Trivia / Warframe

• Acting for Two: Several examples, some of which are voiced by Digital Extremes employees.
  • Rebecca Ford voices both The Lotus and Margulis, essentially two versions of a maternal figure to the Tenno.
  • Ryan Laughton voices both Boon of the Ventkids syndicate and Nihil from the Glassmaker season of Nightwave.
  • Tamara Fritz voices both Eudico and the Profit-Taker Orb.
  • Lucas Schuneman is acting for four, voicing Nef Anyo, Tyl Regor, the Corpus Treasurer enemy that drops Granum Crowns, and a Grineer ghoul.
  • Sara Secora is credited as not only Mathila, but the female Dax Archers, female Corpus Pilots, and a few other voices.
  • Emma Martello voices Rell, Master Teasonai, and Cephalon Cy.
• Amateur Cast: Somewhat stretching the definition of 'amateur'; while several of the voice actors in the game have been performers for years if not decades, for several members of the cast, Warframe is their most prominent credit, and in some cases, the characters they voice are one of their few named roles.
• Ascended Fanon:
  • Clem the Grineer◊ has been acknowledged by the devs, first as the canonical name of the Steel Meridian medallion trader before he became an Ascended Extra and was featured in the "A Man of Few Words" quest. What's more, his weapon of choice, the "Two Grakata", were released as an actual weapon with Update 17 as the Twin Grakata.
  • John Prodman, who originated from a thread about a Prod Crewman taking on Phorid by himself would later become an opponent in The Index who drops an autographed poster of himself.
  • Fortuna 69 is now a permanent instance, meaning it won't be purged for lack of population.
• Ascended Glitch: When the Kuva Lich system launched, if a player failed to kill their Lich, all players would receive progress towards their requiem mods; this was identified as a bug and patched out, but after fan outcry at the fact that this made Lich hunting in squads pointless, it was added back in.
• Author's Saving Throw:
  • The "Abyss of Dagath" update was announced during TennoCon 2023 with the promise that it would mostly focus on alleviating many of the more frustrating and imbalanced elements of the game. When it came out, reception was very positive:
    • "The Waverider" was long considered That One Sidequest due to focusing on the Scrappy Mechanic of K-Drives. As a result, many players ended up ignoring it entirely. The quest was rebalanced to greatly reduce the number of tasks needed, making it much less painful to complete.
  • Hydroid had attained Memetic Loser status due to being a Low-Tier Letdown, with his abilities lacking in both power and utility. His rework flipped this reputation around, turning him into a corrosive status-inflicting machine that excels at damage, crowd-control, and armor-stripping.
    • All companions were reworked, making a wider variety of them viable: whereas prior, only a small assortment of pets were viable, with Sentinels in particular being universally seen as useless outside of low-level missions due to their low durability and the extreme rarity of ways to revive them when they die. The update addressed this by making it so all companions are more durable and come back to life automatically 90 seconds after being destroyed, and many new mods were added to give them a greater variety of purposes.
    • Obtaining a Necramech, which is mandatory for story progression, was an extremely tedious grind in large part because the damaged Necramech parts were considered That One Component, with only a small chance of being obtained from Isolation Vaults. Abyss of Dagath addressed this by making the Necraloid sell these items for a very reasonable price.
    • After players had demanded it for years, an auto-melee feature was added, reducing the risk of repetitive stain injury from Button Mashing for melee-focused players by allowing them to simply hold down the melee attack button.
  • Dante was heavily Nerfed shortly after his release, alongside a new augment for Nezha that released, drawing massive backlash from the community, who felt that the update was not worth it after the nerfs. DE relented and undid the majority of them, and implemented some QOL fixes when it came to line-of-sight Warframe abilities.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: From the end of The New War, many believed that the inhuman bellowing from The Man In The Wall after the fight with Ballas translated to "Oull - Ris - Xata - Vome. Khra - Lohk", presumably summing up the events of the quest with the descriptions of the corresponding Requiem Mods and implying that it knew everything that was going to happen ahead of time. It wasn't until Tennocon 2022's Sounds of The System panel came that lead sound designer Erich Preston mentioned at this moment that the true meaning has yet to be deciphered and no one has found it yet.
