Unhinged and Based Things Warframe has Done (and Pop Culture References)
* Put doomed old man yaoi in a mainline quest
* Has doomed yuri (less obvious than the yaoi, but definitely there)
* “SNAKE? SNAAAAAAKE!!!”
* Made Neil Newborn the VA meme of “voices a super edgelord broody guy… and a fish”
* Evangelion. No I will not elaborate
* Cracked an untold number of eggs with the line “Dream. Not of what you are, but of what you want to be.” (This didn’t crack my egg, but it is what got me to crawl out of the shell)
* Y2K
* Took one of the most traumatized characters in fiction, cut them in half, gave one half even more trauma, then gave that half a place to heal. The other half still has untreated super trauma tho lol
* Heirloom skins… The devs are as horny as their players
* Has opera, labor songs, space shanties, and 90’s boy bands all in one game and it makes sense? How?
* Looked at nearly a decade of lore and continuity errors and said fuck it everything is canon now. And it works? This also spawned one of the funniest memes in gaming. Just a character gripping their head trying to comprehend the bullshit.
* Made me jump out of my skin when I realized that my dad calls me kiddo. He says the thing nearly every time I talk to him. This is never not funny to me.
* Got Nine Inch Nails to license the song “Into the Void” in the middle of a quest. The moment is pretty epic, and the song fits the game well
* Put a dating sim mode in their game about space ninjas
* Made an arcade machine that can play in universe versions of flappy bird, street fighter and more
* “What. The. Balls.”
* Made a fantastic villain. Everyone hates him. He might actually be the least redeemable villain of all time. I love him as a character, but absolutely despise him. About 50% of the story beats in the game boil down to “unfortunately, this one guy decided to be everyone else’s problem”
* Another 30% of the story can be boiled down to “unfortunately, this one scientist’s actions had consequences”. Usually it’s one specific guy you learn about in the mid game, however sometimes it’s one of like 5 others.
* The current creative director (Rebecca Ford) loves JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. It was never confirmed (afaik), but back when she was community manager there was a dev account on switch called [DE]MudaMuda. We all kinda figured it was Rebb being silly and referencing her favorite show. One time the account was active in region chat during an update. I personally said in chat that “Rebb thinks she’s slick”. The account quickly fired back with “you think you’re slick”. To this day that is the most direct contact I have had with the devs. Rebb, if that was you, that was not a good comeback. If not, that was a brilliant comeback lol
* Made me sit sobbing at my computer at 3 in the a.m. because you can actually have a conversation about gender dysphoria with a nonbinary character. This is one of the few times in any major media I have ever seen this addressed. It was handled brilliantly, and you can even reply about being able to relate!
* Made the premium currency the primary trading currency. This means that nearly every item in the game is obtainable for free if you put in the effort.
* On PC there are more items that can only be obtained with real money than on console. This is because of Tennogen (Tenno, the player characters, generated content) cosmetics made by community artists that get a large cut of every sale. On console it’s available via premium currency, but I like that we can directly support artists in the community like that.
* Made a really emotionally impactful quest about one of the edgiest characters in the game
* Dropped a labor (preganante) quicktime event in a quest
* Made a grim dark world where you play as a hero. This hero’s greatest strength that causes their enemies the most fear is not their immortality, nor their ability to appear anywhere and kill everything only to vanish without a trace, nor is it any of the insane feats of strength they accomplish. This hero’s greatest enemies fear their empathy more than anything else. This is a world where you face against the personification of indifference and realize that the only way to defeat it is with love. It is so cheesy and beautiful. This is a grim dark world that was made by optimists
* Have a canonically trans fem character in one of the earliest areas you can access in the game. She runs the in universe Valentine’s Day event.
* Made the character that is essentially a really sheltered “young” scientist really like boy bands. She also loves the in universe version of Halloween
* Digital Extremes puts on a “quest to conquer cancer” charity event every year. All proceeds for the merch and related in game cosmetics go towards cancer research.
* Hoverboards
* Also motorcycles cause why not
* Ok seriously though, 99% of the romances in this game are doomed or end in tragedy. DE are you ok? Who hurt you?
