The Sacrifice – Um… That was… Uh…

So I played the Sacrifice. It wasn’t very long. I think I finished it in about 45 minutes? Not long at all. At the end of it I was all rather… uh… I don’t know. I wasn’t sure how to feel. I think deflated but not surprised is the best description. I expected more. I really did. Before we start, don’t worry, this is mostly spoiler free. I won’t go into details about what happened or anything like that.

Normally me and fellow clan members can’t agree on much. But we all seemed to agree on the same thing – that the Sacrifice had an awfully long wait for not really that much. And we got more questions than answers. In fact, this all just felt like a prelude to something else. We waited a year for this, with the Sacrifice being revealed in Tennocon in 2017, and we waited for 3 years for Excalibur Umbra. While our buddy Umbra is genuinely really cool, I find myself (perhaps wrongly) wondering how this took a year to make.

Okay let’s go through the checklist:

Cool looking effects? Yes.

Get a cool weapon at the end of the quest? Yes.

Some revelations? Yes.

A new gimmick? Kinda.

A new place to do missions on? No.

Bugs? Not really.

A convoluted story shown not by video but by voice clips and text? Yes.

Lots of loose ends? FUCK YES.

Okay right off the bat, genuinely impressed that I got through the whole quest in one go (with only a brief pause to do a Alert mission to grab Nezha’s new helmet) without too many difficulties and pretty much no bugs. One Sentient I had to kill did get stuck in a corner, but that was a very minor thing. So Kudos there.

And it was all kinda pretty. Mostly standard maps though.

The sad thing is, I pretty much guessed every damn plot point. I don’t know why, but as someone with a little bit of lore interest, I got all the plot points right. Where the Lotus went. What Ballas had done. Why Excalibur Umbra was so angry. What Warframes are. I guessed why. I also wasn’t at all surprised by the big ending.

There isn’t much else on offer either. The only other major changes are a HUD that is hard to use, some cosmetics and the ability to mod exalted weapons (i.e. weapons that are Warframe 4th abilities like Exalted Blade and Dex Pixia).

The worst thing about this is that everything game-wise hasn’t gone back to normal or anything like that. It’s gone back to post-Apostasy Prologue things. The Sacrifice was supposed to be the end of a trilogy but it just leaves us with unresolved issues and a complete lack of closure. If anything, it makes these unresolved issues worse.

Okay, yes, I expect there to be some cliff hangars and unanswered questions, but outside of one thing related to Warframes, it’s all just massive holes to be filled in later. The Sacrifice feels more like a path to something bigger than the massive quest it was pumped up to be.

Still, we got a fucking awesome sword and a new friend out of the whole ordeal. That’s always a good thing. I guess.