Warframe

[brat-sampson]

GREETINGS TENNO

What is Warframe?

Warframe is a free-to-play multiplayer loot-em-up Space adventure featuring cyber-ninjas. You level up your Frame (character/class), move around the galaxy map, completing missions and objectives to unlock more planets with more missions and objectives. There are also grand story missions and a tale of loss, mystery, revelations and sacrifice. On top of that though, it's a game about flinging yourself around levels, slicing, bashing, stabbing and shooting hundreds and thousands of enemies.

While unique Story missions are generally played solo, most of the time it's best to run with a group of others, tearing through objectives as fast as you can, grabbing the resources, hoping for good drops and moving on. It's an addictive loop.

What is A Warframe?

As seen in the picture above, a Warframe is a beautiful yet deadly device. Armed with Primary, secondary and melee weapons, and capable of travelling vast distances effortlessly, each also comes with its own 4 Abilities, from generating visual clones, producing a one-way ice shield dome around an area, sprouting damage dealing/status removing grasses around an area in front, shielding itself against all damage and many many more. There are over 70 frames to explore, from the simple to the complex, showcasing a myriad of classes and suiting many different playstyles.

How do I Warframe (beginner's guide)

Download for free on Platform of Choice.

Choose Excalibur. You can always get the others later.

Learn to move. You can crouch into a slide and double jump from the start, as well as wall run, wall jump etc.

The *most* important thing happens when you jump while sliding, into a 'Bullet Jump'.
Forward -> crounch into slide -> Bullet jump -> double jump -> crouch into slide on landing and repeat. This feels nearly as satisfying as Cap-Jumping in Mario Odyssey, seriously.

Pick whatever weapons you want. The Bow allows for cool ragdoll nonsense though, so actually go for that.

The second most important thing happens when you have a weapon. If you aim down sights while jumping, for no physically explicable reason you start gliding forward as your fall slows dramatically. You can clear *canyons* like this. It also feels fantastic.

Finish the opening campaign Story mission 'Vor's Prize' This will start moving you through the nodes on Earth and guide you through a few different mission types, including spy, assassination, etc including some hacking, sneaking, killing, etc. You'll also collect a bunch of mods (those things that look a bit like playing cards) and start to level up your warframe and starting weapons. Don't worry too much about mods yet, basically everything you get will say Damaged. This means it's just an inferior version of a mod you can find later in the game.

Cestus/Plains of Eidolon -  Don't go there! THIS IS NOT FOR YOU! It's essentially an entire sub-world within the wider game with its own goals, grinds, prizes etc. It's kinda cool and pretty but NOT FOR YOU! Look instead to...

Venus. You'll see, down the road on Earth, a Venus Junction. This will also show the conditions for accessing it. THIS IS FOR YOU! The vast majority of your first X hours in this game should be 100% focused on the following pattern: Unlock Junction, access next planet, check requirements for *that* junction, work your way through the nodes on the next planet and unlock the next junction, rinse repeat through the whole star chart.

How do I IMPROVE Warframe?

Level
Your Warframe will level up to a max level of 30, same with your weapons, primary, secondary and melee. Abilities unlock at levels 3, 5 and 10 respectively. Abilities cost energy, which is the pulsating blue balls you sometimes see spew from enemies. Your current energy is shown in the bottom left.

Mastery Rank
Outside of all frames and weapons is your Mastery Rank. Every time you level up any frame or weapon, this contributes to your Mastery Rank, which starts at Unranked. Getting it to Rank 1 shouldn't be too difficult, and requires passing a very basic test. This can only be taken once a day, but the first few rank tests are very easy to pass if you know how to use your weapons etc. Weapons are locked behind Mastery Rank and it's something you should always be looking to improve. This is what incentivises levelling multiple different warframes and weapons, and leads you to want to try out new ones etc.

Mods
Now, you might find that you level a Frame or weapon to 30 and it's still... kinda shit. That's because the real power creep in this game comes from the modding system. Mods, those cards you were picking up during the quest, can be awarded from missions, as enemy drops and generally discovered in a wide variety of ways throughout Warframe and this is really where you'll be making your builds more specific to you and boosting your damage etc.

On the Mods screen there are two important things to note. One is your Capacity. Each weapon/frame will begin at level 1 with a capacity equal to your current mastery rank. This means if your MR is 5 and your weapon is level 2, it's capacity will be 5. It will remain at 5 until your weapon reaches level 6, when it will increase to 6 and so on. Each Mod has a number in the corner, dictating how much Capacity it will take up. This is the main limit on how many/which mods you can have installed. The other is the little weird symbol/Polarity, a V or a triangle or whathaveyou in the other corner of every mod. Note that some of your mod slots on your weapons/frames will have the same symbol. This refers to 'Polarity'. If you put a mod in a slot with the same polarity, its capacity requirement will be halved. If you put a mod in a slot with a different polarity, its capacity requirement will increase. Basically, matching good. There's an autofill for mods if you go to Actions -> Auto-install that will suit you just fine for the early hours of the game.

