Warframe is heading to deep space with their upcoming Empyrean expansion.
To be fair to Warframe, the ongoing space-ninja saga has always been about bouncing around the solar system, but the space portion of the game has previously been kept away from players. Outside of the game’s Archwing sessions, which were never all that popular among Warframe’s adherents, space was a place you saw through a w꧋indow just before you disemboweled someone and covered that window in blood.
Developer Digital Extremes has decided to bring space back into the equation with the recently unveiled Empyrean expansion. Previousꦬly called Railjack and showcased at last weekend's Tennocon, it pits teams of Tenno warriors inside a real spaceship where each one has a specific role in keeping their ship in 💙fighting shape.
Up to four players man the Railjack, with one Tenno being the helmsman while three others man various weapons system. One💦 of them happens to be a big ion cann⭕on-style doomsday gun that shoots the very essence of the void itself at opponents, which is pretty cool.
Besides being able to fly around and shoot things, members of the T🦄enno꧒ crew can hop outside to explore wrecks, asteroids, or create boarding parties to invade enemy vessels. Once aboard, they can eliminate the crew and hijack smaller vessels to grow their fleet.
Of course, that blade cuts both ways, and enemy ships can send their own boarding parties to try and take out the players aboard the Railjack. Th🍨is will require some Warframes to suspend their duties and beat💞 back the invaders.
Another new tech showcased for Empyrean is the Squad Link which will actually link up the Railjack’s crew to Tenno on the ground. The situation in the demonstration was a disruption field preventing the Railjack from boarding a larger enemy vessel, requiring a Warfram🐲e on the Plains of Eidolon to take down the shield generator -style.
The Railjack ship is completely customizable from weapons like lasers, a🐼utocannons, and EMP blasts, to cosmetic things like paint and graphics.
Empyrean’s seamless combination of space and ship-based combat to squad-based, hand-to-hand melees is something that many games aspire to, but few achieve. Warframe juꦗst might be the game to truly get that ꦿformula right.
No word on when Empyrean drops, but Warframe’s next campaign, The New War, is out this holiday season.