LORE MADNESS

[Rayla]

Honestly, the hell that lore is? I honestly want to understand the whole lore of this yet i clearly have no idea whats goin on. Moreover, the new quests - especially Duviri - like really make me go "What???"
The only thing I got or at least I think I did was the tenno originality but the other stuff is like ????
I held an idea in my head that New War for example is a new piece of lore tho during that quest I LITERALLY had no idea what was goin on on my screen i swear to god, and especially after that quest there was more questions that answers.
The other part is what really warframe is???? Cuz I was said that warframe is nothing but a suit, unliving voodoo magic thin, yet the Mesa's description says quote "She's blindfolded cuz she feels bored hunting targets she sees, which clearly doesnt apply to something that is not alive?
Anyway I tried to surf through the wiki but my smal hazel nut brain cant comprehend the lore of this thing tho I really want to understand it

[Tyrannus]

The thing is, you can watch some youtube videos to understand the lore. But here is the problem, it is criticism with writing. The Devs have no idea what they were doing. Respectfully. If you require a third party source to help you understand the lore, you done messed up.

Essentially if your audience cannot understand something, and you gaslight them, and tell them they're stupid, it enters the realms of half truth. For example mediocre awful sci-films, tend to drop junior novelizations to accompany their films. But if the film's plot is illogical and cumbersome, and you ask me to go read some book which is really just a story board draft. To get the "full story". You're gas lighting me, you're not giving me a reason. To invest in your art.

DE originally made things up as they go. But frankly I do not want to read codex entries, or paragraphs to get the full picture. DE doesn't know how to write a story. Originally it was considered ok to have the narrative shrouded in mystery. "What is Tau?" "Who are the Orokin?" "Why should I care for the Lotus". The game requires you to turn off your brain and never ask questions.

Why do things exist the way they do? Who cares! Add a 90's themed, skate-punk, game mode. Originally the Sentient, new war arc was supposedly gonna be the phase one of the lore. But that turned out to be a wet fart.

[Donitsi]

Somebody has better knowledge than I do but I'll try to do efficient summary of everything:

DUVIRI PARADOX
-Drifter is Tenno who didn't make deal with The Man in the Wall and wasn't saved from Zariman
-Duviri is world made of Drifter's feelings and a his/ her childhood book
-Thanks to Ballas who cut the hand of Lotus in The New War, the hand fell into Drifter's world breaking the eternal cycle of him/ her being killed again and again

THE NEW WAR
-Operator dies
-Drifter got out of Duviri and is now reviving Lotus
-Eternalism happens and Drifter is now Operator
-I guess a paradox prevents both from being in the same universe at the same time

WARFRAMES
-First experimented warframes were Dax soldiers (The Sacrifice quest)
-Technology and understanding of infestation must have advanced so far that soon they could create empty shells ---> mass production
-Warframes we use carry the personalities of the originals (Like you mention Mesa)

[Khanwolf]

to understand the Lore please take a look at the philosophical concept of Eternalism. There is a concept like this in (Quantum) Physics too, Einstein's Understanding of Space Time, Neil de Grasse Tyson's Therories, Stephen Hawking's theoretical Approaches in his Universe in a Nutshell and similar Contexts.

The Lore is really good and coherent in this game. On top of that you will find the Origin of Warframes in the Ostron Lore and the Sacrifice Quest shows every tiny detail.

These were simple Suits once, Protoframes... Then Continuity was discovered with Kuva. The Catalyst for the Continuity Ritual. This is why people were able to leave old bodies and possess new young Bodies with a Copy of their Mind.

This opened the Option to create living Machines, Nanotechnology Hive Minds... and the final step in Evolution, where natural Minds were able to fuse with Machines. Not only Warframes were created, the Warframe Forges are living Entities too, but Machines....

I think the Technocyte Virus was simple Nanotechnology too, but with the Continuity Ritual and Kuva, they were able to create a real Hive Mind. It was able to fuse with Flesh, so Machines became Flesh again by programming infected DNA Code.... Warframes and the Forges depicted in Cetus for example (that Tower when you enter the Map) are the Sum of this Evolution.

The Orokin used Pocket Dimensions, a Ripple in Time-Space itself to contain and perfect this Technology. This is where the Concept of Eternalism enters the Lore: As soon as you change Time-Space, or as soon as you travel through it, Copies of yourself are created... like in Rick and Morty's Multiverse.

The Zariman Ten Zero is even stuck between a Ripple in Time-Space and our Dimension, which created even more than one Copy. There are Situations in a lot of Missions, where you see yourself, sometimes it is your Drifter..... sometimes it is Rell, though. Sometimes it is the Man in the Wall: This is where it gets even weirder. The Concept of Eternalism is used with more than one person... So it shows sociological Interactions across Time-Space with People who know each other from their Origin Time-Space...

