Do You Remember When Nightwave had Story?

Does anyone remember when Nightwave first came out? We got a little diorama where we see the big bad wolf escaping from prison, setting up the premise of a story? I’ll be honest, I’d not be surprised if you didn’t remember, because Series 1, the Wolf of Saturn Six, came out in early 2019. A good three years ago. Since then, we’ve had two other stories and… that’s kinda it. Since Glassmaker ended in January of 2021, it’s been nothing but intermissions.

Let’s quickly recap on these tales.

So yeah, I don’t blame you for forgetting the old stories. They honestly weren’t even that amazing. In Nightwave episode 1, the Wolf of Saturn 6 escaped with a bunch of prisoners and ended up not going back to prison. The only interesting tidbit was that the Wolf partially joined up with Alad V and was given Sentient-like damage resistance. As the series went on, the Wolf would attack more regularly, and so would random Saturn Six minions. For some reason, the Wolf also liked attacking Tenno, but as to why, I have no idea.

After that, we had the Emissary,  in which a kid was puppet-ed as a cure to the Infestation, only for it to be nothing but a ruse, allowing all those people to become infected as well. There wasn’t much to say about the Emissary, and we ended up with a mechanic just like Saturn Six prisoners, where infested beings would randomly attack. We ended up getting the Zealoid Prelate boss battle from the end of the Emissary being made permanent.

“Why is Gara not the glassmaker?”

And then we had Glassmaker, which ruined everything for everyone. Instead of just doing random tasks, we were asked to do some detective work. Which would have been absolutely fine had we been in our Warframes. But what we got was a first person view of a crime scene, walking at a snail’s pace and having to pixel-hunt for clues, only to be forced into a memory test immediately afterwards. This put a majority of people off playing Glassmaker, and really spoiled the story. Except the story wasn’t even that interesting. Just an Orokin bastard who wants to glass whoever doesn’t follow his laws, while hiding in the Cephalon version of the internet.

It seemed that Glassmaker was so poorly received that it scared the devs into not including stories any more.

After that, all we got were intermissions.

These days, we just get more and more intermission Nightwave series. The rewards are similar, the cred shop is the same and the various tasks are the same too. There’s just no story attached to them. Simply put, new Nightwave consists of bringing back various things from the three episodic Nightwatches. Then we have your normal QoL things like a Warframe slot and some forma. At level 29 you get an Umbral Forma and a new cosmetic at 30.

Basically, instead of telling tales that we wouldn’t normally here, we just got a repeating loop. And always with the same excuses. They’re simply too busy. So busy in fact that we don’t even get little dioramas any more. But we still get more intermissions, because it’s an easy thing to update and, more importantly, keeps people coming back. Having players content with doing daily and weekly tasks is more important than having to keep on making up new stories.

But I remember those Nightwave tales. And I’d love to have them again.