The Wonders of Captura

Warframe is a particularly nice game to look at. It’s bright and shiny, yet even on low settings, it still looks really nice. The game’s actually optimized pretty well too, even when on high settings, because of the way it loads each environment. As the majority of rooms are basically individual tiles, connected with smaller individual tiles, the game unloads each one once you’ve passed through it so it can load the next one. This makes Warframe particularly efficient and allows it to run even when on a toaster of a computer.

When you turn everything up to maximum though, the game is absolutely stunning. Alright, the enemies are a bit generic, but the locations and environments are mostly amazing. Apart from indoor Corpus tiles, since they were the second to be added to the game and haven’t been revamped yet. Their oldness shows. But even though they’re old, they’ve still got their charm.

Of course, with a pretty game, people want to take pretty pictures. The old way of doing so was to do an Exterminate mission, clear out all the enemies and then fiddle with Remote Observers. Remote Observers are items that can be bought for about 10 credits each and equipped in the Gear slot. When used, they stick to the first object in one’s line of sight and the camera switches to that point – following your Warframe’s movements – for the next 20 seconds. As useful as they are, they can be finicky to use.

When Update 20 – the update that contained Octavia’s Anthem – came out, it was released with a new feature: Captura.

Captura is basically a little sandbox area, similar to the Simulacrum, with various scenes that you can pose your Warframes in. There are no enemies and unlike the Simulacrum you have unlimited health and energy, with no cooldowns or anything, at least until update 21.1.0 which added the ability to make one invulnerable and toggle friendly fire. The same update added the ability to change your arsenal and appearance in Captura.

By default, you get three very basic scenes, one for each main enemy. You can buy more with standing from the respective Syndicates, Baro Ki’Teer once brought the Inaros Tomb scene with his bi-weekly void stuff and you can find three Earth scenes via rare loot crates on Earth missions. I only have the Inaros Tomb scene, but it’s by far my favourite, followed by the Corpus scene. The Infested scene is pretty big and has Corpus elements too, which is nice.

You can pause time using G, which also gives you access to the secondary Captura menu and its set of options. You can mess with graphics settings, slow time and more. There’s also the incredibly handy feature to use slow motion time and skip ahead a handful of frames, which means you can still get the perfect shot even if you pause too early. Really, it’s just a nicer version of the Simulacrum with the ability to pause time and mess with some lighting effects. Depth of field, saturation, film grain, lighting, some colour correction and cross process. Just enough for you to feel like you’re genuinely creating something.

But in the larger maps, it’s nice to just… wander around and take pictures. You get to see sides of your characters that you don’t normally. You see a side to enemies that you don’t normally see. You can take a moment to stop and look at the details and little tiny things that you’d normally not notice as you zoom by. You can just… exist for a while.

The only problem with Captura is that you’re limited to only 3 enemies, which is a weird, arbitrary number. In the Simulacrum you’re limited to 20. You can get around this by spawning splitting enemies (in particular the splitting enemies from Sands of Inaros) but it’s still pretty tedious.

Still, Captura is one of my most favourite additions to Warframe. It’s so… peaceful. And simple. Two things which appeal to me greatly. It’s a thing of beauty, from the stillness of the maps, to the quiet ambient sounds to the simple footsteps of your Warframe, so the beautiful soundtrack that plays while you fiddle around with settings.

Just remember to disable the HUD from screenshots, and use the in-game screenshot key, not the Steam screenshot button. Otherwise the Warframe HUD will ruin your pretty pictures.