[SPOILERS] Warframes and morality of sacrifice

[Acersecomic]

I need an absolute answer on this. Are our, even mass produced models like non-primes, SENTIENT beings.
Because here's the thing... Ballas describes warframes as beasts of destruction who knowing only pain, and only the Tenno calm them and bring them peace.
And even mass produced frames show sentience because we can see in Second Dream that they CAN AND WILL act on their own, even in a limited manner, when your frame breaks War in two.

And now we're supposed to just execute them ala Cloud Atlas style to steal their power for our own benefit, betraying the frame who finally found peace in OUR TRUST?
If people who sacrifice their frames don't end up paying the price in some story fashion later, I'd be deeply disappointed.

But then there's the other side, the real life side, where YouTubers will be sacrificing frames left and right to demonstrate the mechanic, dooming them by default to a "bad" story outcome.

So... will sacrificing frames affect individual player story in any way? Are Waframes, even the mass produces ones, thinking beings? Or are they literally just mindless husks?
This is very important. From a player viewpoint, from a story-stand point and from a moral, ethical stand-point.
I'd very much like to swap some frame abilities, absolutely. But we have to know will murdering a frame for our own benefit affect the story in any way. As a game mechanic this is great and a bit worrying, but from a story viewpoint... this could be extremely amoral and selfish.

[Hixlysss]

The answer is most likely "No."

What Ballas referrs to is the first wave of warframes, what we can assume to be the "Umbral" class of frames, built specifically to fight against the sentients. And over time they were able to refine the process.

We, the tenno, "Tamed" the umbras and displayed that we could control the warframes, and so over time they didn't need to use 'sentient' beings and instead made puppet bodies for the Tenno to...more or less completely inhabit, rather than 'share' it with the Umbral Soul in it.

As for it affecting story...doubtful. Though I do believe we will get some story affecting choices with the Entrati family and ect.

[enemystand]

I find it best to discard such thoughts. -. (cephalon simaris)

you can assume the process consist on the helminth eating or assimilating the helminth strain mutation from these warframes and later injecting that mutation to other warframes so they are able to use their power

[Kethus]

Rebecca said an a recent Shy art stream that apparently they are going to treat the sacrificing of the warframe with respect so hopefully it will sit right with people. I don't see how though.

 

edit: Skip to 0:50:43

[Berzerkules]

If sacrificing a few frames makes committing Grineer genocide a little bit more fun it's fine with me.  

[BloodKitten]

"Is experiment torture? Lab rats also feel pain, yet their suffering creates knowledge. If the lessons learned today save lives in the future, then the ends justify my means."

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/warframe/images/7/75/OnslaughtProg4Waves1.ogg/revision/latest?cb=20190820105047

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/warframe/images/3/37/OnslaughtProg4Waves3.ogg/revision/latest?cb=20190820105112

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/warframe/images/9/9e/OnslaughtProg2Waves2.ogg/revision/latest?cb=20190820105039

 

let me put it in a simpler term, take you'r morality and thorw it out the airlock into the human world you live in, i am playing games because it is not real life, the same idea when you play those visual novels that have lollis and you dont have to worry about something that isent real.

sure, i may grow attachment to a game, like mafia 1 and how i fear about the remake butchering it, but i seperate it from my real world issues since at the end of the day, you play games and other media to have fun and ESCAPE reality.

that is all.

[ebrl]

I think there are two important things to consider here. The first is that the tenno are interplanetary genocidal void demons who were until very recently just doing the whims the Lotus without ever questioning her motives, and since then just... murdering grineer and corpus by the thousands for the fun of it, I guess - morality and ethics don't seem to be a priority. The second is that DE has been making up the story as they go since the beginning, it's not like it's Shakespeare out there.

So yeah, please just get in the goddamn robot, Shinji.

[Aldain]

Considering Helminth's infestation is how we produce those Warframes in the foundry in the first place and the frames show all the sentience of a mannequin when not being controlled (outside of one isolated incident which has not been touched on since) it isn't entirely plausible to say that all Warframes are like Umbra.

Though I myself will not be sacrificing my original Excalibur for all the tea in China.

