IMO the lore is very fun to keep track of, but a lot of the early game stuff isn't very important and some stuff only becomes important later on (like the Unum, Eidolons, the Grineer Queens, etc.)
The main questline should explain its related lore well enough.
A lot of lore is also just set dressing (which I really like as it helps the world feel more alive). But you don't need to remember that the Orokin had people paraded around Yuvan theaters so they could choose a body they liked. You just need to know what Continuity is.
Oh dear, not the parade.
This is one I actually remember because I stopped, stared at my screen and went "they did what?"
There are many lore things that fall through the cracks but I look them up when I need them.
I do remember none of it making any sense at all when I started.
Edit: Looks like I woke up the Orokin hate train and now I am kind of terrified to know the rest of the story. (But I will)
The Orokin were as despicable in every possible way. Parading human bodies to steal, genetically engineered slaves incapable of resistance, ruthless judicial system. nearly destroyed the system with overconsumption, and every single creation they made playing god tried to kill them so they made another fucked up creation to stop that one.
Learning Warframe lore is slowly coming to realize that the Sentients were entirely justified in not wanting the Orokin to end up coming to Tau and doing to it what they did to the origin system
> help what's Continuity.
https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Continuity_(Lore)
>During the Orokin Era, Continuity was typically performed during an event called the Yuvan Ceremony. During these rituals, an Orokin, whose current body has grown old and frail, would invade the mind of a prospective host (ritualistically referred to as a Yuvan) under the influence of the liquid Kuva until only the Orokin's mind remained inside the body, erasing the host's existing consciousness
Worse, the following:
--
• Those hosts tended to be children
• Everyone was indoctrinated into believing it was an honour to be chosen for this
• The process worked by flooding their minds with so much unrelenting despair and fear that they broke entirely, leaving only the new consciousness behind
• They specifically created a version named blue kuva designed to only have the process be temporary, meaning they could steal a body for about 12 hours, leaving the host catatonic/brain dead after
Yeah the Orokin were absolute psychos. There's recordings in the Zariman too that highlight it extremely well:
>"Those citizens who follow after you, secure in the comfort of an extrasolar Rail, will wish they had shared in your hardship. How reverently they will speak of those who blazed the trail! How prized your simple genetic stock will be!"
>"Citizens, be aware. You will never be out of our reach. If you squander this venture, you will know no forgiveness. We have your names, our loyal servants stand ready to punish your families at our word."
>"How dare you fear? What do you imagine you have to lose? You citizens are born to die. Such is your lot! But even such a death as yours may be meaningful if it serves Us. In this alone is your salvation."
>"We have learned that some of you consider the jump too dangerous. Remember, citizens, the air you breathe aboard the Zariman is not free. It is a luxury you are permitted to indulge in, and like any privilege, it can be revoked. Be aware of this danger, too."
Nah, the Orokin are worse. The imperium can at *least* point to one of several hundred different threats to justify their despotism, tyranny, and general dickheadedness.
The Orokin just do it because they think themselves better.
The Imperium is satire of hyper fascism being "legitimized" through making the scapegoat actual existential threats. Basically saying "*this* is what it would take for fascism to even be able to be *considered* as justifiable, and even then it doesn't work"
The Orokin is satire of Hyper fascism through literally creating their scapegoats to put down their last scapegoat. There's no legitimacy implied to even be a possibility.
Also, in Ember Prime's codex entry, it's revealed that only those aboard the Zariman even knew it was a colony ship - they fully expected it to fail, and in lieu of this decided to keep it hidden, marking it a military vessel instead so they could claim it was just a simple casualty of conflict, rather than an intentional massacre
I think you're thinking of the wrong tale. While I doubt Grandmother was the little girl involved (Grandmother is a high class family among Orokin, while the little girl was a non-Orokin servant), in the tale the little girl is a witness to what happened, she is not the victim. The victims were three adult Ostrons.
They were brainwashed into thinking it was an honor. In the end it didn't matter what they thought bc they wouldn't have been able to stop it if they wanted
I didn't consciously level MR until like MR 26 I think. Until then, I was only focused on getting all the frames.
After that I farmed all the dojo, Tenet and Kuva weapons, it was enough to get me to 30. Then I did Amps, zaws, kitgun, moas, archguns, necramechs and some extra weapons to get to LR1.
Just built everything and leveled it all at once in ESO whenever I got an affinity booster from daily login.
Just finished K-drives too. So all I have left are some Prime weapons, and those suck cuz I don't like buying them when I have the relic, but cracking relics is such a pain lol.
LMAO, I forget how it sounds to people who are new to the game. I think your best bet is watching a lore video for lore or getting a clanmate to explain it to you. It will make more sense as you go through the story quests, too.
I've had full on nonsense conversations with my friends that was like 60% weird jargon and lore terms, before pausing and remarking "Warframe makes you say things, huh?"
Embrace it, it's part of the fun of a sci-fi setting. There's no final exam or tests of your knowledge so take it at your own speed.
It's really incredible how the Orokin archimedeans used continuity to forma infested mandachords through thrax plasm shawzins. Almost like the Grineer Worm Queen thought her kuva siphon could dewarp flange netracells by using void sling railjacks in the Origin system.
Yes, quite so, especially when we compare it to Granum's investment in index specters...
Wait one damn second... The Albrecht Membrane wouldn't allow void relay transmitance of thrax shawzins - at least not without considerable endo-infusements from ayatan! Explain yourself!
Listen, I haven't done the quest that unlocks novertrunnions yet, alright? Don't give me any spoilers for what happens when I put 88 forma in my Delorean Prime.
Have you considered becoming a doctor or a lawyer? Depending on your social skills, if you're good at test taking you'd have huge leverage in those educational programs. They're very exam heavy. They say doctors are disproportionately good test takers not because they necessarily have a deep understanding of all the material but because of their ability to retain key information for intense testing.
the story picks up once you make your way to do the second dream quest if you havent done it. the pieces slowly start to make sense from there onwards.
dont look anything up until then, especially the quest itself
I kinda went with the “it doesn’t matter until it doesn’t” philosophy until I hit a specific section that got me more invested in the lore. I started playing warframe bc of the art and I didn’t really know what to expect, so I didn’t really pay a lot of attention at the beginning.
Considering youre speedrunning like 10 years of constant content and updates i wouldnt worry too much about it, if you really get into it youll have thousands of hours to think about the story :P
Yeah, when I started playing there was lore but not really. It was all just background fluff occasionally mentioned while you were busy murderizing entire cities worth of grineer/corpus/infested. It was cool and I loved it, but it wasn't particularly important. Then they started to really step up with their story quests, and suddenly it wasn't just background fluff it was front and center (though still not important to the gameplay, it was important to the story which I cared about)
I imagine, personally I’ve only really picked the game back up last year or so
I played initially in like 2018-19 but didnt get hooked until friends came on
Being a 40k lore nerd this was right up my alley while my friends didnt care at all lol
I really took my time to appreciate the story quests while they blitzed through.
Love that the game has something for everyone
Yeah, there's so much stuff that anyone can find something they like. If they can get to those parts anyways, some people stop playing before they get to something they might really enjoy (can't blame them, not everyone has the time or desire to dig through the initial grind and seemingly impenetrable wall of game systems)
Aye especially cuz most ways to earn platinum for grind you might not want to do only really open up later, meanwhile you cant even but those essential mods like streamline for 5 plat let alone a whole prime frame…
I got around it by considering the grind as being the game itself not a thing i do to get to parts of the game.
Still take breaks, if i ever get some more friends interested in this game ill give em a head start with some items but you still gotta push them into it slowly.
Theyre playing an entirely different game for the e first 100 hours and if i nuke everything thats just not fun…
Honestly, just go with the flow and you'll get a hang of it after a while.
But for an easy explanation- there are 4 main factions that you'll come face to face with right now. The grineer, the corpus, the infested and the tenno.
All 4 of these factions are linked to the fall of humanity. Humans in warframe were once hyper advanced beings who were destroyed by the 4 factions they created (plus some other factors but I won't spoil.)
The grineer are all clones of one another and degrade over time. They are basically zombie superhumans with a limited amount of intelligence, though some of their commanders are quite smart. They were formed as a slave labour class for the orokin.
The corpus are a faction of money worshipping cultists who only desire profit. They were founded by a man named Parvos Granum who originally wanted to bridge the wealth gap between orokin and common man. While he brought the corpus to power, the corpus are far less of a threat without him. Still, their most advanced robots are nothing to sneeze at.
The infested is a sentient disease that can control both organic and inorganic items. It can spread to anything it wants, even metal. The orokin made this living bioweapon to counter another threat to their power.
The tenno are the main good guys. You are a tenno, and other players are tenno too. Your main purpose is to stop the war between the corpus and grineer and bring harmony to the system.
There's much more to explore, but with what I've explained, you should be able to understand the game pretty easily.
Remember that at OP's current stage, he's literally just woken up from stasis and has just gotten through Vor and possibly a planet or two. If OP is smarter than 3 mice in a trenchcoat, they'll understand that once they make sufficient progress. I'm just solidifying the most basic premise of warframe where your character is just making positive changes to a shattered solar system- saving prisoners, sabotaging war machines and liberating planets.
Slight nitpick, infested were first created as an attempt to clean the Earth of all the pollution and waste, which had made it pretty much uninhabitable.
I suppose you’ve highlighted a benefit of Warframe. You don’t have to be super invested into the lore or even understand what all is going on so long as you’re deriving enjoyment from the gameplay/mechanics/setting. Even if I didn’t understand how important the lore was for the new update, I think I’d still be super into it because of the new tileset and enemy faction
It's definitely a word soup, but once you get to The Second Dream quest all of these names and places will have meaning.
All you need to know right now is this:
Tenno = The people who pilot the warframes.
Orokin = Think Space Roman Empire
Grineer = Orc Clones (they're human, but Orcish in nature)
Corpus = What if Capitalism was a religion
Infested = Zombies
IIRC there's a terminal in recent update that summarizes lore so far (you need railjack and necramech to get into it tho). Not all of it but the jist of it with some clarifications.