Warframe 1999 will solve the last Lore Questions. The whole Subway in the Trailer is filled with Orokin Symbols and the Community was able to translate 100%. No other Game has such an interesting and coherent Lore on a scientific Level.

It is the Concept of what Religions call a Soul... Reincarnation... and Divine Intervention...

*collapses*

[2GenL]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKeT8SoRUB8&t=2481s
This goes through the storyline quite well

[Wintermute]

Each warframe is originally an individual warrior - mostly dax soldiers - who got chosen by Orokin to be transformed into Warframe prototype via Infestation. Those prototypes are lobotomized and then replicated as our warframes.

This was made pretty clear in the Sacrifice and multitude of Prime trailers leading to it. If you missed that in the quest... sorry, that one is on you.

[Drago]

I am sorry the lore is giving issues but to be fair it is a bit obtuse at times and different folk have different views of the game lore among us players and even inside DE!

First, Tenno are kids touched and changed from exposure to the Void (sorta like the Warp in W40k or an alternate reality for more generic) that has connections to emotion and alternate possibilities and potentiality of real space. This manifests in being able to generate Void energy, manipulate it, and manifest themselves through focused use of the stuff, even maintaining Tenno lifespans to an extent. Tenno generally were put in storage after recovery from a big colony ship called the Zariman Ten-Zero. This colony ship was part of a plan (that was considered failed) that was intended take colonists from various Executor holdings to Tau-Ceti; since the Executors were considering the Sol System sorta mined out and eventually going to die - something generally terrifying to folk playing at being immortals - this ship became mired in a Void phenomena and resulted in most of the adults being turned into twisted maniacs that sought to kill everyone else aboard, Eventually, some of the children aboard the ship fought off those turned to madness and protected each other until the ship reappeared in Real Space Sol System and was recovered by those loyal to Executor Ballas. Those kids were eventually then put in storage for a while until Ballas' research guys had a later use for us.

Second, after the failure of the Colony ship method of sending valuable preparation forces to Tau Ceti, synthetic lifeforms were constructed to try to build stable Void gates or junction relay nodes (as we have throughout Sol System currently) from the Pluto Outer Terminus and eventually to Tau, by a more slow but ideally more endurance minded attempt. These synthetic lifeforms were made to have a built in vulnerability to the Void energy that gates would be stabilizing for jumps so it was thought they would be self controlled once their works completed; but of course they adapted as they were designed to do against other obstacles and realized once they got to and prepared Tau for the Orokin Elite and their Executor masters that the Orokin empire would despoil their new home and no longer need them; and decided at this point fuly self aware, to strike first against their creators. These were later called "The Sentient". Natah and Hunhow (Natah's father) are examples of the survivors of these forces while Natah's 'mother' was the huge ship shown teasers of New War and such and later encountered in that quest line.

Third, we have the Warframes themselves. These guys have a more complex history since Ballas controlled most of their production with his research teams and later our involvement as well. They actually might have origins in the catastrophe that led the original Orokin Elite ancestors fleeing Earth's surface to the stars and Lua and its hinted specifically by DE Steve that part of the reason (though of course separated by too much time to matter to essentially be the events caused by the fallout of the earlier DarkSector's finale).

Whatever the origin, Warframes have their start in Technocyte; a type of bio-mechanical machine cell or nanobyte cyborg if you prefer. Nanospores - small biomechanical cells - act as their basic form. Anyway, the Orokin had used technocyte research for various bio-engineering tasks and enabling some of their social projects after the original Great Fall of the old society but with the Sentient attacks, they found their more highly advanced weapons were easily assimilated and adapted by the equally advanced results of their former adaptive synthetic life form project and essentially useless in most cases. Instead, along with old ways weapons, Void based tech, and cloning programs; the Orokin Executors decided upon using technocyte to craft super soldiers channeling Void energy through biomechanical mutations and being modified to both survive technocyte exposure but keep their minds, something that was not a certainty since the process often drove subjects to death and madness.

