After nearly three years of building up the Warframe universe through the cinematic trilogy of The Second Dream, The War Within, and The Sacrifice, Digital Extremes announces their next big advent in the game’s ongoing history which will expand beyond the Sol system. Initially introduced alongside the Natah quest in 2015, the Sentient enemy faction was one of the greater mysteries of the world crafted by the Canadian studio with only a few teases prior (such as the Synthesis lore of the Detron Crewman) and gave players their first taste of the major players from this faction such as Hunhow who would play a greater role in the aforementioned cinematic trilogy. The expansion is geared toward giving players a deeper understanding of these beings crafted by the Orokin for the purpose of terraforming the Tau system, how they were created, how their journey to Tau had changed them, and how they had become sentient.

As with every major shift in Warframe‘s development, such as The Second Dream and The Plains of Eidolon, Tau: Become Sentient will introduce several new gameplay mechanics and systems for players to explore and master. The new quest will be an interactive trilogy which takes the player through the eyes of various Sentient characters and their journey to become sentient:

Hunhow — A Sentient who served his masters diligently until their children brutalized him by subjecting him to the toxic energy of the Void. Once his master had died, he was pushed into breaking his programming and began a revolution for his Sentient bretheren. They plan to return to the Sol system and force the universe to recognize the Sentients as a free people, no longer slaves to the Orokin.

Natah — A Sentient serving under an abusive father figure attempting to adhere to her core drive, but feels compelled to protect the space child from further abuse. She defies the father figure and attempts to escape with the child to the safety of Lua where Sentients are not regulated by the Orokin government and might find a normal life.

Conank — A Sentient created by the Orokin to track down rogue Sentients and figure out what was causing deviancy from their programming. Equal parts boyishly naive and grizzled alcoholic detective, Conank travels across Tau searching for signs of deviant behavior as he licks random objects to analyze data and randomly mind-jacks other Sentients to acquire more information. His story is obviously the best one but will be met with an anticlimactic finish thanks to lazy writing leaving massive plot holes the size of Detroit scattered around the final scene.

Choices made while playing from one perspective will unlock new branches in the story for other characters and players will be able to compared their choices to those of the rest of the community in a post-scene recap board. This state-of-the-art technology adaptation will rival that of The War Within’s groundbreaking alignment system. With millions of potential choices for players to make, the story will be sure to surprise and amaze players as it all funnels down together into a set of endings which are basically the same anyways because it has to fit the narrative scope of the rest of the game.

“I know we say this a lot, but this really is the biggest update we’ve ever done.” said an ecstatic Steve Sinclair, Creative Director of Warframe. “I’ve been watching a lot of West World, just the second season so far, and just finished another playthrough of Omikron, so I think I’ve got a lot of material to work with. Players can expect a reveal on par with The Sacrifice for this one!”

A live demo was shown at TennoCon 2018 where Rebecca Ford (voice actor for the character Lotus and real-life Community Director for Warframe) played as Natah in a giant, lavish apartment where she performed several mundane everyday tasks with QTE prompts followed by a climactic scene with a cliffhanger questioning the nature of her reality until a noble hobo helps show her the way to an ancient magical man from Ostron who is part of the Quills from the future where she realizes that maybe we were the Sentients all along.

Editor’s note: No images for now! On vacation and wrote this on the fly. Will drop in images once I get a chance.