Immortal Tenno, Lore Or Simply Game Mechanic?

[Asphyxiants]

In The War Within we are following Teshin through caves learning our locked away skills. When we reach the part where we have to avoid those gilded ass worms we're given a cut scene when we fail.

This very quick scene shows us floating unconscious in the void and then returning back to where we messed up.

My question is, was this a simple game mechanic to allow a reset or are we sent to the void and then spat back out? Are we immortal in the lore?

DE could have simply made a revive mechanic or had the worm throw us back.

[Corvid]

Given that something similar happens in both Chains of Harrow and The Sacrifice (I won't spoil the context), I'm tempted to say it's lore.

[ngrazer]

Lore. 

https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Oro

Plus don't forget Ordis' background story and how there were immortal Orokin as well.

[ant99999]

Probably a game mechanic. If it wasn't why would you even try to free yourself when Stalker and then Umbra tried to strangle you? I guess it's supposed to be like 'a vision from the Void' about your possible death instead of the death itself. 

[ant99999]

4 минуты назад, ngrazer сказал:

Lore. 

https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Oro

Plus don't forget Ordis' background story and how there were immortal Orokin as well.

Oro doesn't work like this. Oro is like a soul capable of travelling free through the Void. To revive yourself via the Oro you must have another body to inhabit. We've seen the Oro resurrection in action when we created Umbra's body and after a while it became self-consious as Umbra's Oro found it and moved in.

[Corvid]

19 minutes ago, ant99999 said:

Oro doesn't work like this. Oro is like a soul capable of travelling free through the Void. To revive yourself via the Oro you must have another body to inhabit. We've seen the Oro resurrection in action when we created Umbra's body and after a while it became self-consious as Umbra's Oro found it and moved in.

Source please.

[AdunSaveMe]

Game mechanic.

[kingvaldemir]

Hmm on the

31 minutes ago, ant99999 said:

Oro doesn't work like this. Oro is like a soul capable of travelling free through the Void. To revive yourself via the Oro you must have another body to inhabit. We've seen the Oro resurrection in action when we created Umbra's body and after a while it became self-consious as Umbra's Oro found it and moved in. 

Well, the game itself, via Teshin, said it prevents any living being  who possesses it from dying. The wiki also have more info from Steve himself: Oro is something "which represents the resurrection ability of Tenno and other enemies that Teshin is most concerned with".

And about that Umbra thing, I didn't recall that happened, but maybe I just missed it. Any source about it?

[Nez-Kal]

Tenno are immortal because they possess an Oro.

 

Oro, for simple terms, is a reflection of oneself within the Void. An imprint, indestructible from the Mortal plain except by those who posses an Oro as well. A body and soul hidden away in a realm of ceaseless space and time and other loopy-ness.

 

Spoiler

The Emperors possessed Oro, which was why only the Tenno could kill them during the Ceremony. (Others tried before, and failed due to not possessing an Oro.)

 

[ant99999]

1 час назад, Corvid сказал:

Source please.

 

1 час назад, kingvaldemir сказал:

Well, the game itself, via Teshin, said it prevents any living being  who possesses it from dying. The wiki also have more info from Steve himself: Oro is something "which represents the resurrection ability of Tenno and other enemies that Teshin is most concerned with".

And about that Umbra thing, I didn't recall that happened, but maybe I just missed it. Any source about it?

Ok, so, as it is with a lot of lore aspects, there isn't a certain quote or text that directly supports this version. Nevertheless there are reasons why I believe it to be true. Let me try to explain.

First of all, we have two theories here: the first is that when a tenno (or other Oro posessing being) dies, Oro then make him respawn with a fresh new body; the second which I believe in is that Oro grant's invulnerability only to you consciousness, not the body.

Let's suppose the first is correct. Then you can be cut in half by a Red Veil fanatic or eaten alive by the Golden Maw, which obviously makes your current body completely uninhabitable, yet then you immediately come back to life in a new body your Oro grants you. If we believe this is true, then questions arise:

1) The most important. What's the point in the story itself? Hunhow obviously knows how Oro works, why did he attempt to kill our tenno?