Also to the inevitable (and one is directly above me) posts about how we're "genocidal maniacs" already, I posit the same question I always do:

Are the Corpus, Grineer or Infested a better option than the Tenno?

[(PSN)Yggranya]

Morality, Pfft. I would rather they stop pretending with the "honor and justice" garbage and embrace the madness. Truth oft resembles madness, inaccessible to the dull of mind.

[Firetempest]

Gently being unified and absorbed into its original strain of infestation and becoming a single entity takes too long.
 

Spoiler

 

I now ask for the plat rush method of chopping it up and tossing it into the mouth.

 

 

[Antris]

A suggestion:

Give us a little animation where we extract a little Kuva cloud from the Warframe prior to sacrificing it, to say we keep the little Oro/Self it has or might have developed while we had it.

[R0AHN]

So best of my knowledge... yes, this is feeding sentient beings to the infestation. Though that degree of sentience varies.

Primes are of course the original models exposed to the Helminth strain and then later fitted with Transferrence bolts both to restrain them and to allow ease of control by an operator. Even after becoming infested the Warframes were still sentient but a bit on the crazy side.

The later copies from the Pimres are explicitly inferior and degraded (like taking a photocopy of a photocopy - we even see this reflected in stats and missing polarities). In such a case there would still be some semblance of sentience there but more akin to someone with brain damage or in a coma...

...That thought just made this whole thing morally worse. Let's feed the disadvantaged to the Helminth?

Umbra is a special case due to his butt-monkey origin story of prolicide. His resulting edgelord status keeps him fully sentient but very much on the "let's kill everything who isn't a Tenno" side of things.

[(PSN)Silverback73]

2 hours ago, Kethus said:

Rebecca said an a recent Shy art stream that apparently they are going to treat the sacrificing of the warframe with respect so hopefully it will sit right with people. I don't see how though.

 

edit: Skip to 0:50:43

Right before it gets completely consumed by the flesh wall it’s arm gives a “thumbs up” like Terminator 2 ending...to give you the warm and fuzzies...and then you realize it is communicating with you right as it dies. 😆

[Acersecomic]

19 hours ago, BloodKitten said:

let me put it in a simpler term, take you'r morality and thorw it out the airlock into the human world you live in, i am playing games because it is not real life, the same idea when you play those visual novels that have lollis and you dont have to worry about something that isent real.

sure, i may grow attachment to a game, like mafia 1 and how i fear about the remake butchering it, but i seperate it from my real world issues since at the end of the day, you play games and other media to have fun and ESCAPE reality.

that is all.

Actually it is not player morality but character morality in the constraints of morality that we are allowed to operate in.

[(NSW)Sniperfox47]

3 minutes ago, Acersecomic said:

Actually it is not player morality but character morality in the constraints of morality that we are allowed to operate in.

I mean considering we're genocidal monsters who butcher people like animals just to get our hands on a shiny new gun I'd say our sense of morality is rather warped. Especially when we immediately deem that gun mastery fodder, get bored of it a day after getting it, and toss it on our growing pile of trash weapons never to get touched again.

[SneakyErvin]

Nothing of what we use is sentient, besides Umbra. So sacrificing them to Helminth and feeling some attachment to it emotionally is like handing a beyond repairs car over to the wrecker while crying about it. The car wont feel anything and in the case of frames, instead of some low amount of cash, we recieve an ability in return.

As I said in another thread. We really only help Helminth to pull of an "Odin", we assist him in giving himself onto himself for knowledge to help us in the future. Odin did it so we could gain the knowledge to carve runes, Helminth does it so we can perfect our weapons of war and take them beyond the ideas and implemetations of the Orokin.

[(NSW)Sniperfox47]

4 minutes ago, SneakyErvin said:

Nothing of what we use is sentient, besides Umbra. So sacrificing them to Helminth and feeling some attachment to it emotionally is like handing a beyond repairs car over to the wrecker while crying about it. The car wont feel anything and in the case of frames, instead of some low amount of cash, we recieve an ability in return.

Considering that frames are literally people, I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion. As has been shown multiple times (Second Dream, War Within, Sacrifice, etc) the Warframes *are* sentient, sapient, and self away. It's merely their autonomy that's inhibited in all cases outside Umbra.

