On the Personalities of Massive Robot Spider Things

So far there are two massive, four-legged spider robot things that are active and angry in the Orb Vallis. The Profit-Taker Orb spends most of her life hanging around the Enrichment Center in the center of the Vallis while the Exploiter Orb is much more active, roaming around the Temple of Profit with a small army of Coolant Raknoids. Both of these weird spider robot things though have personalities. Very different ones.

The Profit-Taker Orb’s personality doesn’t really appear until you do the four heists that are tied to her destruction. Whenever you encounter her outside of the four heist missions, Profit-Taker is mostly silent apart from the occasional Eidolon-like wail whenever alert levels rise too high. In fact, the Profit-Taker is happy to ignore the combat going on down below her unless alert levels reach 3 or 4, at which point she’ll idly just fire mortars at you.

During the heists though, Profit-Taker speaks rather cryptically. She speaks in unusual phrases, almost like short poems – in fact, a lot of her transmissions rhyme or have some flow to them. She refers to us, the players and their Warframes, as Dollies. But Profit-Taker, unlike her sister Exploiter, doesn’t really use normal English, she prefers her poetry at all times. The reason for this isn’t really obvious, but I believe a lot of it is because Profit-Taker has Sentient technology inside her. And you know who else speaks in weird, almost poetic words? Sentients like Hunhow.

Exploiter on the other hand, she as a very specific personality, that of a stern, righteous mother. Even when she’s roaming around the Temple of Profit.

Her words are quite obviously aimed at everyone, not just Solaris United and the Tenno, demanding how she and Nef Anyo want us all to behave. Exploiter wants us to shut up and do our jobs like good little child slaves, and she makes that very clear. Her words echo across the Vallis alongside her also-somewhat-Eidolon-like screams, demanding that we be obedient and efficient.

But Exploiter also has a motherly connection to her Coolant Raknoids. Considering Exploiter actually spawns some of the Coolant Raknoids (but not all of them, as it seems that some Coolant Raknoids just spawn in from the distance and run to her in the second part of the Exploiter Orb fight), you can somewhat understand why she’d be attached to them, but she shows genuine pain and anger when you hurt them.

Most of the time though, Exploiter has no more than harsh words and reality in her sayings. She wants you to be subservient to her and that’s it. Still, it’s an interesting personality to give to a massive storm-generating robot and it’s a lot more… fun than the Sentient-like rambling that Profit-Taker spouts. She seems more alive than Profit-Taker.

Exploiter doesn’t have time for poetry either… except when she dies. Both Exploiter and Profit-Taker have very unusual quotes that they utter while they die. While Profit-Taker mutters the words “Good… night… sweet… heart… good… night…”, referring to an unknown other, Exploiter will wail these unusual words:

“And… so I turn, from the tumult of the world… toward home… that sweetest spot… ‘neath the circuit… of the sun…”

This somewhat implies that both Exploiter and Profit-Taker are from somewhere else. They’re not just minions built by Nef Anyo, they are beings in of themselves. This somewhat makes sense with Profit-Taker, as she has Sentient technology inside her, but Exploiter, as far as we’re aware, doesn’t, she’s pure Corpus technology. But what are they referring to?

Despite the poetry and the motherly anger, there is something else hidden beneath the two massive proxies. Something probably quite scary, especially when you consider how scary these two Orbs already are.

You know what’s scarier? There’s still one more Orb that hasn’t woken up yet. It just sits in the middle of a lake near the Space Port, biding its time. I wonder what personally that Orb will have?