Lore Confusion (spoilers -duh-)

[WRESinn]

Ok, so I'm confused about some of the lore in the game.  I understand in games where the story is added onto over time that the lore involved might change or be contradictory from old to new releases.  What I'm confused about right now is the sentience of the warframes themselves.  So the frames that we build regularly (prime or otherwise) seem to just be shells for our tenno selves to possess and utilize our void powers into different methods of attacks.  What makes Umbra different is that rather than being a shell he maintained his consciousness and thus can fight separately from the Tenno when you pop out for a second.  HOWEVER, when you read the logs about the frames it talks about adventures and whatnot that they go on and are known for.  The biggest example of this is Limbo of course, but even Valkyre's entire storyline is that she was captured by the corpus and they experimented on her in order to learn enough to build Zanuka, that's what drove her crazy and why she goes into berserk mode.  So are they sentient or not?

[Althaline]

OG Warframes are sentient. The ones we build are just blank copies (excluding Umbra).

[Miser_able]

We're not too sure. But there's 2 prevailing theories, either A) the original warframes were sentient, or B) the original warframes only had 1 operator and those operators only had 1 Warframe, so stories about them didn't distinguish between the two. The story of Inaros was about the Operator who used the original Inaros for example. 

[NocheLuz]

In the past, Warframe was something like an Armor. And originally, there a person inside it.

Now, Warframe is just a doll. They are controlled by Tenno (The player). So older Frames will have confusing lore about them. Since older Frames is base on the lore that 'There are person inside' while newer Frames have a lore that 'They are originally human' (or whatever it's base on). However, like anyother Infested. Warframe lost their 'will' in the making process but still have 'Feeling' like any other Infested (like... pain...).

[artemisfortune]

From all the codex stuff, we can infer that original frames were lab grown golems mixed with "human" DNA, the Technocyte Virus, and some other goo DNA to become what they are now. However, they were still made with the intent of having the Tenno control them with their spooky void mind control. That's why Rhino's codex talks about him rampaging through the lab, or Excal Prime being the first and being "built around" the Tenno. Umbral Frames were more than likely made after the first frames, and used living people instead of random goo.

Warframe's lore should always be taken with a grain of salt though. It's one of those things that's interesting, but not interesting under a microscope.

Edited November 16, 2018 by Parzii

[wtflag]

All warframes are built by injecting victims with a special stain of the infection that destorys their intelligence and memories. 

But their bodies still remembers the pain the suffering. Tennos not only control the warframes, but also relives their suffering.

The warframes that "went on adventures" were either due to some special constitution or force of will or lasting regret, able to retain some level of basic instinct-like intelligence, or imprint some dying final thoughts to a muscle memory.

 

[Firetempest]

1 hour ago, wtflag said:

The warframes that "went on adventures" were either due to some special constitution or force of will or lasting regret, able to retain some level of basic instinct-like intelligence, or imprint some dying final thoughts to a muscle memory.

 

Or they were like Rell, moved themself mentally energy like and joined as one with their frame.

All these focus abilities are just skills we lost from being put to sleep. So apparently many had been teleporting as a lost art. 

Then all the other lost abilities yet developed in game to complicate past lore more.

 

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

The originals were real people

the ones we make are empty shells that are filled with Helminth.

[wtflag]

23 minutes ago, Firetempest said:

Or they were like Rell, moved themself mentally energy like and joined as one with their frame.

All these focus abilities are just skills we lost from being put to sleep. So apparently many had been teleporting as a lost art. 

Then all the other lost abilities yet developed in game to complicate past lore more.

 

There is no Or. Rell is a Tenno and the only Tenno to fuse with his frame and he went mad due to external influence by the man-in-the-wall who as far as we know can be some comic-level entity.

Umbra, Inaros and Valkyre are not fused Tenno. Their sentience are what remained from the original host.

1. We saw umbra story clearly so he is not a Tenno.

2. There is no way that AladV can defeat and contain an actual Tenno-Warframe with the power of a god hosted in the near indestructible body of a warframe.