2) The Jade Light. We know that this is the most severe punishment Orokin Empire had. The point in the Jade Light is that your body becomes literally vaporized (see Detron Crewman synthesis results). Why then is it considered killing if your Oro can immediately revive you creating a new body?

3) The Continuity. This proves that the process of switching bodies do exist. Teshin's quote: A Yuvan theater, long abandoned. In ages past, I would have stood guard as the young and exotic were paraded through the mountain pass and marched by the viewing pane. They'd barter here, the Orokin. Withering and coughing- as they prepared for their Continuity. <...> No. The Queen doesn't want to kill you. She wants to become you. To burrow through your mind corrupting it with despair until only she remains.

4) Rell. When we destroy his vessel (warframe) which was at that time his only body left we gain a possibility to ultimately kill him while following this theory, his Oro must've recreate either his warframe or the real body instead of manifestating in the real world as a form of a ghost.

So we have no choice but to lean towards the second variant which solves all these problems without raising new ones as it doesn't contradict with Teshin's quotes from Conclave. So, how the problems are solved:

1) Although Hunhow couldn't kill you, he knew that he could take your body from you, without it you can't control a warframe and fight him.

2) The Jade Light as well doesn't kill your mind, instead it casts you out to the Void where you forever exist as an Oro ghost. Which makes me thing that this fate appears to be worse than death.

3) The Continuity is a way to willingly leave your current body as an Oro ghost and try to drive someone else's Oro from their body replacing it with your one.

4) As Rell had no bodies left, he became a ghost we've seen in the quest (the blue silhouette). The reason why he managed to die permanently is most likely that he became free from the Man In The Wall's influence to an extent where he could himself decide what will happen to his Oro.

And then we have Umbra. This is of cource my own guess. But considering all I've just said it sounds quite believable that what we've seen is in fact how Oro inhabitates a body. After all, Umbra retained all his memories and his consciousness and how else could we 'build' a fully developed human personality via our 3D printer?

[Gullim92]

5 hours ago, ant99999 said:

Probably a game mechanic. If it wasn't why would you even try to free yourself when Stalker and then Umbra tried to strangle you? I guess it's supposed to be like 'a vision from the Void' about your possible death instead of the death itself. 

Well, in Stalker's case it's implied he's the same as us Tenno, which would mean he has Oro as well and is capable of fully killing other Oro beings.

For Umbra, he seems to be capable of interacting with the void to a higher degree than other warframes since he could grab us out of void mode and even attack us with exalted blade during missions, so he might be able to kill us for good.

 

Or you know, maybe the operator just doesn't like the idea of dying even if he gets to respawn

[Lakais]

5 hours ago, Asphyxiants said:

In The War Within we are following Teshin through caves learning our locked away skills. When we reach the part where we have to avoid those gilded ass worms we're given a cut scene when we fail.

This very quick scene shows us floating unconscious in the void and then returning back to where we messed up.

My question is, was this a simple game mechanic to allow a reset or are we sent to the void and then spat back out? Are we immortal in the lore?

DE could have simply made a revive mechanic or had the worm throw us back.

That particular part of the quest doesn't happen in reality. It's a "dream training montage" that Teshin guides us through, somehow. Everything from the point Ordis goes all "Purge Precept" and our Opertaor attacking/breaking the mirror is all a dream sequence that in reality took about a second or so. 

So you could argue it's a sort of dream reset. While as in the Harrow quest, I don't think the mission progress actually resets, but what happens is that our Operator retreats into some void pocket to heal up and recuperate. When we have a frame we retreat back to control our frames because the mission must go on. 

As for everyone else in the universe... the question here is: What do you mean by "immortality"?

In one aspects it could be something through biological engineering, where a person will stay at their physical peak, the body's own repair systems being upgraded or refined from our current understanding to eliminate aging. You can still die through injury and disease. But on the other it could be a case of consciousness swapping or a process similar in Altered Carbon, where you can die, but there's a backup that can be loaded into an another body. 

I think both of these technologies exist in the Warframe universe. Teshin, I think, is the former. Someone who doesn't age or has access to rejuvenation technology. Darvo is currently almost 110 years old, but still considered young by Corpus "royalty" standards, for example. The Executors probably used that AND some process of mind transfer because during their little encounter with Ordan Karris, Ballas clearly said that they all had died many times. This is likely the source of the Oro, a sort of mind/soul package that can be transferred, altered and destroyed. 

