Plus, lots more details revealed.
Image credit: Digital Extremes
Back in August, as part of this year’s TennoCon celebrations, Warframe developer Digital Extremes unveiled Whispers in the Walls, the next (and extremely weird) chapter in the free-to-play sci-fi shooter’s ongoing saga. And as its new confirmed December launch window approaches, the studio has shared a heap of new information on what to expect come the expansion’s release, including confirmation it’ll arrive alongside cross-save support.
Whispers in the Walls introduces new mission types, NPCs, bosses, and factions, a new hub known as The Sanctum, and a new procedural tile set. It’s an expansion primarily focused on the long-hidden laboratory of Albrecht Entrati, deep in the bowels of the planet Deimos, and one that’ll reveal the “proverbial big bang” that kicked off every event in Warframe.
In terms of enemies, the labyrinthine laboratory plays host to a much-expanded Necramech faction, including new Necrodogs, that players can battle using Whispers in the Walls’ new Grimoire, a secondary weapon capable of flinging pages of devastating Void. But that’s not the expansion’s only new threat; at certain points, players will find themselves whisked away from the gothic gloom of Albrecht’s lab to a vast Eldritch desert that serves as the home of the mysterious Man in the Wall. Here, they’ll encounter a second new faction, the Murmur, nightmarish multi-limbed creatures resembling tech-infused biblical angels.
Whispers in the Walls kicks off with an hour-long story campaign that, Digital Extremes has now confirmed, will include the jaw-droppingly leftfield sequence that wowed the crowds at TennoCon – in which players suddenly find themselves flung back in time, playing as new character Arthur and battling through a subway station to the sounds of Nine Inch Nails on New Year’s Eve in 1999. It’s a moment designed to elicit at lot of ‘whys’ and will set up a story continuing in Warframe’s 1999 expansion next year.
Whispers in the Walls’ campaign will be available after completing Warframe’s Heart of Deimos story mission, and Digital Extremes has now confirmed it’ll be attempting to make Warframe’s story content a easier to experience when the expansion arrives. Essentially, it’ll be removing Mastery Rank requirements from story progression, meaning players can forge ahead through the game’s decade of narrative content without being beholden to Mastery Rank’s 24 hour cool-down.
And once Whispers in the Walls’ story campaign is complete, players can jump straight into some classic Warframe action utilising the new assets, enemies, and other features. There’s a new Syndicate, for instance – although Digital Extremes is remaining coy about this one given how closely it’s tied to the story – and the expansion also brings a variety of new missions types.
Alchemy, for instance, is a new endless mission variant requiring players to get their science on by attempting to fuse different elements together in their Crucible while keeping Murmur aggressors at bay. Then there’s Netracells, in which players must first accept a number of Burdens – essentially debuffs – then hack their way into a maze-like laboratory to locate key glyphs, find a Netracell, open it, defend it from Murmur, then get out. And finally, there’s Swarm, a horror-style twist on boss assassination missions that require preparatory work beforehand in order to track down a Eldritch abomination and kill it.
All this arrives alongside the new Tennokai melee modding system – which, at its simplest, lets players perform heavy attacks without exhausting their combo counter by reacting to prompts as they appear during combat – plus an expansion of Warframe’s end-game Archon Shard system, giving players the ability to combine base Shards and create new colours in a process referred to as “coalescent fusion”. Additionally, the update introduces an Arcane distillation system, essentially serving as a form of transmutation for Arcanes.
And there’s more! Whispers in the Walls marks the debut of 55th Warframe, Qorvex – a brutalist concrete creation wrapped round a radioactive Void Core that Albrecht created to protect a “chosen operator” from the hazards of his own lab. Qorvex comes with an alternative helmet (for those who don’t like his comically tall default), plus unique animation stances, a Syandana, and his signature weapon – a heavy weapon arc gun known as the Mandonel. Arc guns, incidentally, have been rebalanced as part of the update.
Abilities-wise, Qorvex can drop concrete pillars that slow enemies within their radius for a not-insignificant amount of time, and can summon a duo of concrete walls that come smashing together, pulverising anything caught in-between. He’s also able to buff himself and his allies, and can fire a massive radioactive laser beam from his chest, a move known as the Crucible Blast.
Qorvex and all the above will be accompanied by Warframe’s usual selection of premium cosmetics – and, at long last, the much-requested introduction of cross-save. Digital Extremes says it’ll be rolling cross-save out to players in phases, taking a cautious approach rather than risking timeouts caused by high demand that could potentially be catastrophic for a feature as sensitive as account merging – with the plan being to have cross-save available to everyone by the end of 2023, as detailed in its FAQ.
Two flavours of cross-save will be on offer, staring with account linking. This is the simpler of the two, essentially letting players pick a primary account then linking it to any additional accounts they might have on other platforms, whereupon the majority of progress and purchases will be available regardless of where they play. Alternatively, players can opt for account merging, a one-time process that combines multiple accounts and all accrued items therein into a single account that can be used across all platforms. This option will only be available to players who’ve had a Warframe account prior to today, 24th November, however, as Digital Extremes wants to avoid people abusing the system by, for instance, creating multiple accounts to get free premium currency then merging them back into their own personal account.
As for when all this will arrive, Digital Extremes isn’t saying just yet. Whispers in the Walls is definitely launching this December, but as for the exact date, that’ll be revealed during this year’s The Game Awards on 8th December in the UK.