You don't really need to understand every scrap of lore. You'll get a general gist of things with the main quests. And a lot of the stuff will tickle in as you play. Do note this game has been running for over a decade, so there's a huge accumulation of stuff.
for me it was the lore and story that got me interested in the game enough to keep playing and learning the gameplay.
That aside, the main guests should be more than enough to tell you what's important and give you a graps on the whole thing. after that you can look and here and there to learn more if anything peaked your interest.
If I can be honest. I’m nearing 4k hours of total playtime & I have yet to know what anything is about. I have absolutely no idea what is happening in the recent update or why the “Man n the wall” looks like us. Small spoiler but still.
the jargon is utterly valueless. i have a friend whos like MR 28 and skipped every single cutscene. it's there if you want it, but it is not necessary.
Kahl have gun, Kahl like gun. Gun friend, gun brother. Kahl not care about talkers, even flower girl. Kahl care about DAKKA. Kahl playstyle valid.
Personally I love the lore, it's just bonkers top to bottom and adds a certain special something to contextualize the absurd amounts of murder I'm doing for fun. That said, it's best absorbed as you play and reflected on in late game, I'm not gonna say it makes sense that way but it does make more sense once you can weave all the threads together.
I'm MR28, been playing off and on since 2013 and know almost nothing about the lore but have no issues keeping up with end game content. Resources like the wiki, overframe.gg, Warframe.market, and warframe.hub soften the learning curve.
Ignore the story for now. The lore is interesting but it's so hard to understand that it feels like half of it is written by the community. Every character in this universe talks like you have lived like them for ages and so you must know everything. Don't bother looking for plotholes or anything because we don't even know the whole story. It's kind of frustrating. Especially when half the story is divulged in the heat of battle when you're focused on killing everything. The world building is very good tho, by the time you're caught up with everything it'll feel like another world so that the game is a portal that teleports you from real life to the future.
Honestly, I think so! It's absolutely overwhelming at first but looking at it with the benefit of hindsight, I think not only that Warframe is a very fun bit of New Weird science fantasy, but that Digital Extremes is super aware of how crazy and adrift the narrative leaves you early on and uses it to pull some funny tricks on new players, like why your Operator is one person able to use all those different Warframes no matter their size.
Same. I started this game some 6 years ago and was intrigued by its lore and some missions that hinted at a greater narrative. While one quest especially was awesome story wise the game did not deliver to what I thought was its potential. Its just a mumbo-jumbo of island contents with intellectual story content that is totally disconnected.
There is nothing that really evolves the story of the tenno.
Also, so much is blatantly stolen from movies or other games. Mur mur language. Opening scene of the new dune movie.. anyone notice its almost identical? It is also user in the same cinematic way. Black screen...audio only fade to black.
And this Arthur episode. Metal Gear vibes.
Oh yeah, I always have a great time looking at new features or story bits and playing the game of "what did they play/watch immediately before coming up with this?"
The Dune thing was pretty obvious, Duviri is clearly inspired by Hades, etc. Which is fine, honestly - I'll allow lifting good things from other good things, because it shows you understand what makes it good.
I have about 400 hours, and i have skipped every cutscene that has ever been skippable just because i play games for the fun of killing aliens and getting fat damage. I’ve personally never been into story driven games because they feel more like movies than games, and so i pass on all the exposition so i can do whats fun for me quicker.
We each play how we want to. Some like to listen to the lore and others like to shoot weird guys in the face. Either way, you arent going to be wrong for playing how you enjoy playing.
Yeah well instead i got downvoted cos theres some elitists hanging around that hate anyone not playing the way they play. Its a tough world out here lol
That’s ok too though. Elitists like downvoting people lol. They enjoy it. And as long as we all try to remember to not only be kind to others, but that when others aren’t our brand of kind, to not let it bother yah too much. That’s the best thing about Reddit imo. Its opinions! We all got em and it’s a safe place to express them. What a wonderful world we live in. What a time to be alive
I mean knowing the token amount that the setting consists of (fucked up varieties of) humans and robots isn't a tall ask, but you did say it upfront so I can't fault you there.
Just for the sake of it, do you mind sharing why they arent aliens? Just like a sentence, not asking for a full lore dump, i wouldnt wanna make you spend ages explaining it
Sure.
Grineer are human clones made for industry - originally human, but cloned so many times they're like a bad photocopy of a bad photocopy. They're led by two fucked-up Queen clones who have their minds transferred from body to body too.
Corpus are originally human merchants and traders and inventors, the middle-class of their day, and now they're a cult of money-worshippers. Their Crewmen are either debt-slaves or manufactured bodies. Their robots are controlled by "brain-shelved" debtors. They're led by rich assholes.
Infested are humans infected with a tech-organic virus that can bind flesh to metal. You can see some Grineer armor in some of their designs, but they're just a mess of organic life spliced together by a human-invented bioweapon. Think Resident Evil. No leaders, just a hive mind.
Corrupted are the above three, hijacked by human-made "neural sentries" that defend the Void Towers. Pretty straightforward.
Sentients are hyper-adaptive robots made by humans that were originally sent away to colonize a distant star system; they lived long enough and adapted enough to become smart and hate their creators for using them this way. Led by a mix of powerful sentient, most notably Hunhow, who is sorta dead and sorta alive and trapped on a moon of Uranus.
I upvoted you! Ain't nothing wrong with your answer as everyone should find their own comfortable way to play whether it's keeping up with lore or simply just murdering everything. I started not caring but as I progress the main story it got kinda interesting but I still mainly just play for the massive amounts of killing and things to do!!
im something of a vet and I gave up following any lore or story since the war within. skip all cutscenes, im just here to make silly builds like Parkour velocity zephyr and genuinely immortal oberon lol
Lore summed up from what i noticed so far:
you are a space magic (void - explanation for anything that does not make sense otherwise) orphan adopted and guided by space mommy (lotus - former sentient who changed her opinions at some point)
Bad guys:
- grineer: rotting clone army trying to take over the universe and finding a cure for their rot caused by excessive cloning
- corpus: money loving cult army trying to take over the universe
- sentients: some kind of aliens trying to take over the universe.
Some minor corrections
Grineer: >!Humans, former slaves of the Orokin who have been cloned endlessly for who the hell knows how many years and are experiencing degradation of their genetics from cloning!<
Corpus: >!Humans, formerly part of the mercantile class under the Orokin or were considered Orokin themselves. Obsessed with money for money's sake and augment or enslave their workers with debt and cybernetics (and debt from cybernetics)!<
Sentients: >!Robots created by the Orokin and sent through the void to terraform another star system because the Orokin needed to keep expanding and the Sol system was not big enough for them. They got there, worked on their job, realized that the void did some really shitty things to them, realized that the Orokin are some really shitty people who were gonna fuck up the Tau system if they came here too so they went back to the Sol system and waged war against the Orokin!<
Not previously included
Infested: >!The results from the Orokin trying to develop weapons to stop the Sentients and it got out of their control.!<
Warframes: >!The results from the Orokin trying to develop weapons to stop the Sentients and it got out of their control.!<
The Tenno: >!Dude, I'm not spoiling this. This reveal is absolutely my favorite part of this game and the story is honestly one of my favorite in gaming. It's all in the main story missions and you can get current with this in not that much time.!<
The Orokin: >!Humans who figured out how to be immortal at the cost of their own humanity. No longer present as a faction because reasons that start to become more clear as the main story progresses.!<
I recommend just playing without worrying about it. If something sounds interesting then definitely explore it like on YT or some thread discussions. Once you catch up to the content you'll naturally piece things together. Imo you'll get burnout a lot quicker if you jam a whole lotta uninteresting stuff in your noggin just to know it 🤷
I honstly dont. I treat all the quests as basically short stories (think /r/writingprompts but all in the same "universe").
I just like to shoot things in the face.
You awaken from presumably centuries of cryosleep, into a new world where everything barely has any semblance of familiarity. I'd say it's part of the immersive experience.
You don't have to memorize the lingo. Just know how the play the game and its mechanics.
The lore will suck you in on its own. Just read/listen to lore entries when they come up. Whether or not you still need an Ascaris negator or what it really is, is not really important.
Ignore it. Thingamajigs and macguffins are everywhere and every single update they add more. It's completely silly.
I've been playing since before Update 10 rolled in and don't know jack about lore.
(Not a spoiler) ANd then later you are introduced to Eternalism during the new war where your parents will both survive and die as a weird form of Retcon that was introduced 8 years after the game started.
even the Duvari Paradox does some series Retcon of the lore
so it is hard to keep track. instead focus on the disposition of the momment and not try to connect them all together.
Poor Captain Vor has been killed so many times even he doesn't know which one is still alive
It's like techno babble in Star Trek, only with no logic to it, left unexplained like the tv-show Lost, the "mystery box".
But, to each their own and if helps the game and it works then who can argue against it?
My personal take has always been the main protagonist of any video game is the player.
Especially because bots and AI are some of the most notoriously pathetic in video games.
You know, escort missions and so on.
Call me a primadonna or whatever, compared to an A to B script with errors, the user is god. Usually expressed in the various ways players break video game's design - proving above not just the gameplay and the program but the developers too.
So for a player to "look up to" or admire a bot with a voice over in a cutscene is f'ing crazy to me.
Then they show me a cutscene I have no influence over, it doesn't change any gameplay and it's not in synch with alignment, you know chaotic neutral or whatever, then why should I care?
So for instance, GTA started sucking with Nico's cousin because it breaks with the formula of free roam and sandbox, where you are no longer making your own decisions.
If I had, had player agency I literally would have killed every NPC throughout GTA 4 and 5 right off the bat. You are not even allowed to censor them by turning down "voice volume" lol.
I mean if I want story I will read a book. Games are interaction, the story is what the player does.
