Looking at the Infested Overall as a Faction

The Infested are a weird faction. They are their own distinct faction in Warframe, but in a lot of ways, they’re really not. That sounds like a weird thing to say, but the Infested are largely just an ugly mess in the corner that don’t get much attention. Even with Nightwave right now being somewhat focused on the Infested, especially now that there are Emissary derelicts everywhere, the Infested still don’t really have their own thing.

The Infested are made up of a handful of units, mostly consisting of Chargers (infested Grineer), Runners, Leapers and Crawlers (all infested Corpus humans), a handful of infested Ospreys and MOAs and Boilers, Brooders and Ancients. With the arrival of Nightwave’s Emissary part 4, we get two new models, the Undying Flyer (an infested Grineer) and the Thrasher, which is an even more infested Grineer to the point of being unrecognizable. Most of the Infested’s forces though are Grineer and Corpus who fell victim to the Infestation.

Thing is, there just isn’t much to the Infested that makes them an actual, well, thing. The Orokin ‘faction’ does have the same issue, where all the units are just stolen from other factions, but the Orokin were never really a faction anyway, since they’re all dead. What we see in Orokin Towers and Void fissures are what remains of the scavengers that tried to take from the tower, it’s only really the drones that are truly Orokin. The Infested though are supposed to be a growing threat that adapts to pretty much everything and can only really be stopped via isolation and complete destruction. So you’d think we’d get a little more variation in those enemies or something, right?

You could argue that, really, the Corpus and the Grineer are no better, but the Corpus and the Grineer both have their own tile sets, as well as more distinct variants. Sure, a Corpus Tech is just a tall Corpus Crewman with a Supra, but said Tech is more visually distinct. More importantly though, the Grineer and the Corpus both have their own proper environments and landscapes. A Grineer Galleon is different from a Grineer Shipyard and is very different from Kuva Fortress stuff. The Corpus are somewhat playing catch up but they do have the nice Gas City Corpus variants and the Orb Vallis variants too. The Infested only really have infested versions of existing older tile sets and the unique Orokin Derelicts.

The Infested don’t even have regional types. You can’t go on a Grineer Galleon and only see Infested Chargers and pure infested units, and you’ll still see Chargers on the myriad of infected Corpus ships too.

It really doesn’t help that the Infested are astoundingly hideous. That’s to be expected, the Infested are basically organic sludge, but there’s no real beauty to them in any way. In fact, the only way to look nice and infested at the same time is to either be Nidus or use one of the various Infested-themed Tennogen skins. But they’re designed to be pretty because the Infested aren’t pretty and you’re not going to sell an ugly skin.

But to top it all off, the Infested have sentience. There’s a hive mind behind it all, but we’ve only ever managed to understand more of it from really fricking tiny slices of information. Even the Infested-themed quests of the Jordas Precept and the Glast Gambit spend way more time on anything but the Infested. Then again, there isn’t really that much to learn about them anyway. The cultures surrounding the Infested are far more interesting than the Infested themselves.

The only good thing about the Infested? You can murder them as much as you want. In fact, you SHOULD go and murder them, because frankly the Infested is bad for everyone and everything. I mean, if the Grineer or the Corpus  gained absolute power over the solar system? That would definitely be a bad situation. But if the Infestation got out of control, then there would be nothing left.

So yeah, go and kill some Infested bastards.