Warframes are ... ? (spoilers)

[Doraz_]

Umbra are people. Every umbra released will behave like a specter.

Primes are the actual weapons used in the old war. Relic hunts are how they re-emerge, thus making critical that grineer and corpus don't have their hands on even a single part.

Normal warframes are merely approximate attempts at reconstructing one. Weaker as we lack the Orokin's knowledge and expertise.

 

To me it looks beautiful, straightforward and a nice basis to develop current and future content, so ...

Why is there that there is so much confusion online? Am i missong something for the lore?

[SarusMindfury]

Cause scaning Cefalon Fragments and reading them isnt a work everyone enjoys to do (? 

[GnarlsDarkley]

13 minutes ago, Doraz_ said:

Why is there that there is so much confusion online?

Most people are like: 

11 minutes ago, SarusMindfury said:

reading?

[Doraz_]

15 minutes ago, SarusMindfury said:

Cause scaning Cefalon Fragments and reading them isnt a work everyone enjoys to do (? 

agreed, although i actually loved that aspect, almost like items descriptions in the souls-series

 

Does is make sense that a weapon comes with lore? Absolutely not. 

In contrast every item/place is an important part of the world it's contained in, holding a part of the story. It adds so much.

 

Maybe changing scanning for fragments to searching a randomly spawned tile that holds important information would be better, sort of like Dead Cells did. 

 

4 minutes ago, GnarlsDarkley said:

Most people are like: 

lol  this is space ninja simulator after all ... sort of

[(PSN)OriginalEquinox]

I've scanned most of the codex stuff but am yet to read a single one because if it was important it wouldn't be so well hidden. As for why the details are confusing,

50 minutes ago, Doraz_ said:

Umbra are people. Every umbra released will behave like a specter.

Isn't EVERY warframe once a person? And why doesn't Excalibur Umbra do anything when we use transference in our ship?

52 minutes ago, Doraz_ said:

Normal warframes are merely approximate attempts at reconstructing one. Weaker as we lack the Orokin's knowledge and expertise

So if Warframes need a human host to be infected my the helminth virus then doesn't that mean that whoever made these bootleg versions (the Tenno or the Lotus presumably as they would be the only ones with the knowledge to do so) are guilty of preforming human experimentation? Also by human I mean something that looks like human I suppose since Orokin and Ostron and such aren't technically 'human' anymore

[Genitive]

1 hour ago, Doraz_ said:

Normal warframes are merely approximate attempts at reconstructing one. Weaker as we lack the Orokin's knowledge and expertise.

I don't think it is entirely true. Take a look at these quotes from the codex:

"This enhanced version of the first Archwing prototype takes the design to its theoretical limits"

"The Dakra Prime is a Tenno forged weapon, crafted during the Time of the Orokin. It is renowned for speed, power and the ability to hit multiple targets"

"The sensual lines of these golden Kamas have long been celebrated as a masterwork of Tenno weapon smithing"

"One of the finest examples of Tenno craftsmanship, the Boar Prime offers a higher rate of fire and clip size with a slight decrease in per-shot damage"

Then these:

"A set of ceremonial daggers from the Orokin era, the Fang Prime's blades resonate violently as they strike. This allows them to pierce hardened materials like armor with ease"

"Reaper Prime is an ornamental scythe, with a blade forged from tempered rubidium"

"The Sicarus Prime is an ornamental firearm that fires rounds in rapid bursts, providing a balance between the lethality of auto-pistols and the accuracy of semi-automatic pistols"

And these:

"This Orokin variation of the Ankyros is superior to its successor in every way"

"Once thought lost to the ages, attempts to reengineer the Burston Prime never fully replicated this weapon's power and agility"

 

These quotes tell us a few things:

1. Some primes are based on non-prime counterparts. So warframes and archwings would fall into this category, since both are exclusively Orokin tech, primes being rare, presumably reserved for the elite. Weapons – not necessarily

2. The Tenno were able to craft primes using Orokin tech. If you apply R&D logic here, you would create superior versions from the standard ones, with a few exceptions

3. Some weapons are described as ceremonial or ornamental, which, for me at least, would suggest that they were also based on standard designs.

