My Predictions about the New War

15th December, 2021. After three years of waiting, it’s finally here. The New War. An update that puts the War back into Warframe. This update is going to be huge and it will have ramifications across the entire game. The main part of this update though is the New War quest, which potentially have massive effects in both the Origin System and the Tau system where the Sentients have been coming from.

The weird thing though is that, aside from the first 30 minutes, we know pretty much nothing about the New War. Okay, yes, we know it will have Sentients and things like that, but the plot is all over the place. So, today, I am going to make three predictions that probably won’t be correct, but do have some thought put into them.

Editor’s note: the New War quest came out on December 15th 2021. This article is probably completely wrong, because I’m bad at making predictions. So enjoy the fact that I know nothing about the update and all my predictions are completely wrong.

Kill or Spare Lotus

By far the biggest question about the New War is what will happen to the Lotus? After all, everything that’s been going on recently, Natah has been behind it all. She went from running a military of teenage Tenno to running a military of Sentients and it all seemed to happen very quickly. We then proceeded to get stuck with purple Ordis Lotus for fucking ages. The delays in the quest meant that, when we hit MR30, we received nothing more than an automatic message, because Lotus wasn’t there to congratulate us in person.

I predict that we actually won’t see much of her. We’ll get teased with close encounters, before finally trapping Natah at the end of the quest. As for what happens next? Death, hopefully. Or at least a conversation and an appeal to emotions.

The bigger question though is whether we will even be given a chance to kill Natah. After all, there’s a massive war going on, and we’re trying to end it before we get overrun. Rather than killing Natah ourselves, we might instead leave her to die inside a Murex. Or maybe she’ll switch sides yet again. It’s all up in the air.

It was Ballas all along

Frankly, there’s been so much deception, mind control and more, that I think Ballas is behind all of this. While it may seem that Erra has Ballas in chains, while re-watching the little New War cinematics, Ballas seems to flip-flop between being a prisoner and falling sorry for himself; and also being sneaky and scheming in the shadows. Heck, we even see Ballas left alone in his room, talking to us, under no supervision at all.

Ballas has been scheming for years and years. After all, it was Ballas who is responsible for these child soldiers, he was the one to betray his kin and, with a touch of his hand, switched off the Lotus and made her compliant. His actions and emotions are unusual, considering that Ballas is the prisoner and Erra has the habit of dropping his lead.

A new weapon or mechanic or both

Of course, the final question here is whether we get a new mechanic to play around with, and a fancy sword to chop things apart. Both the Second Dream and the War Within added things to do with your Operator, while the Sacrifice brought new mods and a Warframe that moves while you are in Operator mode. It stands to reason that you’d learn something new in the New War. My money is currently on an upgrade of our Space Kids, allowing them to control void energy better, or just letting the Tenno use guns. The trailer did hint at extra void magic and a cooler Operator, but that could just be a red herring.

As for the sword? Well, it could be anything. The swords we have received so far have been 1. of Sentient origin, 2. owned by Umbra to kill Sentients; and 3. made to kill Sentients but with more Orokin style. Personally, I’m hoping our quest-given melee weapon is in fact the severed limb of Natah. But it’ll probably just be Teshin’s double swords or something similar.

Anyway, I can’t wait for this update. Even if all it does is give me some closure. The 15th can’t some quickly enough.