I'm willing to bet I'm not the only one who, seduced by its biggest update ever, has jumped back into Warframe. Plains of Eidolon is one of the most impressive pivots I've ever seen a game make. It adds a massive open world for players to explore, complete with new quests, fishing, mining, and deadly colossal beasts that emerge at night to tear you to shreds. While Warframe is still centered around four-player co-op, it feels closer than ever to an MMO—in a good way.

The first time I stepped out onto the Plains, I felt echoes to that moment in Fallout 3 when you emerge from the vault and walk out into the wasteland. It's a liberating experience after dozens of hours spent stalking through the cramped, procedurally generated corridors that most of Warframe's missions take place in. But, despite unlocking early on in Warframe's campaign, Plains of Eidolon feels like a complete waste of time for new players.

Welcome to grindsville 

For a brand new player, Plains of Eidolon will only take about two hours to unlock. It's placed directly in a newbie's sights thanks to a mandatory new story quest, but after sinking almost 14 hours into it over the weekend, it feels like a deceptive distraction rather than a rewarding expansion for newbies like me.

Warframe is already an extremely grindy shooter and Plains of Eidolon exacerbates this problem by being completely compartmentalized from the rest of the game. All of the new features, like fishing, give resources that can only be used in the Plains and not in the main campaign. For a veteran who is already decked out in a powerful Warframe and weapons, Plains of Eidolon seems like a fantastic new area to explore and progress through. But for a new player who is already struggling to farm the materials needed to upgrade and craft new Warframes, you're far better off sticking with the main campaign.

This is a stark difference from almost the entirety of Warframe's main campaign, where resources always have some kind of use. While doing regular missions, slain enemies and broken caches frequently drop dozens of different materials that are used in the intimidatingly huge crafting system. But what's great about this is that, no matter what kinds of missions you're running, you're building a stockpile of materials that you'll eventually need.

Like most MMOs, Warframe is built upon running missions repeatedly in hopes that you'll be rewarded with a specific item drop. Most recently, I ran the Fossa mission on Venus several times to obtain the blueprints I needed in order to craft Rhino, a powerful and tanky Warframe recommended to new players. Meanwhile, I was incidentally picking up more common resources that I could put to use in other areas. But none of the activities new players can do on the Plains offer the same abundance of materials they need—and that's never communicated to them either.

This became clear to me after spending a few hours with the new fishing system. While exploring Cetus, I discovered a fish vendor who could sell me a spear I could take out into the Plains and use to catch fish. As someone that enjoys fishing in MMOs like Final Fantasy 14, Warframe's fishing system is fun and requires a bit of skill. Once I had an inventory full of alien-looking fish I eagerly returned to Cetus to see what I could use them for.

One of the most valuable resources gained from fishing is fish oil, a crucial crafting ingredient for the Archwing Launcher. This allows players to deploy their Archwing (a modular flightsuit that bolts onto your Warframe) in the Plains and fly around the map. That sounds amazing, except new players won't unlock an Archwing until after they complete a fairly lengthy quest from the main campaign. That quest gives them a blueprint they can use to craft an Archwing, which will take roughly two real-time hours to craft. And all that fish oil I harvested isn't used by my Archwing anywhere else in the game.

What's worse, the Plains is so large that it's clear they were designed to be explored with the aid of the much faster Archwing. I'm sometimes left behind by my group when doing quests in public matchmaking because they zoom off in their Archwings leaving me to hoof it on foot. I constantly feel excluded.

This is a recurring theme to everything in Plains of Eidolon and it's made worse by how obfuscated everything is. One of the vendors sells gear for your Kubrow, a dog-like creature that accompanies you on missions. Except—you guessed it—I don't have a Kubrow yet. Once again I'm leaving the Plains behind to set off on another quest from the main campaign. I didn't know how to fish or mine until I found a guide on YouTube that walked me through the basics. But now that I spent all that time learning it only to realize it has zero relevance to me as a newbie, I feel like I wasted my time.

Even the main quest that leads you there rewards you with the blueprint necessary to craft Gara, a sleek new Warframe. But in order to build Gara, you'll need find three other blueprints to craft its requisite parts. Those blueprints are a very rare drop from repeatable bounty missions offered by a quest-giver in Cetus. But here's the problem: The resources needed to craft Gara's component parts are only available until much later in the main campaign. I only learned this after looking up each of the resources on the Warframe wiki—otherwise I would've been completely clueless as to how to build Gara.

