[Spoiler] Concerning the Heart of Deimos quest

[Frosty-the-snowden]

Lest it be buried under controversy about conservation tags and Necramech grind, I wanted to provide some feedback here concerning the quest itself, and its lore implications. Or, more specifically, ask why

Spoiler

So the Entradi are Orokin nobles, who all look like Ballas because, hell, I guess the arm thing was universal. They ask for help. My first thought is "why should the Tenno care, and why should they not 'help' by eviscerating the Entradi, considering they slaughtered the entire Orokin empire and spent an unknown amount of time hunting down and killing the survivors before they went into the dream. The most recent interaction with/ exposition concerning Orokin and their past was Ballas horribly warping and enslaving a heroic Dax and killing his family out of pure spite, and not long before, a surviving Orokin attempted to mind-#*!% the Operator and take over their body.

The Tenno for some reason bother to show up, (I am aware the reason is "So we can access the content, I'm referring to story reason) and don't just shoot the Entradi the second they see them. We're then treated to the wiser, more mature and somewhat haunted Tenno seen in previous quests now stammering out "I just wanted to help....." and similar weak responses to the oh-so-quirky family drama. Get used to that family drama, because "They hate each other" is the sum total of the family's characterization.

Eventually and improbably, we get to the point of the quest, which is that there's a singular artifact buried on this small, Infested moon which is, by best interpretation, solely responsible for the material universe and the Void being capable of interaction. What.

I know there was some desperation to derive actual stakes and a reason to give a S#&$ out of a conflict between the faction we viciously killed in the backstory and the faction that by definition has no characters and is a faceless mass of enemies, but is the best that the writers could come up with seriously that there's a macguffin that's totally the real reason (and has been the whole time) that your operator, a liminal being partially being of the Void itself, can use Void powers and enter the Void, or that vessels like the Railjacks (which use engines utilizing what's implied to be the sundered flesh of a Void entity) are capable of travelling through it? The Orokin, who could not come up with non-biological technology immune to Sentient subversion, who by all indications never managed to leave the solar system, suddenly have had a device that effects at least the entirety of the system at once and allows access to another dimension (granted, via other technology, that was, you know, understood to be completely independent before the update.)

Look, I know that, as said, this exists solely so the Tenno have a reason to somewhat give a S#&$, since it's being "threatened", but this is such a bizarre, spectacularly unneeded twist to the lore that undoes all the growing independence the Tenno have been building lore-wise and chains them and their influence to an ugly metal heart on the brand-new always-been-there moon of Mars.

Cherry on top, this whole incident of the entire solar system being cut off and isolated as its greatest protectors are disabled on the spot, while an invasion from a faction only vulnerable to the Void is underway, was all just a team-building hard-love lesson from grandma. Granted, that's just-about in-character for Orokin, but that's why the Tenno massacred them. I'd sincerely like to know why the Tenno--upon learning that Grandma was playing a game with everyone that resulted in their own quasi-alien essence being severed from its source and only by the miracles of plot contrivance did not instantly kill them-- don't immediately pull her out of her sphincter-flower and cut her into 50 pieces.

 

[(PSN)xBlake360]

Yeah, as much as I love lore in Warframe, I have 2 gripes about the new quest:

• Necramechs > Warframes (Father mentioned that we were the second wave, thus rendering our frames less important, even though the title of the game is WARFRAME, hopefully DE wont force too many mechs on us)
• If the heart stops, our powers die with it ---> how exactly does the heart work? Why would we lose powers if Void is independent from Orokin technology (what I mean is that Orokin didnt create the void, it predates them by a lot of time)

[Dhrekr]

11 minutes ago, (PS4)xBlake360 said:

Father mentioned that we were the second wave, thus rendering our frames less important, even though the title of the game is WARFRAME, hopefully DE wont force too many mechs on us

Eh... sorry what. I mean, we already knew that the Tenno weren't the first wave. The Dax soldiers came before the Tenno. The Grineer clones came before the Tenno. Both of these armies were not enough to stop the Sentient. The Tenno were the last wave - because they ended the war.

Adding a first iteration of Void-infused soldiers doesn't detract anything to the Warframes. You know that the Necramechs were the first wave and the Warframes the second because the Necramechs failed, right?

How does this make the Tenno less important? It puts them on an even higher pedestal!

 

If anything, the criticism could be that Father is forgetting the Dax and the Grineer - but then again, it's well-explained as a self-aggrandizing statement. "Of course the first serious defense of the Orokin Empire was my pet project. A shame it wasn't enough, but come here, I can give you one of them, you want one, don't you.

[(XBOX)Skippy575]

I think the main issue is where you're looking at the lore in terms of where the quest is accessed. 

