Warframe’s new quest cracks open a galaxy full of weird, wild lore

With a decade’s worth of content to explore, Warframe can be intimidating, especially for those who are just starting out. Players who can put up with the high-octane space-mech killing gameplay and ninja flipping will discover one of the best plots in gaming. The game recently concluded a long-running, highly dramatic plot centered around the Lotus, players’ collective Space Mom. And with Wednesday’s new update, Angels of the Zariman, developer Digital Extremes has opened a new act for a universe that has grown to rival canons like Warhammer 40K.

The world of Warframe takes place in the Origin System — a far-future, very sci-fi version of our Sol system — after the fall of the gilded Orokin Empire. You play the part of an Operator for the Warframes. This is a mecha-organic killing machine that protects innocents against supersoldiers and space hypercapitalists. Warframe also keeps a major part of its core premise secret until about 25 hours in — and the community carefully guards that spoiler from new players.

Image: Digital Extremes

“Our biggest failure rate is how do you get a player from finishing the tutorial to The Second Dream?” community and live operations director Rebecca Ford said in a call with Polygon. “That’s the minefield of ‘Oh, god, will someone make it through’ for us, so that needs some patchwork repair — this update does a pretty good job at removing unnecessary obstacles, but it’s clear to us that getting someone there is what makes them actually like or love Warframe.”

For years, the focus of the game has been on the relationship between the player and the mysterious, maternal Lotus. Ford happens to be the voice behind this character. Now that The New War expansion has resolved that story, Angels of the Zariman is set to crack into several of the other weird, wild parts of the Warframe universe.

And for the uninitiated, Warframe truly does get bizarre, going to places where other games are afraid to tread. You will be accompanied by a group of social revolutionaries on Venus, who use robot bodies and labor to pay off their debt. This quest zone is a major one. A second hub centers around family drama. Except that the family is actually a group of scientists who have been consumed by an alternate reality. This is a bit more complex than the killing of eight boars in a wooded area.

“We make [our characters] as human as possible, under a wrapping paper that feels like it’s on space LSD,” said Ford.

Angels of the Zariman was created to celebrate the victory of The New War but also give us a new start. It’s an exciting transition for the writers team. Ford stated that it was a creative exercise, and also served an audience who has placed more trust in Ford than they might have put in themselves. “As a creator, you’re always questioning your decisions, like ‘is this the right choice?’ But when you have an audience to reinforce things, it makes it a much less lonesome feeling.”

As the release to Angels of the Zariman approached, Digital Extremes’ communications have been “hijacked” by a mysterious figure, and fans are already speculating as to who this could be — and dreaming of how they might be able to befriend him, like we have with many of the other NPCs in the game. Even players who aren’t into the nitty-gritty endgame are banding together to solve Zariman-related ARGs and to wildly speculate on plot ramifications. The players are also taking time to send Signal-Chan, a mysterious character that they have created together with others characters like AI Cephalon Cy, the traumatized spaceship AI Cephalon Cy. (Listen, it’s not as weird as it sounds in a setting like Warframe. )

As for what’s next: We may have seen hints of that in the past, specifically in the 2019 TennoCon trailer for the Duviri Paradox, which showed an older Operator wandering through a realm outside of time and reality. Ford stated that players would be well advised to examine every part of the update in order to discover what possible paradoxes might be created. “We’re very committed to blowing your mind with logic … which won’t make much sense until it happens. There’s one or two details in this update that will serve as a foundation for Duviri. You can find interesting things if you look hard