Last week’s TennoCon teased and announced several amazing things for Warframe.
Initiating the preview of things to come with a chain gang song, Digital Extremes set the stage for reveals that eat last year’s Plains of Eidolon reveal alive.
First came the Fortuna update, a parallel to Plains of Eidolon on Earth, but on Venus. Long teased, now shown in a lengthy gameplay demonstration, it’s apparently going to be Plains of Eidolon 2.0. The eponymous Fortuna is a camp filled by cyborg workers indentured to one of the game’s favourite villains, and at the same time a base of operations for the Solaris United resistance group, for whom we’ll be doing most of the work.
The open world of Venus is also much, much more interesting than the PoE hills and brush. Long story short: be prepared for an actual alien landscape, full of non-brown colours, wildlife, and environmental effects. Also: hoverboards. As an alternative to the slightly clunky Archwing, Fortuna brings us honest to goodness hoverboards straight outta Back to the Future. And yes, there will be tricks to perform.
The second reveal was Railjack, AKA frigging spaceship we can pilot with our squad. If you’ve ever wanted to blast from the ground to upper atmosphere, take the helm of a spaceship and tell your squad members not to get cokcy when they manage to shoot down one enemy fighter, Railjack is going to rock your world. There’s even stuff like rerouting energy to different subsystems, handling boarding parties, dousing fires etc. And the best part? At any time you or your team can leave the ship, enter Archwing, and infiltrate an enemy vessel. It’s all fancy as heck, and the gameplay below probably explains it better than I ever could.
Also beware: we’ll be talking spoilers below the vid, so if you’re not up to date on Warframe storyline, don’t scroll too much.
The third and last reveal was the announcement of something we all knew had to come. The New War is going to be the next cinematic quest, and a logical consequence of the last quest, Sacrifice, which was… informative, even if short on gameplay.
As you may remember, at the end of Sacrifice blue daddy Ballas gets stabbed in the gut, and we DON’T even get our spacemom back, because she went full Sentient (brainwashed or disillusioned? Who knows) again and bolts with barely any words spared for the kid she manipulated to fight for her. Turns out she was being literal when she spoke about going back to her mom, because The War War is narrated by a humongous (asteroid-sized at least) Sentient, who is clearly gearing up for the second war with the Origin (Solar) system.
Did they forget the Tenno murdered them wholesale the last time they visited? Clearly.
Anyway, that concludes the most crucial announcements from TennoCon. Late to the party, certainly, but despite having watched the livestream I am still processing all of that. There are no hard release dates given, but we should expect Fortuna this Fall.