This past weekend, Digital Extremes held their 4th annual TennoCon for Warframe and its fan. As usual, the Candian developer had plenty of news to share about their free-to-play action game, including what's next for the title.
The full recap of things can be found over on the official website, but here's a quick summary.
- Next Update is Empyrean: space combat will no longer be relegated to just Archwings, when Empyrean arrives, you'll be able to engage in ship-to-ship combat with the new Railjack; but that's only the tip of the iceberg. It seems like Digital Extremes is finally connecting all these disparate pieces (the ground missions, the Archwing stuff) into one whole as you can have friends join you in your Railjack and each person (up to a max of 4 per Railjack) can be in charge of a different job on the ship, such as firing guns, helm/navigation, etc. What's more, those friends can exit the ship using their Archwings, go into enemy ships, eliminate the crew, and pilot that ship themselves. Seeing this stuff in action is pretty impressive. Along with all that, the Empyrean update will also add:
- Two New Warframes - Gauss and Grendel, no word yet on abilities
- Squad Link - during certain missions, you'll be able to call in another squad of players to help out. In the demo (starts around the 27:50 mark in the video below), a squad in space fighting through a Grineer fleet suddenly has to deal with a disruptor field that's based on a nearby planet (Venus, in this case). The space squad puts up a Signal Link and a squad on the ground can respond to it and take out the disruptor field.
- "Kingpin" System (name subject to change) - these are special enemies with special powers that are created when you kill them and will pursue you. Kind of like a new spin on the "Nemesis System" from Shadow of Mordor. The full details for this haven't been provided just yet, but there's an example given around the 19:10 mark in the video.
- The Next Update is Titled "Duviri Paradox" - this was teased at the very end of the Empyrean discussion and will feature a new open-world area that looks pretty crazy.
- The Next Cinematic Storyline, New War, Arrives This December - yeah, I'm not even going to pretend like I know even half of what's going on lore/story-wise in the world of Tennos these days, but it's kinda nuts. The next chapter will arrive "Christmas 2019."
- Limited Time Event Nightwave: Series 2 Is Underway - this is a kind of side story with challenges to complete and rewards to earn. Go forth and get you some loot, I suppose. Details here.
So, yeah. There's a lot going on in Warframe these days and it's all looking pretty good! That new ship combat stuff, in particular, is really impressive. Maybe we'll be checking this out again during one of our weekly "Let's Play Co-Op" Monday night streams.
Warframe is a free-to-play game available on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. Four player online co-op is available in most missions in the game.