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Zephyr Deluxe and its (Accidental?) Lore Implications


SenorClipClop

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The Zephyr Deluxe skin, as showed off in Devstream 152, looks phenomenal. I really like it and I'm probably gonna get it.

However, part of it annoys me from a game-universe perspective, just a bit. As far as I can recall, Zephyr Deluxe will be the only in-universe use of a modern IRL language*, English. (This of course excludes menu text and character dialogue, which isn't explicitly used in-universe but rather is in modern real language for the sake of the player.) A lot of effort has been put in to show that every literate culture in this far-future Origin System uses their own script (Ostron, Corpus, Grineer, Solari, Orokin/Tenno), implying that the modern scripts we use IRL are gone. But here we have "Zephyr" and "Head in the clouds", printed in English on a Warframe skin.

I get that skins are primarily just artsy customization and aren't meant to be lore deposits. I don't think this use of English on Zephyr Deluxe breaks anything, but it does kinda bug me. Thoughts?

*As I wrote this, I recall that there was a poster in the latest holiday event that uses the Chinese character 福 , so I guess this also counts as a use of a real modern language. However, this arguably gets a pass, as an item in celebration of an IRL holiday. I don't think anybody is considering holiday items like the Spearmint Scythe and Lepus Headgear to be seriously in-universe canon.

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You're not entirely correct. The Unreal Tournament weapon skins, I'm going to venture a guess that this is just a case of handwave it away. 
But there is also a far more meaningful place where english script is used and that is in naming Railjacks. The names are not converted into any language script. It'd be nice if it did, but Tennobet is kinda weird to write out. 

As for Zephyr, I really didn't think about that at all! I wouldn't be overly surprised if the artists over at DE also didn't. An awesome design came up and this detail didn't pop up at all during the creation process. 

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21 hours ago, Lakais said:

You're not entirely correct. The Unreal Tournament weapon skins, I'm going to venture a guess that this is just a case of handwave it away. 
But there is also a far more meaningful place where english script is used and that is in naming Railjacks.

The Unreal Tournament skins are debatable, since they come from another game where real languages are used.

You make a very good point with the Railjack naming. While that does kind of bend the implied lore that real languages are dead (cuz here it is on the side of a spaceship), I think there's a difference in the player naming something they own using real language, and the game itself presenting real language in use.

Also, it'd be really cool if we could input a Tennobet name for our Railjacks.

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  • 1 month later...
On 2021-02-27 at 1:04 AM, SenorClipClop said:

I get that skins are primarily just artsy customization and aren't meant to be lore deposits. I don't think this use of English on Zephyr Deluxe breaks anything, but it does kinda bug me. Thoughts?

I agree. I think some of the other things that have been pointed out, like the holiday poster with Chinese text or the proto skins or the Unreal Tournament skins, can be ignored as non-canon, but the deluxe skins are sort of implied to be a part of the lore due to them appearing in the Silver Grove quest, the Leverian, and their flavour text. So the English text / Latin alphabet does annoy me a bit.

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