And We All Grind Together… Together…

Someone for the love of all that is good and pure, please help me get this fucking song out of my head. Ever since the Tennocon reveal of Fortuna, I have had the song We All Life Together stuck in my head. On loop. And now I’m going to put it in your heads so you can all be stuck as well.

Seriously though, as many parodies of the song have already suggested, there will be a LOT of grind in Fortuna. If anything, the Corpus have always been more grindy than the Grineer. They’re obsessed with loot and credits. Grineer only care about genocide. Fortuna, a place where people slave away, desperately trying to pay off debts with continuously increasing interest rates, is basically guaranteed to be filled with grind.

“But what grind? And how do you know, Medic? All we’ve seen is the gameplay trailer! That trailer you helpfully placed below so we can see it!”

Well, we can gleam a lot from a short video. Alright, we can’t work out how to kill the big spider monster thing (heck, they said we need to work it out ourselves) but just by seeing glimpses of menus and things, you can tell that there’s stuff going on.

And a lot of that stuff is similar to what we have on the Plains of Eidolon. From the larger than normal mapto the deployable way to get around. In this case it’s a cross between Skyrim and Morrowind rather than the Whiterun area of Skyrim, and hoverboards instead of Skywing launchers, but still. A keener eye though would have spotted several other things.

For example, during the sequence where that nice little Mag manages to capture a furry critter, there’s a little thing behind her.

That’s a mining node, just like the ones you find on the Plains of Eidolon. A mineral one, if you’re wondering.

But there’s keener things to look at.

For example, a brief look in a single menu, from speaking to The Business (a guy who is the fishing and animal specialist and Venus’s version of “And the cousins too!” Fisher Hai-Luk), you can actually glean a lot. For example, you can see a bunch of ranks, as well as the same Syndicate system that the Plains of Eidolon uses.

So our ranks are going to be Neutral (as always), Drifter, Ambidexter, Cove, Old Mate and potentially one more. Kinda weird names that suggest workers and things to do with working. Or perhaps even a slight nautical theme? Probably not.

Oh and there’s bait too. Little kinds of fish (or rather, servofish) found in various locations, just like the Plains.

So from those two screenshots, we can learn three things. We will need to grind Syndicate standing for Solaris United, we will need to grind for minerals of some sort and we will need to go fishing. That’s on top of capturing endangered species for ‘Biz’, the creation of all the kitguns and the MOA pets as seen in the video.

There are also bounties, because what large open landscape wouldn’t be complete without missions for us to do?

And right here we see new rewards to grind for. Four new set mods (Tek, Synth, Strain and Mecha), which will all probably be sets of 6 mods (similar to what we already have), three blueprints (one of which I think is for a Kit Gun) and one new Sentinel.

So more grinding right there.

But really, this is all to be expected. We are looking at Warframe after all.

I’ll be honest though, there’s something else bothering me. Let’s go back to that second image.

“Solaris United works from the shadows to free the Solaris people from the yoke of Corpus debt-slavery…”

That sounds pretty normal. Sounds like the normal description of a hidden faction working for freedom. But that second line…

“… to secure a future where all Solaris own their own bodies, and their own futures.”

That’s the scary thing.

These guys in Fortuna don’t even own their own bodies. Either they’ve traded parts of themselves away to raise capital to pay off their debts, or worse, the Corpus have come along and chopped off limbs and even heads when the people of Solaris can’t afford to pay their bills.

That’s terrifying.

But it also means I can’t wait to help these people and find out more. No matter the grind…