Newbiespud's Internet Hermit Hovel

Recovering workaholic. Staying busy to stay sane.

[newbiespud]

I'm an absolute sucker for a weird but thoroughly considered genre pastiche, and, no really, Warframe Tau took everything from the Gritty 20th-Century Noir genre bible:

Grumpy detective with a vice (smoking) and a fatalistic but unflappable inner monologue (voiced by frequently typecasted gunslinger Matt Mercer)

Constant black rain that just makes everything Worse

Drugs and violence devastating the homeless underclass

Helpful urchins surviving as best they can in the lowest streets

Doing dirty favors for shady dock managers to advance a hidden grey agenda involving getting into a mob boss's inner circle to collect information and evidence

Brass-knuckle brawling, obscenely large revolvers, people being thrown out of plate-glass windows

Driving through busy city intersections loaded with glowing enticements to smooth over the suffering

Stratified decadent high society flush with gambling, dancing, and singing

The city's most popular singer/dancer knows the detective on sight, implying either an at-arms-length relationship or frequent patronization, a symbol of beauty for whom the doom timer is no doubt ticking

Atmosphere of lies and betrayal tragically far past the point of ever being healed in one lifetime

Tense negotiations over a card game with a dangerous mover and shaker

My compliments to DE's chefs and their diligent cooking.

[newbiespud]

Okay, I'll admit, I wasn't expecting "gritty 20th-century noir crime thriller through the lens of robot-chimera people in a distant war-torn star system," but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't 10,000% here for it.

[newbiespud]

I've been mostly keeping the daily incremental updates on Bsky, but every so once in a while I feel an obligation to post video proof of my work, and thus: The devlog.

Griftlands: Three For All is now at a bare-minimum playable state, not shareable yet and still rough-draft and buggy, but with enough real content that there's a foundation to build upon for the massive, excessively replayable expansion I want it to be.

This represents a major milestone, and I'll be taking a bit of a break after this and shifting gears to regular fanfic writing to cleanse my palette before coming back. In the meantime, I might be open to assembling team members, but that comes with major considerations when it comes to my social anxiety, so we'll see.

[demilypyro]

[newbiespud]

The great thing about everything ripping off Evangelion, or so I've been told because I haven't watched it, is that thanks to every sci-fi and adjacent series over the last 20 years treating its aesthetic and themes like a free gold mine - especially the Shin Megami Tensei series of games - you are basically no longer obligated to watch Evangelion, because you've already seen most of it through cultural osmosis.

Unless you want the parts that no one wanted to cannibalize, like the messy personal examinations of unlimited male vulnerability.

[newbiespud]

Honestly, I was kind of surprised to quit out of my Warframe session and find out people were Discoursing about the Constellations quest writing.

Not that I'm here to play white knight today and say that your reactions or opinions are wrong. Loyal fan that I am, and as much as I can see how we got to this point with the resources we have, such criticisms are valid and it's worth finding ways to alleviate them.

That said... Maybe I was plenty satisfied because I'm a veteran since the earliest days of open beta, where going along with minimal context clues was just kind of the norm.

Or maybe it's because I'm still shocked that we're doing quests about Stalker at all, the character that was more rumor than confirmed before there was even a "cinematic quest" or a "second dream." And now the character who only speaks in growly half-sentences - now voiced by Gianni Matragrano of all people (not that I don't love him, mind) - is the main character we're hinging all this emotional storytelling on? With his supporting cast, a slow-speaking giant whose main characteristics are "trapped in a water-prison but knows a lot of things"?

Like, how we got here is kind of a meme already, is what I'm saying.

[dorkish98]

Warframe is so funny to me. Sometimes a family is a robot pretendeding to be your adopted mother who then splinters into three separate but conjoined identities, her child she rescued from a shipwreck who got magic space powers from a god that made them kill their own biological parents for its amusement, an alternate timeline copy of the kid who never got rescued and instead was trapped in a magical fairytale world where they got executed and brought back to life on repeat for years before usurping the fictional king and claiming his power over time, their uncle/fighting instructor who hates their adoptive robot mother, a former mass murderer that regreted being a mass murderer and was turned into a glorifed virtual assistant for crime of not wanting to be a mass murderer anymore, a family of former royalty that got infected with a space virus that made them ten times larger and also meat flowers, the gay grandpa of that family who *isn't* infected but *is* haunted by the same god that made the kid kill their parents and is also the reason the god exists in the first place,-

(deep breathe)

-his butler/lover, their cat, three sapient talking animals, the alternate timeline copy's time-traveling polycule, the robot mom's giant robot dad, his estranged son that joined a cult, a single-minded killer that the robot dad also adopted(NOT a robot), his dead wife, AND their child that (as of writing this) seems to have somehow split into two alter egos that are locked in a deathmatch together that it causing mayhem across Venus.

[packetdancer]

For anyone who doesn't play Warframe and thinks this is ridiculous: literally all of this is accurate.

It also leaves out the fact that somehow the developers got Werner Herzog to voice the aforementioned eldritch space god for an advertisement, among other equally absurd things.

Come join us. Embrace the insanity.

[arafaelkestra]

It should be further emphasized that it isn't just that all of it is something like 'accurate but phrased selectively to be weirder/funnier'. If anything, that summary makes most of the specifics sound less dysfunctional and strange.