Since adventuring out onto the Plains, I've repeatedly run into these artificial barriers where I'm excluded from some kind of activity only to find out I need to head back to the main game and progress further. It's frustrating enough to make me wonder why the Plains of Eidolon is even accessible to new players to begin with. Sure, it's an exciting update that has likely sparked interest people who have never played Warframe before. But with everything gated behind the main campaign with zero relation to Warframe's core progression, Plains of Eidolon feels bolted on and alienated from everything else.

Making matters even worse, the Plains of Eidolon is buggy as all hell. Bounties and open-world missions frequently break. Mission objectives often fail to trigger, forcing me and my party to abandon them and restart. At one point, I had to retry a mission almost six times before it began working properly. Looking at the forums and subreddit, it's also clear that veteran players are dismayed with how pitiful the rewards for completing these missions are. Digital Extremes is working on making the whole thing more rewarding and fixing the bugs, but I feel like I'm playing an early beta and not a final release. 

That frustration aside, I'm having a blast playing through the main campaign. The last few years worth of updates to Warframe have made it vastly more enjoyable for new players, and its ninja-flavored parkour and third-person shooting is unparalleled. Maybe once I've progressed much further or Digital Extremes has had some time to balance it I'll return to explore the Plains, but for now I'm more than content to pretend like it doesn't exist.

This article contains complete spoilers for the biggest plot twist in Warframe. 

It's easy to look at Warframe and assume it's a mindless shooter about space ninjas fighting space cyborgs, collecting piles of loot, and levelling up ad infinitum. When it first hit beta back in 2013, that was true. There was no story. But since then Warframe has grown in ways that very few games have, with developer Digital Extremes reinventing and rebuilding it several times over. Compared to 2013, the Warframe of today is almost unrecognizable. 

The biggest surprise in that evolution is Warframe's shockingly nuanced story, built on the back of a unique setting that blends the atmosphere of Dune with cyberpunk and a dash of 90s anime excess.

Warframe’s opening arc begins with you awakening from cryogenic sleep on Earth, now a wild jungle world. A masked woman calling herself The Lotus informs that you are part of a clan called Tenno, warriors of blade and gun, enemies of evil, and masters of the Warframe armor. Each of the 33 Warframes is like its own RPG class, with unique abilities and playstyles that players will craft and upgrade. Once you're suited up in your first Warframe, you'll meet Ordis, a Cephalon AI and loyal caretaker of your personal spacecraft who is psychologically damaged after his centuries-long dormancy. Together, you set out to explore the solar system.

What follows is good enough sci-fi to tempt anyone who isn't already hooked by the words "triple-jumping space ninjas." And once you're invested—deeply invested—Warframe drops a brilliant, unexpected bomb on you. It's one of the most dramatic and intense plot twists I’ve ever seen in a game, and I’m saying that as a Yoko Taro fan. But to see that twist, you really have to earn it.

Seriously, major plot spoilers for Warframe happen below.

More human than human

Almost every event in Warframe’s story, present and past, is linked to the fallen Orokin empire. Everywhere you look, you can see fragments of their unique aesthetic, like literal ivory towers grown from living bone banded with gold. This is partially reflected in the Warframes themselves, ornate armor of Orokin design, and much of the game’s story is devoted to discovering why the Tenno and their Warframes are still standing when their creators are long gone.

While the specifics are left hazy at first, characters frequently reference ‘The Old War,’ the conflict that destroyed the Orokin so completely that, centuries later, the survivors are still picking up the pieces.

Warframe loves its hidden mysteries, and they're extremely easy to miss if you're too distracted by all the running and gunning. The bits of story are sprinkled across each mission, which players tackle alone or in groups of four. Warframe's missions are straightforward, procedurally generated kill-fests centered around objectives like planting extractors and defending them while waves of enemies attack, or rescuing hostages and escorting them to the evac zone.

