Tired of the Whiteness of the Orb Vallis

The more I think about it, the more and more tired of Fortuna and the Orb Vallis I become. There’s been something bothering me lately and I can’t quite put my finger on it.

I’m going to start off with the fact that I love Fortuna. I love the aesthetic of it. I love almost all the characters you meet in Fortuna, apart from Little Duck. I bloody love the music and song tracks introduced alongside Fortuna and STILL find myself humming “We All Life Together” occasionally. The custom MOAs are cool, the Warframes that have come out of Fortuna are cool and pretty much all the weapons that have come out of Fortuna have been amazing, apart from the Kreska. The Kreska is literally a window squidgee.

Even the boss fights, one of them is mediocre, the other is genuinely good and actually shows how strong we are as Warframes. There’s nothing really bad about a lot of Fortuna, but there’s still something that bothers me.

I think it has more to do with the Orb Vallis itself.

The Orb Vallis is just too… white. It’s too bright and horrible and shiny and white and snowy. Sure, the caves are all very pretty, but you leave them and boom, everything is white again. Thankfully, there is the odd Corpus facility or field of giant mushrooms to break things up, but it’s all still very, very white. Especially when you leave a cave but the game bugs out and you’re stuck with everything being white. It’s all very pretty and serene and snowy. In fact, the Orb Vallis is a lot like a cross between Skyrim and Morrowind with sci-fi buildings. But it’s all still very white most of the time. It’s only when the weather is warm, for about 4 out of every 20 minutes, that there’s any colour anywhere.

But speaking of caves and Corpus facilities, it seems like most of them are just there for decoration. Many of the caves are actually insanely pretty, with lots of cool lighting and glowing mushrooms and stuff. They look and feel amazing, but you only ever go into a few of them for the odd bounty, or maybe to mine and go fishing.

The various structures though are even worse. Apart from the various spots for farming Toroids, everything aside from the central areas goes unused. The only real exception is the Pearl, but people only go there to farm easy K-Drive standing because it’s one continuous grind you can do pretty easily. But most of it just sits there, unused and un-visited.

The whole Exploiter Orb and Fractures events haven’t made this any better. Exploiter Orb requires you to go to Deck 12, where Solaris United used to be based, and it’s a cold, dead version of Fortuna. That’s fine, but the second half of the fight occurs in what is essentially a white, flat valley with almost no life in it. The fractures may have you going from place to place, but the locations are only there to give you some initial enemy spawns. Once they’re dead, everyone and everything around you can be completely ignored in favour of an otherwise white and rocky landscape.

But the thing is, there is LOADS of colour in the four minutes that the Orb Vallis is warm. Everything brightens up and you realise that not everything is grey and white and miserable. Even the Corpus infrastructure is warmer and more inviting. Well, as inviting as a money cult can be. When the deflector makes things warm, it makes things nicer.

Most of the time though, it’s dark and grey or bright and white with little in between. Your only solace is inside caves, but caves are dark and only good for fishing and mining.

Not that it matters since not many people go to these places anyway. There’s no reason to. You do your bounties in the same few places over and over again. You farm for toroids in the same places over and over again. You do Profit-taker or Exploiter in the same places…

You get what I mean.

And that’s both tiring and sad, especially when the Orb Vallis is such a huge place to explore.