The 40th frame added to Warframe comes with an interesting set of skills that will let Tenno excel in support, crowd control, and even DPS-oriented builds. Wisp brings an elusive, ephemeral air to the game, and it shows in her abilities as well. You can use a light touch, or let loose the power of the sun on unwitting foes. With Wisp, the only limit is your creativity. Her four abilities and passive will help you aid your teammates, set opponents up for team-based combos, and reposition yourself to get out of—or into—harm’s way.

How to get Wisp

Wisp’s construction isn’t necessarily easy, but luckily you’ll get all her blueprints from the Remastered Corpus Gas City on its own Assassination node on Jupiter. You’ll have to face down the Flying Eidolon Ropaloyst around 8-9 times to expectedly receive all blueprints. Once you’ve got the plans for each part, you’ll luckily have a healthy set of credits and Hexenon from Jupiter. You’ll also need commonly-used frame construction materials like Plastids, Rubedo, Polymer Bundles, and Alloy Plates. Elsewhere, make sure you find an Argon Crystal from the Orokin Void or from Assassination missions and use it on the Chassis before it decays, lest you need to hunt for another one. You’ll likely already have some Tellurium to spare from daily login bonuses, which leaves Nitain Extract as the last material to farm. Put in the time on some Nightwave missions and you’ll be able to buy 2 units required to construct’s Wisp’s systems. If you just keep up with the right objectives, you’ll be soaring through the air with Wisp in no time.

Wisp's Abilities

The backbone of Wisp’s kit are her Reservoirs. These extra-dimensional pods come in three flavors—Vitality, Haste, and Shock—and they all fulfill specific roles. Once summoned, the pod will provide an AOE buff itself as well as sending out motes that extend the buff for up to 30 seconds while outside the range of the Reservoir. Vitality increases base health and adds passive regen, Haste increases movement, attack speed, and fire rate, and Shock provides a passive DOT in a short radius that also stuns in an arc. Since Wisp can have up to 6 pods up at one time, players can feel free to proactively set down support as their team needs it. The pods duration is indefinite, so set up them in strategic situations and you and your teammates can corral enemies near them for effective engagements.

Wil-O-Wisp is Wisp’s second ability, and there’s a reason it’s her namesake. Activating the ability will have the frame cloak and summon an ethereal projection of herself that will continue in a target direction to distract enemies as it travels. At any time during the skill’s duration, players can hit the key again to instantly teleport to the projection’s location and gain temporary invulnerability. You can also hold the button down to conjure a faster projection that will still allow for teleportation as soon as you let go of the ability key. The uses of this skill are myriad. Tenno can summon this spectral clone as a "fire and forget" distraction ability, use it to jump into an engagement from afar with enemies off-guard, or as you gain mastery over the skill, a combination of both! Wisp can even use this ability to open Friendship Doors alone as well as teleport past Spy laser barriers undetected. As we’ll see with her next abilities, Wil-O-Wisp only becomes more powerful in conjunction with her full kit.

Wisp’s third ability is called Breach Surge, and it greatly extends her influence over the battlefield. In a target area, Wisp sunders the dimensions to produce an energy burst that blinds enemies. While blinded, enemies become susceptible to releasing secondary sparks on hit that will travel to nearby enemies and have a chance to blind them as well. What takes this ability to the next level is that if players cast it on a Reservoir, Wisp will teleport to that pod and the ability’s range will be doubled. She can also use Breach Surge during Wil-O-Wisp to have the projection explode forth with a second AOE around it. Using this ability’s different versions will let players dance around enemies and control space as she sees fit.

In her ultimate, Wisp turns her enigmatic abilities towards the radioactive power of the sun, tearing open a portal and channeling this Sol Gate into a giant plasma deathray. Players can reposition and aim the beam at will. Wil-O-Wisp can be used during Sol Gate to quickly hit from a different angle. When you’ve got the enemy just where you want them, holding the fire button will slow Wisp’s movement down but double the effective DPS, incinerating enemies with new vigor. Any motes from active Reservoirs will move to orbit Wisp during Sol Gate, letting you spread buffs and debuffs alike while dishing it out. Breach Surge secondary sparks also have an 100% chance of triggering from each hit of the solar assault. And though the skill continually drains 12 energy from this spritely frame, players can end it early by pressing the ability key again.