But in all the above cases, dying is still possible. Through injury and disease, through having your Oro annihilated to maybe someone with Void powers attacking you in the void or simply hitting you so fast that the Operator doesn't have a chance to retreat into the Void/Frame before being turned into sushi. 

[ant99999]

1 час назад, Gullim92 сказал:

Well, in Stalker's case it's implied he's the same as us Tenno, which would mean he has Oro as well and is capable of fully killing other Oro beings.

That's actually makes sense. But you made me reconsider what we've heard from Hunhow during the Orbiter scene. His quote goes like this:

All you dread-long life, you've waited for this moment... ...but you're asking yourself... Was I one of these wretched things? ...you know the answer. You still hate them... you still hate... yourself.

And now after all we know from The Sacrifice, the more I think about these words the more I believe that 'hate them' meant not to hate the tenno but rather to hate the warframes, meaning that the Stalker might not ever be tenno-controlled, but rather an Umbra-like ferral warframe, although in his case the memory haunting him is him witnessing the massacre the Tenno-controlled warframes commited with the Orokin acting not only as his eternal punishment as in Umbra's case but also as a source for his desire to kill.

That also would mean that in reality his aim is not to assasinate the tenno, but rather to kill the warframe, while a tenno within is what makes his victim rise again and again making him crazy.

But after all it's just a theory.

[(PSN)Cargan2016]

bit of both as it wouldnt do to force people start all over because thier tenno died

[Gullim92]

2 hours ago, ant99999 said:

That's actually makes sense. But you made me reconsider what we've heard from Hunhow during the Orbiter scene. His quote goes like this:

All you dread-long life, you've waited for this moment... ...but you're asking yourself... Was I one of these wretched things? ...you know the answer. You still hate them... you still hate... yourself.

And now after all we know from The Sacrifice, the more I think about these words the more I believe that 'hate them' meant not to hate the tenno but rather to hate the warframes, meaning that the Stalker might not ever be tenno-controlled, but rather an Umbra-like ferral warframe, although in his case the memory haunting him is him witnessing the massacre the Tenno-controlled warframes commited with the Orokin acting not only as his eternal punishment as in Umbra's case but also as a source for his desire to kill.

That also would mean that in reality his aim is not to assasinate the tenno, but rather to kill the warframe, while a tenno within is what makes his victim rise again and again making him crazy.

But after all it's just a theory.

I think Stalker is the same as the tenno, or at least posseses an Oro (could be an Umbra, again we don't quite know if Umbras have some connection to Oro) because otherwise it wouldn't make much sense for Hunhow to team up with him. The only reason I can imagine is that the Stalker is capable of consuming Oro, he just needed to find where the actual operators are since killing the warframe doesn't do anything if the operator is tucked far away. Similarily Hunhow can't destroy the tenno himself since the sentients don't posses Oro, but he did have the information to lead the Stalker to them.

[Rivyn]

Lore. My understanding is that their connection to the Void froze, or simply negated, biological aging. It's why they're still kids. Maybe that's linked to the mind, (cosmetically, they did just hit puberty. Thanks DE!), or maybe there is a limit, as in Rell's case. Either way, Tenno are effectively immortal. 

[TARINunit9]

12 hours ago, Asphyxiants said:

In The War Within we are following Teshin through caves learning our locked away skills. When we reach the part where we have to avoid those gilded ass worms we're given a cut scene when we fail.

This very quick scene shows us floating unconscious in the void and then returning back to where we messed up.

My question is, was this a simple game mechanic to allow a reset or are we sent to the void and then spat back out? Are we immortal in the lore?

DE could have simply made a revive mechanic or had the worm throw us back.

The entire section is a dream, that's why you can't perma-die there

The mechanic is reused for Chains of Harrow outside of a dream, but your Warframe is about 20 feet away so realistically you're just respawning there

Edited December 9, 2018 by TARINunit9

[(PSN)watt4hem]

Probably game mechanics. Otherwise why would ordis be so worried with you going into a mission without your warframe?