My thought is because the only requirement for the quest is just access Mars, then this takes place well before the operator wakes up in TSD. Then, the idea of a heart makes more sense. By the time we get to TWW we find out we don't need a heart for our frames, we the operator can power them ourselves. 

Things still seem fuzzy after looking at it like that, but to me I feel like that was the idea they were going for. It's just not conveyed very well, surprise surprise. 

@(PS4)xBlake360 to your point about the mechs, Pops makes it sound like they were the first war machine platform developed to fight the sentients. Likely they combined the successes of the mechs with the infestation they could control (Helminth) to create the frames.

[(PSN)H-Refr]

22 minutes ago, (PS4)xBlake360 said:

Necramechs > Warframes (Father mentioned that we were the second wave, thus rendering our frames less important, even though the title of the game is WARFRAME, hopefully DE wont force too many mechs on us)

That's not how progress works. Warframes are more advanced technology than those clunky mechs.

[Dhrekr]

@Frosty-the-snowden

Brace for a long post.

 

Anyway, I have been thinking about your feedback on the story and I must say I'm really puzzled by some of the things you say.

For instance: you say that you'd like your Operator to be mature and self-reflected, and you feel that lines like "I want to help" aren't mature. Ok. But you also want your Operator to fly in a murderous, childlike, genocidal rage as soon as she meets an Orokin. Which is... ok? But how which way do you want it?

I think it's perfectly fine if a Tenno has enough patience and maturity to listen to an Orokin. Especially now that the Tenno realize that their plan to kill the Orokin was orchestrated by... you know who... and... yeah. I'm not saying "don't kill the Orokin". I'm saying "hey maybe not all the Orokin are bad, these ones are no threat to us at the moment, let's ask questions first and shoot maybe later".

And if you say "but Ballas!"... my Operator is mature enough to understand that the Orokin are not a hive mind and that Ballas being a bad guy isn't justification to kill every single Orokin who isn't Ballas.

 

As for the retcons... meh. I'm not seeing that large retcon that you say. Let's do a review of the things we already knew and the things that we learned.

- The Void isn't a natural thing in our Solar System: the Origin System is the future of our world, and we don't see the Void. So we knew that someone did something with the Void.

Now we know that it was the Orokin, through the work of the Entrati. Not a retcon.

- We knew that the Orokin did research with the Void and managed to send things in the Void. They sent ships (that's, literally, the Void ship tileset). They sent passenger ships, such as the Zariman. They sent the Sentient to Tau through the Void. The Lotus sent the Moon through the Void.

Now we know that the researches were performed on Deimos. Not a retcon.

- We knew, therefore, that the Void is an alternative... plane of existence... with its own physic, which at some point in history the Orokin had brought into contact with our own universe.

This quest adds, and it is the only true addition to Void lore, that the connection between our universe and the Void isn't stable.

Is it a retcon? No. We didn't have any information about this. The lore never said that the connection is stable and is here to stay. Now we have been given new info - that the connection is in fact not stable and has to be maintained by Orokin technology. Is it surprising that it is Orokin technology that maintains it? No. Given the lore, it's very obvious.

Last thing, the "brand-new-always-been-there moon of Mars"... here I start thinking that you are complaining only for the sake of complaining or to vent frustration.

The quest beginning says clearly that Deimos "emerges", and one of the first things Loid says is "we have been forced to re-phase into Martian [orbit]". So, it's not "always been there", as you say. While we don't know where it was, I think it is reasonable to say that it was in the Void, just like the Moon.

So, the way the lore goes, in my estimation, is:

Entrati start playing with the Void.
Entrati realize a semi-stable connection on Deimos.
Before the end of the war, the Entrati phase Deimos into the Void.
Entrati get infested.
Entrati and Deimos sit in the Void for thousands of years or so.
Something on Deimos starts breaking. The defense against the Grey Strain fails. They realize the only choice is to re-phase in normal space and seek help.
Entrati contact the last "loyal servant of the Orokin Empire".

As a tidbit, Loid calls us "Loyal servants of the Orokin Empire". This suggests that:

- Deimos was shifted into the Void before the Tenno insurgence. My money is: Deimos was shifted before the war, to protect the Heart from a Sentient attack (the Sentient, being weak to the Void, would have wanted to destroy it).
- No one updated the Entrati on the happenings in the Origin System. They didn't know the Tenno rebelled and the Orokin was exterminated. But, because they were away, they were spared.
- As they emerged from the Void, Loid sent the message before getting an update on the political situation.

So, honestly, it's half a miracle that the Entrati aren't hostile to the Tenno. From the point of view of our Tenno, the destruction of the Orokin is a long-lost memory. From the point of view of the Entrati, the Tenno betrayal is the newest news there is. And no one likes "your species was genocided by your children".