 

 

[Tyreaus]

How I understand it:

1. Ballas said that they "took their greatest...and polluted them with these cultured reagents". So it isn't just Umbra but at minimum the first series of Warframes that utilized a human subject.

2. Even newer, i.e. non-primed, Warframes can retain at least some level of autonomy as shown by the Second Dream.

3. Copies of Warframes can re-acquire their sentience. Umbra was rebuilt from blueprints and retained every lick of memory.

One theory is that the Warframes we pilot are imperfect copies of the original series, which explains the Prime / non-Prime distinction and also why Umbra (who was retrieved immediately after destruction versus centuries of data degradation in Relics) has sentience while the other copies do not. Other Warframes exhibiting sentience, like Rhino, can be explained in this way: it's an imperfect copy, but flawed in a way that allowed it to retain some base level of sentience.

Another alternative is failsafes in newer Transference bolts. Ordis notes the technology surrounding Umbra is older than anything in the player's arsenal. Ballas also describes the first series as being "failures" that turned on the Orokin. They may have implemented newer bolts in later versions that carried a conscious suppressant when not under Tenno control—but, as with all technology, it has to fail eventually.

Or it's both, or something else entirely.

[schilds]

22 minutes ago, Tyreaus said:

Ballas also describes the first series as being "failures" that turned on the Orokin

What Orokin creation didn't turn on them, though? 😄

[rand0mname]

I think that Warframes can be sentient. Adding to examples above:

- Stalker and his Acolytes look suspiciously similar to our Frames and Acolytes have some very peculiar things to say.

- There are Frame Specters guarding Rail Junctions and they talk.

- It is possible that Titania have been acting on her own to help Silvana.

Of course it all can be explained by a simple fact that Operators can dream too much and think that they are Warframes. It happened to our space kid after all.

And yet... why Helminth addresses Nidus and Operator as if they are separate entities?

48 минут назад, Tyreaus сказал:

Another alternative is failsafes in newer Transference bolts. Ordis notes the technology surrounding Umbra is older than anything in the player's arsenal. Ballas also describes the first series as being "failures" that turned on the Orokin. They may have implemented newer bolts in later versions that carried a conscious suppressant when not under Tenno control—but, as with all technology, it has to fail eventually.

Or it's both, or something else entirely.

Oooohhh. I was thinking that after several Frame rampages Orokin put some restraining bolts in place, but was thinking it were movement restraints. Suppression of conscious never occured to me and yet it is so... Orokin.

Edited November 16, 2018 by rand0mname

[GenthReborn]

Because us Tenno are Void Devils who kidnap people to inject with Helminth and turn into our Warframes. Ordis tele-captures our victims, holds them in statis until required and then let Helminth get to them. The Blueprints we build upon are spiritual and mental in addition to physical, tearing apart the victim's consiousness and "fixing" it with the desired Engram. This Engram can over time change under certain stressors especially if the Transference and control mechanisms are messed with: see Valkyr, or Khora for details. 

We are monsters, and every frame we make is a silently screaming victim. 

[SilentMobius]

10 hours ago, WRESinn said:

Ok, so I'm confused about some of the lore in the game.  I understand in games where the story is added onto over time that the lore involved might change or be contradictory from old to new releases.  What I'm confused about right now is the sentience of the warframes themselves.  So the frames that we build regularly (prime or otherwise) seem to just be shells for our tenno selves to possess and utilize our void powers into different methods of attacks.  What makes Umbra different is that rather than being a shell he maintained his consciousness and thus can fight separately from the Tenno when you pop out for a second.  HOWEVER, when you read the logs about the frames it talks about adventures and whatnot that they go on and are known for.  The biggest example of this is Limbo of course, but even Valkyre's entire storyline is that she was captured by the corpus and they experimented on her in order to learn enough to build Zanuka, that's what drove her crazy and why she goes into berserk mode.  So are they sentient or not?

We don't know, seriously, any player making a definitive statement at the moment is making unsupported assumptions.