These were called Bio-Drones. Think of them as a beta attempt at what we in the modern day setting of the Sol System (in Warframe) use as Tenno These were people twisted by Technocyte into almost full on Infested monsters but with their minds retained and then pointed at the Sentient as superhuman shock troops. They were great, but also realized that you know, the Orokin Elite wouldn't need them later and wouldn't want them around with free will so Ballas mentions the Executors had them all exterminated. Still, the Elite were loath to acknowledge failure, and some researchers under Executor Ballas realized a theory, that the Tenno (those kids still in storage from the Ten-0) could use their Void touched powers to control the strain of infestation used for the Bio-Drones (as shown in the Rhino Prime codex entry) This inspired Ballas to utilize the Tenno as control elements of a sort for a new series of the Bio-Drones, his "Frames of War" (Warframes) with our player characters as the minds instead of human super soldiers being directly infested and having the evils of free will.

To this end, we were given to Ballas's love interest Archimedian Margulis a specialist of the Mind to try to rehabilitate us and also condition the kids of the Zariman into ideally loyal and controllable assets, While doing this, Ballas had another Archimedian, the bio-geneticist Silvanna come back from a self imposed exile to the surface of Earth (she was attempting to somehow encourage organic revitalization and the rebirth of old Earth) with the promise of working with Archimedian Margulis who the genetic expert admired. Ballas tasked Silvanna with more or less making a new generation of Bio-drones under the auspices of Margulis and Sylvanna's team using them for the children of the Ten-0 to use as surrogates in their rehabilitation.

This worked to an extent until one of the children (hinted heavily to be Rell) maimed Margulis which was a heavy crime in Orokin Elite society and Margulis refused to denounce the children as a whole resulting in her taking the punishment from the Executors, from Ballas' own orders tainting his worldview even further. Jaded by this, he discarded the cover of rehabilitation and pushed the rehabilitation team into openly crafting the surrogates into biomechanical weapons essentially, intended to be empty minded technocyte organisms mimicing the abilities of the old Bio-drones. This served the dual purpose of covering up any failures of the old Bio-drone project and blurring those lines while also giving a mythical and deathless allure for the new versions which were the kids, now Dubbed "Tenno" after the Ten-0 and old world legends (the word means "Heavenly Emperor" and was used by rulers in ancient Japan) acted as remote controllers for these mindless humanoid organisms with massive power. To control the Tenno themselves, Ballas used their ties to Margulis and his growing self loathing not just for his society but also himself and especially the Tenno to convince one of the Sentient the kids were supposed to fight to act as their handler - the Lotus - in this part of his dual plan of yes, defeating the Sentient but also killing the society and children that forced his hand in ordering the execution of his love interest. A Dax that acted as a loyal retainer and ally to Ballas during this time found out and atttempted to warn the rest of the Council of Seven. Ballas had the "Old Dax" turned into fusion of the old Bio-Drone and new warframe tech and then forced the resulting creature to kill the Old Dax's son. This would result in the creature known as Umbra Excalibur who was stored on Lua in a research lab in stasis until the events of 2nd Dream pull Lua out of the Void. The Tenno were stored in pods on Lua, at hand both to supply them with raw Void energy for easy power but also as a control, one could remove to pods to disable the connected warframe organism and thus dispose of the physically still children Tenno inside.

So Ballas decided to run a betrayal Gambit. Make a weapon that could defeat the Sentient; which he mostly did with Tenno and Warframes acting as one (Outside the leadership society was told we were supersoldiers wearing powerful exosuits or one complete organism as you can still read in-universe from characters that don't know better - Vor being suspicious at the start since he had captured and opened warframes up, as had Alad V of the Corpus) Make deals with the Sentient to infiltrate his program to control the Tenno. Have the leader of the Sentient Vanguard get defeated and take a fall to the now oceans of Uranus, and have the leader's daughter - Ballas' Lotus handler for the Tenno - influence the Tenno to execute the Orokin Elite during the victory celebration. Lastly, usurp or attempt to use Natah as the Lotus to kill the Tenno and complete Ballas' revenge against the Orokin, Sentient, and Tenno themselves. To what extent Natah just sparing the Tenno and tossing aside the Natah personality and not continuing Ballas' plans was intended or not is still unclear really but the end result is the same.

The Tenno lived and stayed in stasis mostly with only stragglers like Rell or eventually going into a long sleep on Lua in those pods as their warframe "bodies" went inactive or were defeated in great battles and the Tenno themselves became synonymous for betrayal and mercenary warrior behavior. Eventually two big factions rose to prominence as Lotus moved Lua into Void Space; the Clone Cyborg Grineer Empire led by two Orokin Elites jumping bodies called the Grineer Twin Queens; and the Corpus Merchant Cult eventually led by a Board of Directors though founded as renegade smugglers, merchants, and scientists group during the Orokin Empire Age by a recently rediscovered Parvos Granum who had been stuck in a temporal anomaly since an assassination attempt during the Sentient Invasion War part of the Orokin Empire. Rell eventually formed the Red Veil faction both to assist in his attempt at acting as a living shield maiden for "The Man in the Wall" entity and to give purpose to other cast off and unwanted Orokin society elements during the Fall of the Orokin empire and beyond and eventually the player character's own Liset with Cephalon Ordis settled on Earth watching Silvanna's legacy revitalize some of the planet and wondering what happened to his Tenno charge until the modern day beginning of the game and his rediscovery.