* “For my brothers”
* There is an order of monks that can see every possibility of every future all at once. They often will hint about things that haven’t happened yet. Yes this can be confusing.
* The main character is a warlock. I don’t care what abilities they manifest, the d&d class that describes them best is warlock. Fight me
* One of the game’s concept artists started out as a rule34 fan artist for the game. When a new character was revealed and his concept art showed some censored nudity people started calling him out on twitter, only for him to show the original art he submitted. He drew the character with pants, but Rebb demanded to see more… anatomy (all miracles require sacrifice)
* Gemussy. I’m… not gonna elaborate on that one. Again, the devs are as horny as their players.
* Eleanor’s tongue… again, the devs—
* There is a summer event called dog days. The plot is that one of the Tenno’s enemies who runs a ritual combat arena ends up caught in a “gas leak”. She gets high and demands ritualistic water fights with the Tenno. This is one of the funniest events in canon. It happens every year.
* When crossplay was introduced they had one of the characters in the game who is basically a god be the in universe explanation for it. Yes, this character is an antagonist. Yes, the players who pay attention to lore are terrified.
* There are a few conlangs in the game. Most of them are simple ciphers of English, however one of them is an eldritch tongue that we are only barely starting to understand. If you hear a vaguely latin chanting in the music, no you didn’t. You heard voidtongue.
* They are adding a classic anime school arc to the game. You know, classrooms, good teachers, bad teachers, school being put on pause so students can go help in an existential war on a normal school day. The classics.
* Made one of the most important characters in lore who protected everyone single-handedly for eons extremely autistic coded.
* That one punch man asteroid scene.
* There is a Warframe that is the sand guardian, guardian of the sand
* The main enemies are
* Generic space zombies (totally not the flood)
* An army of clone fascists
* A late-stage capitalism cult
I can keep going lol
Pt 2
Per request! This took a while lol. Three of these I pulled from a poll @deusverve did about 6 months back. Those ones are marked. Enjoy!
* Put their shiny new cinematic opening in the pre-movie trailer crawl before Spider-Man: No Way Home (yes really I was there)
* The character who runs Valentine's Day also runs the pride event. She is a trans woman who is not passing and no one gives her any crap about it. She mentions it once or twice, but no one else does.
* An old man fatally shot the player character to teach them the value of friendship. (Yoinked from deusverve’s survey on funny Warframe plot points)
* There's a boss who refuses to die. Everytime we kill him he just gets angrier. He has a really really long monologue about how you are not worthy. "Look at them, they come to this place when they know they are not pure. Tenno use the keys, but they are mere trespassers. Only I, Vor--" (deusverve)
* The old creative director promised lore for a specific frame. It has been years and there has been none. DE give us Garuda lore pls! (I took so long writing this that they added it! I haven’t gotten around to seeing it yet tho lol)
* They added a frame based on mushrooms and teased him by calling him a "fun guy"
* When it released, the fastest selling Prime Access Pack (premium bundles for upgraded Warframes. Everything except cosmetics are obtainable without purchase) was Wisp Prime. Wisp is known to the community as having arguably the most bodacious booty. These facts are almost certainly directly correlated, although Wisp is also just a really fun, versatile, and well-built frame to use
* One of the romanceable characters is named Arthur. He is based on the frame Excalibur. Sadly this is the only pun based romanceable character name I can think of off the top of my head. (I know about Kaya -- she isn't romanceable)
* There is only 1 (one) character in the game that is arguably an alien, but even then they kinda aren’t? It’s complicated. Everything else tho is human/was human/was made by humans/is descended from humans. Yes even the space zombie virus itself… probably… we are pretty sure that humans made the zombies… there is some debate tho that they just appeared lol. But in defense of them being made by humans, they can time travel! So they kinda bootstrap paradoxed themselves into perpetuity.
* Also their hive-mind exists outside of time so we’re kinda fucked. If they were the player’s enemies… which they kinda aren’t? More like adoring overbearing fans. Who normally are trying to show their love by trying to kill you so you can join the hive-mind. Too bad you kinda can’t die.
* The player character has walked off being stabbed in the chest by a sword designed to kill immortals. It took a while tho. To be fair, they were then trapped in a time loop.
