As of March 24, Warframe’s newest update, Operation Scarlet Spear is now out with new content for the free seven-year-old MMO game.
My personal experience with Warframe stretches a number of years back when I was first getting into gaming and Warframe as a MMO was within my peripheral vision. I thought that the combat looked interesting and the visuals were cool, but it was bogged down with monetization techniques that you would more often see in mobile games. One of the biggest reasons why I stopped in the first place was that nearly everything you get needs to be crafted for use to be used with often 12 to 24-hour wait-times for nearly everything in the game. If you wanted a new warframe (which are essentially the different classes in the game), you would first have to craft each essential part of the warframe, taking 12 hours each to make, and then put it all together into the end product which the wait time for a finalized warframe is 72 hours.
After that experience, my interest in the game dwindled extremely quickly because it would often take literal days before I could get new things to play around with.
While all of that is still in the game, it is mitigated by the addition of a couple of things that I either wasn’t able to do before or simply didn’t notice. One of the core parts of the Warframe experience— besides the wait times — that would put anyone to sleep are the quests that are unlocked by opening up the map.
Many of these quests lead to interesting tidbits about the lore of the world and even give you warframes to mess around with. Despite the, frankly, hilariously poorly-written dialogue that would make George Lucas blush, the lore of the world is pretty interesting and lends to the expansion of the world that I initially didn’t expect. There is an odd amount of insight into the history of the world that I personally didn’t see coming, though it was pretty difficult to ingest some of the knowledge because again, the dialogue was so bad for many of the quests that I could barely contain my laughter for a lot of it.
One of the main characters of the game is The Lotus. A character so stunning and beloved that many of the people that I spoke to said that they wished they could replace her because her delivery is so flat.
Most of that, however, can be blamed on the history of Warframe. Warframe’s conception seven years ago was a rocky one. The initial meager team of Digital Extremes was constantly rejected for their idea for Warframe because at the time, Sci-Fi settings for MMOs were extremely unpopular at the time and no investors were interested in their idea. They were running low on money but decided to make the game with what they had. Obviously, they couldn’t afford professional voice actors for the game. So, a good majority of them were done in house by parts of the team. Some people who work for Digital Extremes place a lot of credit for Warframe’s early success on a review made a long time ago by the late John Bain also known as Totalbiscuit that threw their game into an unexpected spotlight that helped elevate their game to where it is now.
Nowadays, with the more recent content, it is clear that they are on a roll. There are the Plains of Eidolon and The Orb Vallis—two open worlds whose structure for many was a breath of fresh air that even brought in massive bosses for players to fight. There is Nightwave, a quest system that is open for everyone to do that both fleshes out the world and rewards the player for doing even mundane tasks that pretty much any player can do. Very recently, they’ve added a new quest called The New War that ushered in both the Railjack, a four-player vessel that can be used for completely different missions that are unable to be done in the standard mission format, and now the most recent Scarlet Spear missions that require two groups of up to four players to work together: four in the new Railjack that follow the new structure of ship missions and four on the ground that follows the old format of missions.
In Scarlet Spear, a big enemy is trying to destroy life in the solar system, so you and up to three other players work together in the Railjack to take down his massive ships by destroying his troops which consist of rather difficult to kill enemies that can board your Railjack. After that, you can board one of his ships. Once you enter one of his ships, you are then led to a particular spot onboard where you place something called an oplink which implants data into the ship that will drive it away. If you’re on the ground, you and up to three other players are tasked with collecting kill codes to send to the Railjack team while being attacked by, again, rather difficult enemies.
If I were to go into further detail about the missions I’d spoil parts of the plot that, if you were to play the game, is rather important to understand before accessing Scarlet Spear.
Scarlet Spear, while not exactly endgame content, is one of the more involved missions in Warframe. There is currently no other game-mode that allows you to cooperate with 7 people even considering the fact that the group is split into entirely different missions.
I am interested in seeing where this game goes from here.
Edward Park is a third-year student majoring in English education. EP909756@wcupa.edu
[…] As of March 24, Warframe’s newest update, Operation Scarlet Spear is now out with new content for the free seven-year-old MMO game. My personal experience with Warframe stretches a number of years back when I was first getting into gaming and Warframe as a MMO was within my peripheral vision. I thought that the combat … Source […]