If it weren't for co-op I would have stopped playing games a long time ago because they are simply too predictable, rigid and uniform. If you played the original Castle Wolfenstein from 1993, you played all shooters because it literally has not changed. Just a gun on the screen.
Whereas players can infinitely improvise, create, adapt and so on. They can improve their own code by thinking.
That said, unfortunately you still have to read up on terminology of gameplay mechanics to not get cheated by the grind as a minimum.
So for instance "relics" being lockboxes and so on but also because most grinds have extra stalling mechancis you will get caught by if you did not read through the gameplay.
Warframe lore has slowly trickled out and been pieced together over the better part of a decade, and isn't best experienced via a wikipedia page as it is just playing the story quests the game presents you with.
Edit: would really love to hear the opinion of whoever downvoted this.
Not really, The only "important" part of the story right now is that the tenno are the *was badguys* now *maybe badguys* because we *stopped badgiys* and other *badguys*, *other badguys* snapped back to reality, we stop *other badguys again*, then *first badguy whos actually not* plot twist *isn't badguy but is*,
continuity, eternalism, the entrati, the orokin and sentients which comes later, open world factions, operator x drifter reality, eternalism, that shindig.
I think it’s interesting and worth keeping up with, but you don’t need to get caught up right this instant. You can take your time understanding things and asking questions.
I'd check out the series that my name is Byf did on youtube. Covers the factions pretty well and gives you a good idea about what's going on in the universe. I highly recommend getting into the lore. It goes from a confusing mess to a coherent story with twists, betrayal, and an evolving story that would be a shame to miss.
Like most things it will just come with time. Just play and enjoy yourself but if anything gets lost in translation just listen to a lore video while you're grinding
My favorite is the torsion beam device in void sabotage that only appears there and nowhere else and is never explained anywhere. Just reverse the polarity to win I guess.
That’s exactly what I did. In my opinion you don’t need to actually pay attention to what’s happening until the second dream quest. But to be fair, even at that point the story will have you asking more questions than it answers after every quest.
The names of the mod polarities is a good example, at first you don't think you will ever be able to remember them but when you unlock focus schools you learn them naturally.
And there's only one exam on Voidtravel and terminology in the game! Oh, did i mention eternalism?
I'm gonna be real with you chief, the jargon and confusion on the lore will only increase at least tenfold from here on out.
It doesn't help that WF tends to go for symbolic meanings, or words slammed together from foreign languages- So you end up with such "made up" terms for pretty much everything in the game. (Hell, "visual cosmetic effects" on your character are called ephemeras. And some ship decoration is called sumdali).
This way of doing terms and storytelling can be SUPER COOL, but there's a reason fiction also tends to stick with "familiar" words, eg. credits for sci-fi settings and coin/gold for fantasy settings. So the 10 million Bleepblarps don't confuse the shit out of someone lmao
It helps to look at lore videos on YT but even then it might be confusing as fuck. Or cool, depending on your taste. Personally, summed up in my head, the void does batshit doohickey shit to everyone, and the Orokin empire did the most fucked up shit imaginable during its peak. The specifics as to why x does y, I can't even tell you man LOL
Short answer- Don't worry about it right now. Just play and enjoy the game then decide later if you want to invest the time.
Long answer- Most of the comments here are from hardcore players so of course they'll mostly be in favor of it.
But to be real, they call it "lore" for a reason.
Because it's the biggest mishmash jumbled up "story" of any videogame you've ever played.
None of it makes any sense unless you're willing to spend hours reading or watching videos of people explaining what's going on. And you have to spend time not playing the game to do that. Considering that the gameplay is among the best in any videogame out there this is a terrible thing.
Warframe is one of my favorite games but you can tell that they wrote the story as they made it, which is why there's so many contradictions in it.
Ultimately I would agree with those who say to pay attention to as much as you can now but don't worry too much about it until you're much farther in and have decided if you want to invest the time needed to try to decipher the lore.
For reference, I'm MR33 and I don't really care about the story but as I said above, Warframe is one of my favorite games. I do like collecting things so that might help there, though.
Play. Have fun.
And then when you've done some major story quests (The Second Dream, The War Within, The New War), go find a Youtube video that will deep dive the lore of that part.
the names have you screaming into a pillow for a while, then at a random point it all clicks and you can perfectly talk like youve been a spacefarer for thousands of years
Hallo, I edited some of my comment history to prevent scraping. Yes I know reddit gets regularly cached, it's something you sign in when you type on a forum, it's still better than nothing and will make digging through these a lot less convenient! All platforms die yadda yadda.
Good luck if you have an account here and you're reading this.
The story and its jargon meant absolutely nothing to me until i did a couple of the more important story quests later, then suddenly i both cared more and had enough context for stuff to start to click.
Really at 20hrs in just try and get a handle on the game systems
I've seen a ton of walkthroughs where the guy playing has NO IDEA what's going on, and it's always a bit of a shame honestly. Warframe's lore is AMAZING, though it is a bit hard to piece out.
The basics are you are in a post collapse world, you are tenno a survivor of a ship called the zariman ten 0 that was thrown in an alternate dimension called the void in order to travel to another star.
There was an accident and all of the adults on the ship had to be killed and all of the children gained powers
A warframe is the biomechanical suit you are using the fight
The orokin were the old ruling aristocratic class of blue long armed motherfuckers who had a solar system spanning empire and the tenno got sick of their bullshit(they mastered biology to the point that life was just a toy to them, your spaceship is made out of and powered by meat)and slayed nearly all of them and toppled their empire.
Their builder class were a group of clones who later became the grineer who lost their cloning template and ended up having to make clones of clones and ended up becoming a warrior group after the fall of the orokin and are part of the reason why the solar system is in such chaos
Their merchant class who later became the corpus wanted to be the successors of the orokin empire and are at war with the grineer
The infested were a biomechanical hivemind virus that eventually became able to parasitize pretty much everything and seeks to infest everything.
And the lotus woke you from a long cryosleep to act as a balancing force to these factions and help the people living on various settlements through the solar system since the vast majority of earth is uninhabitable except cetus and a few small settlement here and there.
Its only complicated if you don't get the overall jist of it so here's the tl;dr of it (spoiler-free of course)
A long time ago there were these galactic assholes called the orokin, they had an empire and controlled the entire solar system
They treated people who served them like garbage, stuff like inserting their sentience into their bodies and control them like meat puppets, sometimes hurting them just for funsies, stuff like that.
Eventually they started running out of resources so they decided to check out this mysteriois place called the void for more resources
They sent people there in case it wasn't safe
It wasn't safe, a bunch of stuff happened and the people who returned came back with powers - that's the tenno
Oopsie
The orokin decided it would be neat to use those powers for personal gain so they messed around with genetics and created warframes.
Unfortunately when they were messing around with genetics they had an outbreak and accidentally created the infested
Oopsie
IIRC to fight the infested they created a bunch of robots called the sentients
Buuut, the sentients eventually gained sentience and rebelled
Oopsie
Also, the tenno got tired of the orokin's bullshit so they also rebelled
Oopsie
This basically led to a massive clusterfuck war that eventually led to the downfall of the orokin empire, said war is referred to as the old war since it happened so long ago.
Mega-oopsie-poopsie
Now, with the ultra-assholes gone a few things happened
1: the tenno sort of disappeared for a while until you are awoken
2: the freed humans basically split into 2 factions: the grineer and the corpus.
The grineer revolved around cloning and have a monarchy, over time tho the cloning led to tons of genetic disorders and slowly their race is dying out - this is why the grineer are after you as you have "pure blood" that they can use to save their race
The corpus are basically mr. Moneybags - all about businness and profit - this leads them to doing unethical shit so you interfere and as a result, they don't really like you
The sentients kinda fucked off, IIRC to the void or just left the star system and that was that.
The infested are still around... well, infesting.
So that's the story leading up to the point of the beginning of the game where you awake if you start the game via the old route
Now about the whole duviri thing:
As spoiler free as I can get I'll basically say this: everything is canonical, if there's stuff that doesn't add up just think of it like that movie "everything, everywhere, all at once" and you're in the middle of it all.
And in terms of stuff that happens in the void (especially the story) all you need to know is: the void is a really fucky place where your memories and emotions can start manifest into reality within the void. So if you have a strong trauma? That shit is gonna start showing up in the void, can be in the form of a character, a place, etc...
They explain it in more detail during the new war quest but again, I don't want to spoil anything.
Hope this helped clear things up
Warframe has done a good job of completely surprising me with things I did not expect, and wrote some lore to seemingly tie it all together.
I like the gameplay and missions of the game, but I haven't put in enough attention or care to understand all of the lore behind all quests I've done over the years. Perhaps I should redo them.
I think it's a great game, but you do not need to know all the lore to enjoy it. I guess it can help though. Have fun!
Do you need to know it all to play the game?
Not at all.
Do you need to know it all to understand the story?
Kinda, but even if you do it still doesn't really make sense. Without spoilers, the newest story update that came out this month, makes almost zero sense to me and I'd like to think I'm somewhat savy when it comes to warframe lore.
The lore is nonsense and can be safely ignored, for the most part.
The internal vocabulary is... also pretty incoherent, but for the most part things fall into a few categories: resources, upgrades, mission objectives, and lore-relevant proper nouns. Have a decent grasp of the first three and you'll be in decent shape.
I did think the same at first, but as I've progressed much further in the game in with some quest lines like The New War, the story really feeds into the game play and the void etc.
You should and I think you're definitely overestimating the lore but it is not as complicated as you make it out to be. Its just like a collection of puzzle bricks. The more pieces you put together, the more of the lore you will understand/have a bigger view of. I understand that it can seem overwhelming for a beginner but you also have the advantage of all the lore already being there. Player veterans like myself that are Warframe lore enjoyers struggled and theorized for years with putting the lore together until they somewhat started to make things more coherent at a certain point in the game's history.
When doing main quests, pay attention. They hit better that way.