* Explained why we kinda can’t die and holy shit no wonder we walked off the immortal killing sword. Our immortality is like an ogre; it has layers!
* Your character uses space zombie tech to time travel. You get eaten! Everyone else does it in more normal ways. (Deusverve! Again lol)
* There is a character (who I will not describe because spoilers) who probably has dissociative identity disorder. I’m not the most well versed in that, but it seems like they handled it pretty well!
* Not to be confused with another character who had her sisters’ minds smushed into her head… She is really not doing well…
* They sadly did not name the new romanceable character based on Wisp “Willow”. She does seem pretty cool tho! Wisp has no feet and just floats so they made Marie an amputee! Who floats now so that’s cool. Sadly she is French. (Her accent is adorable)
* One of the earliest players of the game made a comic about an enemy wanting to be good. DE liked it and made the character canon, as well as a few other things this artist drew (like tonfas!). When he died a few years back DE made a shrine to his memory in Iron Wake, one of the earliest player hubs where Clem, the character he created, hangs out. RIP Datareaper.
* Turned one of the most universally hated frames into one of the most universally loved by saying that she glared at Ball-ass from across the room so hard that he decided she needed to be tortured. And she never broke and rebelled against him the whole time.
* There is a character that got left behind on a school field trip (kinda, spoilers tho) and got stuck in a space where imagination becomes real. They imagined an entire kingdom (from a book they read. It’s supposed to train kids on how to regulate emotions… since they were sending kids into the space where imagination becomes real… man the orokin were messed up) and grew up there. Then they pissed off the king and got executed. Again and again and again… they escaped eventually but holy cow are they not ok. They were asked to share an embarrassing fact about themselves and described the time they were beheaded and then their head hit a tree on the way down and isn’t that sooo awkward lol. The other character had mentioned that he has a teddy bear. He was very concerned.
* Made an alert for destiny 2 refugees when that game ended for a custom title. The alert’s location is a destiny reference.
* Made me cry twice about grandpa. No I will not elaborate, iykyk
* Made another character split in 2 because eternalism. They fight to the death like brothers, even tho they’re the same person.
* Made our attempted assassin and one of our few direct allies (that can “help” in any mission) team up. It was legendary! And it was just for babysitting lol.
* With the Garuda protoframe licking her gun in her transformation emote they made sure to give Eleanor a special moment if you have her use it… remember that tongue? Again, the devs are hornier than the-
* They made an heirloom skin (the horny… hornier ones) for Mesa! It looks really good, but when they revealed the art for it she didn’t have much of anything covering her top. The players demanded a poncho or a duster. The devs delivered, and made it toggleable! They also gave her a little hat she can wear! Again, the devs-
* Just to contradict me (specifically), the devs added actual Latin chanting to the ost. Because why the hell not! To be fair that area and character are all about demonic vibes tho, so it makes sense. (Tho I did remember that there’s a little bit more Latin in another place… dang.)
* Gave a character a kinda spouse person, and then made them a widow in the span of like 5 minutes.
* The only way I can possibly make sense of the lore of this game is that there are 2 timelines. One that the greater universe experiences, however this one gets lots of canon retcons and stuff. The other one is the meta timeline of the player character (And the space zombies, because of course). This one is basically what we as players see (Tho out of order because flashbacks). Because time travel and paradoxes and split timelines and oof. This means that if older lore gets overwritten by new lore, the old lore is still canon, just that it got retconned in universe and we the player character are somewhat outside of time and can tell.
* Let you have a small polycule in the dating sim mode (tho you can’t date 2 characters from the same group at once). They even have you ask your first partner for permission and it’s really cute. Sadly the groups you can date can’t meet. Yet. Here’s hoping I can have a cute lesbian cuddle pile in game lol.
* The artist that started out as a rule34 fan artist also apparently did Bionicle art? Which I mean… based.
* There is a Warframe that got so brutalized and tortured that her damaged form became the only one that exists across all of time. Except for the cosmetic you can get of her original look!
* Most players get a million of one part to the Harrow Warframe because it drops from an enemy class found in literally every mission. You can trade 150 of it for a title based on a meme about its crazy common drop rate.