What we do know is that:

• Ballas' statements in the vitruvian seem to be completely general and relate to all warframes at the point the Vitruvian was made.
• The only thing that is notably different about the creation of Umbra seems to be the transference bolt (That Ordis comments on) Other Warframes have stated lore about "torture" of (What seems to be) their progenitor Human (Mirage, Valkyr) and those warframes are not motive/seemingly sapient.
• All Warframes (except the one we start the game in) are all created in the Foundry with no need for a human "scarifice" (Including Umbra), at what point the Orokin stopped needing humans and became able to replicate Warframes is unknown to us.
• Ballas indicated that the pre-Warframe bio-golems were motive and uncontrollable until the Tenno did the whole "Taking the pain away" thing. Does that mean that the non-umbra blueprints we use create a being from a post-taking-the-pain-away? We don't know.

And I think it's a huge problem, while The Sacrifice demonstrated consent for the singular Operator/Umbra case. What the state is for non-Umbra Warframe is still very much up in the air. if they are just as sapient but the transference bolt is suppressing them, we-the-player-Tenno are actively complicit in some seriously rapey stuff that would be a really problem for the story.

I would go so far as to say that no moral Tenno can make any more Warframe until the question of non-Umbra Warframe sapience is answered.

Also, just for reference, "Sentient" implies feeling, emotional ability. "Sapient" is the condition of person-hood and the ability to reason. It's often misused in sci-fi.

Edited November 16, 2018 by SilentMobius

[Rayden_Tenno]

34 minutes ago, GenthReborn said:

Because us Tenno are Void Devils who kidnap people to inject with Helminth and turn into our Warframes. Ordis tele-captures our victims, holds them in statis until required and then let Helminth get to them. The Blueprints we build upon are spiritual and mental in addition to physical, tearing apart the victim's consiousness and "fixing" it with the desired Engram. This Engram can over time change under certain stressors especially if the Transference and control mechanisms are messed with: see Valkyr, or Khora for details. 

We are monsters, and every frame we make is a silently screaming victim. 

Now i know where all those capture targets go to.

 

5 hours ago, schilds said:

What Orokin creation didn't turn on them, though? 😄

They were always described like some kind of geniuses but in truth they cant even hold their own pants on them (see ballas, or more like ballless)

[(PSN)zeratul____12]

All warframes were created through injecting a subject with a heavily modified strain of the Technocyte virus and then cut up and shaped into the warframe they will become. As we learned through the Sacrifice quest. Tenno are needed to help the Warframe suppress, redirect or give acceptance to the poor being that was lost inside and they form what at this point can only be defined as a symbiotic relationship.  

 

The area where it gets really grey is how we replicate Warframes we find from schematics. From what Ballas was implying a warframe must use a human as the base, now for awhile this I'd stump me and asked me some moral questions but then I had a thought: who are the people in the warframe pods during defence missions? 

 

So now I think (until proven otherwise) that they are people who were infected with technocyte waiting to be used as bases for any new warframe design the Orokin came up with. though since the Orokin dont need them anymore we use them as bases for warframes.

[YUREtheFURY]

12 hours ago, Iamabearlulz said:

OG Warframes are sentient. The ones we build are just blank copies (excluding Umbra).

That cant be true, the umbra we have is also a copy we rebuilt him after he got destroyed by lotus. I think what makes umbra different is the memories he kept, allowed him to keep some sentience to get revenge on ballas. 

[NocheLuz]

7 hours ago, rand0mname said:

And yet... why Helminth addresses Nidus and Operator as if they are separate entities?

IIRC, Nidua created to supervise Helminth... But I do think Nidus created to control over all of the Infested. But in the end only Helminth strains were under control. Since Operator is immune to any Infested infection. Helminth seen them as Demon entity. Also, Helminth seem to know about Operator since one of his line address operator as 'Awake'.

[kingsnurre]

Conclusion: It's complicated.🍍

[Althaline]

9 hours ago, WARmaro said:

That cant be true, the umbra we have is also a copy we rebuilt him after he got destroyed by lotus. I think what makes umbra different is the memories he kept, allowed him to keep some sentience to get revenge on ballas. 