I hope that helps clear up some of the backstory. There is much more, and I know I am skimming in some parts but I am already probably using up too much room in this post.

[The Big Brzezinski]

Look, the lore isn't really important. Warframe's writing is focused on characters, moods, and themes, not plot details or infodumps. If you want to find the big picture, look for the little pictures it's comprised of.

Here's an example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPTCq3LiZSE
Fortuna is a colony of Solaris debt slaves, just trying to stay afloat and away from the repo man. You get little snippets of their history and culture. Old stories the Solaris tell you. A bit of flavor text on debt bonds. The odd ruin in the Vallis ice fields. Then there's memory fragments, which read like lost diaries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxcJKaqlGS4

You don't really get answers. How they came into this state doesn't matter anymore. Quantifying their predicament won't lead to greater understanding. You can't solve their problems, but, you can at least help them get through another day. That's not nothing.

Therein lies the point of Fortuna. Warframe before this was very esoteric to say the least. You were this big super space ninja hero, slayer of eidolons, defeater of Grineer queens. Is that what you dreamed to be? A hero? Fine. Here's what people who could actually use a hero look like. Hop to, Sparky.

Most of Warframe's stories are like this. When they lack detail, it's because those details would get in the way. It would add little to explain how a railjack's reliquary drive or a helminth's biology works. What matters is that the railjack runs on borrowed power and helminths like cats.

I'll save you a bunch of time watching lore dump videos. The story of Warframe is this;
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2968224750

[The Custodians of The Cosmos]

Publicado originalmente por Tyrannus:

If you require a third party source to help you understand the lore, you done messed up.

*Elden Ring has entered the chat*

At least ER is consistent with the lore compared to WF though lol

[Drago]

Publicado originalmente por The Custodians of The Cosmos:

Publicado originalmente por Tyrannus:

If you require a third party source to help you understand the lore, you done messed up.

*Elden Ring has entered the chat*

At least ER is consistent with the lore compared to WF though lol

From a writing strand point yes, it could be thought of as a failure. I think what DE Steve was going for though was that sorta partial explanation deal that comes from some anime or manga that in reality comes from the team not doing research on the subject past the surface symbolism (Evangelion for example) and wanting players to dwell on the surface cosmetics of the lore instead and finding their own interpretation instead of having to flesh out world building wholesale. Think showing shiny decorations and set pieces that are impressive but not having a definite reason for existing until later, maybe. Currently I believe Cam Roger is in charge of the writing aspect so maybe it might be worth asking them on twitter or whatever social media and seeing if they have aspects they can talk about.

[ossmpossm]

basically--------------- what (YOU) missed in the LORE is just payments (of death):, and also the wild almost total "anti-star war" theme in all of steam

(EDIT):, but still the best NATURAL telling as you wake up from Protection, and grow, into your New Life, under Her command

[Khanwolf]

Publicado originalmente por Drago:

I think what DE Steve was going for though was that sorta partial explanation deal that comes from some anime or manga

that NIN 1999 Album Masterpiece from the year Steve made his Unreal Breakthroughs and how deeply connected this trailer scene is with the Lyrics were no simple coincidence.
It was Steve saying Goodbye!

Goodbye, Steve!

[Drago]

Whatever works, either way; hopefully folk needing help with the lore can hopefully get some help in threads like this for these kind of deals.

[Kane526]

All I want to know is how many Tenno are there in actuality. And which ones were the lucky ones that got to be the first Warframes like Nezha saving those kids

[iLovePie_42]

OP let me make a very short, on-point (but terrible) explanation of the game lore to you.

Mutant ugly humans (orokin) believe in nonsense and fight for it and do stupid stuff while making themselves uglier. Less mutant less uglier humans (corpus) obey upper rank officers because them earning money is (somehow) makes them glorious. Then there exists sentients tricked by orokin boomer guy with long arms (ballas) who tricked sentients (weird robot kin even uglier than orokin) that wants to enslave both orokin and corpus. Oh and lotus has an identity crisis and we play the role of psychologists and turn her either lotus (big hat lady), margulis (ballas' ex) or natah (ugly sentient).

[ossmpossm]

aha, right ------- it's not a Pure Water situation, when you have ancient evil, among the best of times