Also, iirc, the oro in conclave were just to teach/train tenno for fighting sentients (which drop these little things as well)

[Beartornado]

17 hours ago, ant99999 said:

1) The most important. What's the point in the story itself? Hunhow obviously knows how Oro works, why did he attempt to kill our tenno?

Because that's how Mirage's operator died (Per mirage quest), sentients possess a synthetic Oro, and I believe any "mother" sentient has the power to finish off anyone with Oro. That's why the Tenno were so valuable, they could not only wipe out fragments ruthlessly but properly finish off the synthetic Oro they took from the mother. Killing Sentient enemies in game will cause you to pick up their oro as it is destroyed when they are.

17 hours ago, ant99999 said:

The Jade Light. We know that this is the most severe punishment Orokin Empire had. The point in the Jade Light is that your body becomes literally vaporized (see Detron Crewman synthesis results). Why then is it considered killing if your Oro can immediately revive you creating a new body?

Oro is not universal. It seems that beings exposed to the void almost exclusively have Oro, and that makes sense since Oro is effectively a void clone that overlaps with your body/mind. To my knowledge no Tenno were killed via Jade light, feel free to let me know if it was otherwise.

17 hours ago, ant99999 said:

3) The Continuity. This proves that the process of switching bodies do exist. Teshin's quote: A Yuvan theater, long abandoned. In ages past, I would have stood guard as the young and exotic were paraded through the mountain pass and marched by the viewing pane. They'd barter here, the Orokin. Withering and coughing- as they prepared for their Continuity. <...> No. The Queen doesn't want to kill you. She wants to become you. To burrow through your mind corrupting it with despair until only she remains.

Continuity is the process Orokin who do not possess an Oro went through to transfer minds. As before only the Tenno and the Emperors posses true Oro, the Orokin elite including the Executors did not. While Tenno could do this, it seems to be unnecessary and used only for Warframe control. As Teshin stated in that quest, "You exist on the fold between two worlds," I always got the impression that a Tenno's physical and Void form overlap in a way that allows the physical to reform as long as the one in the Void (oro) remains intact. This blurring of the boundary between their physical form and their incorporeal void form was why Transference was originally used as therapy. Being able to enter 100% physical constructs with your mind and control them would be like therapy for walking on land after spending years swimming in the (void) sea.

17 hours ago, ant99999 said:

Rell. When we destroy his vessel (warframe) which was at that time his only body left we gain a possibility to ultimately kill him while following this theory, his Oro must've recreate either his warframe or the real body instead of manifestating in the real world as a form of a ghost.

I'm less certain on this, but per the wiki Rell willingly gave up his physical body for multiple reasons, one of them being that he didn't have access to the cryosleep that other Tenno were given. This does suggest that the Tenno will in fact age, perhaps at a slower rate, given time. Rell also wanted to focus entirely on finding and suppressing The Man In The Wall, but he'll always be part of the physical world and needed something physical to bind his Oro to even after giving up his original physical form. Per the quest with him, his mind splintered and separated from the vessel over time which we had to put back together before releasing him from his vessel so that his spirit could rest (die).

17 hours ago, ant99999 said:

And then we have Umbra. This is of cource my own guess. But considering all I've just said it sounds quite believable that what we've seen is in fact how Oro inhabitates a body. After all, Umbra retained all his memories and his consciousness and how else could we 'build' a fully developed human personality via our 3D printer?

Kuva was used in the reconstruction of Umbra if you recall his building requirements. Given its uses to allow non-Oro beings to transfer minds I think that's a fair explanation for why he retained his memories when we rebuilt him. Remember that Ballas specifically designed Umbra to remember just enough details of his past to suffer through a specific memory over and over; it's likely built into his design which we scanned and reformed with the Kuva.

Edited December 10, 2018 by Beartornado

[ant99999]

8 часов назад, Beartornado сказал:

Because that's how Mirage's operator died (Per mirage quest), sentients possess a synthetic Oro, and I believe any "mother" sentient has the power to finish off anyone with Oro. That's why the Tenno were so valuable, they could not only wipe out fragments ruthlessly but properly finish off the synthetic Oro they took from the mother. Killing Sentient enemies in game will cause you to pick up their oro as it is destroyed when they are.