4. Finally, there is a category that explicitly says that non-primes were based on primes. So they were either already crafted as primes or didn't survive until the modern era outside of Orokin vaults.

In conclusion, I would say that primes were developed after non-primes, with a few exceptions. But considering that Orokin tech was so rare it didn't survive the fall of the Orokin.

 

54 minutes ago, (PS4)Equinox21697 said:

So if Warframes need a human host to be infected my the helminth virus then doesn't that mean that whoever made these bootleg versions (the Tenno or the Lotus presumably as they would be the only ones with the knowledge to do so) are guilty of preforming human experimentation? Also by human I mean something that looks like human I suppose since Orokin and Ostron and such aren't technically 'human' anymore

I would assume that once a template from the original is created Helminth can recreate it from other stuff, like all the neural sensors we collect.

[Doraz_]

1 hour ago, (PS4)Equinox21697 said:

I've scanned most of the codex stuff but am yet to read a single one because if it was important it wouldn't be so well hidden. As for why the details are confusing,

Isn't EVERY warframe once a person? And why doesn't Excalibur Umbra do anything when we use transference in our ship?

So if Warframes need a human host to be infected my the helminth virus then doesn't that mean that whoever made these bootleg versions (the Tenno or the Lotus presumably as they would be the only ones with the knowledge to do so) are guilty of preforming human experimentation? Also by human I mean something that looks like human I suppose since Orokin and Ostron and such aren't technically 'human' anymore

I've ended up on this:

 

Umbra frames are the original warframes designs, the ones that rebelled because they retained memories of their past,.

Primes are instead the product of further development, which require only the infestation and not a human body. The past failures served as blueprints.

Same for the normal ones crafted later, no human host is required.

 

It is my guess that every frame started as an umbra ( i include future yet to be released frames ), ended up uncontrollable, and a perfected version is built afterwards.

 

In addition, when i saw this screenshot, i got my hopes up for one reason.

If these were supposed to be the "weapons" the orokin put a lot of faith in to win the war, they would eventually start seeing them as heroes, god-like, destined to save the empire, thus sparking a cult-like following and worship.  At lest from the common folk ( humans poor and rich alike), left defenseless by the orokin elite.

Edited February 6, 2019 by Doraz_

[Doraz_]

10 minutes ago, Genitive said:

I would assume that once a template from the original is created Helminth can recreate it from other stuff, like all the neural sensors we collect.

Absolutely 😄 Thanks for the correction.

[(PSN)OriginalEquinox]

1 hour ago, Doraz_ said:

In addition, when i saw this screenshot, i got my hopes up for one reason.

If these were supposed to be the "weapons" the orokin put a lot of faith in to win the war, they would eventually start seeing them as heroes, god-like, destined to save the empire, thus sparking a cult-like following and worship.  At lest from the common folk ( humans poor and rich alike), left defenseless by the orokin elite.

I may be wrong but I think these are actual frames that have been abandoned and are meant to be for the updated version of the Vor's prize quest where we get to select between one of the three as our starter frame, I think it was mentioned in one of Steve's tweets

[BlachWolf]

Well all warframes are infested humans cyborgs controlled by space demon children. Though we dont know if all frames of one type share the same condciousness like the infested do, or if each of them are their own individuum, or even if there were multiple frames of one type aside from the normal versions.

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

On 2019-02-06 at 8:03 AM, Doraz_ said:

Why is there that there is so much confusion online? Am i missong something for the lore?

Quite a bit. Tons of spoilers to follow, obviously.

On 2019-02-06 at 8:03 AM, Doraz_ said:

Umbra are people

Every Warframe started as a person. Every frame in game is a copy of the original, including Umbra. The 'real' Umbra died when Ballas betrayed him.

