Warframe facts for kids
Quick facts for kids Warframe |
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Storefront artwork, featuring four of the game's various playable Warframes; from left to right: Excalibur, Ember, Loki, and Rhino
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| Developer(s) | Digital Extremes |
| Publisher(s) | Digital Extremes |
| Director(s) | Rebecca Ford Pablo Alonso Steve Sinclair (former) Scott McGregor (former) |
| Producer(s) | Dave Kudirka Pat Kudirka |
| Designer(s) | Ben Edney Mitch Gladney Joey Adey Jonathan Gogul |
| Programmer(s) | James Silvia-Rogers Glen Miner |
| Artist(s) | Michael Brennan Ron Davey Mat Tremblay Geoff Crookes |
| Writer(s) | Cam Rogers |
| Composer(s) | Keith Power George Spanos |
| Engine | Evolution |
| Platform(s) | |
| Release date(s) |
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| Genre(s) | Action role-playing, third-person shooter |
| Mode(s) | Single-player, multiplayer |
Warframe is a free-to-play action role-playing third-person shooter multiplayer online game developed and published by Digital Extremes. First released for Windows personal computers in March 2013, it was later ported to PlayStation 4 in November 2013, Xbox One in September 2014, Nintendo Switch in November 2018, PlayStation 5 in November 2020, and Xbox Series X/S in April 2021. Support for cross-platform play was released in 2022. Cross-save, as well as ports to mobile devices, is planned for 2023. The game is in a perpetual open beta.
In Warframe, players control members of the Tenno, a race of ancient warriors who have awoken from centuries of suspended animation far into Earth's future to find themselves at war with different factions in the Origin System. The Tenno use their powered Warframes along with a variety of weapons and abilities to complete missions. While many of the game's missions use procedurally-generated levels, it also includes large open world areas similar to other massively multiplayer online games, as well as some story-specific missions with fixed level design. The game includes elements of shooting and melee games, parkour, and role-playing to allow players to advance their Tenno with improved gear. The game includes both player versus environment and player versus player elements. It is supported by microtransactions, which lets players purchase in-game items using real money, but also offers the option to earn them at no cost through grinding.
The concept for Warframe originated in 2000, when Digital Extremes began work on a new game titled Dark Sector. At the time, the company had been successful in supporting other developers and publishers and wanted to develop its game in-house. Dark Sector suffered several delays and was eventually released in 2008, having used some of the initial framework but far different from the original plan. By 2012, in the wake of the success of free-to-play games, the developers took their earlier Dark Sector ideas and art assets and incorporated them into a new project, their self-published Warframe.
Initially, the growth of Warframe was slow, hindered by moderate critical reviews and low player counts. Since its release, the game has experienced positive growth. The game is one of Digital Extremes' most successful titles, seeing nearly 50 million registered players by 2019.
Setting
Set in the future, players control members of the Tenno, a race of ancient warriors who have awoken from a millennia-long cryosleep on Earth without memories of their past. In the Origin System (an in-game term for the Solar System), they find themselves at war with the Grineer, a matriarchal race of militarized and deteriorated human clones built upon metal, blood, and war; the Corpus, a mega-corporation with advanced robotics and laser technology built upon profit; the Infested, victims of the Technocyte virus; the Sentients, a race of self-replicating machines made by a long-dead transhuman race known as the Orokin; and the Corrupted, brainwashed Grineer, Corpus, and Infested units defending ancient Orokin towers. The Lotus, Tenno's mysterious guide, helps the player through difficult situations, as well as gives hints which help them defeat enemies. To fight back, the Tenno use bio-mechanical suits, the eponymous Warframes, to channel their unique abilities.
All of the factions encountered in the game, including the Tenno, were created by or are splinter groups of the old Orokin Empire, which the Tenno learns was an ancient fallen civilization and former reigning power in the Origin System. Although most of them are long dead by the time of the Tenno's awakening, their lingering presence can still be felt throughout the Origin System. Before their fall, the Orokin had realized the Origin System was becoming dangerously depleted of resources, and their solution to keep their empire alive was to colonize new star systems. The Orokin sent out colony ships through the Void, a trans-dimensional space that enabled fast travel between stellar systems. They had also sent out the Sentients beforehand, to arrive in these systems first, and terraform them, so the colonists would arrive to garden worlds, capable of supporting human life. None of these residential ships returned, and those they had loaded with Sentients returned with the Sentients now deciding to wipe out the Orokin, leading to the Old War, the creation of the Tenno, and finally, the collapse of the Empire.
In the game's "The Second Dream" quest, which was introduced in December 2015, the player discovers that the Lotus is a Sentient being known as Natah, rebelling against the Sentient to protect the Tenno, desiring to have her surrogate children after losing her ability to procreate. The Lotus' father, Hunhow, sends a vengeful assassin called the Stalker to Lua (the remains of Earth's Moon), which the Lotus had hidden in the Void, to find its secret. The Lotus dispatches the Tenno there to stop the Stalker, arriving too late as the Stalker unveils the entity that the Lotus had protected: a human child known as the Operator, who is the real Tenno controlling the Warframes through the course of the game. The Operator is one of several human children that survived the passage of the Zariman Ten Zero colony ship through the Void, the adults have all gone mad from its travel. When the ship returned to the Orokin Empire, the children had all been put to sleep for thousands of years, outlasting the fall of the Empire, to be found by the Lotus and becoming the Tenno (Tenno short for the "Ten Zero" of the ship's name). The power of the Void gave these children the power of Transference to be able to control the Warframes, making them powerful weapons in battling the ongoing forces in the Origin System. From this point forward, the player can then engage in missions both as the Warframe and the Operator.
