Warframe has fully embraced its weird side over the past few expansions, but if you thought its whimsical westerns and long-lost dimension-shifting labs were as far as the free-to-play shooter was willing to go, then you might be wrong. want to prepare: developer Digital Extremes has revealed the first game of its upcoming story expansion 1999, and let’s say you go into space and kill a boy band from the 90s.
We’ve known 1999 was likely to be special ever since its tease at last year’s TennoCon absolutely stole the show – catapulting players away from Warframe’s usual far-future sci-fi aesthetic and into the eerily familiar world of Earth’s eccentric underground. station and retro tech. And now that TennoCon 2024 is underway, Digital Extremes is sharing more about its bold new expansion.
To get some burning questions out of the way first, yes, it really does take place in 1999 (New Year’s Eve, to be exact) and no, this isn’t quite the Earth we know – but it’s close enough, filled with extremely familiar period – appropriate artefacts that feel joyfully incongruous in the wider world of Warframe. And that starts with the new center from 1999: an abandoned 1990s mall full of faux palm trees, arcade machines and screens spewing cheesy infomercials.
The mall serves as the base of Hex, the newest Warframe Syndicate, and as Digital Extremes’ 22-minute demo begins, we’re introduced to its six members, proto-forms of the game’s most iconic Warframes. Players take on the role of squad leader Arthur Nightingale (Batch Designation: Excalibur), working alongside Amir Beckett (Volt), Aoi Morohoshi (Mag), Leticia Garcia (Trinity), Eleanor Nightingale (Nyx and especially Arthur’s sister), plus Quincy Isaacs, whose the batch designation – Cyte-09 – relates to the new warframe that comes with 1999.
So it’s no surprise that the expansion is all about giving players the chance to experience some major events from Warframe’s past – but that’s probably the least interesting thing about it. 1999 is almost laughable in its audacity: it is an expansion that dares to add a romance system to Warframe, allowing players to develop deeper relationships with their friends by visiting their beige desktop PC, logging into KOL (KIM Online) and text chatting. for them in an IRC style, choosing dialogue options as the conversations unfold. And yes, you might even get a New Year’s kiss if you play your cards right.
And if this raised eyebrows in disbelief, there will be more. One brisk scene later, all six members of Hex are astride motorcycles and hurtling through a neon-lit tunnel (well, five are on bikes – Volt is running beside them on foot), which is rather unexpected. But then the tunnel ends and the gang bursts into the moonlit, rain-drenched streets of Kulvania – a new open-world environment that feels somewhere between a modern-day American city and Half-Life’s City 17. Players can explore its corners from behind. their motorbikes once 1999 arrives, all with a screeching metal soundtrack.
At this point in the demo, Digital Extremes transitions to something a little closer to traditional Warframe third-person action. Enemies swarm the streets after an encounter with Scaldra’s commander, Major Neci Rusalka, and there’s a take on combat from 1999 that combines classic earth weapons with flashier sci-fi attacks. Eventually, the battle spills out into a large open square where players encounter a boss similar to the H-04 Efervon Tank, at which point everything erupts into absolute chaos – heavy gunfire, poison-spewing drones, laser blasts, and constant drops of new troops. escalating intensity.
But there’s a sudden pause when the character from the end of last year’s 1999 teaser shows up and Arthur gives chase – the action soon moves down into the tunnels of an abandoned subway system full of pulsating bioluminescent plants and strangely organic technology. We see Arthur interact with a “security terminal” that players can hack by playing a mini-game reminiscent of the classic Snake for mobile phones – but failure results in a sudden influx of enemies and, more worryingly, the potential to be injected with the Coda worm. virus. what is it? Well, it’s not entirely clear yet, but Arthur’s demo journey comes to a doubly painful end when a strange series of screens spawns a giant creature (think Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors) that then churning out the Warframe version of the Excalibur we all know and love. Crashing credits.
Except… we then return to the Origin System centuries later, where something is decidedly wrong. As the Railjack mission plays out, pulsating music suddenly blares from the comms, taking the player to an asteroid in deep space. When he steps out, he discovers the source of the music: a huge, Earth-like concert stadium manifesting somewhere really he hadn’t – apparently as a result of that earlier Coda virus. But we’re still not done: Arthur enters the stadium and follows its corridors out, revealing a live performance in progress. Lights flash, lasers dance, a convincingly 90s-esque pop anthem plays over the sound, and some strange creature is thrown onto the stage by the five infected members of the (fictional) boy band On-Lyne. Boss time – but alas, that’s the end of the demo.
It’s a brilliantly rounded affair, and Warframe players will be able to see where it’s all headed when 1999 kicks off this ‘winter’. And in addition to the story campaign, it will also introduce Gemini skins – allowing players to switch between their Warfarme and its fully customizable 1999 counterpart – plus a new sniper-focused Warframe, Cyte-09.
There’s more to come before the 1999 release, however Digital Extremes promises two more Warframe updates before then. August brings The Lotus Eaters, a “micro-story” that serves as a prologue to 1999, followed by a second update in the fall – which will be detailed at this year’s Tokyo Game Show. However, expect a new theme plus a new Warframe and various quality-of-life improvements, including a rework of Caliban (Caliban will be free as part of the update), new Incarnons, Companions 2.0 Part 2 and more.
But before everything else that – right now, actually – players can get a taste of Warframe’s 1999 expansion in a special in-game narrative that lets them explore a mall version of it as part of Special Relay. It will be available approximately one week after TennoCon 2024.