#splatoon and warframe take place at the same time

[decktech-vis]

a really shit splatoon lore diagram

[transamus]

I wrote this whole thing Ages ago and its just been sitting in my drafts, and since then Digital Extremes has actually done a lot of things Similar to this, but for the sake of cleaning out my drafts, heres this Long warframe post I talked about writing like a year or so ago:

Okay so. Warframe Ideas based on some criticisms of the game, universe, & etc.

Conclave

Right now, like a good chunk of the content in the game, Conclave exists in a bubble. The game isn't really meant to be PVP, so this is... somewhat understandable? I really don't like how they've gone about it, though, because as it stands this means that the content within conclave is more-or-less unable to be accessed without breaking into that bubble and putting countless hours towards something they don't Want you doing in the first place. I don’t think “all content should be accessible from multiple angles” is a good approach, but the game literally isn’t designed for PvP, even if they’re able to balance it with special loadout stuff. An issue with conclave is that it kind of attempts to follow the same gameplay flow as the rest of the game, without taking into account that you're, for the first time, on equal grounds power-wise? Which is a really weird place to be in in a power fantasy type game. To combat this, I think the best solution would be to have more objective-oriented conclave missions, with a sort of tug-of-war winning system. Players would, at the beginning of each “season”, choose a side, & then using something along the lines of Splatoon's Splatfest ranking system, the more popular side would get less points per win, but this way you would be able to at least reap some of the benefits of conclave even if you really, really sucked at it personally, from a "winning" standpoint. This inherently takes some of the potentially toxic stress off of the pressure on your team-mates to Win rather than just do their Best. Having Hijack missions, Spy missions, Sabotage missions, and tooling them towards asymmetrical pvp with a limited amount of revives could be a super interesting way of doing it. I don't know how they would break through the reward structure to break the bubble, but having Conclave missions exist on the starchart, with some minor Nightwave-esque level storytelling associated with them like the earlier days with things like The Gradivus Dilemna would bring this content to the forefront of the game as far as "easy to make, high player-impact, more engaging" content is concerned. I feel like Nightwave is a good step towards filling the empty spaces between updates in warframe, and long-form events like this reiteration of conclave would be what could close the rest of the gap.

Mercenaries

So, with Railjack, we're getting a Command Intrinsic, which Digital Extremes has basically said will do the same sort of thing as this idea. The root criticism is that we already have the Operative models per syndicate, but because they didn't exist when we got syndicate specters as rewards, we just... only ever get to see them in battle in syndicate missions specifically: they don't even come after us in the syndicate death squads. They’re relegated explicitly to “two per syndicate mission, they’ll probably die by the end, and there’s no fundamental weight to having them there / reward for getting them to the end / etc.” The BASIC idea is to add hireable specters that use reputation to rank up / keep hired if they fall in battle, & give us a handful of NPC's per syndicate to have some story attached to. Think Diablo's mercenaries, functionally. I’ve got a longer, albeit much older & rough, document with my ideas on it here

Overworlds

I'll honestly address this in another post but basically while I don't think saturating the game with more & more open worlds is a good idea, there are a few ideas that I DO have that I think could have some interesting implementation. To put it in very brief terms though, infested overworld with medgun modular primary that uses apothecaries made with a combination of the plants from Titania’s quest and world-specific resources, Mars node-and-web structure that uses empty sand dunes to bridge the gap, very crag-based, made so that there are several smaller “cities” that you can reclaim from the grineer for like a week before you have to reclaim them again, and a few other less-fleshed-out ideas that aren’t super worth mentioning.

