How I Would Have Altered the Call of the Tempestarii Quest

Gonna be honest, the more I think about it, the less pleased I am with Sevagoth’s quest. What started off as an interesting premise led absolutely nowhere. There was not much substance to the quest, and nowhere near enough time to actually, well, do anything. Now, I don’t claim to be a good writer. But I really feel like even an idiot like me could, well, do more.

Heads up, there ARE spoilers in this article. There kinda have to be. But the Call of the Tempestarii is literally half an hour of quests and cutscenes. It’s literally a Spy mission and a sabotage mission. So go do it.

The current quest is nothing but future setup.

You can summarize the Call of the Tempestarii really easily. Do a mission, run into a Corpus ship, a ghostly railjack appears and everyone splits up. Cy gets curious, you do a spy mission to find out more, then track the ghost ship down. You find out that the corpus ship’s captain wants to capture the ghost ship because she blames it for her sisters’ death. You manage to get the ghost ship to lower its shields, find Sevagoth’s ghost inside, then the ship gets captured by the Corpus captain. So you blow up her ship.

Straight forward, really. And it leads to a small teaser for the Sisters of Parvos update. Another teaser for something that was supposed to come at the same time as Call of the Tempestarii. Sure, there’s not THAT much time for exposition, but there’s an entire spy mission with tons of empty air in it. We could have had something more.

At this point in time, a Warframe-only story makes no sense.

If you have a Railjack, then you know that Operators are a thing. So it’s weird that we have a rogue half-a-warframe wandering around. Especially one that just dies at the end. This made sense back in the early Warframe quests, where not everyone doing them may or may not have had an Operator. It also makes sense in the Leverians, since the narrator is basically telling fairy tales. We had an opportunity to actually explore another Tenno and see into their past, but we only ever see the Warframe.

However, we could have had some interesting Tenno-based interactions here. In the original quest, we save Sevagoth’s main body. And then blow them up in a funeral. But wouldn’t it have been more interesting to save another Tenno? One that had trapped themselves in a void loop, and was trying to save their own body? Maybe they do die at the end. Or maybe they disappear again, to catch up on what they’ve missed.

That being said, Sevagoth is just one of the two main characters in this story. And neither of them really get the time they need.

Captain Vala needs an actual role.

So we have an angry Corpus woman. But we don’t see very much of her. Okay, I get it, she lost her sisters. That’s very sad. You know who else lost her sisters? Rude Zuud. Yet somehow Rude Zuud’s loss feels stronger, because we can see and hear what happened. Deck 12, what is left of it, can be visited repeatedly and both good guys and bad guys comment on it. Eudico mentions how Zuud broke, and Exploiter seeks to punish Zuud further by threatening Fortuna.

Vala gets none of that. All we get are her angry words and a story that doesn’t make that much sense. Especially since the Tempestarii is apparently a rescue ship, and only seems to attack if you attack it. A quick flashback to this actually happening would have done wonders. In fact, the Spy mission would have been a perfect place for this. You find information in the first vaults about the Tempestarii, but the last could contain snippets of when it was last seen, transmissions of people screaming as the Void Storm closes in.

At the very least, we need to have something more about Vala’s past, to make her reasoning stand out and more relatable. The whole cut scene where you murder people as Sevagoth’s Shadow does absolutely nothing for her. If anything, it paints Valas’s sisters as generic Corpus, which we slaughter with ease.

Sure, Vala would still be a bad guy, but she’d be so much more relatable if we got to step in her shoes, even just for the moment.

I have some other nitpicks as well.

Like, for example, the name of the ship. Tempestarii implies plural. But there’s only one ship. A ship that is never explained how it’s tied to Void Storms. And why did the Tempestarii even attack the Lucretia space station in the first place?

And absolutely nothing is explained by the Void Storms. We know they exist. Void Storms have actually been the reason behind Energy Reduction Sortie missions. But Sevagoth has pretty much nothing to do with them, aside from the fact that he disappeared inside of one, and seems to appear when Void Storms are around.

Really though, what this quest needed the most was just, well, more. Make it longer. Throw in some more dialogue. Because it’s shortness is what REALLY limits the Tempestarii quest.