Warframe: The New War preview

The New War is both the culmination of years of storytelling and the abandonment of Warframe's most cherished secrets.

Every major Warframe update has changed the game. The Second Dream introduced players to themselves for the very first time. The Plains of Eidolon gave Warframe its first open world. Railjack brought ship-to-ship combat in deep space battles. But The New War is different. It’s both the culmination of years of storytelling and the abandonment of Warframe‘s most cherished secrets. You are not the biomechanical ninja deftly hacking and blasting its way through hordes of enemies, but actually a small child cursed with supernatural abilities and caught in a battle for survival centuries old. 

New War sets a different tone for Warframe–a darker, more desperate story that brings perspective to factions that Warframe players have thus far considered mostly cannon fodder. While previous open-world expansions and limited-time events gave us glimpses into the rest of Warframe’s universe, The New War aims to tell a story that’s bigger than the player.

To tell that story, developer Digital Extremes has focused its efforts towards something that hasn’t been in Warframe for a long time: a narrative, single-player experience. Warframe’s bread and butter gameplay has always been high-octane co-operative action, with recent years even propelling the game to almost Musou-levels of mayhem, but not The New War. Instead, the Sentient invasion will be told through the eyes of three non-player characters that the player will temporarily control.

The first is Kahl-175, a Grineer trooper that was first introduced at TennoCon 2021. Unlike the Tenno who control the biomechanical ninjas called Warframes, Kahl is just a lowly clone soldier without fantastic powers to save him from marauding Sentients. All he has are his fists and his gun, which hardly seems enough in the face of genocidal robots called Sentients.

Next is Veso, a lowly tech working for the ultra-capitalist Corpus faction. Like Kahl, Veso is nobody special–although he has access to fantastic Corpus tech, it’s still nothing compared to what the Sentients unleash on his vessel. Veso’s survival depends entirely on his wits and the benevolence of his corporate overlords. 

Finally, there’s Teshin. A powerful Old War-era Dax soldier who was once a personal bodyguard to the opulent Orokin, Teshin has since allied himself with the Tenno in their fight to free the system from Sentient oppression. Of the three, Teshin is most similar in capability to the Warframes he fights alongside. 

Because each of these characters are far less powerful than a typical Warframe, The New War‘s gameplay will be necessarily slower, more methodical, but ripe with opportunity for storytelling.

Unlike recent Warframe content drops, The New War isn’t meant for newcomers. To access The New War, players will have to complete all of Warframe’s main story quests and also unlock the Railjack spaceship, the Necramech from the Heart of Deimos expansion, the Archwing, and perhaps Warframe’s best-kept secret, the Operator.

For most of Warframe’s eight-year history, players assumed they were humans wearing an ultra-high-tech armored suit, like Iron Man from thousands of years in the future. Only after completing The Second Dream does the player learn that they’re actually just a small child using fantastical powers to control their chosen Warframe from a distance, safely ensconced in a Matrix-like pod that broadcasts their presence throughout the cosmos.

It was a secret that both veteran players and Digital Extremes itself kept from new players for years, but with The New War, that secret is laid bare. Not only does the preview trailer reveal The Operator erupting from the blasted chest of her Warframe, but The New War will go even further to show the very origins of the Tenno.

The Zariman Ten Zero has been something that Digital Extremes has been trying to revisit for two years. Ever since being revealed at TennoCon 2019, Warframe players have been wondering when we’ll be able to board the Zariman, a mythical figure in Warframe‘s lore and the origin of the word Tenno (10-0). Part of The New War’s story will bring players back in time to before the colony ship Zariman Ten Zero became lost in the Void, before its crew returned either dead or gifted with incredible powers. Before the Orokin turned the survivors into weapons to fight against the Sentients in The Old War.

Digital Extremes promised that not every secret will be revealed in The New War, but many of Warframe’s biggest mysteries will be solved with New War’s arrival.

Although this expansion seems to diverge from Warframe’s titular biomechanical ninjas, it wouldn’t be an expansion without a new Warframe. Caliban will arrive with The New War as the game’s 48th Warframe, a number that doesn’t seem to phase Digital Extremes Live Operations Manager Rebecca Ford. 

“If the Orikin can make them, we can make them,” Rebecca tells USA Today in a brief interview. “We’re setting ourselves up for a really fun year next year because we’ll have Warframe number 50. So we are very aware of what the future holds for that, especially with regards to our 50th.” 

Fitting the theme of The New War, Caliban is a fusion of Tenno and Sentient technology. Like the Sentients he fights, Caliban features a self-contained energy core between his two halves and a lanky, almost bird-like stature. He attacks much like the Sentients do, with powerful light beams and a tornado-style spin attack that deals increasing damage over time. He can also call upon his own Sentient combatants to do his bidding.

Harrow, the Gun Priest Warframe, will receive its Prime version with The New War, and both Mesa and Volt will receive Sentient-themed deluxe skins to perhaps fool the Sentient hordes that players will be facing. 

But these almost minor content drops are mere sideshows. It’s the story that drives this production, and one that will drive Warframe from this point forward. The New War will serve as “a new fundamental progression point” for the Warframe community, one that ties together the many disparate plot points from Warframe‘s past, and one that will influence everything that happens in the game for the rest of 2022. The New War will result in a few immediate changes to Warframe‘s Starchart after players complete its three-act quest, and then the real war for the Origin System will begin next year.

The New War arrives on all platforms Dec. 15.

Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.