[detaylor]

i'm celebrating 10 years (and one month) at Digital Extremes! 💕

it's hard to put into words how much the past decade has meant to me — working at DE is a gift i'll never take for granted. i'm truly blessed to work with such an incredible team and such an incredible community every day 🥰

when I started, The Second Dream had just launched, so I got to witness the excitement of our first cinematic quest (with no idea what was happening haha)

Warframe was a completely different game back then (void keys, old star chart, fusion cores) and it's mind-blowing to think of how it's changed

my role at DE has changed a lot too over the years — from social media, to tennogen, to creator program, and now managing live ops (aka hotfixes).

the care you see with making our game is the same care extended interally. i couldn't be surrounded by a better group of people. ❤️😭

in short: i am filled with ten years of gratidude. both for my team, and for the lovely lovely community who shares their joy (and bugs) with me every day

[newbiespud]

I haven't posted about it much here on Tumblr, but for a good chunk of my life - nearly 13 years - I wrote and assembled a screencap webcomic mixing D&D and My Little Pony in the same vein as DM of the Rings or Darths and Droids, which I called Friendships is Dragons.

It officially ended two years today, and I thought I'd mark the occasion with a casual reminiscence stream with my friends in the ol' Discord. Turned out to be a pretty fun and invigorating hour-and-change - I'm glad I did it, I kinda needed it.

[newbiespud]

What? Styanax Prime? That's... That's crazy, Styanax just came out, it- it was the 50th Warframe, they commissioned that whole animated trailer and everything, it...

(looks at Hunter Founder badge and crumbles into dust)

[newbiespud]

I'm still so very, very glad that Arint's Last Day is getting the occasional positive comment here and there. Really lifts my spirits in hard times.

[newbiespud]

Slay the Spire players when Face McStabberson, Scion of Fuck You, who personally stabs you in the eye in real life every turn, is removed from the boss roster: Aw man, that guy was really fun, I enjoyed how challenging that fight was

[newbiespud]

Newbiespud (@newbiespud.bsky.social)

Rounding out this week's worth of #modding work, sidequest number 3 has its emotes and tone indicators for dialogue, and I've hunted down an

Work on my current Griftlands mod project is chugging along at a reasonable pace. Getting closer to the point where I'll feel comfortable making a proper devlog out of all the progress I've made... and then it'll probably be time for a short break while I work on other things.

[newbiespud]

I don't know what it says about me as a player or prospective designer, and I know for certain that I'm in a minority of people having this reaction, but I am relishing the fact that I got into Soulframe during its alpha period, getting to see things get reworked like crazy every other hotfix. It fills me with glee, like getting to sit in and watch the mad scientists work as test tubes boil over and concoctions blow up on the table.

Even with the wealth of Early Access projects to watch these days, you rarely get to see a game tinker so hard on its foundations due to how important it is to set things up for the long term. To me, the appearance of chaos and rapid pivoting is an indicator of passion and movement and experimental thought as opposed to stagnation.

[newbiespud]

Thinking about how I sometimes feel like I don't consume enough horror media to round out a healthy media diet, but then I remember that I've got a lot of legit stress and trauma triggers that I have to dodge or sometimes outright tank every day, so I don't need more simulations of fear and stress because my life is already a horror game in a lot of ways

[thegreatyin]

warframe veterans will be like yeah back in the day we needed to pay taxes on an hourly basis or else ordis would beat the shit out of us and we would have to leave early to get to the tax station because otherwise our stamina would run out and all of our keys would fall out of our pockets. and then we stubbed our toes and had to pay cash money to get a bandaid because we overextended the daily limit on bandaids. and then we went back home to our tiny cramped cardboard box and stared at the wall. and they look at you like this isn't an insane thing to hear

[newbiespud]

Personally, I'm really only nostalgic for the feelings I had when I first joined and started playing Warframe back in 2012/2013, what it was like to be a baby Tenno slowly figuring out how to go from struggling mercenary to cackling power fantasy.

Everything else, I've been more than happy to see things iterate and improve. While the Void Key system lent the Void a great deal of gravitas on the hunt for Prime parts, having to manually squad up every time was a social nightmare, and the Void Fissure system was an improvement in just about every respect. There's not really any particular state of the game where I'm like "man we ought to go back to that," because, like, no.

...Except Ash's 4, Blade Storm, back when that was a one-tap button where everyone around you died in a flurry of takedown animations, and you didn't need to race your allies with a reticle. I understand why they changed that - too easy to idle and auto - but man that was a satisfying ult for when you got caught and needed a panic button.

[newbiespud]

My favorite fictional character from the last decade is still probably Leif from Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling, because I too have spent two centuries in an unwilling parasitic fugue state only to emerge blinking blearily into an unfamiliar and hostile world with weird tastes and opinions and all I really want to do is eat and get good at card games

[newbiespud]

There's a lot of different ways to attempt to describe the smorgasbord that is Warframe, but here's my preferred way:

You know that dream project magnum opus you've got in the back of your head? The one you daydream about, the one you'd make if you had infinite money and time, with all your favorite things in it, with endless potential to add more stuff you like into it? The one you know would be completely unrealistic and would probably die in production if you ever tried to really get it made?

Warframe is someone's dream project that they threw out into the world as a last-ditch effort and, against all odds, it actually survived and thrived.