Okay For an Hour - Warframe: The Sacrifice

Warframe's new story content skips all the padding, gets straight to the point and woooosh! It's over!

Plains of Eidolon drove me away from Warframe. A giant, majestic, sprawling landscape full of ore to dig out of rocks, fish to catch and other stupid resources to farm for days, weeks and months in order to get the most out of a feature I never cared for - Tenno powers. As in, peeling your annoying little space-child out of their warframe to fight the enemy without superpowers or protection, because reasons, I guess.
I farmed Eidolon for two or three days, then got too bored to continue. Look, I get it. Warframe is the grind. Without it, there's no game. It's just that I didn't care for the reward at the end of it this time around. Farming for a cool new gun, an awesome new Warframe, that shit is fun. Farming to get a new pea shooter for my space brat? And I need to catch fish and use a mining laser instead of murdering stuff? Fuck that shit.

Like me, Eidolon is stunning to look at, but ultimately hollow and pointless.

So I took a bit of a break from the game to do other stuff. You know, like racing my bulbasaur car in Forza.

And then they finally released a new story quest. 'The Sacrifice'. To put it bluntly, it's a story the developers had to pull out of their asses to justify the introduction of 'Excalibur Umbra' to the western version of Warframe. This one may require a bit of explaining.
When Warframe was released in China, they offered a special edition of Warframe's posterboy Excalibur. That special version, dubbed Excalibur Umbra, was all black and edgy and came with a flowy scarf, so folks outside of China started wondering when they'd be able to get their hands on him. Originally, it was stated that Excalibur Umbra was really just slightly altered (visually) from regular Excalibur and there was nothing special about him apart from that.

Surprisingly, people in a game about edgy space ninjas still wanted a western release of this guy, so developer Digital Extremes said they didn't just want to throw him in there without explanation. Instead, they promised there would be a bit of lore to introduce him in a way that makes sense. Which is cool, of course, but that was also something they announced so many years ago, that the whole thing turned into a bit of a running gag.

So edgy.

But lo and behold, The Sacrifice is here and it doesn't just allow everyone to grab Excalibur Umbra for free, but it also continues the story of The Second Dream and The War Within. And unlike the previous story missions, The Sacrifice cuts right to the chase and shows you the good stuff without too much annoying padding and repetition. Basically, you're on a quest to chase after Excalibur Umbra to find out why he's such a huge jerk, to learn about his past and to ultimately stop him.

As with previous content of this type, the presentation is absolutely superb, from tons of action-packed cutscenes to fantastic voice acting. Gameplay itself is more of what you'd expect from Warframe. Go someplace, kill some stuff, scan a few things, craft something. What's cool is how there are no artificial time sinks in place in order to encourage people to spend real money. You get to craft your own Excalibur Umbra as part of the storyline and there is no endless grind for resources required, no 24+ hours construction time for you to skip with real cash or any such nonsense. Just play, finish the story, get your free Excalibro all leveled up and with a sexy new katana to boot!

Though my one true love will always be Rhino.

For better or worse, the whole thing won't take you much more than an hour to complete. Previous story quests would often stretch over an agonizing amount of samey bog-standard missions with a bunch of expository monologue by one of the main characters going on for an eternity and a half. The Sacrifice is all about 'show - don't tell', which I appreciate. Even when the game reveals Excalibur Umbra's story, you get to experience it through a character's eyes and there's a bit of interactivity. This makes it easier and a lot more fun to follow the story than in previous quests of this kind.

I much prefer it this way. I'd rather spend an hour playing through fun new content, which is full to the brim with awesome cutscenes and story than spend three or four hours repeating copy-pasted missions where the villain of the month keeps blabbing about his latest project or whatever. That said, there were two (minor) annoyances during my playthrough. First of all, you can only fight Excalibur Umbra as the Tenno. As in, without your warframe. I have no idea how this plays out on a properly upgraded space-kid, but since I never got into Plains of Eidolon, my brat is grossly underleveled and Excalibro kicked the absolute shit out of me.

