Warframe - 5/20 hours

Today, on the blog, I'm going to present a feature known as "John tries to figure out the plot of Warframe despite not reading any of the supplementary material and only barely paying attention to the cutscenes." This I do for posterity, so that many years from now, when there is no longer any clear distinction between your favorite MMO, your job, and your national citizenship, future anthropologists will be able to answer the question, "what was it like to play a primitive MMO with a shockingly disrespectful degree of casualness?"

As far as I can tell, the game is set in the very distant future, when, thanks to genetic engineering, humanity has branched off into a wide variety of sub-species. Sometime prior to the start of the game, there was a war between two or more of these subs-species (or perhaps between factions that used genetically modified people as weapons). The player character is a Tenno, which is a variety of genetically engineered super soldier used by the losing side of this war.

The war was, in fact, lost so badly that the Tenno were mothballed, put away in cryogenic storage and then subsequently forgotten about. Sometime later, another genetically modified group, the Grineer, was facing some kind of crisis, that led to a major decline in their population. Based on certain things that were said to me by Vor, I think it was a disease, but it could be that they are losing a different war. Anyway, the Grineer society was getting desperate, so they started reviving Tenno, in the hopes of reversing their situation (although, it's possible that some third party was reviving the Tenno to fight the Grineer, and it was just Vor, acting alone, who decided to try and hijack them to solve whatever it is that's plaguing his people).

Whatever it is, the majority of Tenno wind up not under the Grineer's control, instead gathering together to form a new faction in this future world, basically fighting to preserve something (I'm not at all sure what) in the face of the Grinner's aggression and the covetousness of the Corpus, a third faction which appears to be made up of high-tech scavengers.


While I'm sure that I'm pretty far off, video game lore is not all that important. A bigger problem is that I'm not really sure how to judge my power level vis a vis the various available missions. If it says that the enemies range from level 3-6, does that mean that I should play it with a level 6 warframe and weapon? Or is there some other measure of power that I'm not aware of? Doing the first set of story missions was fairly straightforward, but when I started the second quest, I blew through my reloads in about ten minutes.

I think learning to optimize my equipment is going to take a good, long while. From what I can tell, things don't really start going until you've got a full set of level 30 gear, and even then, your starting stuff isn't nearly as good as some of the craftable items (which themselves must be leveled up). When I visited a hub area, every player I saw had 300 hours or more invested in the game. It may be that my planned 20 hours are hardly anything at all.