With all of Wisp’s abilities combined, you can dance around enemies while providing key support to teammates in need. You have the power to approach situations in a way that best suits you thanks to all of her movement abilities, and this is only aided by her passive, Phased. Whenever she takes to the air, Wisp wreathes herself in a dimensional shroud which renders her invisible to enemies until she lands or fires a weapon. Experienced Tenno will be able to surgically apply her buffs and fake out enemies at a moment’s notice. If you’d like to move like the wind, the ethereal Wisp is the frame for you.

Wisp builds

Wisp is such a nice frame for a range of players because no matter what build you go with her, you’ve still got an excellent kit of abilities that will test your skill and creativity. For a balanced approach, upping Ability Strength should be a priority to ensure Reservoir and Sol Gate have greater effects for both you and your team. You can never go wrong with more efficiency from Streamline, as this will let you shape the battlefield easily with more opportunities for targeted buffs and debuffs. For players looking to lean into the debuff side of things, they should definitely look into adding Overextended to their setup, as increasing the range of your abilities goes further in that it’ll mean more potential victims for Breach Surge’s secondary sparks and the stuns from Shock motes.

Definitely check out the Warframe-School for more in-depth Wisp builds and try your hand at crafting the perfect setup for your own elusive summoner at Warframe Builder. Putting time into mastering Wisp will let you dance on the wind and control the battlefield.

Math is hard, but Space Math is even harder. If you can imagine all the complex physics calculations that go into moving a videogame character around a 3D space, think about how much harder it would be if that level was also moving around a 3D space. That's the conundrum Digital Extremes was facing when it first conceived of ship-to-ship space combat almost ten years ago—a problem it finally managed to solve in Warframe's upcoming Empyrean update.

If you missed out on all the big Warframe news from its annual Tennocon convention last weekend, the gist is that Warframe is getting an expansion where you can build spaceships and fly them with three of your friends. At any time, you can leave your ship to board enemy ships or explore ruins floating in space. It all looks really ambitious and exciting.

But the physics calculations necessary to have ships that players can walk around in that are also pitching and yawing through 3D space are extremely complex and demanding. That's why, as detailed in our extensive interview with game director Steve Sinclair, Digital Extremes originally abandoned the idea when it was first prototyping Warframe over a decade ago. But as Sinclair explains, that fantasy of space ninjas piloting spaceships stuck with him and he was eventually able to solve the problem using some clever tricks.

You should watch the Empyrean demo above so you have a reference for what I'm about to explain. As you can see in the demo, the player takes control of the ship and flies around space and it all looks just like it does in any other space game like Star Citizen or No Man's Sky. But here's the trick: The ship isn't actually moving.

Instead, Digital Extremes is using an ancient rendering technique called 'portal rendering' which works almost exactly like it does in the puzzle game Portal. Essentially, you create a portal or a window that is attached to somewhere else in 3D space, and when you look through it you see from a different perspective. The cockpit of Warframe's spaceship is actually one big portal into an entirely separate map.

"You just connect the player controls to where that portal is," Sinclair said in our interview. "For Empyrean, there's a big 32 kilometer-squared space where all the space combat is happening and you're pitching around and it feels like you might vomit, but [off to the side] there's a little level and that's your actual spaceship. You have a solid, reliable physics system driving what appears to be this six degrees of freedom experience over here [in an entirely separate area]."

The trick is apparently so clever, even some of Digital Extremes' own programmers were confused by it. "The idea was so sound that last week—last friggin' week—one of the graphics engineers, who is a way better programmer than me, said 'I think this is a problem because the level is rotating too fast.'" Sinclair told me. "And I'm like, whoa, pump the brakes. The level doesn't move. It's fixed in space and we're just moving the backdrop perspective."

