Tennocon Assumptions

Time zones suck. All the cool things always seem to happen in time zones that I am not in. One of those many cool things is Tennocon, the big developer stream by Digital Extremes, done live at a real life exhibition in Ontario, Canada, where we are shown all the cool shit that the devs have been working on and plan to release in the near future. The last two Tennocons that I saw brought us the Plains of Eidolon and Fortuna. Fortuna in particular was pretty insane because it started off with the song “We All Lift Together”, which proceeded to get stuck in everyone’s heads for months afterwards.

Considering how cool the last two Tennocons were, this Tennocon is going to be amazing. But I don’t know yet, since it will be 1am on July 7th when I start watching it. So I’m going to make some wild assumptions beforehand, then write a second article once I’ve crawled out of bed at 10am on Sunday to see just how right or wrong I was.

I mean, it has to be. Digital Extremes even went as far as putting a VERY expensive-looking trailer for Warframe in select cinemas showing the new Spider-Man movie, showing off not the teased Railjack stuff but what looks like a tutorial overhaul showing the three starters, Excalibur, Volt and Mag, as well as a scene that was teased on a Dev Stream a while back.

There was also a trailer for Warframe: Empyrean as well, shown at E3. But that was mostly just stuff from the end of last year’s Tennocon, shown at different angles.

So what will I expect to see? Two things mainly. A new tutorial/starter quest for new players and more information on Empyrean. Those are obvious. How much will we see? I have no idea. The starter stuff is a much more recent thing that was teased on Dev Streams and they didn’t seem nearly as far ahead with it as they made out to be. The bigger thing is Empyrean though and the real question is just how far along are they with Empyrean?

Looking back at previous Tennocons, they were a long way off launching Plains of Eidolon and Fortuna, so you would assume that’s the case here, on a system that sort of rewrites how you access Warframe. Less dropping down on a planet and more flying to your next mission. How much of this is real and how much will be loading screens or cut scenes? No one knows. But I have some doubts that we’ll be seeing a complete star chart rework with everything being changed to space ship stuff, especially since it’s already been confirmed that you need to be in a clan to access Railjack stuff.

On the flip side, all of Warframe’s social media has suddenly had a face lift with a new logo, something that only seems to happen when there’s a big update on the way. Sooner rather than later. I really, really doubt we’ll see any real announcements but we might get a date if we are very lucky.

The other things that we might expect are teasers for both the New War and any Sentient related stuff. We’ve already seen footage of a brand new terrain that seems to float eerily and be made out of, uh, Sentient stuff. But aside from locations, things have been pretty quiet on that front. Frankly I think the New War will be more like the teaser for the Sacrifice, a brief thing at the end of the whole stream.

Of course, I could be wildly incorrect on all of this. But that’s the fun of it all, you never know what you might see.

Guess I’ll see you all tomorrow as I hurriedly write a new article, claiming how much of a fool I was…