Little Duck

I don’t like Little Duck. There, I said it. Unpopular opinion but I think she’s not a good character. She’s a bitch, and one who could potentially get a lot of people killed.

Normally, I like ducks. Ducks are cute, except when it’s mating season. They sit in water, quacking harmlessly, chasing kids that feed them bread. Rubber ducks are even better. More floating, less being horrific monsters when it comes to breeding. Little Duck though isn’t a duck at all. She works alongside Vox Solaris, helping you defeat the Orb Mothers of the Orb Vallis.

Our first introduction to her though is via a comic. Warframe did a little comic in which an Excalibur fucks up royally and needs his ass saving by Mag. That comic is actually the origin of the FREESWORD promo code, which unfortunately recently expired. Anyway, in the comic, we are introduced to a little girl from Cetus and Little Duck, who just seems to be an ex-Corpus mercenary. The whole story involves an Orokin vault and all sorts of shenanigans, and ends with Little Duck taking the little girl to the Quills.

Aside from being pissed off, Little Duck seemed… like a rather general badass anonymous character. That changes when you meet her in Fortuna.

The first thing you’ll realise is that she flat out talks down to you if you approach her in your Warframe. If you want to talk, you have to switch to your space kid. In front of Eudico, the Biz and Thursby. It’s not like Onkko, who is mostly alone and set off to one side, the other NPCs are right there and you’re revealing your true self right there. But on top of that, Little Duck just magically knows what you are. Sure, she did some stuff with the Quills but she was last seen working with a Warframe, not an Operator.

Even when you talk to her as an Operator though, she is still very dismissive. Sure, just like at max rank with Solaris United, she will show you her real face, but you have to give up your secret before she trusts you and she demands the moon before she’ll give you her secrets.

But Little Duck is also… dangerous. During the Profit Taker missions, Little Duck CLAIMS that she can disable the Profit Taker’s impenetrable orbital shields. After we do the infiltrating and getting her inside the systems, that’s what she says she has done. That the shields have been disabled. This turns out to be a massive lie, the orbital shield generator had just moved and Little Duck didn’t tell anyone. Little Duck also seems to have intimate knowledge of the Profit Taker that she doesn’t seem willing to share with anyone.

In fact, you don’t know about any of this until you go out and fight the giant robot.

The first thing you realise is that you’re on a timer. The Profit Taker’s magic shields are only temporarily disabled and that, if you don’t destroy it soon, it will become immortal. So you need to destroy it before it reaches the new destination where the orbital canon is now located.

What Little Duck also doesn’t tell you is that the Profit Taker explodes violently on death in a nuke-sized fireball. Eudico has to scream at you at the last minute to run like hell.

The thing is, Little Duck knew about these things in advance. And she didn’t tell anyone. Not you, not Eudico, not the Biz. Vital, dangerous information. She put all of our lives in danger. We trust her but she doesn’t seem to trust us.

And frankly, that worries me. Goodness knows what else Little Duck is hiding.