  • As of Whispers in the Walls, the Man in the Wall's words are revealed to have been the following: "VOULL NE XATA VOK, MARA LOHK?". However, beyond the specific meaning of the two Requiem words in it ^note "Xata" meaning "Truth" and "Lohk" meaning "Void", the actual meaning of the wider sentence remains unknown.
• Colbert Bump: Two:
  • The devs credit Youtubers such as Totalbiscuit for helping to bring them publicity in the early days of Warframe.
  • An odd example; while it was a rather popular game beforehand, the massive ongoing controversy kicked up by the blunders of Destiny 2 (see Dueling Works below) ended up bringing a lot of extra attention to Warframe as people began mentioning it in discussions as "like Destiny 2 if it wasn't crap". Particular attention was paid to how its monetisation methods are less exploitative, despite Warframe being an actual F2P game, unlike Destiny 2 which goes the whole hog with lootboxes and restricted content despite being (at the time) a full-priced AAA game. As a result, Destiny 2's losses have proved to be Warframe's gains. Extra Credits even did an episode about how Activision had ended up investing $500 million in marketing... for Warframe.
• The Cast Show Off: Vala Glarios's voice actress, Damhait Doyle, sings the entirety of Sleeping in the Cold Below. Outside of Warframe, Doyle is a professional composer and singer and is part of the band The Heartbroken, which has been nominated twice for "Group of the Year" by the Canadian Country Music Association.
• Christmas Rushed: The Empyrean update, which introduced the Railjack game mode to Warframe, was, to say the very least, not ready for launch when it released in December of 2019, where its launch was announced at that year's Game Awards; it was an Obvious Beta in several aspects, with bugs preventing players from loading into and out of missions, causing enemies to become invulnerable or invisible, and had damage values that were so overtuned that a specific meta had to be maintained just to survive in a mission, let alone beat one.
• Defictionalization: Among the Tennocon 2021 merch items were real-life versions of the floofs for the Sunny Pobber and the Kubrodon Incarnadine.
• Diagnosis of God: A tweet by the game's Live Operations & Community Producer has confirmed that Rell is autistic coded.
• Descended Creator: Since at least February of 2022, Rebecca Ford has been creative director of Waframe, taking over the role from Steve Sinclair during Tennocon 2022 and on. Ford is also the voice of The Lotus, and is probably the character who you will hear the most of while playing.
• Dueling Works: With Destiny, thanks to both being post-apocalyptic sci-fi games set in the distant future with a focus on loot collecting. Considering Plains of Eidolon was released around the same time as Destiny 2 and the expansion's extensive advertising campaign, many believe it's official.
  • Also with Anthem, which is stylistically even closer to Warframe than Destiny is (with a 3rd-person perspective, a range of different powered armour suits to choose from, and an emphasis on high mobility). Warframe ultimately won when further development of Anthem was shelved in 2021.
• Dummied Out: As one would expect from a game developed since 2004 and first released in 2012, Warframe has a surprisingly large amount of unused content. Digital Extremes often teases content years before releasing it, which leads to them sitting unused in the game files for a while.
  • The Tanukai armor set and sword skin were originally known as the Shinai set. They were first created in 2017, but remained unreleased until 2021 during Tennocon.
  • The original incarnation of the New War weapons bundle concept from 2018 included the Shedu rifle, a pistol and a speargun. The Shedu was released as part of the Scarlet Spear event, but the other two weapons remain unreleased to this day.
  • There's a skin for the Braton assault rifle in the game's files that seems to have been a collaboration with the GPU company Nvidia that never came to fruition. It's still a linkable item in the game's chat, but it's unknown why it has never been released.