 

That being said if you're getting torn up about sacrificing a few frames to the blood gods I've got to wonder how you manage to play a game where we literally mutate and deform people into weapons of war so we can commit mass genocide against three entire races of being plus a self-aware and intelligent plague.

[SneakyErvin]

1 minute ago, (NSW)Sniperfox47 said:

Considering that frames are literally people, I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion. As has been shown multiple times (Second Dream, War Within, Sacrifice, etc) the Warframes *are* sentient, sapient, and self away. It's merely their autonomy that's inhibited in all cases outside Umbra.

 

That being said if you're getting torn up about sacrificing a few frames to the blood gods I've got to wonder how you manage to play a game where we literally mutate and deform people into weapons of war so we can commit mass genocide against three entire races of being plus a self-aware and intelligent plague.

The frames we use arent people. The frames we use are knock offs of prime frames that already had the human host replaced. Tenno frames, those we can sacrifice are the third (atleast) version of frames. Only the very first that had no transference bolts or tenno interaction were living beings, all the others are made up of a helminth core, nothing else. A select few still have echoes of their past living self.

[(PSN)Wil_Shatner_face]

I can’t believe this is a real thread. This is a video game, don’t overthink it.

People with a moral objection to this, have you ever played a grand theft auto game, and if so, how do you justify your actions in that game?

 

[Acersecomic]

1 hour ago, (NSW)Sniperfox47 said:

I mean considering we're genocidal monsters who butcher people like animals just to get our hands on a shiny new gun I'd say our sense of morality is rather warped. Especially when we immediately deem that gun mastery fodder, get bored of it a day after getting it, and toss it on our growing pile of trash weapons never to get touched again.

Yes, but we commit genocide unto our enemies. A military hell bent on killing everyone. A cult hell bent on enslaving everyone. An infestation hell bent on STDs. A creation hell bent on killing the remnants of their creators.

57 minutes ago, (PS4)Wil_Shatner_face said:

I can’t believe this is a real thread. This is a video game, don’t overthink it.

People with a moral objection to this, have you ever played a grand theft auto game, and if so, how do you justify your actions in that game?

 

Yes, it is a thread. Yes it is a video game. No I am not overthinking it, I am asking a serious question that is related to lore and immersion.

I have played GTA, a fkton. I have played a lot of games and have been a lot of people, good and bad, holy and most vile. I justify my actions in those games by playing that character and as that character. When I play Trevor in GTA I play as a drug addicted psychopath and so I have no qualms with being a dik. If I play as Commander Shepard who's a Renegade I certainly won't pat someone on the back, I'll pat their face in or if I'm played as a Paragon I'm not gonna be a xenophobic ashat to everyone.
There is a separation of Player and Character. My character is not someone who'd murder the very frames who find peace in her, just so I could grab some power. My side are the TENNO, not the grineer or whoever else. In real life if I had to choose to in a single moment defend my family or the family of my enemy, I'd defend MY FAMILY. And in Warframe Tenno and frames are the family, they are my side in this war.

[herflik]

To answer your qeuestion, yes, the standard frame types are sentient beings.

The proof of it is even in the recent story or Protea. You fought standard model of Protea that isnt controled by any tenno. She was a sentient guardian that followed her duty till the end.

[(NSW)Sniperfox47]

2 hours ago, SneakyErvin said:

The frames we use arent people. The frames we use are knock offs of prime frames that already had the human host replaced. Tenno frames, those we can sacrifice are the third (atleast) version of frames. Only the very first that had no transference bolts or tenno interaction were living beings, all the others are made up of a helminth core, nothing else. A select few still have echoes of their past living self.

A) The frame you're using in the Second Dream acts autonomously and defends you.

B) A Helminth core? Where are you getting this? I can't find a single reference to this in Ask a Cephalon, Fragments, Codex entries, Simaris Entries, or the quotes available on Warframe Wiki. While it's possibly a quote from an operation that's not recorded on the wiki, if it is I don't remember it and would appreciate a source.

The only confirmed difference that we have is that the standard Warframes are mass produced versions from later in the Old War, while the primes were hand grown artisanal warframes from which the others were based (and somehow versions exist for frames that were made post-Orokin like Valkyr...?).

