Sick of Space Kids

I’m gonna be honest. As much as I like Warframe, I really, really dislike anything to do with my Operator. The initial reveal of Operators was great. They sat in their special chair and we could ignore them for a bit. But pretty much every update or quest since keeps on pushing Operators further and further. And it’s getting harder to avoid using Operators.

These days, you can’t really get past them. Operators become a fancy new requirement for, well, most new updates. The War Within was an obvious sequel to the Second Dream, but it’s only gotten worse from there. The Sacrifice, with Excalibur Umbra, required you to do things mostly as your Operator. Chains of Harrow also had forced Operator-only segments. And the Ropalolyst requires the same sort of gear needed to kill Eidolons: Operator abilities.

But then later on we get things like Orphix missions. Normal, regular missions that ditch Warframes completely and make you use Necramechs. In Orphix missions, the only useful thing you can do with a Warframe is use it to hop between Orphix spawns. And even then, both Operators and Necramechs are better to use to save swapping between items all the time.

“But Medic, the Operator should be combat ready, to work alongside our Warframes!”

Yeah no I’m not buying that. My Warframe is combat-ready enough. My space kid dies if you breathe on it. Or, rather it does since all Focus was reworked. And even then, they don’t fight side by side. The only time this happens is when we use Excalibur Umbra, and even then, Umbra kinda just does his own thing as he follows behind you.

At the same time though, Warframes are becoming more and more useless. We are introduced to our Warframes as powerful tools that ended the war against the Sentients, but when it came to the New War, we only sparingly used Warframes. Heck, I can name those two moments: at the start, before Teshin’s small section, and right at the end, as you climb the Unum and face off against Ballas on the sun-eating ship. And that is pretty much it. Almost everything else was just Drifter or the Operator.

Maybe I’m ranting too much. After all, I am rather pissed off. We get yet another storyline about our Space Kids. The plot doesn’t even make sense any more, because we found adults on the Zariman 10-0. Despite the fact that all the adults were supposed to be dead. The Operators’ actions don’t even make much sense. Our Operator talks about how bad things were on the Zariman, yet we’re still there helping the Void-equivalent of Konzu and Eudico, rebuilding… well, something. For reasons that I really don’t understand, the Zariman 10-0 is our responsibility, and we’re supposed to care for the hellhole that mindraped our Operators’ parents.

Sure, there is plenty of stuff that you can do without the Operators. But the Warframes’ usefulness has been constantly shrinking. I mean, the game is CALLED Warframe, but the Warframes are gradually getting less and less screen time. It seems like, ever since we had the Sacrifice, lore about our Warframes kinda gets ignored. It’s all on our Operators now.