  • The official drop tables mention a boss version of Erra, with drops similar to those from other Sentient fighters. However, Erra defects from Narmer during The New War before he can be fought, is crushed to death right before its climax, and has spent the rest of the main story being controlled by Pazuul, who himself does not appear in person, nor does he possess NPC data.
• Fan Community Nicknames: A semi-example; Digital Extreme constantly refers to the players as ''Tenno".
  • When Rebecca Ford accidentally mixed up "users" with "losers" during an interview on the 2016 VGA, the community rolled with it and adopted "Losers" as a nickname.
  • Fashionframe both for the game itself and the part of the community that likes to play with fancy skins.
• Funny Character, Boring Actor: Inverted with The Lotus / Rebecca Ford. While The Lotus is a stoic, calculating Voice with an Internet Connection who only really emotes when things are about to go truly pear-shaped, like when the Grustrag Three are sent after you in a mission, Rebecca Ford is more along the lines of a fun-loving and energetic lady with a charming sense of humor.
• Genius Bonus:
  • The name of the Perrin Sequence syndicate originates from the mathematical number sequence named after mathematician Raoul Perinn.
  • Introduced in the New War, the Narmer faction gets its name from the the first ever Egyptian Pharaoh, who united Lower and Upper Egypt under a single kingdom, much as Ballas does to the Origin system.
• In Memoriam: The Echoes of Veilbreaker update added a memorial of Datareaper, who had passed away earlier in 2022. He was Clem’s original creator and designer of the Kronen, behind Clem’s fort in Iron Wake, and his memorial has an Excalibur Prime and Kronen Prime decorated after his gear.
• Meaningful Release Date: Amongst updates, Update 26: The Old Blood, which introduced Grendel and the Kuva Liches to the game, was released on October 31st, 2019 for PC - that is to say, Halloween Day.
• Official Fan-Submitted Content: Due to Digital Extremes' close relationship with its playerbase, they will often draw upon the community for content ideas:
  • Several Warframes are based on player-submitted designs. These include Nova, Zephyr, Xaku, and Sevagoth.
  • They have also added fan-designed weapons, including the Silva & Aegis, Kronen, Mios, and Jat Kusar.
  • The TennoGen system allows players to submit cosmetic items through the Steam Workshop. The best and most popular submissions are then made available for purchase for Steam players.
• Orphaned Reference: Vay Hek flees his boss fight upon losing in his second form, and Jordas mentions that there are more Golems like him in their assassination missions, two details that don’t go anywhere despite rendering their attempted assassinations moot. Before the Plains of Eidolon update scrapped them, there used to be raids known as Trials, with the two being themed on finally killing Vay Hek and taking out the "main" Jordas Golem, before they were axed thanks to being full of different kinds of Game-Breaking Bug, with each update worsening them. Their main rewards, arcanes, were then moved to Eidolon hunting.
• Schedule Slip:
  • DE understably delayed the release of Operation Scarlet Spear from early March to the last full week of the month due to the coronavirus outbreak, which forced all of their staff to work from home for safety reasons.
  • Similarly, they delayed the release of The New War from early 2020 to December 2021. DE actually liked this better, as it allowed them to introduce Necramechs and the Orphix, which could then be incorporated into the quest.
  • Due to bugs, "Veilbreaker" was released in two parts — the first portion (containing the Veilbreaker quest, the 50th Warframe celebration that provided players access to Styanax for free, and the Archon Hunts) was released on September 7, 2022. The second portion, containing Kahl's garrison and the Break Narmer missions, would be released the following week.
• Troubled Production: The New War suffered this due to the at the time ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which forced DE to push back its release date from early 2020 to December 2021. This also forced them to replace the intended release of the Duviri Paradox with Heart of Deimos, and even when the New War dropped, only the quest itself and follow up bounties were included because DE no longer desired to change the release date again.
• What Could Have Been: Inverted — Warframe is this to darkSector, or to be more precise, to this trailer. The lore might be different, but the looks are nearly identical. As for straight examples:
  • In an earlier design phase, all Warframes were intended to have both male and female variants; Nyx was originally Excalibur's female variant, hence why her body is nearly identical to his. There is also concept art of a female Ash.
