Little World-Building Tidbits I’d Like to See in Warframe
Warframe has a lot going for it. We recently had a war go in and have just started making things go back to normal. In particular, the New War did somewhat show how normal people lived, most notably for the Tenno. However, I feel like a lot of world-building lore is pretty well hidden, restricted to quests or events of the past. Here are a few ideas I’ve had, to add just a pinch of nice lore into the daily grind.
Exploring other colonies a bit more
“What other colonies?” you may ask. Well, there’s been a few mentioned. In the tutorial, Vor’s Prize, Lotus clearly states that you risk a Grineer ship crashing into a colony ship, and one of the Grineer ships you visit, you avenge dead colonists. All these colonies remain unvisited, nothing more than unseen people living in an unseen place.
We also have the Mycona, a group that harvests Infested parts, and the Grineer defectors living a peaceful life away from Steel Meridian. But we never see anything more about them. It’d be nice to give them a hub world or something so we can visit. We only spent brief moments inside the hidden base, before leaving to do crappy Index missions.
Heck, we don’t even need to visit, it’d be nice to fly by a friendly colony sometimes.
Exiting public areas more gracefully
One thing that kinda bothers me is that you are generally dumped into a room and go from there. On the flip side, relays have two animations of our ships landing. However, aside from relays, none of these places have an animation for leaving. Or even a button. Mostly for petty lore reasons, I’d love to have an exit animation as well. Having to hit ESC and Leave is a bit immersion-breaking. Open worlds should have this too. I’d love a little beacon that I can deploy when I want to exit an open world, so I can leave via my landing craft.
It’d also help ease confusion on open worlds too, since hitting Esc and leaving always brings up a popup saying you’ll lose your stuff, which generally isn’t true.
Bases for all the Syndicates
Weirdly, there is only one Syndicate base that we know of. Iron Wake is a nice little place for the Steel Meridian, which was released when Harrow came out. However, while the Steel Meridian are nice fellows with their own base, we never really get to see the same for anyone else. We can kinda view both Simaris’ and Suda’s domains, but those are mostly data-scapes in which only a Cephalon can reside. The other syndicates don’t get a base at all. This is pretty strange because, well, the Red Veil don’t have a base either, one of their leaders chills out in Iron Wake.
Of course, access to these bases would be strictly limited by a player’s standing with each Syndicate. I’d very much doubt that the Arbiters of Hexis would let me in, due to what I think of them.
More people to talk to
When it comes to casual conversation, everything in Warframe is kinda dead. Most people never speak, and those in relays or open world hubs just spew the same things over and over. Everyone also seems to be completely oblivious to things going on, especially after the New War. Being able to check in with some NPCs would give a little bit of a fresher atmosphere in these places.
Random encounters
The solar system is big and mostly empty, but where there is life, there’s a lot of it. And a lot of random things happen as well. We do already have invaders though, in the form of Stalker, Acolytes, Zanuka hunters and the Gustrag Three. But these are all rather negative encounters. Just people who want to kill you. It’d be nice to see some random counters that don’t involve murder.
Funnily enough, Nightwave kinda used to do this. For series 1, we had both the Wolf and his friends spawning in randomly. For series 2 though, we had Arlo and his Devotees randomly appearing to revive us and help kill enemies. Series 3 kinda ruined this though with Nora Night’s repetitive lines. No one liked glass enemies, but series 1 and 2 had things just about right.
But yeah, we could have random NPCs joining us briefly. After all, there are a lot of people in our little solar system.
While these little things sound rather pointless, they’d breath a little bit of not just lore, but also immersion, intrigue and curiosity to the Warframe universe.