The difference with Umbra is that every copy remembers what has been done to him. None of the others do.

However, there's evidence of other frames managing limited activity independent of their operators, such as at the end of Second Dream.

On 2019-02-06 at 8:03 AM, Doraz_ said:

Every umbra released will behave like a specter.

Umbra is a single frame. There won't be any more, as that would create a kind of Prime 2 level that devalues their current market. It only works for Excalibur because his Prime was a founder-only perk.

On 2019-02-06 at 8:03 AM, Doraz_ said:

Primes are the actual weapons used in the old war.

I'm not sure that's cannon. They're better versions, but there are some confusions. For instance Nidus is a prototype that predates all the other frames, Valkyr Prime somehow shares Valkyr's rage, supposedly due to torture and vivisection at the hands of Alad V, Gara is found on the plains because that's where she fell in the war, etc.

On 2019-02-06 at 8:03 AM, Doraz_ said:

Relic hunts are how they re-emerge, thus making critical that grineer and corpus don't have their hands on even a single part.

I'm not sure that's cannon, either. Relics just leftover tech to find/unlock, I don't think they're elaborate plans to hide it, especially as Corpus are adept at tech and Vor understands and can control Orokin tech.

On 2019-02-06 at 8:03 AM, Doraz_ said:

To me it looks beautiful, straightforward and a nice basis to develop current and future content, so ...

You've missed out a ton of stuff, so of course it looks straightforward 😉

 

[Doraz_]

1 minute ago, (XB1)KayAitch said:

You've missed out a ton of stuff, so of course it looks straightforward 😉

Exactly \o/

Thanks for the answer, i really appreciate it.

[Knowmad762]

On 2019-02-06 at 1:03 AM, Doraz_ said:

Why is there that there is so much confusion online? Am i missong something for the lore?

It's interesting that you have a discussion about what a Warframe is without a single mention of how they are piloted. This is a huge source of confusion, partly because this concept has changed several times over the game's real world chronology. IMO, there have been three distinct eras thus far.

When the game first came out, the Warframe was heavily insinuated to be an exosuit. Much like an Anthem Javelin, or Iron Man, the Tenno pilot was assumed to be inside the frame, physically present in the battlefield. This Tenno would already be an experienced and capable fighter, and the Warframe protects them from damage, augments their already impressive speed and strength, and gives them use of unique abilities. There is a metric ton of evidence supporting this idea, that still remains to this day in much of the game's older content. There are several voice lines and story ideas that don't make sense unless you consider that this was the core idea at the time it was written, only to be changed later on.

The release of the Second Dream quest (about 2.5 years after the original release) was a revelation because it changed the Warframe from a directly piloted exosuit to a remotely piloted mechanical robotic drone. The lore was vague enough that this change generally worked, aside from a few lingering details, as mentioned above. The idea here is that the Warframe is a essentially a robot, an unthinking machine that is incapable of thought or action when not being actively piloted.

The very recent Sacrifice quest was another game changer, as it brought the idea that every Warframe was originally a human subject, changed by the infestation into some amalgam of technology and biology. The key concept now is sentience: Umbra is confirmed to have retained his sentience from his original human mind through the conversion process, and is the only Warframe know to have ever done so. There is no evidence currently that more Umbra Warframes were ever made, and I personally hope that they do not go down that road. And because every other frame is also made from a human, the idea that something of their original human mind remaining after conversion is pretty intentionally vague right now. The other frames are not sentient like Umbra, but they are not mindless machines either, they are somewhere in between. Evidence for this is the Warframe acting independently during the Second Dream, and Rhino Primes`s codex implying an unpiloted Rhino Warframe attacked and ate people.

Deliberate or not, what a Warframe is, is pretty confusing.

[(XBOX)Erudite Prime]

Umbra - The ones that were actual people, the 1st Generation, the prototypes.

Primes - Clones of the originals, more or less just as strong. Cloning process included the Helminth virus, so they were never people.

Regulars - Tenno reproductions of Primes. 

