Last night in London, Ontario, Canada (this morning in Australia and New Zealand), developer Digital Extremes held its TennoLive developer presentation. As part of the TennoCon fan event, TennoLive was held in front of live and digital audiences.
If you recall this time last year, the developers announced the extremely successful expansion ‘The Plains of Eidolon’, which attracted a huge new audience to the game. This year’s announcements are likely to continue that trend.
The presentation kicked off with a reminder that Twitch viewers would be gifted Ash Prime; a deluxe version of one of the game’s warframes. Continuing with the Twitch partnership, there will be more giveaways on Prime Day, starting July 12.
At this stage, it’s not yet understood how long this offer will last. During this promotion, Warframe players with a linked Twitch Prime account will be gifted a Liset (ship) skin and colour palette through the service.
TennoLive 2018
Next, it was announced that Warframe will be coming to Nintendo Switch. The crowd went wild for this one.
Nintendo’s popular console seems to be getting all the good free-to-play games; Fortnite, Paladins, Arena of Valor (soon) and now Warframe. The Switch looks to be becoming a portable powerhouse for multiplayer gaming on the go.
This port will be developed by Panic Button, who also ported DOOM, Wolfenstein The New Colossus and Rocket League to the Switch.
No release date was announced, nor was there any mention of account cross-play, which would be of importance to those of us who already have hundreds of hours under our belt.
All the Cosmetics
Following this announcement, there were a couple of quick initial displays of upcoming skins and warframes.
- New deluxe skins coming for Nyx, Vauban, Limbo, Titania, Nezha, and Nidus; all of which looked particularly impressive
- Two new warframes were shown off
- The Revenant, which was announced during a previous DevStream and is vampire-themed
- All-new warframe, codenamed Garuda, which will have a gore theme
These initial announcements are not really insignificant themselves. The Warframe community thrives on these details.
Digital Extremes then went on to outline three very impressive new expansions, all coming to Warframe in the future.
Fortuna represents the next planetary expansion per ‘The Plains of Eidolon’. Whereas that expansion was on Earth and focused on the Grineer faction, Fortuna will take place on Venus, and will focus on the Corpus enemy faction.
The announcement trailer — above — is somewhat Western-themed and players will be supporting Solaris United; a group of body-augmented people who work in slavery to the Corpus (specifically Nef Anyo).
As part of this expansion, players will be able to create their own secondary weapon. Creating weapons is done via a modular weapon system called Kitguns. Companions will us a similar modular build-a-pet component.
Spearfishing also looks to be making a return, although it is understood that the fish themselves will be technological this time. I noticed a reference to “servofish”. Beyond this, though, DE has added a hunting mode.
Here players will equip a sound lure and tranquiliser to capture and rescue local wildlife – channel your inner conservationist!
The new open-world location will, of course, come with new set mods, new bounties — which can now be collected within the environment — and new enemies to confront. This includes terrifying spider monsters that already look annoying.
The new location itself, The Orb Vallis, is absolutely gorgeous, and apparently much larger than The Plains. As such DE has added a new form of locomotion – hoverboards, which they are referring to as the Bondi K-Drive.
Yes, you can do some basic tricks while riding these about. Fortuna is packed to the brim with impressive new features and is due out in 2018.
The Railjack expansion’s release date is unknown. This mode is early in development and remains a codename at this stage. It appears far more ambitious and represents a more co-operative approach to multiplayer than has yet been experienced in Warframe.
In this mode, players team up with friends to control a “trans-planet warship”, which essentially allows players to wage war against other warships. This mode is intended to allow players to take control of the solar rails that provide access to the different areas of the Star Chart, although how this will work in practice remains to be seen.
The live demo showed players transitioning from Venus to space over Venus in order to take down a starship that was bombing the planet, although this may have been used for demo purposes only. Here, players can directly control the starship, man weapons stations to shoot down smaller fighters (think Star Wars/Trek), with the goal for a single player to eventually infiltrate the opposing starship in order to take it down from the inside.
There were other features shown off in the demo — the ability to direct ship power to shields or weapons etc or to hack the opposing starship to support infiltration — but clearly, the focus here was intense coordination between players, and I am very much looking forward to this mode being added to the game.
I don’t think I’m alone on that.
Finally, we have The New War. This represents the continuation of the cinematic story quests. The original trilogy has just ended with the release of The Sacrifice. The New War represents the next chapter. Not much else needs to be said for fear of spoiling the current storyline, but for players in the know – this was an epic reveal.
I’ve embedded the video below, but SPOILERS IF YOU HAVEN’T PLAYED THE SACRIFICE.
As part of an ongoing tradition of charity, Digital Extremes donated $200,000 CAD to a local charity; this year – Canada Learning Code) Further, it gave away 100,000 platinum (in-game currency) to both a live attendee and a single very lucky viewer on Twitch.
Everything that was shown off in today’s TennoLive presentation was highly impressive. Regardless of whether you are already a player or not I implore you to check out the whole stream below.
For existing players, though, these expansions represent new life in a game that has already sustained many of us for hundreds of hours.
