Ivara Skathi Skin and Other Metallic Models

Alongside the Kuva Lich 2020 Vision update (the update didn’t really have a proper name!), we got a few new weapons in the form of Kuva weapons and variants, and we also got a deluxe skin for Ivara. It’s not that uncommon to have a deluxe skin come out not long after a primed Warframe, since generally they take longer to do – while a Prime Warframe is the same base frame with a new helmet and some pretty dangly bits (and I assume the weapons take longer because they are new models), a deluxe skin is a completely fresh look at a Warframe’s theme. Most of the time.

The Ivara Skathi skin is pretty nice. It’s a slightly less animal-themed, more badass Artemis-hunter-woman themed, but it also doesn’t so much have the fancy addons that the default Ivara skin has, with her custom quivers on her arm and things like that. The Skathi skin is also incredibly… metallic.

Like, it’s mostly metallic.

Actually, it’s almost completely metallic.

Metallics are nice on Warframes. It’s why people like Prime Warframes so much because they have these nice little extra metallic bits that make the rest of the Warframe stand out. While the Orokin were horrible, murderous assholes who fucked up repeatedly, they did do one thing right, and that was the correct use of gold on things like white and black. Orokin stuff has just the right amount of metallic gold parts to look fancy and expensive without going over the top.

The Ivara Skathi skin doesn’t do this. The Artemis Bow skin that comes with the Ivara Skathi skin is insanely nice but the rest of the skin is a massive blob of shiny stuff, half of which is set down two different colour channels,  giving the skin a rather Equinox-y split look. In fact, as nice as the skin is, Ivara’s probably the 5th or 6th frame you’d think it was made for. At first glance, it looks like a skin for Gara or Khora (although deluxe skins for those two are supposedly coming soon…) or maybe someone like Equinox. Perhaps Mirage even, what with just how reflective the skin is.

It actually reminds me of another skin – the Inaros Ramses skin. It’s a skin fit for a sandy emperor but it’s just so damn shiny that everything just merges together. There’s shiny, there’s metallic and then there’s going completely overboard with the metal hues. Heck, even Gauss’s default skin pushes the metallic level a bit too far and he’s a great looking Warframe. But not everything needs to be so damn super shiny.

I suppose I should at least be thankful that my third favourite Warframe actually has a nice deluxe skin. Volt has a Proto skin and probably won’t get a new, actually Deluxe skin for a long, long time, especially since he has a lot of Tennogen stuff – in fact, I doubt he will get a deluxe skin since the Proto skin was meant to BE the deluxe skin. Meanwhile Khora has one deluxe skin idea that has vanished and one single Tennogen skin which I don’t particularly like.

And I suppose I should be immensely thankful that my favourite Warframe isn’t Zephyr, who still doesn’t have any sort of deluxe skin, just a handful of unfinished ideas…