My Love/Hate Relationship with Warframe (1/2)

Warframe is a free-to-play cooperative third-person shooter/melee action video game developed by Digital Extremes for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. In Warframe, players control members of the Tenno, a race of ancient warriors who have awoken from centuries of cryosleep to find themselves at war with different factions. I've experienced the game for over a year. I decided to share my thoughts about the game. In this two part article, I will be covering what I love and hate about the game. This is part one so I will be talking about what I love.

When I asked the community of r/Warframe what they love about the game, most of them answered with constant updates, rich and convoluted lore and variety of choices at their disposal. And it's true. The game is constantly updated to add new weapons, frames (character) and quests.

But first, let's talk about quest. Usually, there are around 4 to 5 quest added every year and 1 story quest. The quests are usually tied to each Warframe's origin story. For example, the latest big update introduced Harrow, a dark priest-themed Warframe. In order to get this new Warframe, players can either buy them with platinum, the game's premium currency or play the quest and farm for his parts. While these Warframe-related quests are fairly enjoyable, what I truly love is the story quests. Oh my, the story quests are amazing! The developers didn't introduce cutscenes in the quests not until 2015's The Second Dream. These story quests explore the lore behind the origin of Tenno (the operator of Warframe) in general and how it ties to the universe. I wish I can talk about it but it will spoil things, a lot.

Now, let's talk about the next things I love, variety of weapons and frames. But first, the weapons. The game features and immense amount of weapons divided into 3 category; primary, secondary and melee. There are rifles, shotguns, snipers, swords, polearms, blade and whip, machete, daggers, dual swords, dual axes, sword and shield, throwable glaives and much more, as far as the human minds can think of. Each of the weapons in the game is unique and not just a lazy reskinned weapons with different stats. Hell, some of them even feature weird, crazy feature like Hema, a zombified monstrosity of a rifle. What's cool about this rifle is that it doesn't use traditional ammo like other rifles in the game. Instead, it sucks the life out of its user to reload its ammo. Luckily, each shot landed on enemies granted its user with health to make up for loss of health for reloading. There are other weird weapons like Lenz, the latest weapon that was added. This one too has a weird feature; it deals both Cold damage and Explosion damage. The point is, there are a lots of weapons to keep you busy.

Let's talk about frames now. There are more than 30 frames in the game and still counting. Each frames have their own 4 abilities and one passive ability. Just like weapons, each frames is unique. My personal favourite, Limbo can enter an alternate plane of reality and stopped taking damage from enemies (unless that enemy is in the same plane as me). Plus, this frame can stop time. How awesome is that? This makes my frame an ideal frame to troll people, which I don't do that. I have other frames to suit my needs. Inaros, a mummy-themed frame can revive himself if he died by sucking the life out of nearby enemies (or ally). There's Nidus, an infested-themed frame that can evolved and become stronger over time. Then there's Octavia, a musical-themed frame where the players can customize her music to their own liking. You get the point. If I want to write about each of them, my fingers might broke. Oh, did I mention that you can mod the stats for each frame and weapons? I'll try and keep this simple so that my fingers still intact, you can mod each frame and weapons to suit your needs. Let's say you're up against weak-to-fire enemies in the next mission, you can make your weapons to deal fire damage using various mods found on missions.

Last but not least, I love the combat and freedom of movement in this game. There is no wrong way to play the game. Let's say, there is a limited time mission where you can only bring a shotgun, but you don't have any good shotgun or mods for it. So, what to do? Simple! Just bring a frame that can summon melee weapons like Excalibur. The fourth ability of Exaclibro (as the players love to call him) allows him to summon Exalted Blade, a sword made out of light that can deal high damage. The combat is easily one of the strongest point of the game, enough said. Not only that, the movement in the game is so satisfying. You can run, slide, bullet jump, aim glide, wall dash and wall latch around the entire map. I've seen some videos on youtube where people dash around the map in split second with the right mods equipped. It's crazy, I tell you.

Thus ends the first part of a two-part article about Warframe. I've explained what I love about the game and I will later write about what I hate about the game. In the meantime, why don't you give the game a try? It's free, available on all platform and more importantly, it's free. You will lose nothing out of it (apart from a few hours of your lives). If you wanted to add me as friend, my in-game name is alcatraz_88. Until then, do leave a comment if you want to. Farewell, for now.