[Doraz_]

18 hours ago, Knowmad762 said:

It's interesting that you have a discussion about what a Warframe is without a single mention of how they are piloted. This is a huge source of confusion, partly because this concept has changed several times over the game's real world chronology. IMO, there have been three distinct eras thus far.

When the game first came out, the Warframe was heavily insinuated to be an exosuit. Much like an Anthem Javelin, or Iron Man, the Tenno pilot was assumed to be inside the frame, physically present in the battlefield. This Tenno would already be an experienced and capable fighter, and the Warframe protects them from damage, augments their already impressive speed and strength, and gives them use of unique abilities. There is a metric ton of evidence supporting this idea, that still remains to this day in much of the game's older content. There are several voice lines and story ideas that don't make sense unless you consider that this was the core idea at the time it was written, only to be changed later on.

The release of the Second Dream quest (about 2.5 years after the original release) was a revelation because it changed the Warframe from a directly piloted exosuit to a remotely piloted mechanical robotic drone. The lore was vague enough that this change generally worked, aside from a few lingering details, as mentioned above. The idea here is that the Warframe is a essentially a robot, an unthinking machine that is incapable of thought or action when not being actively piloted.

The very recent Sacrifice quest was another game changer, as it brought the idea that every Warframe was originally a human subject, changed by the infestation into some amalgam of technology and biology. The key concept now is sentience: Umbra is confirmed to have retained his sentience from his original human mind through the conversion process, and is the only Warframe know to have ever done so. There is no evidence currently that more Umbra Warframes were ever made, and I personally hope that they do not go down that road. And because every other frame is also made from a human, the idea that something of their original human mind remaining after conversion is pretty intentionally vague right now. The other frames are not sentient like Umbra, but they are not mindless machines either, they are somewhere in between. Evidence for this is the Warframe acting independently during the Second Dream, and Rhino Primes`s codex implying an unpiloted Rhino Warframe attacked and ate people.

Deliberate or not, what a Warframe is, is pretty confusing.

Didn't even consider that to be honest, that's really interesting.

I've only really stuck with the game from the sacrifice quest and plains of eidolon.

19 hours ago, Knowmad762 said:

but they are not mindless machines either, they are somewhere in between. Evidence for this is the Warframe acting independently during the Second Dream

.That puzzled my mind for a bit too ... I've just taken that Lotus herself piloted that Warframe.

 

[Knowmad762]

3 hours ago, Doraz_ said:

.That puzzled my mind for a bit too ... I've just taken that Lotus herself piloted that Warframe.

It's a confusing moment, that has never really been explained fully. But it seems incredibly unlikely that Lotus played a role. The Lotus is essentially a Sentient AI, the very species that the Orokin were fighting in the Old War. Warframes were developed for the sole purpose of fighting Sentient AIs: because they did not rely on computer circuitry, they were virtually unhackable by the AI, and thus were successful against them. If a Sentient ever showed the ability to take direct control of a Warframe, that would have huge implications elsewhere.

As for the timeline:

Ballas did mention early prototypes that failed and were destroyed. Not much known about them. They are worth mentioning, but I wouldn't consider these Umbras or Warframes at all.

The Primes were the original Warframes. Full stop. Period. Excalibur Prime was the first ever developed, then many others were made and used throughout the Old War. These originals did use the human subject, but any later reproductions of the original (a second Prime or later Vanilla) likely did not. This is not super clear right now.

The Vanilla frames are Tenno reproductions, close but inferior to the original Primes. The Tenno, to this day, lacks the skill or tech to build a Prime from scratch. You'll note the Tenno never actually builds a Prime anything, they just collect existing pieces and reassemble them into a working whole. Building a dresser out of pieces from an Ikea kit is much different than building a dresser out of a tree.

Excal Umbra is a unique oddity, the only one of his kind. Ballas expressly calls him a mistake, so it seems possible that no others were made. And there are a few things that indicate that Excalibur Umbra had to have been made only after Excalibur Prime was.