Rambling About the Corpus

The Corpus aren’t treated fairly in Warframe. Most of the time they’re simply set to one side. Most of the time, we have to deal with pissed off Grineer. The Natah quest featured Grineer. The War Within featured Grineer. The Silver Grove, Chains of Harrow, the Plains of Eidolon, the Sands of Inaros and even the shitty quest that is the Limbo Theorem are all Grineer places. What is Corpus-orientated? The Glast Gambit. And that quest was worse than the Limbo Theorem. The best Corpus thing we got lately was the Corpra Tennogen skin for Excalibur, the Supra Vandal, the Arca weapon set and Ambulas Reborn. Everything else is Grineer, Grineer, Grineer.

Now, I don’t mind the odd corrupt empire going around crushing everything in its path. You kinda need a bad guy to beat down and destroy. But if we’ve got three major factions, then maybe we should, I don’t know, use them? I mean, the Corpus do have a pretty interesting theme, a capitalist society gone mad, a person’s value based on how much money they have in their bank account…

Or not.

There’s only two real Corpus baddies anyway. Nef Anyo is pretty much a bad Saturday morning cartoon villain, a rich brat with lots of money who wastes it all on dumb plots and schemes. “I know! Let’s spend a fortune on another death robot!” “I know! Let’s put some of our mere mortals up to fight against ageless killing machines in a friendly competitive sport!” Nef Anyo seems like the goofball baddie who always messes things up, even when it looks like he’s winning. All you can do is laugh at his antics. A bit like Vay Hek, but Vay Hek has his hands in way more cookie jars than Nef Anyo does.

The other Corpus baddie is Alad V. Who is an opportunistic scumbag who has both vaguely assisted us and cut Warframes into pieces to turn into robotic dogs. He’s a genuinely evil person, one of the few non-Tenno aligned beings to actually know a bit about Warframes. To the point that he basically tortured a bunch of Valkyrs to death to make his Zanuka pets. And considering the Jackal, the Hyena Pack, the Lynx and the quadrupeds used in the Index? He’s probably sold a fuckton of Warframe parts over the years. Somehow though, the guy has had some sort of personality development, going from making Zanuka to becoming Infested and working with them to control the universe (and at the same time learning how to control a Warframe with the Infestation) to us saving his ass from the Infested and Alad V floating on the fringes of becoming an ally.

Apart from that? Nothing really. The only other Corpus blokes who are tolerable are Darvo and Ergo Glast, the guy behind the Perrin Sequence, who nearly bankrupted himself in an attempt to save a bunch of kids and to stop Ambulas. Ergo Glast is a pretty good guy. Darvo just kinda steals and cheats his way across the solar system but at least he has some charm.

Compared to the Grineer though? They have nothing. Everyone prefers Clem over Darvo. Most people prefer Cressa in her nice Grineer gear over Ergo Glast. And the bosses, every single Grineer boss has their own sort of charm, even if the actual fights aren’t that good. Who is more memorable, Sargus Ruk, Tyl Regor, Kela De Thayme or Robotic Boss #97681 from the Corpus? Even the most un-reworked Grineer boss, Lech Kril, is way more advanced than the poor Sergeant.

The basic mooks aren’t much better either. Most Corpus enemies are either differently coloured humanoids or differently coloured robots with attachments, and they are the same no matter where you see Corpus, from Jupiter to Venus to Pluto. The more unique enemies like the Hyenas aren’t much better, and even among special enemies, the Nullifiers mostly just have big backpacks, the Bursas are all different colours and the Scrambus and Comba enemies are hardly ever seen and utterly hated. Corpus Techs are literally just big red normal Corpus.

Meanwhile the Grineer have all sorts. The Grineer equivalent of a Tech, a Heavy Gunner, has a distinct look and custom voice lines, as do Ballisticas. They might not have robot proxies, but Grineer do have different soldiers for different places, and custom looks for those soldiers, with the likes of Tusk, Drekar and Kuva variants.

And honestly even maps come into this too! The Corpus seem to only have four tilesets: icy planet, slightly less icy planet, gas city and Corpus ship. The Grineer have the arid landscapes of Mars, the forests of Earth, the Plains of Eidolon, the flooded chambers of Uranus and the Kuva Fortress, on top of the base Grineer Asteroid and Grineer Galleon landscapes.

The Corpus need some love. Because they have good ideas that would be so awesome to build on. I’m hoping that the new landscape, which will be Corpus-focused, will lead the way for a lot more variation among Corpus lore and assets. But it’s clear as day that everyone prefers Grineer over Corpus.

I suppose at least they’re doing better than the Infested though. No one likes the Infested.