Every question you might ask about the story likely has an answer somewhere, even if it is tucked away in a piece of item description text in the style of Dark Souls, or written in plain sight but in an alien script needing deciphering. But Digital Extremes had been playing a clever trick on its community for quite some time. At the point where almost any other game would begin a gentle cruise into endgame rhythms, Warframe switches up a gear, introducing entirely new systems and completely upending what you thought you understood about its story. Calling this a big plot twist is an understatement.

The Second Dream

By the time most players reach the story quest ‘Natah’, they will have likely sunk 30-40 hours into the game. You’ll have explored most of the solar system, fought countless battles, and forgotten half the questions you once wanted answers to. When an encounter with a robot unlike anything you’ve seen during a routine mission causes the Lotus—your constant, reliable guiding voice the entire game—to cut contact and disappear, it’s clear that something big is happening.

Warframe, and, in part, its community, have played a long con with its story, letting you think that those first 30 hours are how it is, and always will be. The Old War is a perpetual mystery, the Tenno are just space ninjas and there probably isn’t anything more to it. 

But Natah sets in motion a story arc revealing the Sentient—true rogue AIs (listen to this intricately hidden piece of audio from Ordis, your AI companion, for context) and the reason the Orokin empire fell—and The Lotus’ complicated history with them. One of these Sentients, named Hunhow, is determined to remove the Tenno and their Warframes as a threat before its plans can move forward, and it knows your weakness—one that very few players would have even imagined. So begins The Second Dream, the most important quest in the game.

Warframe’s greatest trick is in the revelation that the armored figure on-screen all this time is not you. Your Warframe is revealed as a remote-controlled proxy: A mechanical golem, puppeteered by a sleeping psionic youth so potent that their dreams can manipulate these machine-bodies across incalculable distances. In order to save yourself, you have to rescue this child from their previously safe sarcophagus hidden deep within Earth’s moon and carry it—under fire—to the safety of your ship.

It is here, nearly 40 hours into the game, you are presented for the first time with the character creation screen. You are asked to create your Operator—the real Tenno. You sculpt their face, and assign yourself a voice. For the first time, you—your Tenno, your Operator—are a protagonist unmasked, and will have dialogue choices and internal monologue from this point onwards where previously stood a silent cipher. The Warframes are still how you fight, primarily, but you know their true nature now, and your own.

 The War Within, and conflicts beyond

The Second Dream is just the beginning of Warframe’s central story, now being told in episodic updates. Many sidequests unlock after that quest, building on your newfound knowledge, as well as opening up a continuation of the central story arc. In a later quest—The War Within—you find your psychic link severed from your Warframes, forcing you onto the surface of a hostile planet without your proxy-armor, where you learn a new set of psionic powers including teleportation and powerful energy beam attacks. Essential, to compensate for the fragility of your flesh-and-blood body.

Eventually you are reunited with your Warframes, but from that point onwards, you can—at any time—teleport in to handle the situation personally, with your Operator having their own progression systems and skill tree. While used sparingly at present, the Plains of Eidolon expansion is already increasing the gameplay focus on Operators, making them more viable in combat, and their powers essential in combating the Sentient weapons waking up on Earth.

Of course, as with all things Warframe, the mystery is maintained as best as possible. While Operators appear in much of the expansion’s loading screen art (the character in the wide helmet is an Operator), and even the patch notes, they are always masked, with their nature left for players to discover for themselves. A journey worth taking, but it’s a long hike, even in the shoes of a triple-jumping space ninja. 

Today, something a bit different is coming to Digital Extremes’ multiplayer action romp, Warframe. The Plains of Eidolon expansion is, for the first time, introducing an open-world area, the titular plains. It’s about nine square kilometers in size, and is full of secret caves, enemy camps and new missions. 

Along with this large new area, expect new gear, a new warframe, and a brand new mission type that will see you making some fancy weaponry. And you can’t have an open world without some relaxing diversions, so of course there’s fishing, and if you prefer to crack rocks instead of catching fish, there’s always mining. 

It would be a good idea to get all the mini-games finished before night falls, however. During the day there are threats, certainly, but night is when the massive Eidolon appears. It’s a huge beast that’s woken up to search for something “mysterious and dangerous” and you’ll probably need to put together a team if you have any hope of hunting it down. 

Here’s a 20 minute developer walkthrough to whet your appetite. 

The Plains of Eidolon launches today on Steam, and it’s free.