Upgrading mods
In your ship there's a console full of mods. Here you can look at them all or sell them for credits, combine dupes ('Transmute') in the hope of getting a better random one or, most importantly, level them up (Fusion). Levelling a mod can take it from a 20% health boost to a 300% health boost, so clearly this shit aint something to be sniffed at. I'd definitely recommend levelling things like health, armour, raw damage etc at first, at least a couple of levels. Only a couple because this becomes incredibly expensive and also every time you level up a mod, its Capacity also increases by 1. You can see the current level of a Mod by its pips at the bottom, they glow blue when you level it. All your shitty cracked FLAWED mods can only be levelled half as far as their real counterparts, hence why they're shit.

New Weapons
Remember how in the Story quest you used a blueprint to build a thing you needed? It's the same with weapons. Go to the Market console on your ship and look for weapons. You'll see a stupid number. Pick one, doesn't matter. You'll see it costs X Platinum, remember that that's the real money currency in the game and uninstall immediately BUT WAIT! You'll also see a Credits symbol in the corner, or another button that says Buy Blueprint. Blueprints cost Credits, which is the ingame currency. To get new weapons, you need to buy/collect the blueprint either from the market or through playing the game (some weapon blueprints drop as Story mission rewards etc) then build it yourself. You can then level it up for improved MR and to make it better, install mods on it etc. Which ones you want is kindof up to you, but most are locked behind Mastery Rank at the start anyway and fuck it, this shouldn't matter until your current shit hits level 30 anyway. But yeah, that's how.

New Warframes
Simple, repeat as above. Go to the market, find the frame you want and buy the Blueprint for credits, then build it yourself. Well, not quite...
The first Frame you'll probably be able to obtain is a Tanky fucker called Rhino. You can buy his blueprint from the market as described. Now, to actually build him you'll need a Rhino Chassis, Rhino Systems and Rhino Neuroptics. This is the same for every Frame in the game. Get Chassis, Systems and Neuroptics and you can build the frame from the blueprint you buy on the market. So where do you get the Rhino Parts? On Venus you'll encounter an assassination mission against a Boss called The Jackel. If you go in with a party you'll spank him in moments, but if you want to do it on your own the first time that might be more fun. Win, and he'll drop one of the three. The rest, you have to repeat the fight as many times as it takes for him to drop all three. They have equal weighting so there's a chance you could get them all in 3 goes, but it's unlikely.

Get the parts, build the frame. It takes 72 hours in real time, so can act as something to look forward to while you're going around further, unlocking more of the star chart, progressing across Mercury, then Mars and beyond.



There's enough in this post to last you a good few hours/days with this game, and it's immediately obvious there's a fuck-ton that could still be discussed* but honestly that can allll be ignored for a very long time, like until you start reaching like Jupiter or Saturn etc on the Star Chart. For further reading I suggest the game's Wiki, or a youtube beginners guide like this one.

I do hope some others take the plunge though, you've got literally nothing to lose, and I've had a really great time with it, giving special mention to some later story missions, the feeling of tooling around with a Frame you made yourself or just marveling at the depth and quality of a free-to-play effort. One other thing, if you're a Twitch Prime user, you can get free extra weapons and Frames pre-built by linking your accounts etc. It'd definitely worth it. If not, it's worth getting the free trial just to do this.

*see Eidolon, Fortuna, Factions, Standing, Corrupted Mods, Endo, Dojos, [SPOILERS], [MORE SPOILERS], Archwings, and more...

Shit, forgot the real most important thing, you can control your ship during loading scenes!! :o

[The Boston Crab]

Thanks dude, I'll definitely give this a whirl. Supposed to be an amazing technical achievement on Switch.

[brat-sampson]

Anyone tried this more?

I imagine it's going something like this:

100 Days of Warframe

[Kelvin]

Anyone tried this more?

I imagine it's going something like this:

100 Days of Warframe

I downloaded it, but haven't had a chance to try it yet. Will post here once I do.

[Bhazor]

I thought it was bit shit to be honest. Just the bland floaty number based combat with no impact or game feel. Like a Korean MMO where you're drawn in by the smashing norks on the banner ad and then you find out its all just a mindless endless samey grind and that the boob girl doesn't even spoon her udders out.

[brat-sampson]

No norks, but it is pretty grindy. You're getting stuff done the whole time though. I think the game feel's great, but that's largely down to the movement, which really kicks in when you're literally flying through levels, Max Payning fools all over the shop. You don't get much in terms of enemy AI or anything, but the array of weapons you can get do feel appreciably different, comparing say an auto-rifle to a shotgun to a bow etc.

[Kelvin]

I had a go on this tonight, did the first two levels. Seems okay, not gonna win any awards or blow any minds, but it was good enough fun for an hour, especially for a free to play game.

I'm not sure if I'm getting old, play too many Mario games, or whether this is a wider trend, but it does feel like yet another game which was a bit too overwhelming once you arrived at the hub area - just billions of options and no clear sense of what I'm meant to doing.

Not sure if I'll see it through to the finish, but it might be enough to keep me entertained until Smash next weekend.

[The Boston Crab]

I would say impressive in handheld, bit blurry on the telly, but not something I can get into. I have too many endless games on the shelf and I have to pick my grindathons carefully, or rather, I drop them all after ten or so hours.

[brat-sampson]

Well, Fortuna got me back on the hook for a little while, but after a few days I'm back on the grind, playing alerts, levelling Frames and farming credits to upgrade mods and buy more weapon blueprints to level too.

Love it. Got a new frame just today and finally finished another old quest to get another that's cooking right now.