We fixed Umbra, we didn't copy him. Key difference is that we already had the parts from the original Umbra and regrew what was missing (probably the same process that we use on our normal frames after each mission, turned up to 11).

[WRESinn]

I guess another option is that the adventures that the frames went on were things that they did before they were made into Warframes.  Valkyre got kidnapped and experimented on, blah blah, whatever else happened, and then because of their great service they were given the privilege of become Warframes so that they're abilities on the battle field could live on forever.  Maybe?  I don't know.  I'm enjoying reading everyone's theories, though.

[TARINunit9]

On 2018-11-15 at 5:14 PM, WRESinn said:

Ok, so I'm confused about some of the lore in the game.  I understand in games where the story is added onto over time that the lore involved might change or be contradictory from old to new releases.  What I'm confused about right now is the sentience of the warframes themselves.  So the frames that we build regularly (prime or otherwise) seem to just be shells for our tenno selves to possess and utilize our void powers into different methods of attacks.  What makes Umbra different is that rather than being a shell he maintained his consciousness and thus can fight separately from the Tenno when you pop out for a second.  HOWEVER, when you read the logs about the frames it talks about adventures and whatnot that they go on and are known for.  The biggest example of this is Limbo of course, but even Valkyre's entire storyline is that she was captured by the corpus and they experimented on her in order to learn enough to build Zanuka, that's what drove her crazy and why she goes into berserk mode.  So are they sentient or not?

Warframes are clones of people who had sentience. It's left ambiguous if they are A) fully sentient and just happily let us be the dominant life form in our brain-merge Transference ritual, B) have their sentience suppressed by some sort of restraining bolt, or C) lost their sentience in the cloning procedure.

Excalibur Umbra is the only one who provably has none of the above, but it is entirely possibly that all warframes are category A and just don't bring it up

[SilentMobius]

On 2018-11-16 at 11:07 PM, Iamabearlulz said:

We fixed Umbra, we didn't copy him. Key difference is that we already had the parts from the original Umbra and regrew what was missing (probably the same process that we use on our normal frames after each mission, turned up to 11).

Quotes from the quest indicate otherwise:

Quote

Almost crude. If you can get another scan I may be able to synthesize a partial schematic of the victim

Uncertain if any Tenno has linked with this design. The Transference bolt seems different, but we cannot build this without more data.

I have been upgraded, Star-Child. Your Warframe blueprint now has the required data. Check Foundry.

The Warframe I warned you not to build, that you build anyway, caused a massive Transference overload and damaged my precepts. It has escaped out into the system.

Any one of those should have referred to repair rather that building from data, they didn't

Edited November 18, 2018 by SilentMobius

[(XBOX)DShinShoryuken]

Wowzers....

Looks like there are so many versions that people are grabbing at. And this is what happens when there is misdirection by vague breadcrumbs spread around. 

I don't even follow the lore as much anymore as something feels "off". Can't explain it but.....

Good luck getting it to feel organic and smooth...cuz if not for head canon, I would have gone crazier than usual. 

Cheers

[(PSN)Zero_029]

Warning...EXTREME SPOILERS in this post...

Spoiler

 

From my understanding of it & The Infestation...

The Infestation literally copies those it assimilates, memories & all.

The Helminth strain was developed to mass produce Warframes. However, Umbra was a very special case as Ballas programmed his assimilation to be extremely specific.

Also, the stories of Inaros, Mirage, & Valkyr all relate to their Operators as well. Many Operators will not abandon their Warframes. So they died with them.

Limbo's being an accident, Mirage not being abandoned (Lotus states that she tried to surge the revive system & when that failed she tried to cut the link.), Inaros died in battle not to be abandoned.

Harrow literally fused with its OperTor in order to contain the MITW.

Titania confuses me as it seems as if her Operator came to Silvana's aid but Silvana makes it sound as though it was the Warframe itself.

Also in the Second Dream the base Frames save The Operator. So they DO have sentience.

Umbra however is cursed to be I want to say...100% aware & haunted by his memories. So he is a unique case. But it could be that the Original/First Edition Warframes were people & did not need Tenno transference.

That's how I figure it.