The Cosmic Gallery: Big Plays in '04

The lore behind WARFRAME is extremely dense and shrouded in mystery. Digital Extremes has crafted a unique story with amazing background being released with content that seamlessly ties together a past of ruin with a future of threatened hope. So let's dive in to this cosmic gallery!

And remember folks, it's all theory and opinion!

Space Ninja. That premise alone has been enough to keep players in Warframe entertained as they leap from walls, fire rifles, slice enemies, and generally flip out and kill people. It's a basic sort of wish-fulfillment that makes it easy to ignore or forget that there are a lot of background details in the game.

The 2013 E3 video has been turned into an in-game in-universe tutorial to explain to freshly-liberated Tenno just what is happening to them and what their purpose is in the world. Thankfully for the Tenno, that purpose is the same as it always has been; we're going to flip out and kill people. All across the solar system and in parts unknown.

Lore and a Disclaimer

The lore we have to work with in Warframe is limited, to say the least. The Orokin are a mystery to every faction in the game. The Grineer are a rampant plague of cloned soldiers. The Infested are a sickness absorbing everything they can. And beyond a few specific references, that's the most we have to work with.

So we have to THEORIZE about what we have in the universe of Warframe!

This is where the danger of Lore comes into play for we, the players. We are members of The Internet and susceptible to the influences of Trolling and Flaming, and this is very prevalent in the way lore discussions go. As anyone that has brought up the connection between Warframe and Dark Sector can attest to, there are two camps of people vocal about lore.

• The first responds to discussions of concepts working in either game and the history of both with rage; they do not believe that there is any in-universe connection between the games and MUST be sure to publicly shame those whom disagree.
• The second responds to discussions of concepts working in either game and the history of both with intrigue  they are open to the idea of concepts carrying over and inspiration being derived from one game to the other, as well as one IP to the other.

I am firmly in the second group of people. Digital Extremes has gone as far as to say in their livestreams that they see a lot of the fan fiction as inspiration for what THEY themselves can do and design. The community plays the game; the community should be looked at in order to find out what they want to see and do.

And that's what the Cosmic Gallery is. We're not going to set things in stone, and we're not going to dictate rules of the universe. There will be no attempt at rewriting history. And we won't be insisting our Ember/Rhino slashfic is canon. We're going to discuss what could be, what might be, and what we'd like to see.

And it's going to be fun, damn it!

What Is and Is Not

Dark Sector is a third-person shooter with cover elements and a mild system of upgrades. The story follows a CIA agent that is infected with a virus, causing him to become a mutated monster. He fights Russians and not-zombies with a glaive-weapon and doesn't afraid of anything.

Warframe is a third-person action-shooter-platformer where you flip out and kill people with techno-magical space ninja powers. The story follows the Tenno as they are given tasks by the Lotus. You work with other techno-magical space ninja to kill all the guys and save the solar system.

Inspiration vs. Canon

As of the writing of this, the lore in Warframe does not officially include any other game as canon. The lore in Warframe is what Digital Extremes has on the official site and the Lore tab in-game. Bits and pieces of information have been mentioned in the Livestreams which Digital Extremes does for the community, but for the vast majority of canon lore we must look to what we are given in the game its self.

In order to approach the lore of Warframe we must look at the influences present in the game and the story, as well as the development process and the parallels present between game mechanics and the in-universe reality. The discussion of how these things influence one-another and the way they need to be interpreted is going to be a very drawn-out discussion, so we will start with what is an inspiration in Warframe, and what is canon to the story.

Dark Sector, dark development

The inspiration taken from Dark Sector is clear once the source materials are looked at and the development cycle of the game is better understood. Not putting too-fine a point on the matter, the original concept for Dark Sector should look very familiar to Warframe players, while completely different from the aesthetic present in the release of the game.

Simply put, the original concept for Dark Sector was panned by investors and publishing companies and cast aside as something that would never work in the market. It was compared to other first-person and third-person shooters of the time and the market was not favorable. With the release of Halo 2, Far Cry, and the mounting success of Battlefield 1942, the publishing-side of the industry desired no risk or true innovation. And with the powerhouse of Halo and Halo 2 on consoles making a case for simpler game design for a greater market share, pushing a new intellectual property through such as Dark Sector would have been a nightmare.

Digital Extremes has quotes across the internet on the issue, with shots fired from J.J. Abrams on the issue of the Star Trek game being a "big disappointment." So it can be understood that through development, some ideas had to fall to the wayside and some art assets (read: almost all of the original concepts used in Warframe now) had to be discarded. What resulted in Dark Sector was a bland story that didn't do much more than tell us about a CIA operative with seriously bad luck and handlers that suffer TV Tropes-like cliches.

Looking Ahead

Now that we have the baseline issue out of the way of what Dark Sector is, we'll take a look at what Warframe is and how we can look at the lore. There is going to be a great deal of interpretation involved in the next step, as the Orokin didn't leave us with a road map of their efforts and history; no one else in the solar system has much desire to learn from their mistakes if we can judge how the Grineer and Corpus act to be true-to-faith.

Next up is the simple question and lengthy evaluation of the situation in the solar system and how society tends to fall so easily from grace; and where it will lead to next.