Not Sure I Like This Whole No Warframes Thing…

The other day I talked about the Warframe Operation, Orphix Venom. This event is really weird because it doesn’t involve Warframes. I mean, you spawn in as your Warframe, you run to the first objective in your Warframe, but that’s it. Orphix Venom is about one thing: Your Necramech.

It’s also part of a growing trend where Warframes are, well, undesired.

We’re completely removing the game’s namesake from the gameplay.

Think about it. This game is called Warframe. The point of the game is to pilot biomechanical suits called Warframes and use them to slaughter our way to a better future. Yet more and more often, we find ourselves being torn away from them. Mostly because of the ever-adapting Sentients, mind you. Orphix Venom takes it to extremes, where you HAVE to ditch your Warframes. The Sentients have fields which literally force you out of your Warframe and into your Operator. Not even Excalibur Umbra can pass through this magical shield.

Okay, sure, you can kinda do the event with Operators alone, but that’s beside the point. Warframes are completely sidelined in this event. It’s kinda like playing DOOM and not playing as Doomguy.

Lore-wise, this doesn’t make sense.

I mean, the Warframes are what WON the Sentient War for us! Everything else the Orokin tried had failed. Literally everything, from bombs to bioweapons. The Warframes were a last-ditch effort to make something that could fight the Sentients and not have their technology taken over or adapted to. We had to use guns and swords and the most bare bones of spaceships, powered with Void energy, to even get close to beating the Sentients.

But now, apparently a Necramech also doesn’t get adapted to by Sentients. Even though it’s still higher levels of technology than most things we’re used to. There’s probably more tech in a Necramech than there is in our Railjacks, which we literally dug up. Father claims we could use them side by side with our Warframes to defeat the Sentients, but really, it’s just using Necramechs. The only use for Warframes in Orphix Venom is to get from place to place and generate energy orbs.

This is actually kinda worrying.

Sure, this is just one event. But this has been slowly happening for ages. Everything that has come out has had some way to ignore Warframes. Either by ignoring their abilities, forcing us to use Operators or, now, ditching Warframes completely. The Ropalolyst fight has you using your Warframe but disables movement abilities. Meanwhile, the majority of an Eidolon fight is done using Operators. And a lot of newer enemies either ignore Warframe abilities, nullify them or have damage reduction and diminishing returns from Warframe powers. Half of Deimos is flat out immune to Viral, and Orb Vallis enemies have hidden resistances as well. And seemingly everything seems to be immune or resistant to crowd control these days.

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. Innovative gameplay is what keeps older games afloat. Warframe in particular throws everything at the wall. But it’s also… I dunno, kinda annoying.

There’s not enough gameplay options to fully realize this though.

The thing about Warframes is that we have a LOT of them. We can customize them in a lot of ways. Everything else though is much more limited. We have two Necramechs, and only one of them is genuinely somewhat good. Operators require a HUGE amount of grind to unlock Focus and make them usable, and Amps are not much better. The new ideas are cool, but they are kinda standalone objects that require as much work as Warframes. Yet they lack the ability to customize. Pretty much everyone uses Zenurik for Operators, with Unairu and Madurai only coming in to play when Eidolons are about. And Necramechs are really just holsters for Archwing weapons. Or rather, the Mausolon, which is the best AW gun by a mile.

It’s fine to shake things up a bit. But things feel weird when you can no longer use your Warframe loadouts, complete with weapons and companions, in any way what so ever. Especially when you’ve spent so long modding and forma’ing them, and there’s so few other options elsewhere.