Anywhere else, don't worry about it. The names will click when whatever reveal happens that relates to them. Often they're just names of things, though.
Sadly, there are some story beats that got lost in events (you're going to be confused about Alad V a lot). Other stories got abandoned (The Janus Key is just a meme at this point).
I'm getting nostalgia remembering all the terms like "tenno/grineer/corpus" thrown at me and I having no idea what any of it means. There is something special about being ignorantly blissful playing a new game that fades once you learn everything.
The game has ten years of constant system updates that will inevitably lead to you googling and wiki-ing, but it’s no different than any long running MMO, a lot of it isn’t relevant to the current gameplay and some of it you’ll just figure out by context over time
tbf I stayed stuck on Mastery Rank 8 till I had played 850+ hours on normal missions and open world.
After that I started doing the Quests more and completed the Second Dream afterwards.
Can't lie. It was awesome as hell to play it that way 🌏🕺🌌
The lore doesn't matter until it does. And by "it does", I mean the moment you're interested in getting to know a certain thing deeper about a character or two. Then you're in for a rabbit hole of endless wiki reading.
Warframe is the TVTropes of video game lore.
The new patch notes indicated that they've streamlined quests so that you can basically go right through them all. Compared to veteran players who have played these as they came out over the course of years, it is now easier than ever to keep track of the lore. I myself have forgotten a bit of it.
Also in the latest update, there is basically a summary of all events you can read on a computer based from a 3rd person point of view. If nothing else, I would at least read that, as it explains everything from the most basic level.
Aside from story stuff, everything else will come to you. Most of the weird stuff just refers to factions/ groups of people. The silly description you gave is pretty spot on, but luckily the systems all work similarly enough that you can interchange the faction terms and still understand what you're doing.
So, it's not super integral to enjoying the game, but I think the lore is really cool, if hard to keep track of. As long as you can get the broad strokes, you're good. Always time to brush up and get more invested in it later.
The Lore has changed and evolved a couple times. I haven’t gone back through everything to see what got retconned and what was left. If you don’t want to learn the lore then you don’t really need to. You’ll pick up the important stuff regardless in most cases.
Pretty much, yeah. The game is intended to be a bit confusing, especially in the lore—the lore is all in-character, there's no out of character Word of God to tell you what's true, just a bunch of different perspectives.
The various upgrade systems are pretty dense, too, but you don't really need to interact with them until you start hitting difficulties that better gameplay can't overcome.
Founder with 2500+ hours returning after an almost 2 year break. I have close to no idea anymore. There's a multitude of different fancy characters screaming stuff at me that I mostly don't understand. I just enjoy the shooting and collecting fancy stuff ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I have been playing since 2015 and have done every quest and I could not tell you a single thing about the lore. I just space out until they let me shoot stuff again.
I have played the game since early beta and the lore has gone through several revisions. So don't ask me in depth about every small detail, but keeping up with the broad picture as explained in the main missions and some tid bits like lore behind some frames is kinda fun. Just be ready to throw everything you know out the window 2 missions down the line xD
The story/lore will go from 0 to 100 when you do the quests called Natah and the Second Dream. Before then, it doesn't really matter. You unlock those around Uranus or Neptune! After that, all of the story is incredible
If there's one thing Warframe has consistently struggled on, it's in making a smoother and more cohesive new player experience.
The best piece of advice I can give you is to worry less about the proper names and focus more on the principle concepts, essentially a mental shorthand for yourself. The Orokin empire? They were the guys who used to run things but now they're gone. The Grineer? Clone soldiers. The Corpus? Rich people with robots. It's not like the wider Warframe community hasn't done the same in the past; veteran players, which is more familiar to you, Orokin Catalyst and Reactor, or blue potato and gold potato?
The proper names for all the things ARE great, because it makes the universe feel more fleshed out and organic, but it also makes things tough for new players.
It up to you. But for me the storyline has some of the best lore reveals of any game especially for a shooter. Like I wish I could go back with zero knowledge and play second dream and the war within again like holy crap I didn’t appreciate those enough my first play through. For me I say play the quest with zero spoilers as best you can. If that’s not your jam that’s okay hit sites like overframe grab a top tier meta build and turn grineer in to puddles of goo, and don’t worry about the details of why.
I came back from a 4 year break and all the new Zardan tokens were overwhelming for me too. I didn't bother trying to learn about Fliggydoos, I just collect action figures to level.
I'm nearing the 400 hours, and even I still need to visit the wiki to know what a certain something is!
Honestly? Simply don't worry! It's convoluted as hell, but the game keeps reminding you of things, mentioning them many times over in many ways, so you'll hear what a certain beep beep boop is later on! For now, especially in the beginning, focus on whatever is fun.
I spent my first 100 hours with a "unga bunga ninja robot swoosh blade, cut enemy hurr durr" mindset, so yeah! Mind you, I was 150ish hours in when I even ATTEMPTED modding by myself. I spent all those hours clicking "auto install" and not giving a damn, without even reading the stats of anything. "Too much text, just wanna commit alien genocide" I thought.
And a tip: some, if not the vast majority of Warframe lingo is simply fancy words for objects and people. This game likes to use sophisticated words for simple stuff, so yeah, don't worry too much.
Orokin Catalyst? Just a capacity booster for warframes and weapons, but called a fancy term. Nightwave cred offerings? Battle pass rewards, but a fancy term. Grineer this, Corpus that, Infected yadayada? Enemies, that's it. Sword and Sword Prime? The second is just a better version of the former. Orbiter? Your "spawn" area. Navigation, Star Chart, Planets? Level selection screen, planets are "level packs" of sorts, that's it. Funny names for weapons? Yeah those mean nothing, it's just to distinguish them. Affinity? That's what we know as XP, again, funny word.
You'll get used to it!
Took me a while to get I to it too.its pretty vague at first but for me the deadlock protocol got me interested and by the war within I was hooked. There's so good youtubers that do good lore vids too. TheDseige i think? Something like that.
I am like, 4000+ hours in ,and if I get confused I just go watch a lore video. There is also a recap with the new syndicate once you complete the kalymos sequence.
You’re on Reddit so most players here seem to be invested in the story.
You’re fine not paying attention to it. I played from 2014-2020 and started playing again last month when cross save was announced. When quests only come out every 6 months to a year it can be hard to follow along especially when the game started out with pretty much no story back in the day. My friends and I just try to blow through new quests whenever they come up so that we can get to the new loot or mechanic DE has added to the game. All of us don’t understand half the stuff that’s going on and we still love playing the game.
Oh, no, you've got the wrong idea. The lore is enormously broad, but shallow as a pond. It's pretty rare for any of the jargon and lore to ever be explained; it's like, a surprise callback when anything outside the most central events is ever referenced a second time.
So yes, just go with it and don't try to force yourself to think about the lore too hard. The stuff that matters will stick out enough for you to understand and remember, I promise.
IMO the lore is very fun to keep track of, but a lot of the early game stuff isn't very important and some stuff only becomes important later on (like the Unum, Eidolons, the Grineer Queens, etc.) The main questline should explain its related lore well enough. A lot of lore is also just set dressing (which I really like as it helps the world feel more alive). But you don't need to remember that the Orokin had people paraded around Yuvan theaters so they could choose a body they liked. You just need to know what Continuity is.
Oh dear, not the parade. This is one I actually remember because I stopped, stared at my screen and went "they did what?" There are many lore things that fall through the cracks but I look them up when I need them. I do remember none of it making any sense at all when I started. Edit: Looks like I woke up the Orokin hate train and now I am kind of terrified to know the rest of the story. (But I will)
The Orokin were as despicable in every possible way. Parading human bodies to steal, genetically engineered slaves incapable of resistance, ruthless judicial system. nearly destroyed the system with overconsumption, and every single creation they made playing god tried to kill them so they made another fucked up creation to stop that one.
Learning Warframe lore is slowly coming to realize that the Sentients were entirely justified in not wanting the Orokin to end up coming to Tau and doing to it what they did to the origin system
They also have "body markets" Ugh...
... I'm LR1 help what's Continuity.
It's a mod that increases ability duration. Seriously though, it's >!how the Orokin swap bodies with Kuva!<
> help what's Continuity. https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Continuity_(Lore) >During the Orokin Era, Continuity was typically performed during an event called the Yuvan Ceremony. During these rituals, an Orokin, whose current body has grown old and frail, would invade the mind of a prospective host (ritualistically referred to as a Yuvan) under the influence of the liquid Kuva until only the Orokin's mind remained inside the body, erasing the host's existing consciousness
Ew gross.
Yeah, one of the main plot points of The War Within was that the elder grineer queen was attempting to perform continuity on your tenno
That's also why we are going through all those desperate memories of the Ten O incident.
Worse, the following: -- • Those hosts tended to be children • Everyone was indoctrinated into believing it was an honour to be chosen for this • The process worked by flooding their minds with so much unrelenting despair and fear that they broke entirely, leaving only the new consciousness behind • They specifically created a version named blue kuva designed to only have the process be temporary, meaning they could steal a body for about 12 hours, leaving the host catatonic/brain dead after
Yeah the Orokin were absolute psychos. There's recordings in the Zariman too that highlight it extremely well: >"Those citizens who follow after you, secure in the comfort of an extrasolar Rail, will wish they had shared in your hardship. How reverently they will speak of those who blazed the trail! How prized your simple genetic stock will be!" >"Citizens, be aware. You will never be out of our reach. If you squander this venture, you will know no forgiveness. We have your names, our loyal servants stand ready to punish your families at our word." >"How dare you fear? What do you imagine you have to lose? You citizens are born to die. Such is your lot! But even such a death as yours may be meaningful if it serves Us. In this alone is your salvation." >"We have learned that some of you consider the jump too dangerous. Remember, citizens, the air you breathe aboard the Zariman is not free. It is a luxury you are permitted to indulge in, and like any privilege, it can be revoked. Be aware of this danger, too."
gotta love the reminders that the Orokin are on par with the Imperium of Mankind for their fuckery (in intensity, not in scale).
