Warframe will get two expansions over the next two years, developer Digital Extremes said this weekend. The first, called Fortuna, includes a new cyberpunk-themed open-world area on Venus and will arrive before the end of the year. The second, planned for 2019, is an entirely new mode, currently called âCodename: Railjack,â that will let teams of players crew warships in space in the vein of Sea of Thieves
The Fortuna expansion, which doesnât yet have a release date, will be geared around Solaris United, a new faction of cyborgs that control the âBlade-Runner-esqueâ Debt Internment Colony on Venus. This is the underground hub area where players will be able to interact and trade the loot theyâve been collecting on the planetâs surface. The Orb Vallisâbecause Digital Extremes never passes up an opportunity to try and outdo Destinyâs maze of proper nounsâis what this open world surface area will be called. There, as in the current area Plains of Eidolon, players will be instanced with one another and allowed to freely roam around hunting for rare items, taking down monsters, and engaging with whatever other hostile alien forces are on the loose. In addition to new spider robot enemies and exotic animals, Orb Vallis will also have another awesome addition: hoverboards.
But while Fortuna looks to build on ideas already introduced to the game last year, Codename: Railjack looks completely different from anything Warframe has done before and for that reason has me very excited. Digital Extremes, which showed off an 11-minute demo of the mode over the weekend at TennoCon 2018, the gameâs annual convention, says up to four players will be able to group up, hop on a ship together, and then âfly seamlessly into space.â Each person onboard will have a unique role, like piloting the ship, controlling the laser turrets, or managing shields and repairs. The aim in this mode will apparently be to discover, board, and ultimately take control of various AI-controlled enemy ships. Once close enough, players can launch Archwings (bigger mech suits that go overtop of your Warframe mech suit) to get inside these vessels and complete objectives like they normally would on any other map. While each of the pieces looks familiar, the way Digital Extremes is trying to combine them for Railjack feels like an exciting new evolution for the game thatâs all about movement and exploration.
Warframe has been an incredibly slow burn. When it launched in 2014 it was hard to tell apart from all the other free-to-play shooters being tossed out onto PC and console at the time. The game managed to find a small but committed player-base passionate enough to continue spending money on in-game purchases to keep it afloat while Digital Extremes continued to refine it. This culminated in last yearâs graphical overhaul with the Chains of Harrow update, followed by the Plains of Eidolon in the fall. On Steam, the number of concurrent players finally broke 100,000 in September 2017 and as a result the game currently sits at number six on the Steam Charts. Also available on PS4 and Xbox One, Warframe will be coming to Switch in the undetermined future, the studio announced at the event.
While stretching modest, piecemeal updates out over the course of several years isnât ideal on paper, the game has benefited immensely from this extended timeline and lack of over the moon expectations. Rather than try to rush out Warframe 2, Digital Extremesâ has been able to continue adding new items, areas, and mission types to a base game just on the revenue it makes off its microtransaction economy alone. The result has been a game that has been allowed to mature at its own pace, while also allowing for interesting experiments.
On Twitter, Steve Sinclair, the gameâs director, confessed that Railjack was almost scrapped altogether. â15 days ago [the] entire RailJack section of the demo was going to be cut,â he wrote. âBroken, incomplete, flawed. But our team went all-in. Iâve wanted this type of gameplay since I was a boy. Solaris sing âwe all lift togetherâ and I choke up because the song and itâs message became real for me.â Itâs tough to tell from the demo alone whether Railjack will indeed achieve everything Sinclair wants, but for a four-year old game no one much paid attention to when it originally released, itâs exciting to see Warframe taking on such bold new challenges.