What we hear from the Lotus during the quest is a memory of Margulis (because the Lotus is a kind of fusion of Margulis and Natah, and the memories couldn't be of Natah, because, she's a Sentient and an enemy to every warframe). Now remember the quote:

The Orokin murdered Margulis - used her work to create 'Transference'.

So Transference as a mean for a tenno to control a warframe was created after Margulis' death while a memory is obviously from before her death which 100% prove that Mirage we are hearing about in the quest didn't have an operator.

Now in short about Mirage. Mirage in the Hidden Messages and Mirage Ballas are referencing to in Mirage Prime trailer is one and the same warframe. She was one of those 'biodrones under our command', the first warframes coordinated by the Helminth. In the trailer Ballas is confused that for some reason Mirage didn't 'writhe and rage in the vice', that she 'distorted his design'. What did he mean? Other persons who were transformed in warframes became furious as soon as they realised what is being done with them, this strong memory of hatred and despair is what haunred them for all their remaining lifes, giving them desire to fight and kill. However Mirage wasn't like that, instead of going insane she accepted her new form and even 'played the fool'. For her the reason, the stimulus making her fight the Sentient was not rage, but her vitality, her cheerfulness turning into foolishness sometimes. This was the reason she didn't despair even before her death.

Now, Sentient posessing Oro never mentioned ingame. On the contrary this sounds a bit illogical to me. If an Oro is a Void imprint as you mentioned yourself, why could a Void imprint revive a Sentient if the Void is poisonous to them? This makes no sense. Even if we suppose that the Sentients that arrived to the Origin system got Oro because of Void exposure they've come through, then why did the Sentient from Earth feared so much for his life to even be afraid to fight the Unum tower openly? Why did he only attempt that when he discovered the kuva supply inside the tower?

And if you suppose that sentient drones ingame posess Oro then you have to cosider also all the Corpus soldiers posessing an oro, as in the opposite case they couldn't kill these drones and use their parts for the weapons like Battacor we see ingame. Greneer are also capable of killing the Sentient (see Lancer Synthesis imprint). What we pick up from defeated drones is their cores which can make their posessor adapt to damage or in case of the tenno as we see heal them.

8 часов назад, Beartornado сказал:

Oro is not universal. It seems that beings exposed to the void almost exclusively have Oro, and that makes sense since Oro is effectively a void clone that overlaps with your body/mind. To my knowledge no Tenno were killed via Jade light, feel free to let me know if it was otherwise.

Here I will agree with you, Oro is not universal. But if any being exposed to the Void posesses an Oro then Margulis was no exception, as during her work with Zariman children they multiple times harmed her (even blinded) with Void energy they radiated. So then Margulis should posess Oro one way or another, and yet she was killed completely by the Jade Light. But even if we toss all the speculations aside, the Orokin gave a special meaning to the Jade Light, so it can't be just an overpowered electric chair, it must have something to do with the nature of the Orokin.

8 часов назад, Beartornado сказал:

Continuity is the process Orokin who do not possess an Oro went through to transfer minds.

Nowhere in the game it is said that ones who don't posess Oro can use the Continuity. The elder queen do posess Oro, as the Worm queen intents to bring her back to life using enormous amounts of kuva and even expects her sister to hear her from her dead state (one of her quotes during Kuva Siphon mission).

8 часов назад, Beartornado сказал:

As before only the Tenno and the Emperors posses true Oro, the Orokin elite including the Executors did not.

Ballas does posess Oro as well being an Executor which supported by his quote from Nekros Prime teailer: we who are beyond death, have forgotten the simple power of fear, and the fact that he was killed by Ordan Karris and yet came back to life. And if we believe that posessing an Oro is the result of Void exposure then quite a lot of people posess it like Kaleen, the investigator of Zariman, although she was only an officer, or tecnically any Corrupted expecially Vor.

8 часов назад, Beartornado сказал:

While Tenno could do this, it seems to be unnecessary and used only for Warframe control.