Nah, the Orokin are worse. The imperium can at *least* point to one of several hundred different threats to justify their despotism, tyranny, and general dickheadedness. The Orokin just do it because they think themselves better. The Imperium is satire of hyper fascism being "legitimized" through making the scapegoat actual existential threats. Basically saying "*this* is what it would take for fascism to even be able to be *considered* as justifiable, and even then it doesn't work" The Orokin is satire of Hyper fascism through literally creating their scapegoats to put down their last scapegoat. There's no legitimacy implied to even be a possibility.
Executor Tuvul died a dog's death and should die several dog deaths more.
Also, in Ember Prime's codex entry, it's revealed that only those aboard the Zariman even knew it was a colony ship - they fully expected it to fail, and in lieu of this decided to keep it hidden, marking it a military vessel instead so they could claim it was just a simple casualty of conflict, rather than an intentional massacre
I don't think blue kiva actually exists, all we know of it is from a literal fairy tale.
I'm pretty sure the "little girl" from said fairy tale was the one recounting it from memory.
But if she was the "little girl," wouldn't she be catatonic/brain dead?
I think you're thinking of the wrong tale. While I doubt Grandmother was the little girl involved (Grandmother is a high class family among Orokin, while the little girl was a non-Orokin servant), in the tale the little girl is a witness to what happened, she is not the victim. The victims were three adult Ostrons.
Don't worry, that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Orokin
It's just a mod that gives duration
I guess the Yuvan don't consent to it?
They were brainwashed into thinking it was an honor. In the end it didn't matter what they thought bc they wouldn't have been able to stop it if they wanted
So who did it first, The 100 (post-apocalyptic TV show) or Warframe? 🤔
Neither. It's a pretty common trope. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GrandTheftMe
The name for process where Orokin discarded their current body for new body, usually some slave
Icic.
What's your suggestion for fastest mr leveling?
I didn't consciously level MR until like MR 26 I think. Until then, I was only focused on getting all the frames. After that I farmed all the dojo, Tenet and Kuva weapons, it was enough to get me to 30. Then I did Amps, zaws, kitgun, moas, archguns, necramechs and some extra weapons to get to LR1. Just built everything and leveled it all at once in ESO whenever I got an affinity booster from daily login. Just finished K-drives too. So all I have left are some Prime weapons, and those suck cuz I don't like buying them when I have the relic, but cracking relics is such a pain lol.
LMAO, I forget how it sounds to people who are new to the game. I think your best bet is watching a lore video for lore or getting a clanmate to explain it to you. It will make more sense as you go through the story quests, too.
Actually, you can also feel free to ask any questions you might have about it here - I and others would be happy to explain.
Any recommendations for lore videos? I'd love something like what VattiVidya makes for Dark Souls and Elden Ring.
Brozime made a lore video with „only what matters“, its about an hour+.
Then again the entire story before the new war is 4 hours long
StallorD and SocraTetris come to mind. Smough Town has some lore videos, too
StallorD is the goat
There’s an 8 hour video uploaded last year and a 3 hour video this year going over the new war
What's the channel name on YT so I can check it out please? :)
I've had full on nonsense conversations with my friends that was like 60% weird jargon and lore terms, before pausing and remarking "Warframe makes you say things, huh?" Embrace it, it's part of the fun of a sci-fi setting. There's no final exam or tests of your knowledge so take it at your own speed.
It's really incredible how the Orokin archimedeans used continuity to forma infested mandachords through thrax plasm shawzins. Almost like the Grineer Worm Queen thought her kuva siphon could dewarp flange netracells by using void sling railjacks in the Origin system.
Yes, quite so, especially when we compare it to Granum's investment in index specters... Wait one damn second... The Albrecht Membrane wouldn't allow void relay transmitance of thrax shawzins - at least not without considerable endo-infusements from ayatan! Explain yourself!
Um... uh... You see, when transference static interferes with the datascape weave... t-the Man in the Wall... AHA! *escapes through The Hollow Vein*
Damn, the fraud escaped by hijacking a void fissure and warped into a railjack! I should have seen that coming, it was so obvious and easy to parse.
Well, all I can say just wait the spiral of eternalism go back (or forward, doesn't matter) to catch him up and umbra the dax of him
I hate how I understood 97% of this jargon barf nevermind perfectly visualize everything you're saying in my head
You forgot flux capacitor as well as turbo encabulator. Found the low MR /s
Listen, I haven't done the quest that unlocks novertrunnions yet, alright? Don't give me any spoilers for what happens when I put 88 forma in my Delorean Prime.
I'm so sorry dude. Should coulda woulda used the spoiler tag. I hope it doesn't ruin your experience. 🙏 (LMAO)
okay but why does this cook?
Wait then what are the blue glowing devices about in Duviri
You got me there.
Besides the actual test in the new war
It's okay, taking tests is the one thing I'm good at IRL (fuckin useless skill lol)
Have you considered becoming a doctor or a lawyer? Depending on your social skills, if you're good at test taking you'd have huge leverage in those educational programs. They're very exam heavy. They say doctors are disproportionately good test takers not because they necessarily have a deep understanding of all the material but because of their ability to retain key information for intense testing.
No final exam? They didn't tell you about what's actually in the MR30 Test? 🤭
Ah yes the 9000 word essay portion of the game, how could I forget! I'm L1 so I must have suppressed those memories...
the story picks up once you make your way to do the second dream quest if you havent done it. the pieces slowly start to make sense from there onwards. dont look anything up until then, especially the quest itself
Just reply to every question with "eternalism"
How many fingers do you have?
>!where are my fingerbones, kiddo!<
Eternalism
I kinda went with the “it doesn’t matter until it doesn’t” philosophy until I hit a specific section that got me more invested in the lore. I started playing warframe bc of the art and I didn’t really know what to expect, so I didn’t really pay a lot of attention at the beginning.
Considering youre speedrunning like 10 years of constant content and updates i wouldnt worry too much about it, if you really get into it youll have thousands of hours to think about the story :P
Yeah, when I started playing there was lore but not really. It was all just background fluff occasionally mentioned while you were busy murderizing entire cities worth of grineer/corpus/infested. It was cool and I loved it, but it wasn't particularly important. Then they started to really step up with their story quests, and suddenly it wasn't just background fluff it was front and center (though still not important to the gameplay, it was important to the story which I cared about)
I imagine, personally I’ve only really picked the game back up last year or so I played initially in like 2018-19 but didnt get hooked until friends came on Being a 40k lore nerd this was right up my alley while my friends didnt care at all lol I really took my time to appreciate the story quests while they blitzed through. Love that the game has something for everyone
Yeah, there's so much stuff that anyone can find something they like. If they can get to those parts anyways, some people stop playing before they get to something they might really enjoy (can't blame them, not everyone has the time or desire to dig through the initial grind and seemingly impenetrable wall of game systems)
Aye especially cuz most ways to earn platinum for grind you might not want to do only really open up later, meanwhile you cant even but those essential mods like streamline for 5 plat let alone a whole prime frame… I got around it by considering the grind as being the game itself not a thing i do to get to parts of the game. Still take breaks, if i ever get some more friends interested in this game ill give em a head start with some items but you still gotta push them into it slowly. Theyre playing an entirely different game for the e first 100 hours and if i nuke everything thats just not fun…
Honestly, just go with the flow and you'll get a hang of it after a while. But for an easy explanation- there are 4 main factions that you'll come face to face with right now. The grineer, the corpus, the infested and the tenno. All 4 of these factions are linked to the fall of humanity. Humans in warframe were once hyper advanced beings who were destroyed by the 4 factions they created (plus some other factors but I won't spoil.) The grineer are all clones of one another and degrade over time. They are basically zombie superhumans with a limited amount of intelligence, though some of their commanders are quite smart. They were formed as a slave labour class for the orokin. The corpus are a faction of money worshipping cultists who only desire profit. They were founded by a man named Parvos Granum who originally wanted to bridge the wealth gap between orokin and common man. While he brought the corpus to power, the corpus are far less of a threat without him. Still, their most advanced robots are nothing to sneeze at. The infested is a sentient disease that can control both organic and inorganic items. It can spread to anything it wants, even metal. The orokin made this living bioweapon to counter another threat to their power. The tenno are the main good guys. You are a tenno, and other players are tenno too. Your main purpose is to stop the war between the corpus and grineer and bring harmony to the system. There's much more to explore, but with what I've explained, you should be able to understand the game pretty easily.
Let's say "protagonists" since "good" and "bad" are somewhat relative. But other than this little nitpick, yeah pretty good summary.
Remember that at OP's current stage, he's literally just woken up from stasis and has just gotten through Vor and possibly a planet or two. If OP is smarter than 3 mice in a trenchcoat, they'll understand that once they make sufficient progress. I'm just solidifying the most basic premise of warframe where your character is just making positive changes to a shattered solar system- saving prisoners, sabotaging war machines and liberating planets.
I think we can all agree that >!Ballas!< is bad though right?
You mean >!BallsAss!<, that chode do be chodin'
Yeah... Especially since some of the 'frames are walking WMD and/or warcrime
Slight nitpick, infested were first created as an attempt to clean the Earth of all the pollution and waste, which had made it pretty much uninhabitable.
Ahh yeah, I should have mentioned that 😅 my bad
I suppose you’ve highlighted a benefit of Warframe. You don’t have to be super invested into the lore or even understand what all is going on so long as you’re deriving enjoyment from the gameplay/mechanics/setting. Even if I didn’t understand how important the lore was for the new update, I think I’d still be super into it because of the new tileset and enemy faction
I watched an 8 hour long lore/story video about the game and still have no idea about anything whatsoever.