    • As an extension of this, Ember was originally released as a male Warframe, before he was replaced by her current version in Update 5.3, Blazing Embers.
  • Ember's first Deluxe Skin was originally going to be Ember Phlegeton by IgnusDei. Unfortunately, an alteration to the design done by Digital Extremes◊' art team (The blade on the head was added by DE) led to a heated argument that ended with DE ending his contract with them and replacing the skin with Ember Vermillion.
  • Protea's original name was to be Obalisque.
  • Equinox's original names were Animus and Anima. Equinox Day was Animus, and Equinox Night was Anima.
  • Nef Anyo has been teased for years as an upcoming boss rework to his original version (now known just as "The Sergeant"). So far, nothing's come of it yet.
    • Nef was also going to fight alongside his son/nephew Derf, a Loony Fan of the Tenno who flies with a disk-like hover vehicle.
  • The Kuva Liches were originally supposed to have a more eldritch theme toward their immortality.
  • There existed a proof-of-concept gamemode where players would play as the Stalker, invading Tenno cells. Despite Digital Extremes stating their intent to include something like it in the future, there has been little news about the idea, possibly due to the formidable balancing challenges, the developers' focus on The New War and the COVID-19 pandemic. Stalker was finally made playable in The Duviri Paradox, albeit only as a selectable Warframe in the Undercroft (and requiring the player to max-out the Drifter's Opportunity Intrinsic), and the devs have implied that this will be the only area where he is playable.
  • The initial version of Cetus had a few more Ostrons in it, alongside Corpus actually doing merchant work. These would be excluded until several years later due to time crunch.
  • When Lunaro was released, there were plans to make a weapon version of the Arcata (A Jai alai Xistera-like gauntlet) that could throw Lunaro balls at enemies. It was ultimately never released because the ball kept getting stuck on terrain due to its wonky physics.
  • Sanctuary Onslaught was originally intended to be the Spiritual Successor of the PVP Dark Sectors, with more cooperation in mind instead of competition.
  • The Sentinels were going to have a quest related to them, which would explain them in more detail. The Taxon was going to be the reward for completing the quest, instead of having to obtain the blueprint by beating the Venus Junction.
  • The Grineer Hellions were going to have their own weapon, a more advanced rocket launcher. Said weapon does show up in the game as a Narmer version of the Grineer Napalm’s flame launcher, albeit with a darker color scheme and gold embellishments.
  • The Zundi was originally going to be a weapon instead of a universal pistol skin. According to its concept art, it was an Uzi-like submachine gun and the secondary counterpart of the Quellor rifle and the Pennant nikana. This is given a nod ingame, with the lore mentioning that no Zundi weapons survived the Old War.
    • There's also two more Railjack-styled weapons◊ that remain unused: A massive glaive shaped like a pendulum blade and a missile launcher that fires up to 24 small warheads.
  • The Shedu Arm Cannon was originally going to be the weapon of a modular Sentient enemy◊. The Shedu was one of its potential weapons which could be ripped out from the Sentient and used. When the Shedu was released, it was as a permanent weapon instead of a temporary one.
  • The very earliest trailer for The New War implied that Natah's mother, Praghasa, would have a greater role than the one she ultimately had (A braindead Doomsday Device).
    • At one point, Praghasa (or the Sentient Outpost, as she used to be known during development) was going to be the main "planet" of the Sentients.
  • Modular Archwing content was in the works for a long time around the time of Railjack’s introduction, but never really found a good place to be introduced from then on. An interview with Rebecca in 2023 has also more or less confirmed]] that despite progress made on it, the game has evolved to the point Archwings were Out of Focus, and did not integrate well with content.
• Word of God: During an interview, following Tennocon 2022, Rebecca confirmed that Veso was killed when his ship was destroyed in "The New War". She also revealed that the devs left Kahl's fate open-ended because they wanted to see if the fandom liked him before committing to giving him a dedicated game-mode.

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