If players leave the ship, they're then teleported into that real section of virtual space where they see a model of the spaceship their friends are piloting—but it's not the actual spaceship with full rendered interiors.

Whereas games like Star Citizen strive to simulate spaceflight more directly, that comes at an enormous burden to both the game engine, the computer playing the game, and the developers who have to stitch it altogether. "I'm going to fake it because I can make it faster," Sinclair laughed.

Thanks to lots of nuanced lighting and spatial effects, the trick works. From the demo, it's impossible to tell that you're not actually flying in 3D space.

That's just one of the cool tidbits that came from my time at Digital Extremes offices last weekend. Read the full interview to get a more in-depth look at the challenges Digital Extremes faced when making Empyrean, and check out my overview of all its cool features for more on why it's so exciting.

When Digital Extremes first revealed Warframe's Empyrean update last year, it was a transformative moment for the free-to-play game and its community. At the end of a live tour of its second open world area, the on-stage team of developers surprised everyone with a second demo of the then-unannounced update that would let players build spaceships, explore, and fight in space.

I don't think I can fully convey the wave of confusion and excitement that gripped the live audience in that moment. For six years, players had been stuck exploring procedurally generated corridors and a few open world zones, but then a squad of Tenno boarded a Railjack spaceship, flew to low orbit above Venus, and battled a Corpus capital ship. It was an audacious spectacle that had the audience screaming and cheering.

But for the developers at Digital Extremes like game director Steve Sinclair, the quest to create Empyrean goes back decades. It's a story woven into Digital Extremes' own brushes with financial disaster and Sinclair's obsession with realizing a cool fantasy wrapped up in a challenging game design conundrum.

"I just can't let it go," Sinclair laughs. "I have a problem."

Clipped wings 

At Tennocon 2019 last weekend, Digital Extremes gave players their second taste of space combat in Empyrean with a 30-minute live demo. In lieu of a shocking twist like with its initial reveal, Sinclair and his team opted to give players a granular look at how piloting the ship works while still surprising them with fun features like the ability to steal enemy ships or call in a second squad from somewhere else in the solar system for ground support.

You can read about Empyrean in my preview, but the gist is that it's Warframe meets indie roguelike FTL. With four friends, you pilot a spaceship through stretches of open space, manning battlestations and dividing your limited energy pool between different offensive and defensive modules as the situation demands. But the comparison ends there because players can also disembark from the Railjack in their Archwing flightsuits and zip around, invading enemy ships or exploring derelict ruins floating in space. 

It's a mode that Sinclair doesn't like to call an expansion, since it doesn't expand so much as it glues all of Warframe's disparate features together into one cohesive whole. It also brings Warframe closer than ever to the original game idea that nearly ruined Digital Extremes in the early 2000s.

Before Warframe was released, Digital Extremes had made a name for itself developing Unreal Tournament. That success inspired its team to make a game of their own, an ambitious sci-fi MMO called Dark Sector—a vastly different game than the Dark Sector that Digital Extremes released back in 2008. 

"It's probably common knowledge [at this point] that the original version of Dark Sector was hardcore sci-fi, anime, glowing tentacles coming out of your head kind of game," Sinclair laughs. "But I had made the mistake of convincing the studio that we would also write our own game engine at the same time, which is a great way to sink a company."

It's a story beautifully told in NoClip's Warframe documentary, but this gist is that no publisher wanted to fund Digital Extremes' weird sci-fi MMO, and so the studio was forced to do contract work to make ends meet while eventually scrapping many of its ideas or adapting them to make the Dark Sector third-person shooter that eventually released in 2008.

Though the modest success of Dark Sector and the development of games like The Darkness 2 carried Digital Extremes for a few years, but in 2012 the studio needed a new game—and it was abundantly clear that no publisher wanted to fund its original Dark Sector idea. To survive, Digital Extremes was going to have to adapt.

"We had this crisis," Sinclair says. "What are we doing? What are we doing next? Are we going on the road? What's our pitch for our next game? At one point I had written a thing—I'm not taking credit for this—but I had written up this bullet point design document called Tenno. It's was like space-ninjas-slash-space-pirates, and the idea was that we'd make an Xbox Live Arcade game—remember that genre of game?—and I thought, the budget is small enough, the expectations are small enough, the price point is small enough. We could do that and self-publish it."