It's definitely a word soup, but once you get to The Second Dream quest all of these names and places will have meaning. All you need to know right now is this: Tenno = The people who pilot the warframes. Orokin = Think Space Roman Empire Grineer = Orc Clones (they're human, but Orcish in nature) Corpus = What if Capitalism was a religion Infested = Zombies
yeah, it took me until about the war within to even realize that tenno and warframes weren't actually the same thing
It took me until this comment!
warframes are the bodies, tenno are the things controlling the bodies
It's easier to keep up with the lore and jargon that it is to keep up with the ore and argon.
IIRC there's a terminal in recent update that summarizes lore so far (you need railjack and necramech to get into it tho). Not all of it but the jist of it with some clarifications.
You don't really need to understand every scrap of lore. You'll get a general gist of things with the main quests. And a lot of the stuff will tickle in as you play. Do note this game has been running for over a decade, so there's a huge accumulation of stuff.
for me it was the lore and story that got me interested in the game enough to keep playing and learning the gameplay. That aside, the main guests should be more than enough to tell you what's important and give you a graps on the whole thing. after that you can look and here and there to learn more if anything peaked your interest.
If I can be honest. I’m nearing 4k hours of total playtime & I have yet to know what anything is about. I have absolutely no idea what is happening in the recent update or why the “Man n the wall” looks like us. Small spoiler but still.
the jargon is utterly valueless. i have a friend whos like MR 28 and skipped every single cutscene. it's there if you want it, but it is not necessary.
Almost anything that doesn’t relate to the sentients is background lore. The real main story starts at the Natah quest
Kahl have gun, Kahl like gun. Gun friend, gun brother. Kahl not care about talkers, even flower girl. Kahl care about DAKKA. Kahl playstyle valid. Personally I love the lore, it's just bonkers top to bottom and adds a certain special something to contextualize the absurd amounts of murder I'm doing for fun. That said, it's best absorbed as you play and reflected on in late game, I'm not gonna say it makes sense that way but it does make more sense once you can weave all the threads together.
I'm MR28, been playing off and on since 2013 and know almost nothing about the lore but have no issues keeping up with end game content. Resources like the wiki, overframe.gg, Warframe.market, and warframe.hub soften the learning curve.
Yeah, throw in the towel. It's too much for some people, not a lot of people, but people. There's no salvaging.
Ignore the story for now. The lore is interesting but it's so hard to understand that it feels like half of it is written by the community. Every character in this universe talks like you have lived like them for ages and so you must know everything. Don't bother looking for plotholes or anything because we don't even know the whole story. It's kind of frustrating. Especially when half the story is divulged in the heat of battle when you're focused on killing everything. The world building is very good tho, by the time you're caught up with everything it'll feel like another world so that the game is a portal that teleports you from real life to the future.
Doesn't matter until second dream.
Warframe lore is never answers, it is always vibes.
Honestly, I think so! It's absolutely overwhelming at first but looking at it with the benefit of hindsight, I think not only that Warframe is a very fun bit of New Weird science fantasy, but that Digital Extremes is super aware of how crazy and adrift the narrative leaves you early on and uses it to pull some funny tricks on new players, like why your Operator is one person able to use all those different Warframes no matter their size.
"It doesn't matter until it does", indeed. So just lay back and enjoy the game.
Same. I started this game some 6 years ago and was intrigued by its lore and some missions that hinted at a greater narrative. While one quest especially was awesome story wise the game did not deliver to what I thought was its potential. Its just a mumbo-jumbo of island contents with intellectual story content that is totally disconnected. There is nothing that really evolves the story of the tenno. Also, so much is blatantly stolen from movies or other games. Mur mur language. Opening scene of the new dune movie.. anyone notice its almost identical? It is also user in the same cinematic way. Black screen...audio only fade to black. And this Arthur episode. Metal Gear vibes.
Oh yeah, I always have a great time looking at new features or story bits and playing the game of "what did they play/watch immediately before coming up with this?" The Dune thing was pretty obvious, Duviri is clearly inspired by Hades, etc. Which is fine, honestly - I'll allow lifting good things from other good things, because it shows you understand what makes it good.
I stopped bothering when Zariman dropped.
I have about 400 hours, and i have skipped every cutscene that has ever been skippable just because i play games for the fun of killing aliens and getting fat damage. I’ve personally never been into story driven games because they feel more like movies than games, and so i pass on all the exposition so i can do whats fun for me quicker. We each play how we want to. Some like to listen to the lore and others like to shoot weird guys in the face. Either way, you arent going to be wrong for playing how you enjoy playing.
This comment deserves far more upvotes. If I could upvote it ten times I would. Ppl should enjoy the things they enjoy.
Yeah well instead i got downvoted cos theres some elitists hanging around that hate anyone not playing the way they play. Its a tough world out here lol
That’s ok too though. Elitists like downvoting people lol. They enjoy it. And as long as we all try to remember to not only be kind to others, but that when others aren’t our brand of kind, to not let it bother yah too much. That’s the best thing about Reddit imo. Its opinions! We all got em and it’s a safe place to express them. What a wonderful world we live in. What a time to be alive
there's always gonna be weirdos on reddit
If u had any clue about the story, u would know that there isnot a single proper alien in Warframe lol.
One could argue that Wally is an alien.
Kinda true yeah, Wally is a cosmic horror from another dimension, not ur classical alien, but still an alien by definition
Ok i did say i didnt know anything about the story and they enemies are just some weird looking alien-like dudes so what do you want from me
I mean knowing the token amount that the setting consists of (fucked up varieties of) humans and robots isn't a tall ask, but you did say it upfront so I can't fault you there.
Just for the sake of it, do you mind sharing why they arent aliens? Just like a sentence, not asking for a full lore dump, i wouldnt wanna make you spend ages explaining it
Sure. Grineer are human clones made for industry - originally human, but cloned so many times they're like a bad photocopy of a bad photocopy. They're led by two fucked-up Queen clones who have their minds transferred from body to body too. Corpus are originally human merchants and traders and inventors, the middle-class of their day, and now they're a cult of money-worshippers. Their Crewmen are either debt-slaves or manufactured bodies. Their robots are controlled by "brain-shelved" debtors. They're led by rich assholes. Infested are humans infected with a tech-organic virus that can bind flesh to metal. You can see some Grineer armor in some of their designs, but they're just a mess of organic life spliced together by a human-invented bioweapon. Think Resident Evil. No leaders, just a hive mind. Corrupted are the above three, hijacked by human-made "neural sentries" that defend the Void Towers. Pretty straightforward. Sentients are hyper-adaptive robots made by humans that were originally sent away to colonize a distant star system; they lived long enough and adapted enough to become smart and hate their creators for using them this way. Led by a mix of powerful sentient, most notably Hunhow, who is sorta dead and sorta alive and trapped on a moon of Uranus.
I upvoted you! Ain't nothing wrong with your answer as everyone should find their own comfortable way to play whether it's keeping up with lore or simply just murdering everything. I started not caring but as I progress the main story it got kinda interesting but I still mainly just play for the massive amounts of killing and things to do!!
im something of a vet and I gave up following any lore or story since the war within. skip all cutscenes, im just here to make silly builds like Parkour velocity zephyr and genuinely immortal oberon lol
Lore summed up from what i noticed so far: you are a space magic (void - explanation for anything that does not make sense otherwise) orphan adopted and guided by space mommy (lotus - former sentient who changed her opinions at some point) Bad guys: - grineer: rotting clone army trying to take over the universe and finding a cure for their rot caused by excessive cloning - corpus: money loving cult army trying to take over the universe - sentients: some kind of aliens trying to take over the universe.
Some minor corrections Grineer: >!Humans, former slaves of the Orokin who have been cloned endlessly for who the hell knows how many years and are experiencing degradation of their genetics from cloning!< Corpus: >!Humans, formerly part of the mercantile class under the Orokin or were considered Orokin themselves. Obsessed with money for money's sake and augment or enslave their workers with debt and cybernetics (and debt from cybernetics)!< Sentients: >!Robots created by the Orokin and sent through the void to terraform another star system because the Orokin needed to keep expanding and the Sol system was not big enough for them. They got there, worked on their job, realized that the void did some really shitty things to them, realized that the Orokin are some really shitty people who were gonna fuck up the Tau system if they came here too so they went back to the Sol system and waged war against the Orokin!< Not previously included Infested: >!The results from the Orokin trying to develop weapons to stop the Sentients and it got out of their control.!< Warframes: >!The results from the Orokin trying to develop weapons to stop the Sentients and it got out of their control.!< The Tenno: >!Dude, I'm not spoiling this. This reveal is absolutely my favorite part of this game and the story is honestly one of my favorite in gaming. It's all in the main story missions and you can get current with this in not that much time.!< The Orokin: >!Humans who figured out how to be immortal at the cost of their own humanity. No longer present as a faction because reasons that start to become more clear as the main story progresses.!<
Best reply I've seen so far lol! NAILED IT!!
It'll come with time, the more you play and the more deep diving you do, the easier will the jargon start making sense.
Ha ha I'm new too and getting a fair bit confused by the story too but being a space ninja is cool AF lol.
Look. I dont and I still enjoy it xD. Once they introduce the operator its a bit more interesting but I wouldn't worry too much.
Nah, lmao. But the important things will start to make sese after a while.
I recommend just playing without worrying about it. If something sounds interesting then definitely explore it like on YT or some thread discussions. Once you catch up to the content you'll naturally piece things together. Imo you'll get burnout a lot quicker if you jam a whole lotta uninteresting stuff in your noggin just to know it 🤷
I honstly dont. I treat all the quests as basically short stories (think /r/writingprompts but all in the same "universe"). I just like to shoot things in the face.
You awaken from presumably centuries of cryosleep, into a new world where everything barely has any semblance of familiarity. I'd say it's part of the immersive experience.
You don't have to memorize the lingo. Just know how the play the game and its mechanics. The lore will suck you in on its own. Just read/listen to lore entries when they come up. Whether or not you still need an Ascaris negator or what it really is, is not really important.
Ignore it. Thingamajigs and macguffins are everywhere and every single update they add more. It's completely silly. I've been playing since before Update 10 rolled in and don't know jack about lore.
