vayn

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

Every open is a cold open. Loid doesn’t tell you what’s going on at all, halfway through the new war you don’t even know who you are playing as or what your objective is, and Stalker simply appears in the middle of the orb vallis and shoots some gun.

This works for the sake of quests like the arthur section of WITW or The Hex itself where a cold open allows for an extremely sharp contrast from what you’re normally used to.

It also works for The New War because the quest starts with a series of three separate cold opens that when stitched together actually form a long, slow burn opening showing the war itself and slowly establishing the stakes of the story.

Every bit of explanation or characterization is hidden away in places the average player won’t go, or triggered by a mechanism that you would only think to fund out by going onto the wiki.

Isleweaver requires you to go out of your way into places you probably won’t even be able to reach in time if you’re playing with a public squad for secrets you wouldn’t come across on your own.

Jade Shadows famously included a not so well written female character whose story and voice we only heard through a story hidden in relays up until the most recent quest.

If you want to find out literally anything about why alad v is infested and also amalgam and also normal as a new player without consulting the wiki, good luck because that’s almost all hidden behind events that already happened.

This severely alienates anyone who prefers to understand a game within said game by experiencing it themselves, let alone people who don’t like reading essays in the middle of action heavy games, let alone people who prefer dialogue and exposition over paragraphs.

Every quest is as short as humanly possible. I understand that this is on purpose so that players can get to the content faster, but it really hurts the quality of quests. Most quests leave players with one emotion; “okay but what the fuck actually just happened”.

Look at the responses to Angels of the Zariman, The Duviri Paradox, even The New War. It’s like they heard the phrase “show don’t tell” but forgot to show in a way that actually makes sense. It feels impossible to explain lore to people because I’m not even sure I know what the lore is.

TennoCon2026 Community Art Showcase submission.