"That pitch was basically what Empyrean is," Sinclair adds. "You're on a spaceship, you fly over, you board the other guy, you kill the guys, get some loot, repeat, repeat, level up."

Digital Extremes only had enough money to last about a year. While the studio tried to drum up more contract work, Sinclair and a team started building a small free-to-play game out of this pitch. But with limited resources and looming bankruptcy, Sinclair says it wasn't the time to start taking risks.

To help offset the burden on the design team, this new game would use procedurally generated levels and old art assets and features stripped from the ill-fated original concept for Dark Sector. "It was really a function of needing to use all parts of the buffalo," Sinclair explains. "Trying to create a product out of the scraps of the things that you had. And that's what we did."

Of everything detailed in that original pitch that would eventually become Warframe, one feature was left on the cutting room floor: Spaceflight. "The first version of Warframe that shipped as closed beta was only nine months of work from ten people," Sinclair says. "We said, well, it would be cool if we could go into space, but we have no time. Execute on what we know we can execute on, and at that time was procedural levels with Left 4 Dead-style gameplay. We knew how to make shooters so it was like, we have the code, we know how to do this kind of thing, go, go, go."

Though spaceflight was a key part of that original design for Warframe, Sinclair says it created major design challenges that Digital Extremes wasn't equipped to solve at the time.

"You have this problem with physics," Sinclair explains. Unlike most space combat games, Sinclair wanted to create spaceships that players can fight and explore while simultaneously flying through space. To illustrate his point, Sinclair grabs the table we are sitting at and jostles it so the cups of water resting on it almost spill. To get the movement physics of each in-game character to work correctly, the game engine would have to constantly offset the math to stay relative to the movement and velocity of the ship so that the metaphorical glasses of water (in this case, the players) didn't spill as it was moving around. It's a problem that gets exponentially more complicated when you add dozens of enemies and multiple spaceships players can invade and explore all fighting in one shared universe.

Without a practical solution that didn't involve designing a game engine with the mathematical chops to keep up, the feature was quickly abandoned and Warframe became exclusively focused on fighting through procedurally-generated levels. But that dream of flying and boarding spaceships stuck with Sinclair and a few members of the development team, eating away at them until they could find a way to make it work.

Portals solve everything 

Even without space combat, Warframe slowly became a smash hit thanks, in part, to its release on Steam. In 2014, the Archwing update let players to suit up in Gundam-style flight suits that allowed for six degrees of freedom while flying through linear sections of space that still closely resembled the design of Warframe's procedural corridors. But Sinclair couldn't give up on that original idea of letting players fly ships in open space.

In 2017, over a year before Empyrean was unveiled at Tennocon, Sinclair was streaming on his personal Twitch account when he decided to share the problem—and his proposed solution—with his viewers who were unaware that this feature would one day be a part of Warframe itself.

In this stream, Sinclair explained that the Unreal Engine had a trick called 'portal rendering' that was the key to making Empyrean work. If you remember the puzzle game Portal, portal rendering is exactly what it sounds like: You create a "window" to a different area of space that you can see into. "It's a simple fucking trick," Sinclair laughs. "It's the simplest thing."

When you watch that Empyrean demo and you see the player flying the ship, everything you see is an illusion. There's a large portal stretched across the cockpit of the Railjack, and the ship itself isn't moving at all. 

"You just connect the player controls to where that portal is," Sinclair says. "For Empyrean, there's a big 32 kilometer-squared space where all the space combat is happening and you're pitching around and it feels like you might vomit, but [off to the side] there's a little level and that's your actual spaceship. You have a solid, reliable physics system driving what appears to be this six degrees of freedom experience over here [in an entirely separate area]."

"The idea was so sound that last week—last friggin' week—one of the graphics engineers, who is a way better programmer than me, said 'I think this is a problem because the level is rotating too fast.'" Sinclair adds. "And I'm like, whoa, pump the brakes. The level doesn't move. It's fixed in space and we're just moving the backdrop perspective."