The primes may or may not be the "original" frames and we do know the original frames were made by taking human humans and brutally torturing them and twisting them with the infection (though not typically as sadistically as Ballas).

As for whether the newer Warframe's are manufactured form people I don't know there's been anything definitely 100% said. Considering that the Original frames and Primes are confirmed to be made from people and that DE has allowed the implication to hang heavy that the defense objectives are cryopods of Lotus Operatives being turned into Warframes, it's safe to say it's fairly heavily implied that the Warframes are people.

[Alaeacus]

We've slaughtered thousands upon thousands of Grineer, Corpus, etc.  We shoot wildlife in Cetus for fun and an achievement.  I wouldn't say we hold the "moral" high ground at all.  

[(PSN)guzmantt1977]

2 hours ago, SneakyErvin said:

Nothing of what we use is sentient, besides Umbra. So sacrificing them to Helminth and feeling some attachment to it emotionally is like handing a beyond repairs car over to the wrecker while crying about it. The car wont feel anything and in the case of frames, instead of some low amount of cash, we recieve an ability in return.

As I said in another thread. We really only help Helminth to pull of an "Odin", we assist him in giving himself onto himself for knowledge to help us in the future. Odin did it so we could gain the knowledge to carve runes, Helminth does it so we can perfect our weapons of war and take them beyond the ideas and implemetations of the Orokin.

Himself to himself, is an interesting take. 

23 hours ago, Acersecomic said:

I need an absolute answer on this. Are our, even mass produced models like non-primes, SENTIENT beings.
Because here's the thing... Ballas describes warframes as beasts of destruction who knowing only pain, and only the Tenno calm them and bring them peace.
And even mass produced frames show sentience because we can see in Second Dream that they CAN AND WILL act on their own, even in a limited manner, when your frame breaks War in two.

And now we're supposed to just execute them ala Cloud Atlas style to steal their power for our own benefit, betraying the frame who finally found peace in OUR TRUST?
If people who sacrifice their frames don't end up paying the price in some story fashion later, I'd be deeply disappointed.

But then there's the other side, the real life side, where YouTubers will be sacrificing frames left and right to demonstrate the mechanic, dooming them by default to a "bad" story outcome.

So... will sacrificing frames affect individual player story in any way? Are Waframes, even the mass produces ones, thinking beings? Or are they literally just mindless husks?
This is very important. From a player viewpoint, from a story-stand point and from a moral, ethical stand-point.
I'd very much like to swap some frame abilities, absolutely. But we have to know will murdering a frame for our own benefit affect the story in any way. As a game mechanic this is great and a bit worrying, but from a story viewpoint... this could be extremely amoral and selfish.

I think that the whole question is supposed to make it a decision that we don't take as lightly as some of the other responses make one believe. 

I said that I intend to sit that one out, because one of those warframes of "questionable sentience" saved me. It was a very moving development, far more than the reveal in that quest for me. Especially since before that point he was me.

It's not something I have any wish to rush into. Not at all. 

[R0AHN]

3 hours ago, (PS4)Wil_Shatner_face said:

I can’t believe this is a real thread. This is a video game, don’t overthink it.

People with a moral objection to this, have you ever played a grand theft auto game, and if so, how do you justify your actions in that game?

 

Yes, this is a thread. It may surprise you but some people come to this game not only for the gameplay but for exploration the lore and discussion.

If you're here just for whizz-bang shooty fun action, that is perfectly fine. But taking a dump on other people for their fun isn't.

Personally I have to say taking gaming as a medium just for having fun is reductionist and sells it short. We have a truly interactive medium on our hands and there's the chance to weave complex narratives and pose questions, even if the developers didn't necessarily intend them. Now does every game have to be like Journey or Dark Souls and filled to the brim with metaphor and complexity? No, in the same way every film doesn't have to be like Silence of the Lambs or Koyaanisqatsi. You can just have dumb fun like in GTA or The Sims. but reducing all titles of an interactive medium to just gameplay is reductionist.

Yes, in-universe there can be questions of morality and that's precisely what this thread is about. While Warframe's lore isn't the most complex or the most fleshed-out, there are some interesting twists of lore and mechanics that are worth discussing. So if you or anyone has something to add to that discussion, please go ahead.