Toggle Prime Details

The other day, I hit Mastery Rank 26, currently the highest rank you can get. Feeling proud of myself, doubly so because I managed to finish the MR26 test in one attempt without even seeing what it was, I decided to treat myself. How? By buying myself a nice Tennogen skin.

I’ve actually been considering buying a Tennogen skin for a long time. It was always guaranteed to be for Volt, because Ivara’s Tennogen skins aren’t that nice (even the Youkai bunny-like skin) and Khora doesn’t have any yet. In fact, I don’t really want Khora Tennogen at all unless she gets a Corpus-themed skin, because I have a feeling her first skin would be even more dominatrix-y than she already is.

Anyway, after a LOT of thought, I decided to go with the Fulgursor skin for Volt. It’s a pretty Infested-looking skin, but less obvious than the Zener skin (which looks Corpus-y) and the Graxx skin (which is literally a Grineer skin), while also having a sort of look that kinda matches how I think certain Phoviverse characters would look. All three were better than the Capacitor skin, which looks nice but has a really ugly helmet.

When I bought the skin, a new option popped up, underneath your normal helmet, skin, syandana, attachments and regalia actions. When you buy a Tennogen skin, you can toggle the prime details of a Warframe on and off.

Of course, this does very different things depending on the Warframe. Volt actually gets very few changes because Volt Prime, aside from the skin, arm armour and helmet, doesn’t have many changes. But someone like Limbo or Mesa will have a LOT of changes when their parts are toggled. I could show you what this looks like, but frankly I don’t really play many of the newer Prime frames and don’t really want to spend €7 to make an example. But you can probably guess that it does very little for frames like Frost and Mag, which have very few Prime details to begin with.

This option though is ONLY available on Tennogen skins. On any other skin, it disappears. Which is a shame, really.

Alright, it doesn’t make much sense on a Deluxe skin. The majority of Deluxe skins completely change the body, making various parts smaller or more buff. If you look at the Nezha or Nidus Deluxe skins, you’d struggle to see them as the same frame. In fact, the Volt Proto skin looks more like a Nidus skin, while the Nidus skin looks more like a skin for someone like Rhino or Chroma. All Prime parts are removed from a Deluxe skin, just like everything else, so a toggle is pointless.

But there are more than just Tennogen and Deluxe skins. There are also seasonal skins and Immortal skins. And these… don’t really play nice.

Immortal skins, when put on a Prime frame, go underneath all the Prime parts, and dump the new textures on the Prime body. This looks fine on older frames with no base model changes, like Volt or Mag, but it means that the Oberon Immortal skin has the same tiny arms and shoulders Oberon Prime has. It’s not even really consistent. Nyx Prime is an older frame, but she has a lot of large plates that separate her from normal Nyx, so the Immortal skin looks odd underneath. But on top of that, a lot of Immortal skins are old and render differently from more modern frames, giving them a shiny, plastic-y look.

But then there’s the seasonal skins. Currently this only really applies to Dex Excalibur, Festive Frost and Festive Mirage, since Titania doesn’t have a Primed variant yet. The Festive Mirage skin doesn’t play nice with Mirage Prime at all. It completely replaces the Mirage Prime skin with the Festive skin, without any option to toggle parts. Festive Frost is the same, but it’s far less noticeable because Frost Prime has fuck all when it comes to little Prime bits. I can’t really comment about Dex Excalibur since I don’t have Excalibur Prime, but Excalibur Umbra goes the same route the Immortal skins do on Primed frames, with his Umbra parts overlaying the other skin parts.

Really though, we should be able to toggle Prime Details on and off on any Prime frame, no matter the skin. It seems silly that such a useful feature is only ever usable if you buy a skin with real money. But at the same time, we should be able to toggle the body of a Frame as well, if only so that Oberon doesn’t have skinny arms when I use his Immortal skin on him.