But players aren't stuck inside the Railjack. They can also leave via their Archwings and fly around in space. Again, Sinclair and his team devised clever illusions to make that transition feel seamless. "If you pay very close attention to the demo, there are moments of crossfades," Sinclair says. "You're flying in the ship, you're about to jump into the little pneumatic tube that spits you into space, and we play an animation. As you animate, it goes black, and we pop you over here, into the actual 3D space."

While in the Archwing, you're actually flying in space, but because the scale of Warframe's character combat and space combat are wildly different, you're actually shrunk down to the "size of a fairy" to maintain the illusion that the Railjack is larger than your character. Keep in mind, though, that the Railjack you see flying around in space while in your Archwing isn't the same Railjack that your teammates might still be inside of, it's just a model with no real interior.

Using that solution, Digital Extremes is able to create an approximation of space combat without having to tackle the same complications that games like Star Citizen have spent years solving. But at the end of the day, does it matter which approach you take if the end result is the same? "I'm going to fake it because I can make it faster," Sinclair laughs.

Final frontiers 

Though Sinclair discovered the solution to this puzzle years ago, Digital Extremes' brush with bankruptcy meant that the studio had to be extremely careful about where they invested their time. But that's quickly changing. Warframe is a game defined by its audacity—this is a game with a warframe whose weapon is a programmable synthesizer, after all.

Empyrean is different, though. It feels like an update that could see Warframe undergo even more significant evolutions in the future. Sinclair says the team isn't making Empyrean another "island" to grind on (like some of Warframe's compartmentalized expansions), but a way to connect everything—from racing through procedural levels to Archwing combat to spear fishing on Fortuna.

As our time together comes to a close so that Sinclair can prepare to take the Tennocon stage and show Empyrean off to an audience of thousands (not to mention the 400,000 viewers that will watch on Twitch), I ask him how it feels to finally realize a fantasy he's been chasing for so long. His answer catches me by surprise.

"You would have to ask me that tomorrow," he says. "Right now, I'm right on the edge. I have this fear that it's not enough for our audience. I don't want to let them down—that's the biggest thing. I don't want to have a technical flaw that torpedoes the whole thing and let's them down. I feel this enormous responsibility to these people."

But that responsibility was borne from the freedom that allowed Sinclair to experiment in the first place. Sinclair remembers a frigid January after Warframe launched and was successful enough that he didn't have to fear that he'd lose his job and Digital Extremes would go bankrupt. 

"I remember that January I felt like, what do I do now?" Sinclair says. "My whole career leading up to that was the hustle: the milestones, the publishers, the grind, the pitching, the milestone approval—not approved, they're going to cancel it, it's cancelled, start again. I felt lost when I didn't have to be a junkyard dog [fighting for scraps]. That was a really bad feeling. It's one of those weird paradoxes. It lasted a month, just feeling like there was no reason to keep doing this. But Sheldon [Carter, chief operating officer at Digital Extremes] was like, yeah there is, you love this. Geoff [Crookes, art director] would say to me, what do you want to do? Just put it in Warframe. Whatever the hell you want to do, let's just do it. Suddenly it was like, oh, there's creative freedom here, and that is amazing."

Warframe's annual Tennocon conference was this weekend, and despite being about only one game it still somehow managed to pack in enough announcements and reveals to rival an E3 press conference. Not only are there new quests, warframes, and open world zones to frolic around in, but Warframe is also getting an entirely revamped new player experience as well as ship-to-ship combat that looks extremely fun.

The Tennolive mainstage presentation is worth watching (it's embedded above), but if you can't spare the time here's a quick rundown of all the major updates that are coming to Warframe over the next year.

Warframe's ship-to-ship combat looks incredible

Who could've imagined that spaceship combat would be the next frontier for Warframe? When it was first revealed last year, the Empyrean update surprised everyone but didn't offer much in the way of concrete information. During Tennocon 2019, Digital Extremes played Empyrean live on stage for 30 minutes—giving an intimate look at just how this update is going to work and fit into Warframe's already complex ecosystem of looting and shooting.