I need my warframe to compensate for certain deficiencies.

Not only did he basically oneshot me again and again, but in the unlikely event where I actually survived a single attack, he'd just spam follow-ups, making it impossible to get away or retaliate. You can't ever really "die" when your Tenno gets their ass kicked and these missions are set up in a way where you just try again and again, chipping away at your enemy's shields one pixel at a time, which is an exercise in frustration, but I suppose they had to shoehorn a way for people to enjoy their powered-up Tenno weapons in there somehow.

The other problem was that, as with all story quests right after release, the dark side and light side dialogue choices were all over the place. You defeat a main villain and according to the UI, the light side dialogue option is, "Squirm like the maggot you are!" Clearly there's something wrong here.
The whole light vs dark side thing has no known gameplay effect right now and knowing the developer, it's at least gonna take another 3-5 years before that changes. And there will certainly be a patch for this, if there wasn't one already. Still, it felt a little weird to have all the asshole options associated with light side points and all the kind answers with the dark side.

I could really eat a Mars right now.

Finally, I had a look at Khora, the newest addition to the roster of playable Warframes. Her passive ability allows her to bring a battle pet, a (hideous) space cat, to all missions. The cat deals decent amounts of damage and functions pretty much exactly like the kavat and kubrow pets you can breed and use on all Warframes. In fact, Khora can use one of these regular pets on top of her cat, so she's the only warframe to get two active pets at once. She's also incredibly tanky, so I went and played a 1 hour solo survival, where enemies went all the way up to level 100 and higher in the end. Depending on when you're reading this, the video might still be converting to a watchable quaity, because a 1 hour video file in 4k takes a while to convert, apparently.

There's also a new Onslaught mode, which is basically like playing Nephalem Rifts in Diablo 3. You quickly hop from one randomized environment with random enemies to the next and try to make it as far as you can until time runs out or you run out of respawns. It's a fun new way to farm so-called relics, which are required to obtain the powerful primed warframes and primed weapons.
It's my favourite way to play right now, because you really just fight your enemies, the clock and your old record as you try to progress further and further each time. No objectives, no consoles to hack, no NPCs to babysit, no bosses endlessly talking to you - just instant action. And sometimes that's just what I want.

If you want to know why people are leaving Destiny 2 in droves and feeling very little excitement for Anthem right now, you need to look no further than Warframe. Not only can you (realistically!) play the entire game without ever having to spend any money at all - you can earn LOADS of premium currency just by selling off unwanted gear and mods you find while playing the game. Yes, player trading is deliberately awkward, with a chaotic trade chat and shitty face-to-face bazaars, but I'd rather post a bunch of WTS messages and get my premium currency that way, than shell out $100 for some AAA title featuring season passes and paid cosmetic shit on top.

Warframe is free, the content updates are free and you can earn tons of premium currency for free.

Being the lazy bastard that I am, if I want any particular new guns, mods of warframes, I'll shell out some small amount of money on a bit of platinum and insta-buy that stuff, because I can't be bothered to grind for it. Maybe I'll spend five bucks on a fun new skin for my favourite warframe. Because, you know, in a game that costs me absolutely NOTHING, I'm perfectly happy to spend some small amount of money on some cosmetics or a bit of new gear every six or so months. This is how you monetize your shit.

And I'll be happy to play Warframe on Switch when it releases on there later this year. The folks at Panic Button are in charge of the port, so I have no doubt it will be a very blurry experience with (mostly) stable FPS and absolutely all of the content intact. Just like Doom and Wolfenstein 2. They also ported Rocket League, which is absolutely fantastic on Nintendo's hybrid and supports cross platform play. That's not really something we've ever seen in Warframe, but who knows? I certainly wouldn't mind having access to my original account and its progress when playing it on the go.