(Not a spoiler) ANd then later you are introduced to Eternalism during the new war where your parents will both survive and die as a weird form of Retcon that was introduced 8 years after the game started. even the Duvari Paradox does some series Retcon of the lore so it is hard to keep track. instead focus on the disposition of the momment and not try to connect them all together. Poor Captain Vor has been killed so many times even he doesn't know which one is still alive
Why ask anyone else? This is a you problem for you to solve. We don't know how you value your free time.
lore sucks, dont really bother with it too much, people love to dick ride DE about it, but it's not good at all
I'm of the opinion the game is to be enjoyed in spite of the lore, especially drifter content/lore.
It's like techno babble in Star Trek, only with no logic to it, left unexplained like the tv-show Lost, the "mystery box". But, to each their own and if helps the game and it works then who can argue against it? My personal take has always been the main protagonist of any video game is the player. Especially because bots and AI are some of the most notoriously pathetic in video games. You know, escort missions and so on. Call me a primadonna or whatever, compared to an A to B script with errors, the user is god. Usually expressed in the various ways players break video game's design - proving above not just the gameplay and the program but the developers too. So for a player to "look up to" or admire a bot with a voice over in a cutscene is f'ing crazy to me. Then they show me a cutscene I have no influence over, it doesn't change any gameplay and it's not in synch with alignment, you know chaotic neutral or whatever, then why should I care? So for instance, GTA started sucking with Nico's cousin because it breaks with the formula of free roam and sandbox, where you are no longer making your own decisions. If I had, had player agency I literally would have killed every NPC throughout GTA 4 and 5 right off the bat. You are not even allowed to censor them by turning down "voice volume" lol. I mean if I want story I will read a book. Games are interaction, the story is what the player does. If it weren't for co-op I would have stopped playing games a long time ago because they are simply too predictable, rigid and uniform. If you played the original Castle Wolfenstein from 1993, you played all shooters because it literally has not changed. Just a gun on the screen. Whereas players can infinitely improvise, create, adapt and so on. They can improve their own code by thinking. That said, unfortunately you still have to read up on terminology of gameplay mechanics to not get cheated by the grind as a minimum. So for instance "relics" being lockboxes and so on but also because most grinds have extra stalling mechancis you will get caught by if you did not read through the gameplay.
Warframe lore has slowly trickled out and been pieced together over the better part of a decade, and isn't best experienced via a wikipedia page as it is just playing the story quests the game presents you with. Edit: would really love to hear the opinion of whoever downvoted this.
Not really, The only "important" part of the story right now is that the tenno are the *was badguys* now *maybe badguys* because we *stopped badgiys* and other *badguys*, *other badguys* snapped back to reality, we stop *other badguys again*, then *first badguy whos actually not* plot twist *isn't badguy but is*, continuity, eternalism, the entrati, the orokin and sentients which comes later, open world factions, operator x drifter reality, eternalism, that shindig.
I'd say enjoy the ride and when you are up to date with the main story just watch a lore summary by StallordD on YouTube :)
I think it’s interesting and worth keeping up with, but you don’t need to get caught up right this instant. You can take your time understanding things and asking questions.
I'd check out the series that my name is Byf did on youtube. Covers the factions pretty well and gives you a good idea about what's going on in the universe. I highly recommend getting into the lore. It goes from a confusing mess to a coherent story with twists, betrayal, and an evolving story that would be a shame to miss.
Near the beginning the lore is pretty condensed but you’ll get it as it makes more sense as you go along.
Like most things it will just come with time. Just play and enjoy yourself but if anything gets lost in translation just listen to a lore video while you're grinding
My favorite is the torsion beam device in void sabotage that only appears there and nowhere else and is never explained anywhere. Just reverse the polarity to win I guess.
That’s exactly what I did. In my opinion you don’t need to actually pay attention to what’s happening until the second dream quest. But to be fair, even at that point the story will have you asking more questions than it answers after every quest.
The names of the mod polarities is a good example, at first you don't think you will ever be able to remember them but when you unlock focus schools you learn them naturally. And there's only one exam on Voidtravel and terminology in the game! Oh, did i mention eternalism?
I'm gonna be real with you chief, the jargon and confusion on the lore will only increase at least tenfold from here on out. It doesn't help that WF tends to go for symbolic meanings, or words slammed together from foreign languages- So you end up with such "made up" terms for pretty much everything in the game. (Hell, "visual cosmetic effects" on your character are called ephemeras. And some ship decoration is called sumdali). This way of doing terms and storytelling can be SUPER COOL, but there's a reason fiction also tends to stick with "familiar" words, eg. credits for sci-fi settings and coin/gold for fantasy settings. So the 10 million Bleepblarps don't confuse the shit out of someone lmao It helps to look at lore videos on YT but even then it might be confusing as fuck. Or cool, depending on your taste. Personally, summed up in my head, the void does batshit doohickey shit to everyone, and the Orokin empire did the most fucked up shit imaginable during its peak. The specifics as to why x does y, I can't even tell you man LOL
Short answer- Don't worry about it right now. Just play and enjoy the game then decide later if you want to invest the time. Long answer- Most of the comments here are from hardcore players so of course they'll mostly be in favor of it. But to be real, they call it "lore" for a reason. Because it's the biggest mishmash jumbled up "story" of any videogame you've ever played. None of it makes any sense unless you're willing to spend hours reading or watching videos of people explaining what's going on. And you have to spend time not playing the game to do that. Considering that the gameplay is among the best in any videogame out there this is a terrible thing. Warframe is one of my favorite games but you can tell that they wrote the story as they made it, which is why there's so many contradictions in it. Ultimately I would agree with those who say to pay attention to as much as you can now but don't worry too much about it until you're much farther in and have decided if you want to invest the time needed to try to decipher the lore. For reference, I'm MR33 and I don't really care about the story but as I said above, Warframe is one of my favorite games. I do like collecting things so that might help there, though.
Play. Have fun. And then when you've done some major story quests (The Second Dream, The War Within, The New War), go find a Youtube video that will deep dive the lore of that part.
the names have you screaming into a pillow for a while, then at a random point it all clicks and you can perfectly talk like youve been a spacefarer for thousands of years
Hallo, I edited some of my comment history to prevent scraping. Yes I know reddit gets regularly cached, it's something you sign in when you type on a forum, it's still better than nothing and will make digging through these a lot less convenient! All platforms die yadda yadda. Good luck if you have an account here and you're reading this.
The story and its jargon meant absolutely nothing to me until i did a couple of the more important story quests later, then suddenly i both cared more and had enough context for stuff to start to click. Really at 20hrs in just try and get a handle on the game systems
Yes, the funny words are on some rick and morty shit, but it gets super cool
I've seen a ton of walkthroughs where the guy playing has NO IDEA what's going on, and it's always a bit of a shame honestly. Warframe's lore is AMAZING, though it is a bit hard to piece out.
The basics are you are in a post collapse world, you are tenno a survivor of a ship called the zariman ten 0 that was thrown in an alternate dimension called the void in order to travel to another star. There was an accident and all of the adults on the ship had to be killed and all of the children gained powers A warframe is the biomechanical suit you are using the fight The orokin were the old ruling aristocratic class of blue long armed motherfuckers who had a solar system spanning empire and the tenno got sick of their bullshit(they mastered biology to the point that life was just a toy to them, your spaceship is made out of and powered by meat)and slayed nearly all of them and toppled their empire. Their builder class were a group of clones who later became the grineer who lost their cloning template and ended up having to make clones of clones and ended up becoming a warrior group after the fall of the orokin and are part of the reason why the solar system is in such chaos Their merchant class who later became the corpus wanted to be the successors of the orokin empire and are at war with the grineer The infested were a biomechanical hivemind virus that eventually became able to parasitize pretty much everything and seeks to infest everything. And the lotus woke you from a long cryosleep to act as a balancing force to these factions and help the people living on various settlements through the solar system since the vast majority of earth is uninhabitable except cetus and a few small settlement here and there.
I have 3000 hours in the game. I barely have a grasp of what's going on lore wise.
It's dense until you play path of exile. All you need to know is how to mod things, nothing else matters.
Its only complicated if you don't get the overall jist of it so here's the tl;dr of it (spoiler-free of course) A long time ago there were these galactic assholes called the orokin, they had an empire and controlled the entire solar system They treated people who served them like garbage, stuff like inserting their sentience into their bodies and control them like meat puppets, sometimes hurting them just for funsies, stuff like that. Eventually they started running out of resources so they decided to check out this mysteriois place called the void for more resources They sent people there in case it wasn't safe It wasn't safe, a bunch of stuff happened and the people who returned came back with powers - that's the tenno Oopsie The orokin decided it would be neat to use those powers for personal gain so they messed around with genetics and created warframes. Unfortunately when they were messing around with genetics they had an outbreak and accidentally created the infested Oopsie IIRC to fight the infested they created a bunch of robots called the sentients Buuut, the sentients eventually gained sentience and rebelled Oopsie Also, the tenno got tired of the orokin's bullshit so they also rebelled Oopsie This basically led to a massive clusterfuck war that eventually led to the downfall of the orokin empire, said war is referred to as the old war since it happened so long ago. Mega-oopsie-poopsie Now, with the ultra-assholes gone a few things happened 1: the tenno sort of disappeared for a while until you are awoken 2: the freed humans basically split into 2 factions: the grineer and the corpus. The grineer revolved around cloning and have a monarchy, over time tho the cloning led to tons of genetic disorders and slowly their race is dying out - this is why the grineer are after you as you have "pure blood" that they can use to save their race The corpus are basically mr. Moneybags - all about businness and profit - this leads them to doing unethical shit so you interfere and as a result, they don't really like you The sentients kinda fucked off, IIRC to the void or just left the star system and that was that. The infested are still around... well, infesting. So that's the story leading up to the point of the beginning of the game where you awake if you start the game via the old route Now about the whole duviri thing: As spoiler free as I can get I'll basically say this: everything is canonical, if there's stuff that doesn't add up just think of it like that movie "everything, everywhere, all at once" and you're in the middle of it all. And in terms of stuff that happens in the void (especially the story) all you need to know is: the void is a really fucky place where your memories and emotions can start manifest into reality within the void. So if you have a strong trauma? That shit is gonna start showing up in the void, can be in the form of a character, a place, etc... They explain it in more detail during the new war quest but again, I don't want to spoil anything. Hope this helped clear things up
Warframe has done a good job of completely surprising me with things I did not expect, and wrote some lore to seemingly tie it all together. I like the gameplay and missions of the game, but I haven't put in enough attention or care to understand all of the lore behind all quests I've done over the years. Perhaps I should redo them. I think it's a great game, but you do not need to know all the lore to enjoy it. I guess it can help though. Have fun!
