Tennolive 2023 – What Did I Just Watch

I’m writing this article literally as Tennocon ends. I’ve just watched Tennolive, the big hype event that teases what’s coming up next in Warframe. This year is special because it’s all brand new stuff that we’ve not seen before. It’s all completely and utterly new. And I’m still not really sure what I just watched.

Okay so it kinda started off as normal. We see a trailer of some Entrati stuff, with a weird hint of year 2000 technology. Like, computers we use, rather than fancy far-future stuff. Oh and there’s a giant head in the middle of the room. And we go through all sorts of weird shit. We start off in Necraloid’s secret back room, and everything changes and we follow a giant staircase, downwards into, I don’t know, Entrati environments, except completely clear of infested. Instead, we fight new Necramech enemies for a bit.

But as we wander through this place, suddenly we end up in a place called The Indifference. This place is weird and desolate and sandy. Kinda like the void but not at all. And it’s filled with weird new enemies called the Murmur. It’s all weird and we run into an enemy called The Fractured One, which is basically a load of chests and limbs all coming together to attack you. It all falls apart though and you keep on going. We run around and walk through a weird Entrati subway, then find a phone that is ringing. A phone just like an early 2000’s phone.

We then wake up the original Loid, and we take a portal back to the room with the giant head in it. Somehow, our Tenno can operate the normal-looking computers. We do that, and then we suddenly break transference. Our Excalibur slumps to the floor in a rather familiar way. But suddenly, that giant head seems to wake up. It seems as though we have used transference to control this giant head in some way.

But then something else happens. Not related to the fact that you’ve used transference and are now controlling that giant head back from the start. This is the bit that really blew my brain.

We find ourselves in some sort of abandoned subway. Like, modern times subway. Well, more late 90’s. And we see someone who looks like Hayden Tenno from Dark Sector but is called Arthur, fighting a bunch of what look like infested except mechanical. And we’re fighting in an urban environment, a subway. We speak to some woman called Aio via a radio, and then fight a bunch of enemies. Arthur looks a lot like a Warframe but with his normal head, not a helmet or anything, and is using a modern day rifle. He makes it through the subway into a slightly more open area, and meets… Albrecht Entrati. Suddenly things get all weird, and Albrecht says that we are late.

Then the stream ends on a dead screen on a dead enemy, with the following words: Warframe 1999.

As in, the year 1999.

Warframe, a game set in the far future, suddenly being set in 1999. And is coming out some time in 2024.

My mind has been blown. I am still trying to digest this.