Jupiter’s New Look – The Jovian Accord

The Jovian Accord is Warframe’s latest big update, featuring a new boss fight, a new game mode, a new Warframe, some new weapons, some new enemies and, most importantly, a complete do-over of the Jupiter Gas City Tileset.

Now, the Gas City Tileset isn’t really that old. In fact, there are plenty of planets that actually needed reworks way before Jupiter did. Saturn, the other major gas giant, shares all the same tilesets that Mercury does and has most of its missions on Grineer ships. Meanwhile, Neptune and Pluto both share tilesets with Venus and Europa. But alas, we got this massive new rework.

And at first glance, it’s a really nice rework. Jupiter felt like a world of orange gases already, where everyone lived in floating cities high above Jupiter’s denser atmospheres. The rework aimed to make things look much prettier, while fixing the wonky lighting and effects that made up Jupiter’s levels. Everything in the old Gas City Tileset was a horrible cheeto orange. Which, while being probably quite accurate, is not very pleasing on the eye.

Enter the new Gas City tileset and you’re greeted with a world that actually has proper lighting and is genuinely alive. Or at least moves a little. There’s automated machinery everywhere and the feel that things actually HAPPEN in these places when you’re not there murdering people. Like, even the Corpus are slightly more natural. The local Corpus mooks have also been re-imagined to fit in this new area. I may not be happy with some of the new mooks (I’m prety sure I saw a flamethrower-using Corpus being protected by a Nullifier that works just like the annoying melee-spamming ones on Fortuna) but they’re all cool. The more Sentient-based Amalgams though… they’re… just…. no. Poor things.

There’s also a lot more scale to the rooms that you leap through. Every room is much larger and has much more going on. Plenty of space And there are fancy energy generators everywhere.

It all looks gorgeous.

But looks aren’t everything. I’ve played a bunch of missions and honestly, I’ve already noticed some issues.

The first (and personally biggest) issue is that EVERYTHING IS SO DAMN DARK. There are ‘outdoor’ areas that have reasonable levels of brightness but most areas are insanely dark, to the point that you find yourself shooting at moving lights. When you’re breezing through a level after successfully capturing a target or murdering everyone, that’s not too bad because you’re not focusing on murder. But in places where you might have to be standing still for a bit (like the new Disruption game mode), it’s just dark and gloomy all the damn time.

So you have this insane contrast between glowing energy generators and dark everything else. What’s the point of a rework if everything’s going to be dark?

Some rooms are brighter than others, but smaller rooms are the worst offenders. Some rooms I found when playing Disruption were SO dark I had to just throw out my Zenistar and hope I kill things.

The other issue is that most people will stop seeing these changes after a while. Aside from the new boss and the new lore, there’s never really been much of a reason to explore Jupiter. Heck, once Disruption is no longer the flavour of the month and the current Operation ends, people will probably only play that to get to the new boss battle fight. Sure, you can say that about most places in Warframe (heck, who goes back to Earth these days?) but Jupiter, aside from the new Eidolon, doesn’t have anything at all.

And that’s ignoring the fact that 99% of the time, people speed through things anyway.

Oh well. At least Jupiter is not completely bright orange now.