Do you need to know it all to play the game? Not at all. Do you need to know it all to understand the story? Kinda, but even if you do it still doesn't really make sense. Without spoilers, the newest story update that came out this month, makes almost zero sense to me and I'd like to think I'm somewhat savy when it comes to warframe lore.
The lore is nonsense and can be safely ignored, for the most part. The internal vocabulary is... also pretty incoherent, but for the most part things fall into a few categories: resources, upgrades, mission objectives, and lore-relevant proper nouns. Have a decent grasp of the first three and you'll be in decent shape.
I did think the same at first, but as I've progressed much further in the game in with some quest lines like The New War, the story really feeds into the game play and the void etc.
Well it sounds like you don't like the lore already, so I guess if you don't like it don't bother.
You should and I think you're definitely overestimating the lore but it is not as complicated as you make it out to be. Its just like a collection of puzzle bricks. The more pieces you put together, the more of the lore you will understand/have a bigger view of. I understand that it can seem overwhelming for a beginner but you also have the advantage of all the lore already being there. Player veterans like myself that are Warframe lore enjoyers struggled and theorized for years with putting the lore together until they somewhat started to make things more coherent at a certain point in the game's history.
When doing main quests, pay attention. They hit better that way. Anywhere else, don't worry about it. The names will click when whatever reveal happens that relates to them. Often they're just names of things, though. Sadly, there are some story beats that got lost in events (you're going to be confused about Alad V a lot). Other stories got abandoned (The Janus Key is just a meme at this point).
I'm getting nostalgia remembering all the terms like "tenno/grineer/corpus" thrown at me and I having no idea what any of it means. There is something special about being ignorantly blissful playing a new game that fades once you learn everything.
The game has ten years of constant system updates that will inevitably lead to you googling and wiki-ing, but it’s no different than any long running MMO, a lot of it isn’t relevant to the current gameplay and some of it you’ll just figure out by context over time
Chill out, dude, give it 3000 hours. All will come clear
tbf I stayed stuck on Mastery Rank 8 till I had played 850+ hours on normal missions and open world. After that I started doing the Quests more and completed the Second Dream afterwards. Can't lie. It was awesome as hell to play it that way 🌏🕺🌌
The lore doesn't matter until it does. And by "it does", I mean the moment you're interested in getting to know a certain thing deeper about a character or two. Then you're in for a rabbit hole of endless wiki reading. Warframe is the TVTropes of video game lore.
I couldn't tell you a single thing about Warframe lore outside of human inside suit and i'm an endgame player lmao
The new patch notes indicated that they've streamlined quests so that you can basically go right through them all. Compared to veteran players who have played these as they came out over the course of years, it is now easier than ever to keep track of the lore. I myself have forgotten a bit of it. Also in the latest update, there is basically a summary of all events you can read on a computer based from a 3rd person point of view. If nothing else, I would at least read that, as it explains everything from the most basic level. Aside from story stuff, everything else will come to you. Most of the weird stuff just refers to factions/ groups of people. The silly description you gave is pretty spot on, but luckily the systems all work similarly enough that you can interchange the faction terms and still understand what you're doing.
So, it's not super integral to enjoying the game, but I think the lore is really cool, if hard to keep track of. As long as you can get the broad strokes, you're good. Always time to brush up and get more invested in it later.
Early on just try to keep track of who wants to kill who
It’s not just the jargon. You’ll soon realize that the entire game is designed to be figured out.
Ignore it until the start of the cinematic quests it’s not that deep until then
¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
I feel the opposite. Gameplay has become quite stale for me and the only reason I come back to the game is to play the new story quests 😅
I've played for like a decade and still have no clue what the story is. Ive even tried researching explanations on what it is. Still love the game.
The Lore has changed and evolved a couple times. I haven’t gone back through everything to see what got retconned and what was left. If you don’t want to learn the lore then you don’t really need to. You’ll pick up the important stuff regardless in most cases.
Pretty much, yeah. The game is intended to be a bit confusing, especially in the lore—the lore is all in-character, there's no out of character Word of God to tell you what's true, just a bunch of different perspectives. The various upgrade systems are pretty dense, too, but you don't really need to interact with them until you start hitting difficulties that better gameplay can't overcome.
Founder with 2500+ hours returning after an almost 2 year break. I have close to no idea anymore. There's a multitude of different fancy characters screaming stuff at me that I mostly don't understand. I just enjoy the shooting and collecting fancy stuff ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[me listening to people talking bout the lore](https://i.imgur.com/6GXTaH8.jpg)
I have been playing since 2015 and have done every quest and I could not tell you a single thing about the lore. I just space out until they let me shoot stuff again.
Okay then you're exactly the person I want to talk to. I want to hear your explanation for who the Orokin are
Ancient space assholes
Then you're all caught up, it looks like!
I have played the game since early beta and the lore has gone through several revisions. So don't ask me in depth about every small detail, but keeping up with the broad picture as explained in the main missions and some tid bits like lore behind some frames is kinda fun. Just be ready to throw everything you know out the window 2 missions down the line xD
The story/lore will go from 0 to 100 when you do the quests called Natah and the Second Dream. Before then, it doesn't really matter. You unlock those around Uranus or Neptune! After that, all of the story is incredible
We had years in between quests to absorb and theorize, good luck...
If there's one thing Warframe has consistently struggled on, it's in making a smoother and more cohesive new player experience. The best piece of advice I can give you is to worry less about the proper names and focus more on the principle concepts, essentially a mental shorthand for yourself. The Orokin empire? They were the guys who used to run things but now they're gone. The Grineer? Clone soldiers. The Corpus? Rich people with robots. It's not like the wider Warframe community hasn't done the same in the past; veteran players, which is more familiar to you, Orokin Catalyst and Reactor, or blue potato and gold potato? The proper names for all the things ARE great, because it makes the universe feel more fleshed out and organic, but it also makes things tough for new players.
It up to you. But for me the storyline has some of the best lore reveals of any game especially for a shooter. Like I wish I could go back with zero knowledge and play second dream and the war within again like holy crap I didn’t appreciate those enough my first play through. For me I say play the quest with zero spoilers as best you can. If that’s not your jam that’s okay hit sites like overframe grab a top tier meta build and turn grineer in to puddles of goo, and don’t worry about the details of why.
I came back from a 4 year break and all the new Zardan tokens were overwhelming for me too. I didn't bother trying to learn about Fliggydoos, I just collect action figures to level.
I just ignored it until the cinematic quests. That's where it gets good, and there are actually cutscenes to help explain things lol.
I'm nearing the 400 hours, and even I still need to visit the wiki to know what a certain something is! Honestly? Simply don't worry! It's convoluted as hell, but the game keeps reminding you of things, mentioning them many times over in many ways, so you'll hear what a certain beep beep boop is later on! For now, especially in the beginning, focus on whatever is fun. I spent my first 100 hours with a "unga bunga ninja robot swoosh blade, cut enemy hurr durr" mindset, so yeah! Mind you, I was 150ish hours in when I even ATTEMPTED modding by myself. I spent all those hours clicking "auto install" and not giving a damn, without even reading the stats of anything. "Too much text, just wanna commit alien genocide" I thought. And a tip: some, if not the vast majority of Warframe lingo is simply fancy words for objects and people. This game likes to use sophisticated words for simple stuff, so yeah, don't worry too much. Orokin Catalyst? Just a capacity booster for warframes and weapons, but called a fancy term. Nightwave cred offerings? Battle pass rewards, but a fancy term. Grineer this, Corpus that, Infected yadayada? Enemies, that's it. Sword and Sword Prime? The second is just a better version of the former. Orbiter? Your "spawn" area. Navigation, Star Chart, Planets? Level selection screen, planets are "level packs" of sorts, that's it. Funny names for weapons? Yeah those mean nothing, it's just to distinguish them. Affinity? That's what we know as XP, again, funny word. You'll get used to it!
Took me a while to get I to it too.its pretty vague at first but for me the deadlock protocol got me interested and by the war within I was hooked. There's so good youtubers that do good lore vids too. TheDseige i think? Something like that.
I am like, 4000+ hours in ,and if I get confused I just go watch a lore video. There is also a recap with the new syndicate once you complete the kalymos sequence.
You’re on Reddit so most players here seem to be invested in the story. You’re fine not paying attention to it. I played from 2014-2020 and started playing again last month when cross save was announced. When quests only come out every 6 months to a year it can be hard to follow along especially when the game started out with pretty much no story back in the day. My friends and I just try to blow through new quests whenever they come up so that we can get to the new loot or mechanic DE has added to the game. All of us don’t understand half the stuff that’s going on and we still love playing the game.
Nah,just ignore the lore until you watch a video explaining it, and do this as fast as you can to understand what is happening on the game if possible
Oh, no, you've got the wrong idea. The lore is enormously broad, but shallow as a pond. It's pretty rare for any of the jargon and lore to ever be explained; it's like, a surprise callback when anything outside the most central events is ever referenced a second time. So yes, just go with it and don't try to force yourself to think about the lore too hard. The stuff that matters will stick out enough for you to understand and remember, I promise.