palette but Gamespot's UI is acting up.

Ivara, my favorite frame. Here she is sporting one of the Steam Workshop skins which happens to be the only in-game micro-transaction I have ever purchased for any game (ever).

The game is SIGNIFICANTLY better than Destiny 1/2.

It is absolutely great, and 100% free. One of the best F2P models around actually, you can buy nearly EVERYTHING in game without paying. And you can trade items for the premium currency, so if you're good at online economies you can do everything with ease.

If its not exclusive no one cares. Games are only good if it is exclusives. Everyone knows this. :P

I played it years ago. Maybe in 2013. I liked what I played. But it's not something I could invest a bunch of time into.

So yeah, Warframe is fucking great.

@pelvist: Nice design. I generally try to design my warframes after fictional characters. I got a Wolverine Garuda, Vash The Stampede Mesa, Dio Limbo, Carnage Nidus, Goku Wisp, Goku Wukong, Red Power Ranger Hildryn and Saitama/One Punch Man Atlas.

People cry about paying for horse armor on this site and you want to ask why no one hypes up one of the most expensive free to play games of all time? The prices for new items is absolutely insane unless you want to grind the same content for weeks on end... also if you are playing with friends that drop a lot of money on the game it is absolutely impossible to keep up with them unless you do the same.

@WitIsWisdom: If you're trying to buy everything with the games premium currency then you're doing it VERY wrong. Warframe is not a pay to win game. One of the main points of Warframe is to collect resources and build things. Pretty much everyone will tell you to only use your Platinum(premium currency) on warframe and weapon slots as getting the warframes and weapons is easy. If you are a new player the game will often give you discounts on Platinum as a daily reward especially at 75% off and then you can buy $20 worth of platinum for $5 and be set for a long time. You can also obtain Platinum by simply trading rare mods and items with other players.

A lot of the premium stuff such as Orokin Catalyst/reactors, Exilus adapters and even weapon and frame slots can be obtained for free. There is a mode in the game called Sortie where once a day you complete a set of 3 missions with different restrictions and conditions and after completing you get rewarded a premium item. The item you have the highest chance of getting is riven mods which are mods for specific weapons that can greatly enhance their capabilities, you can make easy platinum by selling those as they can range from 20 platinum to even 11000 platinum depending on what weapon it is for. Another premium reward you have a high chance of getting is 3 day boosters. Boosters ranging from doubling the money you earn, doubling the amount of XP to help you level up faster, doubling the amount of resources you get and increasing the chances of rare resources to drop. I've often had boosters that went on for a week because I kept being rewarded a 3 day booster from the sorties.

Also speaking of friends, people in this game are very friendly and will help you out and will even give you rare stuff for free from time to time. It is very common for high level players to bring their low level friends to high level missions to help them collect rare loot that doesn't drop at lower levels or help them level up faster. I've had friends give me prime weapons and frames just because they wanted to.

@anthonyautumns: Thanks for the forma bundle man you didn't have to do that!

it just seems like too much complicated stuff going on around the edges of the shooty shooty stab stab to get into at this point

i briefly played it when it came out (might have been in beta i can't even remember) and it did not grab me. seems like a very different game now but i don't have much desire to get into it

This game been advertised and hyped by fans all over the net yet somehow someone feels its still underappreciated. I feel its overrated at this point