I will languish in weary solitude until I open up Warframe again

I have a Ko-Fi store for various fandom stuff, including shaker keychains of all playable Warframe characters and stickers of the Elder Scrolls Tribunal as bunnies, and with more ideas brewing!

Examples of what's available under Read More

our second cyberpunk city is so much more on-the-nose with its references. There’s literally a two story tall glowing blue hologram. There’s literally ace through king playing cards you’ll be able to buy 1:1 from the merch store in a year or two.

Our new update seems less interested than ever in the things that make it distinct from what it’s copying — in the Tenno, in the Sentients, in the fact these characters are robots at all.

Warframe operates with a base level of abstraction, particularly in Warframe design. Warframe operates with a base level of re-particularization — it’s not “thank God,” it’s “thank Sol,” it’s a “nikana”, not a “katana”, it’s not a “dog,” it’s a “Kubrow”.

Our new Warframe smokes cigarettes and plays poker with 52 cards and dates Joi from Blade Runner 2049. Is that what’s new?

Despite being a clear sequel to the Old Peace, [DE] not only chose to let you play as the protagonist with zero connection or interest to any of the relevant characters or history, they chose to play them on stage. Is that what’s new? Is the Operator being sidelined for the Build-a-Bear Gooner OC anything new?

This cyberpunk city full of alien robots seems markedly less interested in the concept of transhumanism or even the aesthetic of mechanical bodies than Fortuna was.

our second cyberpunk city is so much more on-the-nose with its references. There’s literally a two story tall glowing blue hologram. There’s literally ace through king playing cards you’ll be able to buy 1:1 from the merch store in a year or two.

Our new update seems less interested than ever in the things that make it distinct from what it’s copying — in the Tenno, in the Sentients, in the fact these characters are robots at all.

Warframe operates with a base level of abstraction, particularly in Warframe design. Warframe operates with a base level of re-particularization — it’s not “thank God,” it’s “thank Sol,” it’s a “nikana”, not a “katana”, it’s not a “dog,” it’s a “Kubrow”.

Our new Warframe smokes cigarettes and plays poker with 52 cards and dates Joi from Blade Runner 2049. Is that what’s new?

Despite being a clear sequel to the Old Peace, [DE] not only chose to let you play as the protagonist with zero connection or interest to any of the relevant characters or history, they chose to play them on stage. Is that what’s new? Is the Operator being sidelined for the Build-a-Bear Gooner OC anything new?

This cyberpunk city full of alien robots seems markedly less interested in the concept of transhumanism or even the aesthetic of mechanical bodies than Fortuna was.

sentients, while originally being mere machines, were isolated in tau, an otherwise empty system, long enough to develop both sapience and their own full society. we were given hints of this as early as the natah quest; it's been established for a very long time that sentients are natives to tau in all the ways that matter.

the game uses the phrasing of the orokin wanting to "colonize" tau, but it wasn't (originally) colonialism in the way europe colonized the americas, aka, chasing out an established people. the sentients were sent there as terraforming machines; they didn't conquer anyone.

buuuuut... the sentients are stated to have been living independently, cut off from the orokin, developing their own society, mores, family structures, etc, for a very long time before they jumped back to the origin system and instigated war with the orokin.

as an aside: the recent writing has been playing extremely fast and loose with established orokin-era lore. the old peace in particular does not actually fit into the timeline in any sensical way; via the lotus herself the tenno were locked away in the second dream by margulis before the war started (the final convo in the second dream quest), and did not have access to transference without the somatic link until teshin's aid in the modern era. margulis was executed for her blasphemy before the warframe project was fully realized, so she couldnt have been alive on tau during the peace era as it was presented. etc. i have seen some people speculate that the entire old peace quest was falsely constructed memories for some reason, because of loid's line about poisoned histories, but that's a reach, given everything about the quest is presented to us entirely straight with nothing "suspicious", such as glitches or static or anything else odd, just the narrative inconsistency. it's far more parsimonious to regard that as poor writing, courtesy of bringing in a dark romantasy writer and giving her narrative control over a niche scifi game with ten years of intricate established lore. but i digress.

so youve got the sentients, a people from a distant land where theyve been living for generations (or the sentient equivalent thereof), who realized that the orokin were still planning to move to tau and stripmine it the way theyd stripmined their own system. and they were like "uh, no, we're not letting you do that here" and started the war. with the explicit motivation of wanting to protect their homeland from colonization and exploitation. much like how indigenous americans fought to protect their homelands from the colonizing forces of the europeans pushing further and further west.

this is all established before the old peace, but that quest made the coding extremely explicit. there's the peace treaty itself, echoing the many, many peace treaties europeans signed and subsequently violated whenever they wanted more land. there's adis's name being "truth-bloom", which echoes indigenous naming conventions (a few historical indigenous names: Spotted Elk, Sitting Bull, Scarlet Point, Little Crow). there's the fact that adis is being deliberately trained in the ways of the colonizers so he can impress them enough to think it's worthwhile to not murder his whole species. he's literally wearing a mask and pretending to be human (white), because the orokin don't respect his personhood as a sentient (native person). there's the deliberate wholescale poisoning of the blooms, a native species that was intrinsic to the indigenous way of life, as a method of crippling their ability to resist colonization (see: the mass slaughter of the bison that were central to so many plains societies.)

i am trying very hard to be straightforward and not condescending, and i apologize if my tone dips sarcastic. but the parallels, while almost certainly not deliberate, are pretty plentiful.

and when i say "not deliberate", what i mean is i don't think the warframe team set out to tell a story about colonizers conquering and genociding an indigenous people. if that had been their intention, we would have... well, soulframe, lol.

Sand Of Inaros. Part 1 25 to 40

what are they talkin about

-

Had some bad artblock recently so I drew Volt, my like 4th favorite warframe... I want to get better at the organic style of the characters. Finally had time to fully get back into the game, I've been reminded why I consider it my favorite.