Six months ago, I complained that thanks to Saya’s Vigil being required to unlock Venus, brand new players have now met a sentient long before Natah, which strips away some of the mystery. If someone asks “What’s an eidolon anyway?” or even just pays attention to the ingame lore, the question of “what the hell were the Orokin scared of?” evaporates and the dramatic tension of Natah is gone.
Now, Heart of Deimos is required to unlock Ceres. Which is long before you get access to Stolen Dreams. So now when Maroo says “Oh, the Orokin? They’re all dead and nobody knows shit about them”, the player has gotta respond “Actually, I met a whole family of Orokin last week. They’re on Deimos, the planet you yourself frequently visit to look for Ayatans.”
In other weird starchart progression changes, we now have the fact that you don’t have to fight Lech Kril at Mars. But you do have to fight him and Vor at Ceres. So when Lotus says “your two biggest enemies have teamed up”, “uhhhhh, what enemy? Who the hell is Lech Kril? This boss is so confusing, how do I damage him? I’m unfamiliar with the concept of his frost armour because I didn’t get his lore on Mars.”
The new player experience is getting weirder and weirder and I’m having to work overtime to smooth over the cracks for my friends. I have a friend who’s newly getting into Warframe, and since I can no longer rely on Stolen Dreams to introduce the Orokin prior to Heart of Deimos, I made sure to tell them about the mysterious ancient orokin to appropriately tease the lore. But I’m sure they’ll still have absolutely no context for what they’re experiencing when they do the quest. Warframe is getting more confusing.
Between all the story-relevant events that were one time only and are never accessible again and the absolute jumbled up mess of a timeline the game puts you through while progressing, it’s nearly impossible to get an actual grasp on the story of Warframe without relying on external sources. Alad V for example, plays a big role in multiple quests but unless you were here years ago to do the events that introduced you to him and explained his relevance, he’s just some random Corpus guy who show up out of nowhere, then gets himself infected and is back to normal again? Teshin shows up in multiple quests but unless you somehow ended up queuing up for Conclave (in which case I’m very sorry for you), you have no idea who this guy is and why he is so important. The game really would benefit from having brief questlines actually introducing you to the characters early, a quest that sends you to Teshin for some training, a small quest line that involves Alad V being a bad guy and you dealing with the aftermath and have Lotus or someone else explain his history briefly to you. Same for all the bosses you end up fighting, most of the Grineer bosses are complete mysteries unless you were there when their respective events happened years ago.
It is a shame that those story relevant events are inaccessible, but I never played them, and I understand things perfectly well. The bosses’ assassination missions explain their deal very succinctly. Salad is a sadistic tech CEO. Regor is a sexy geneticist. Kela runs the prize fights. The Sergeant is a punk ass bitch. The only weird boss is Sargus Ruk, now that the Tenno have been rewritten as superheroes instead of mercenaries. Oh, and corrupted Vor, but he’s such a meme he doesn’t need to make sense. He’s funny anyway.