My Worries about the Sisters of Parvos
I haven’t really done a speculation article in a while. Mostly because my speculations are always wrong. With Warframe, pretty much anything can happen in an update. But this isn’t so much speculation as it is worries and concerns. Ever since we got Call of the Tempestarii, I’ve been worried about the Sisters of Parvos update. After all, it’s a massive update that has been pushed back repeatedly.
Too long in the oven?
To get an idea how long this update has been pushed back, we were teased ephemeras and weapons for Sisters of Parvos last year. We also had a whole Warframe and song released, teasing the upcoming Queenpins update, but that was more than two months ago now!
And the Call of Tempestarii update wasn’t even particularly good. It was two short Railjack missions with Cephalon Cy doing all the talking. It didn’t go anywhere of interest, it just gave us a pretty background and a reason why we have Corpus Liches. That being said, we already technically HAVE Corpus Liches in the form of the Animo Project and Ambulas. After all, Ambulas supposedly comes back stronger every time you kill it, and it’s supposed to have adapting AI. It doesn’t, but in lore it does.
Either way, this update has been constantly pushed back, more and more and more. Which is concerning all on its own.
Developer Hell
My biggest concern is that, deep down, the developers don’t know what to do with these Queenpins. They’ve been stuck in a sort of developer hell, where no one knows what they really want from these new Corpus Liches.
We’ve been all over the place with these Sisters. First they were going to just be Corpus Liches. But we saw nothing of them. Everything we saw about the Queenpins at first was secretive, and mostly just focused on the weapons and rewards, nothing on the Liches themselves. But later on, we were told that we’d also get robotic dogs and strange things like that. However, in the Dev Stream these were teased in, it seemed that the developers weren’t sure themselves how these dogs would act and how it would all tie in together. In fact, most of the information we have received has all had a little asterisks on it. Everything is liable to change. Little has been set in stone. Feature-creep, an issue of constantly adding more features, is everywhere.
Since then, dev streams have kinda gone silent, as they’re preparing for Tennocon.
The same thing has happened lots of times. Railjack is a great example of something that has been pushed back. And, unfortunately, Railjack did come out a bit buggy and half-baked. In fact, it’s had two reworks. One of which was this year, where all our avionics were changed into standard mods.
The problem is, Railjack has some sort of excuse
The difference between Railjack and Queenpins is that, well, the Sisters of Parvos aren’t really anything new. Railjack is a huge shift in gameplay, completely brand new. Adding working space ships to an engine that’s built around third-person shooting is going to be tricky. And the fact that they pulled off a mostly-working space ship fighting system is impressive. Even if you don’t like Railjack at all, you can at least admit it’s new and interesting.
However, the Sisters of Parvos are not new tech. They’ll most likely work in a way very similar to the Kuva Liches of the Grineer. There’ll just be a few extra features and some different enemies and models. The core gameplay loop already exists. And while most people aren’t huge fans of the Grineer Liches, they do play them, and the tweaks to making them more fun are somewhat obvious.
So what IS holding back this update? Because it’s been ages. To the point that I no longer really care about the Queenpins. It seems this whole adventure has been riddled with feature-creep. And that makes me really concerned…