WTFrame! Tennocon 2018

What the fuck. What the fuck Warframe, what was that? That was all insane! I decided to stay up until 2am watching the Tennocon Live Stream, which has always proven to be pretty neat. In 2017, Digital Extremes announced the Plains of Eidolon and the Sacrifice. They decided to completely one up that in 2018 with the reveal of not one, not two but three insane things.

I’m going to stick the full video here just so you can all see it, because frankly my descriptions probably aren’t doing it justice.

So firstly there’s the new expansion for Venus. Named Fortuna, it is the Plains of Eidolon for Venus but waaaaaaaaaaay bigger. Like, the Plains could probably fit in the few places they explored. Fortuna is a huge, mountainous place on Venus, in the eye of a massive storm, a landscape that’s a cross between Skyrim and Morrowind with a nice pinch of the New Vegas vibe – cold, frosty areas combined with vaguely steampunk, cobbled together technology and massive mushrooms. Us Tenno are helping out a force called Solaris United, a bunch of anti-Corpus folks who want free from Nef Anyo (who is basically Venus’s Corpus equivalent of Vay Hek but less likeable).

The start of the reveal was similar to Plains of Eidolon. After a little singsong, you’ve got your hub area with facilities similar Cetus, although they’ve changed fishing into tracking rare creatures, Zaws have been swapped with customizable secondary weapons (which is awesome) and you can build your own pet MOA if you want to. Weirdly, many people here seem to have robot heads that clearly don’t seem big enough to hold human heads underneath. Fortuna is a place for people enslaved by debt, so I wouldn’t put it past the Corpus to turn you into a machine to make you work until you pay off your debts.

But once you leave the underground base, you realise that Fortuna is a vastly different beast. No day and night cycle, smaller bases you can capture and get bounties from, animals to hunt, new spider-like enemies (which admittedly look more like Grineer than Corpus but oh well) and fucking hoverboards to get around. Hoverboards you can do tricks with. Which is probably for the best because carrying a full-sized wheeled vehicle in your gear wheel is probably impractical.

After a bit of wandering about and completing a bit of a bounty, something strange happens. A ship arrives.

A ship arrives and picks you up.

Yep, Digital Extremes are working on your own ship that you can pilot, control, maintain and fly around in, doing missions and destroying other ships. You can fly it around, shoot down enemies, have your team mates use the ship’s turrets and fend off attackers, you can get boarded by enemies and you’ve got a whole control panel to control your ship and weapon systems.

In the video, we follow a Mag and Excalibur destroy a Corpus ship with Nef Anyo escaping at the last minute, featuring a split in what’s going on – Mag controls the ship while Excalibur jumps on board and sabotages the ship’s core, allowing Mag to use the ship’s massive cannon to lock on and destroy it. There’s also a Volt in there somewhere putting out some fires when the ship gets boarded briefly by Corpus soldiers.

And of course, they decide to end things with another teaser. Like the Sacrifice except far more ominous. Huge numbers of Sentients. An army, drifting, preparing. A strange, alien-looking solar system.

We find out where the Lotus went. Lotus’s mum is pissed. Natah is working for the Sentients again, and they’re planning to destroy us all.

Tennocon’s final reveal is the beginning of the New War against the Sentients. Coming soon, like everything else.

And that’s all on top of the fact that Warframe is coming out on the Nintendo Switch. Really, the release of Warframe on a whole new console was probably the smallest part of the whole Tennocon live reveal.

That’s fucking insane.