Multitask Missions

We already have a little bit of this, and a few very small versions of this, but basically it'd just be nice to have 1) missions where there are multiple different objectives (i.e. similar to when the objective changes mid-mission), and 2) more optional tasks per mission based on point-of-interest tilesets. We have missions similar to this on open-world maps already, so it's definitely a format that works. Maybe on a spy mission, one of the data vaults informs us of a captive in the same tileset, where if we decide to rescue them we get another reward. Maybe we learn about an experimental proxy unit that we could opt to destroy. Maybe it's just a handful of potential minigame stuff, like fishing in water tiles on Earth's forests. Small stuff like that that gives tilesets more of a reason to exist in and explore, rather than just pass through. As fun as I used to have exploring tilesets when they came out, ultimately right now they're essentially just skins on the mission, because of how fast-paced the game can be. I don't feel like it would be a good idea to change the pace of the game, though, but I feel like inviting players to interact with the tilesets more through side objectives is a pretty easy fix for this. Kuria hunting was a good addition to this, but is so hidden that most players don’t even know about it. It's something we already do in Titania's quest, with the flower gathering, and even that small bit makes the universe of Warframe feel that much more interesting, and actually gave me a reason to go to those tilesets in specific, rather than just the missions hosted on them, even if only for a time.

Radio

We already have a radio host for one station, but... what does Nora Night do, aside from just her short monologues and stories on the radio? Are we to be expected to believe there's only the Grineer Chatter channels and her occasional talkshow? It'd be super neat to have, even as a tiny handful, a few other stations with songs that play on them. It would flesh out the world pretty well, and give a lot more information on the culture of the world, since we already know music is still being made (see: We All Lift Together being diegetic). It would also give Digital Extremes a good opportunity to commission a few musical artists for their talents, and would just be... a really cool addition, I think? I can imagine that there could be a Corpus Hymnal station, probably a Steel Meridian station, and almost certainly a station for Nora Night & for the Solaris United. The culture of warframe's universe feels... really empty in a lot of ways, and I feel like even if we don't have to see them, encountering more of it even in the abstract like this would make the whole of it feel more alive. Bonus points if its able to be implemented in a way similar to Fallout, where you can use these tracks to “replace” the in-game music via the radio console.

Cityscape Tileset

So, up until the Glast Gambit introduced Defection missions, the only interactions we ever had with the people we were saving in the Origin System was through Relays & Cryopods (which were originally implied to only have warframes in them). I think it would be really cool to get some, if not just one, tileset(s) of the settlements we supposedly save all the time from Grineer / Corpus / Infestation, where mission types would be a lot more involved with the NPCs in the tileset. We already know that there are space settlements / colonies all over the system, I would like to see them! Like, "draw Grineer attention away while agents evacuate our operatives" & etc. It wouldn't even have to be anything too ridiculously complicated, just... something. The closest thing we get to this right now is through Fortuna & Cetus, and the missions there supposedly helping, but we never see the effects of that, which leads to a... weird issue with MMORPG type games where even if you save the world 10,000 times, the people are still eternally in danger. There is no amount of corpus you can kill to set the Solaris free, and because of the necessitation that content must be replayable, this will likely remain true for the entire time Warframe exists, unless they add a “saved” instance of Fortuna & Cetus available. This is only really an issue because they’re set NPCs, rather than ones we only encounter temporarily. Having a Cityscape tileset where the missions strike randomly on starchart nodes, and otherwise you can freeroam would be an interesting blend of the Open World format, the Event format, and the Node format, and would give us more NPCs to encounter, help, and have that be the full of our interactions with them.

Syndicate Headquarters

We already have the Iron Wake, & I think it'd just be cool basically to have more places like that. Plus, it'd give Palladino a different place to be than in the Steel Meridian's place. Honestly, it already kind of rubs me the wrong way that they're allies in the first place, since Steel Meridian is more antiauthoritarian & Red Veil is Kinda Fashy, but it'd also give opportunity to just kind of flesh out the fact that these syndicates actually Exist a little bit more in the first place. Potentially, they could even make it so that the Relay areas only house a Representative of each syndicate, instead of the literal leaders, because it... kind of breaks a bit of the idea / lore / etc to have 1) the syndicate leaders existing in every relay simultaneously, and 2) to have them still exist & be surviving if a relay gets destroyed. These headquarters could also house a small story quest each for the syndicates, potentially, just to like... flesh them out a little bit more, and provide more of a buffer between the main quest content. As someone who was playing the main quest content while it was coming out, the waiting between the new quests to drop gave them impact, but for someone new to the game who's able to Kind of just rush straight from the quests Natah to Erra, the impact of the Lotus leaving almost seems comical. I feel like Syndicates are a good way to fill that gap.