One thing I actually really like about 1999 is the whole techrot angle. At first it seemed really silly and farfetched that an Entire city just got consumed by giant bug spores but I didn't realize it was an alternate past where entrati manufactured the virus outbreak because he's a massive cunt for some reason lol
What I like about it is the infestation is... Well to be honest it's one of the weakest parts of Warframe as a franchise. All the other stuff is kind of interesting with weird twists but the infestation is literally just every other sci fi hive mind bioweapon ever, it's the tyrannids, it's the dead space necromorph, it's the starship troopers bugs, there's really nothing new or novel there other than I guess the relationship to our warframes... Until it gets put in 1999
The rest of the game are these fantastical sci fi far future tilesets with space ships and corpus angular technology and orokin white and gold, it's completely detached from our view of the world because the orokin destroyed all the old world stuff, but all of a sudden in 1999 things are familiar. You RECOGNIZE this stuff, you could picture going downtown and seeing everything look like that... And the infestation is eating it alive, the techrot.
You get put face to face with what it looks like and how it works, you see a familiar landscape get torn apart almost instantly and everyone panicking or desperately trying to fight it off (and for some reason still finding the time to celebrate new Year's Eve with a scheduled boyband appearance lol)
Halo tried to do a similar thing with the flood when they made the big reveal that the flood were on earth and fucking shit up but it just felt like another generic sci fi shooter level, even people who play the game don't often realize the ramifications of earth being infested, it's just such a bang bang oorah way of engaging with it. It doesn't help of course that every single halo game immediately goes to shit the moment the flood show up and start instagibbing you with perfect accuracy shotgun shots and rockets
Something about Warframe makes it feel different though, more personal, it's like it contextualizes it far more, it gets the right feeling across that wow hĂśllvania is completely fucked and you're just trying to scrounge together the ashes to make the world work again
