If there's one thing you should watch from Tennocon, it's this demo. There were so many cool details packed into it. Using your clan dojo (think guild housing), you can build spaceships known as Railjacks that are, like everything in Warframe, modular and customizable. Using the Railjack, you can explore regions of space around the solar system and harvest materials that will, in turn, power up the Railjack's various abilities.

The Railjack can house up to four players and a handful of recruitable NPCs who must man various battlestations to pilot and defend it from enemy threats in space. Players can also exit the Railjack to explore nearby ruins or invade enemy ships to sabotage them from the inside or even steal them. During Railjack missions, special 'SquadLink' objectives let you call on your friends who might be somewhere else in the solar system to complete secondary objectives which will, in turn, affect your mission.

Oh, and there's also a Shadow of Mordor-like Nemesis system where players are hunted by a Kuva Lich that grows stronger and mutates each time you kill it. It's a lot to take in, so read my preview to get more information.

Warframe's tutorial is getting revamped with a new prologue video

One cool surprise out of Tennocon is that it's getting a revamped tutorial that better reflects how dramatically Warframe has changed since it launched six years ago. The director of 10 Cloverfield Lane (and the upcoming Uncharted movie), Dan Trachtenberg, joined forces with Digital Extremes to make a badass new intro video. The special effects are gorgeous, but the video also serves to introduce players to the three starting warframes so they can better decide which one suits their playstyle.

As for the reworked tutorial itself, we don't know much other than it is likely coming at the end of the year. Digital Extremes implied a new series of quests will help guide players through Warframe's complex web of shooting, crafting, and modding—but even veterans will be able to go back and check them out too.

The Duviri Paradox is a surreal open world zone with horses

Warframe now has two open world zones that are both a lot of fun, but its upcoming third zone looks completely different than anything in the game so far. Details are scarce at the moment, but the trailer (embedded above) holds tons of clues—all of which imply that The Duviri Paradox is going to be one weird-ass place to visit.

For one, it looks as if The Duviri Paradox won't allow you to use your warframes and will instead force you to play as your operator but all grown up and without their special powers. The new zone will also have a new faction for players to fight (or befriend?) and implies that, despite lacking your powerful warframes or operator abilities, you'll be able to tame a weird robot-horse and ride it around. All of this is just guesswork, though. Hopefully Digital Extremes shows more soon.

The New War is coming this Christmas

One of my favorite parts about Warframe is its "cinematic quests" that feature long cutscenes, fun boss fights, and hard-won insights into Warframe's esoteric lore and backstory. And The New War quest promises to be its most climactic chapter yet.

I won't go into details at the risk of spoiling some of Warframe's coolest plot twists, but The New War, together with Empyrean, feels like a critical turning point. A mass invasion by the ancient Sentient robot race tied with the ability to finally explore space in the Railjack has tantalizing implications for the future of Warframe. It's also expected that The New War will bring to a close one of Warframe's best and most-intimate character arcs—but we're going to have to wait until The New War releases this Christmas to know for sure.

A closer look at two new warframes

New warframes are always on the horizon, but I'm particularly excited for this next pair, Gauss and Grendel. During a livestreamed art panel at Tennocon, we were given a sneak peek at each frames' idle animations, which hinted at what their play styles would be. Both also made a quick appearance during the Empyrean live demo as members of the SquadLink team that helped the Tenno in space by destroying a shield generator located nearby on Earth.

Gauss is, quite simply, The Flash from DC comics. As Digital Extremes already revealed, one of its abilities is to run super fast, which will be helpful when traversing Warframe's growing list of open world zones.

Grendel looks like a sumo wrestler crossed with a troll, but that's all we know. Digital Extremes wasn't ready to talk about either frame's abilities, and there's no confirmed release date yet.

That covers all the major announcements from Tennocon 2019. There was loads of smaller reveals, like the start of Nightwave Season 2 (which is now available) and also a contest that will send one lucky winner to outer space—yes, you read that right.