Throughout various updates, various quests have been released after the Second Dream that elaborates on the story. "The War Within" quest introduced the Grineer Queens, rulers of the Grineer, and their asteroid-based Kuva Fortress, also giving the Operator the ability to act fully on their own as another playable entity, rather than a single-use attack. Quests afterward would introduce figures such as "The Man In The Wall," a mysterious entity, presumably from the Void, who takes on the visage of whoever sees them, most often as the playable Operator, and Ballas, one of the last living Orokin, assumed to be responsible for creating the Warframes.
Gameplay
Warframe is an online action game that includes elements of shooters, RPG, and stealth games.
The player starts with a silent pseudo-protagonist in the form of an anthropomorphous biomechanical combat unit called 'Warframe' possessing supernatural agility and special abilities, a selection of basic weapons (primary, secondary, and melee) and a space ship called an 'Orbiter', which has an A.I. named 'Ordis' who will refer to the player as 'Operator'. The player's primary goal from this point is to explore the Origin System. Later in the course of the game, the player unlocks the ability to gain direct control of the 'Operator', which is the true Tenno protagonist in physical form (and no longer silent). The Operator can physically manifest themselves in the environment by projecting out of the Warframe, disappear by resuming control of it (a process called 'Transference'), and possesses abilities of their own. After that, the Operator can Transference into a larger, purely mechanical combat unit called 'Necramech', which is the technological precursor to the Warframes. Players can engage in space-bound combat using an auxiliary combat platform called 'Archwing', mounted on a Warframe, which comes with a unique set of abilities. Necramechs and Archwings (in space combat) do not use Warframe weapons, but heavy weapons called 'Archguns', which can be upgraded to be used by Warframes. Late in 2019, an update was introduced to the game letting players pilot and manage a distinct spaceship called 'Railjack', which is a combat vessel, unlike the Orbiter. This was designed as a co-op experience with up to four people working together, performing different tasks to keep the ship operational while destroying enemy ships. A Railjack-focused update was released in 2021, which brought expanded content and a new skill tree aimed at making solo play more accessible.
Through the Orbiter's console, the player can select any of the available missions to them. To progress through the Solar System, players must complete Junctions to travel to other planets. These Junctions have a set of tasks that must be met to access the Junction, where the player faces off against an NPC Warframe. Other missions rotate over time as part of the game's living universe; these can include missions with special rewards and community challenges to allow all players to reap benefits if they are successfully met. Aboard the ship, the player can also manage all other functions for their Tenno, including managing their arsenal of equipment, customizing their Warframe and weapons, crafting new equipment, and accessing the in-game store. Missions can be played alone or with up to four players in a player versus environment cooperative manner, and are generally played on randomly generated maps composed of "tiles" of map sections. Missions have various objectives, such as defeating a certain number of enemies (Exterminate), stealing data from terminals without raising enemy alarms (Spy), rescuing and escorting prisoners (Rescue), or defending points on the map for set periods (Defense). Later updates have added three large open-field environments where numerous bounties can be completed.
Players can use their weapons, abilities, and several parkour style moves to navigate through and overpower forces within the mission. Downed players may choose to revive themselves up to a maximum of four times, or can be revived by other players an infinite number of times. Once complete, players are rewarded with in-game items, as well as in-game currency and items picked up while exploring the map; failure to complete a mission causes these rewards to be lost. In addition to cooperative missions, the game includes player versus player (PvP) content through the multiplayer 'Conclave', which also rewards the player for placing high in such matches.
Players and their equipment also gain experience and level up from missions; equipment with higher levels support more 'Mods', abstracted upgrades (presented as cards in the game's UI) that can be slotted into the equipment to change its attributes or provide benefits, or sometimes negative, bonuses and abilities. Mods are dropped by enemies during missions and may be part of the rewards, and are generally given out following a rarity distribution, with more powerful mods being more elusive to acquire. The most advanced weapon Mods, called 'Riven Mods,' have randomized stats, based on a prefix/suffix system characteristic of ARPGs. Alongside mods, players have other means of improving their equipment, including conditional upgrades called Arcane Enhancements and, for a few weapons, fusing an item with another of its kind to get a superior version. Another type of reward is equipment blueprints, which can be used to construct new Warframe parts or weapons; blueprints and their resulting equipment may also be purchased directly using Platinum, the game's premium currency that can be traded for with other players for rare items in-game, or be purchased via microtransactions. Players need to have specific quantities of construction resources (found from missions and their rewards) to build these items.
Warframe is designed to be free-to-play, and has avoided using pay to win elements; all Warframes, weapons, and other non-cosmetic equipment can be acquired in-game over time through normal gameplay, which may involve grinding. Spending the in-game currency can simplify and quicken the process. New weapons, Warframes, equipment, and blueprints to construct such equipment and cosmetics like skins and capes (called 'Syandanas') can be purchased in the market, using either Credit, which are earned in-game, or Platinum. Some cosmetic items can only be obtained through in-game payments. However, some indirect upgrades can only be bought with Platinum, such as arsenal slots for Warframes, weapons, and certain other equipment, though they can be unlocked via a "Nightwave" battle pass-esque reward system, which is completely free.
See also
In Spanish: Warframe para niños