There is a difference between Transference and Continuity. Transference is like a diplomatic visit of your mind to the mind of the subject. If the subject's personality appears to be a lot stronger than yours, yours can easily be suppressed and you will die (see the Siver Grove). Continuity is a violent invasion when you are the one who suppresses the mind of a subject. So I doubt that Tenno are capable of using the Continuity.

In the Rell part I agree with you and it is basically what I believe is true I just didn't want to go into unnecessary detail. However as you yourself mentioned Rell had to remain tied to some body in the material plane. His warframe functioned as an anchor, without it his Oro would fly away to the Void and probably splinter into millions of shards i.e. he would die a terrible death (or undie? Whatever).

About the kuva part. Well, this is so terribly unclear that I won't claim anything to be the truth here. The kuva is mostly used in recreation of bodies so I believe it to be a universal healing elixir. Here are all the cases in the story kuva was used in:

To create Cephalon Ordis' 'frame' or body

To perform the Continuity

To transform Riven mods (which can be a hint that the mods are in fact either living beings like cephalons or fragments of a cephalon)

To create warframes (which can mean that kuva was also used for cloning)

To make a sterile Sentient regenerate his body as well as make the Unum tower regenerate it's flesh.

To control Dax soldiers.

So as you see kuva can be practically anything including what you and I mentioned, but neither of us could definitely say what it really is.

Sorry for such a collossal wall of text, but I really felt like going into more detail this time.

[Crashen]

I think its lore. We can already voidshift as tenno, partially entering the void to become invisible/invulnerable. I think we can go deeper into the void reflexively to save ourselves.

In the second dream, we had just woken up for the first time in who knows how long, and couldnt even walk properly. We could spastically shoot void energy, but not much else. At that point we didnt know how to shift into the void, were too weak, or not fully aware.

In the war within we learned to really tap into our powers in the dream. I dont think we get new bodies though, and at that point we didnt know how to fully heal, since i believe we respawned with our bum leg after getting the bone rammed into it.

By the time we got to chains of harrow, it was a reflexive survival instinct, and more efficient too. We get near death, we immediately shift into the Deep Void to regenerate quickly, and then plop out nearby.

Ideally we would return to our warframe, to keep fighting, but if that isnt possible we retreat to the void. In fact, maybe that is where our body is while transferred into a frame during missions. Maybe we shunt our body into a little coccoon in a void pocket while we use the frame. Perhaps our "active" frame, and our transferance chairs are like beacons to us while we are in the Deep Void. We can always return to meatspace through either one, and we can always shift to crazyspace provided something isnt interfering.

I think some things that can affect the void, can pose a threat to us. Stalker and Umbra I think can 'cut the void' to a degree, enough to knock us out of the Near-Void of Voidshift/mode. The Queens, with their magic kuva, can reach us in the Deep Void.

[FlusteredFerret]

On 2018-12-09 at 10:44 AM, ngrazer said:

Lore. 

https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Oro

Plus don't forget Ordis' background story and how there were immortal Orokin as well.

Interesting...though pretty sketchy on details.

I hope they are planning to flesh it out in due course.

 

[SilentMobius]

Transference is definitely lore and we have been shown that Tenno didn't need the transference equipment in order to transfer between the transference chamber and our Warframe.

However if we were unbreakable immortal then much of the story-threat of the game is meaningless.

Hunhow believed that destroying the Tenno body would kill them. Which suggests that perhaps the Tenno need at least one stable transference point to inhabit, but that they can return there if and other transference target is destroyed or if their remote form is disrupted.

We really have not true understanding of "Oro" for all we know it's just a term that describes something that is "represented" in conclave, wheras the reality could be more complex.

We also don't know if "The Jade Light" can kill Orokin, because we don't know at which point in the Imperial hierarchy a subject becomes "Orokin" (Which seems to imply having taken the "Red Vial"). Was Margulis Orokin? Or is the rank of "Archimedean" below "Enginus" which was implied to be the lowest "caste" that was considered Orokin (From the Guardsman synthesis. We know about "Executor", "Sectarus" and "Enginus")

I don't think we know enough to have any certainties yet. But I'd guess limited corporal immortality, where the Tenno can reconstitute their body but also have notable vulnerabilities that can prevent it, ensuring that death is a valid threat.