Eating Warframes, Taking their Powers and Giving them to Other Warframes – WHAT?

TennoLive 2020 was a roller coaster of emotions and chaos, swirling around the Heart of Deimos. It’s a new open world involving ancient Orokin and a fuckton of new Infested stuff. It’s going to be massive, building on what Fortuna and Cetus created. A strange, hideous yet beautiful landscape filled with fleshy tunnels, demented death mechs, insects used as K-Drives and more.

I don’t want to talk about that though. It’s interesting, but not today’s subject. I want to talk about what came BEFORE the Heart of Deimos.

Let’s talk about this whole Helminth thing.

But to do so, we need to take a step back. To a time a long, long time ago.

You see, originally, Warframes didn’t quite mod like we do now. To upgrade a mod, you’d have to fuse other mods into it. And, right at the start? Warframe abilities were mods. You could equip them as you pleased. So, if, for some reason, you didn’t want Volt’s Speed ability, you could just not equip it and put something else in that space.

This however was limited by the Warframe’s own abilities. And later on, this was removed completely. Warframe abilities were baked into the Warframes, and you couldn’t change what they did, just modify them with mods and augments.

The Helminth Chrysalis System changes that.

By feeding the massive monster that’s living in your basement, you can unlock some cool abilities. These abilities will replace one of the abilities you have on your Warframe.

What these abilities are, no one’s quite sure. But frankly, no one cares. Mostly because of the title of this article. By sacrificing a Warframe, by feeding it to the Helminth monster in your room… you can… add one of that Warframe’s ability to another Warframe.

In TennoLive2020, the demonstration showed a Mag being consumed, and Pull being unlocked as a move that you can put on another Warframe. The demonstration also showcased an Excalibur with Shock on it. But these are just low level stuff, done for visual purposes. The ability to put one Warframe ability on another Warframe opens up thousands of new ideas and potential scenarios!

And on top of that, augments will work on these frames. So not only can you stick Shock on your Excalibur, but you can also use the augment Shock Trooper on your Excalibur as well.

All this, and none of these changes are permanent. Well, to the Warframe getting the ability. The Warframe donating the ability will die a slow, painful death as they are absorbed by the Helminth.

Don’t get ahead of yourself just yet though.

There’s definitely some terms and conditions to be considered here. It’s already been explained that you can’t just get every ability. Signature moves and ultimate moves are not going to be included. This means you can’t go and give Mag Excalibur’s Exalted Blade. And since you have to sacrifice a Warframe to do this, the costs are going to build up. However, the list of abilities hasn’t been confirmed yet. We are apparently going to get a list of abilities that can and can’t be extracted from Warframes.

There’s also balance to consider. But this whole idea throws balance out of the window right from the get-go. Frankly, no matter how you look at this, someone is going to make something extraordinarily overpowered. It basically can’t be avoided. I think the resources needed and the sacrificing of Warframes will slow down the power growth, but we’re still going to have an explosion of power here.

There’s another issue though.

A moral one. I think we’re forgetting something. Aren’t Warframes… alive? At least, some of them? Excalibur Umbra is definitely alive. And from the Second Dream, it’s been believed for years that Warframes have some sort of sentience. So are we going to have… problems, blatantly murdering them? I mean, the Helminth Chrysalis is a bit different from selling your Oberon after getting Oberon Prime. You’re sticking it to a wall in your ship and having a horrible infested monster suck the life out of it.

While the Helminth Chrysalis system does seem really, really cool, I am worried that there’s going to be… big consequences… to all of this.