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

With a decade’s worth of content to explore, WarframeFor those just beginning, it can be daunting. The most interesting plot in the game is for those who have the patience to look beyond high-octane space-mech-murder gameplay and ninja flipping. 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 title role as an Operator in the Warframes. These mecha-organic killer machines are used to kill innocent people. 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.

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“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 main focus of the game was the player’s relationship with an enigmatic, maternal figure known as the Lotus, who happens to be voiced by Ford. Angels of the Zariman has now resolved the story and is ready to explore other wild, strange parts of the game. Warframe universe.

For the inexperienced: WarframeIt’s quite a challenge to go to areas that other games don’t allow. You will be accompanied by a group of social revolutionaries, who live in a Venus debt colony. They use robot bodies to work and pay off their debt. This quest area 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. It’s a little more cerebral than killing eight boars in the woods.

“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 is a victory lap following The New War. It also represents a fresh start. As such, it’s an interesting transition for the writing team. “It was an exercise in creative fulfillment, but also serving an audience that has put more trust in you than you might have in yourself,” said Ford. “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. They’re also taking the time to ship a new ominous character (dubbed Signal-Chan) with other characters, like the traumatized ship 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. “Players will be wise to inspect every aspect of this update to see what paradoxes could be born,” Ford said. “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. If you know where to look, you’ll perhaps find something of interest if the Duviri Paradox caught your eye.”