Image via Digital Extremes
Developer Digital Extremes released its first-ever demo for anything Warframe-related in October 2024. It’s a demo for the winter 2024 expansion Warframe: 1999, allowing even those players still early on in the main quest slog to try out the freshest content and get an idea of where the universe is heading.
I attended TennoCon 2024 and had the pleasure of seeing Warframe: 1999 in action twice alongside some incredible cosplay and a huge chunk of its passionate fan base. None of that prepared me for actually jumping into the streets of Höllvania, the expansion’s setting, and tackling an Exterminate-style mission for myself.
This demo brought up so many thoughts and feelings that I couldn’t boil them down to a single cohesive point. So instead, I’ve combined my three key takeaways in a thread of three thoughts below that should give you an idea of why this is such an exciting time to be a Warframe fan.
Nostalgia is a Powerful Thing, but Warframe: 1999 Mutates an Entire Decade to Make it Familiar Yet Individualistic
As someone who was a kid in the 90s, there’s a lot that I look at in Warframe: 1999‘s demo and see as nostalgic. The CRT monitors were all commonplace, and the massive ones were what you had if you were rich. But they also weighed so much that you’d break your back moving them around. These are baked directly into the Techrot, and it almost makes the most appealing part of the 90s the main antagonist.
I don’t know for sure what the Techrot is, but it’s slowly taking over the planet and looks a lot like patches of Infested matter elsewhere in Warframe. The demo makes it look like something out of The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag.
Technology has become an infection, and it is so prevalent that people don’t stand a chance against it. However, there is more to the upcoming expansion’s nostalgia than just monitors and that everything’s connected by chunky black wires.
The entire setting is dark, grimy, and a bit of a mess. It’s exactly like walking down a street during that decade. Things were darker because the streets felt a bit safer, and even though there was dirt all over the walls and floor, it felt like its own style. The world was too busy moving into the future to care about cleaning itself up. At least, that’s how it felt.
Warframe: 1999 perfectly encapsulates this. It’s taken those inspirations from movies and perfectly recreated them it feels like an action game set at the correct time period.
What really sells it as a video game is Arthur’s AX-52, which is Warframe‘s 90s version of an AK-47, and the sweet samurai-style sword he wields. Games in the 90s, and far beyond, used these extensively, but if you’re going to have two poster weapons for games from the period, it would be these.
I think this nostalgia is going to be missed by quite a few players, but that’s okay. It’s there for people like me to see and point at the screen and scream at. Just before I wrote this article, I was talking to my daughter about CRT monitors, and she said they’d learned about them from their history studies in school. After I’d recovered from the near-death blow, it made me realize how important Warframe: 1999 is to players who have that same view. Us oldies just have to get over it.
Y2K Was the Fear of Waking up to Warframe: 1999
I’m old, okay. I remember staying up late at my dad’s house while me and my parents gathered around to watch New Year’s Eve 1999 as Y2K fears spiraled. My parents split up six years prior to this, so them being together at this point is a good indicator of just how much fear there was underlying the festivities.
A lot of you are too young to have any idea of what Y2K felt like. As a kid, there was this anticipation of hover cars suddenly becoming a reality as soon as we hit January 1, 2000. For adults, it was an incredibly stressful time of getting businesses in order and praying that the world wouldn’t set fire as soon as the clocks turned over to the year 2000.
I don’t understand the specifics of where the fear came from, but it was so extremely tangible in the days leading up to New Year’s Eve. Warframe: 1999 may be set on an Earth not quite like our own, but it portrays pretty much what everyone was afraid of opening their doors to on January 1.
The location of Höllvania is overrun with Techrot, a variant virus that’s extremely similar to Warframe‘s Infested issue. Entire buildings are covered in large yellow plastic, encasing them to keep the infection inside from escaping. Thick yellow tubes act as airlocks and hidden passageways for people to move through in safety lest something dangerous see them.
That dangerous thing is the new faction, the Scaldra. They look like living breathing hazmat suits, though their leader is pretty hot. No, I don’t have a problem, the entire Warframe community is pretty into her. These enemies rush you with their terrifying bright yellow suits and glowing green toxic weapons, making you panic and flustered as you try to aim down sights and clip them before they get too close.
To me, it feels like a world that’s become hostile to all life. Technology has become sentient and is overrunning the planet like a grotesque plant that consumes anything it touches. The Scaldra are similar to The Division’s Cleaners in that both factions see the only solution as the eradication of all life. Kill the beast by starving it of food, and that food is us.
I remember waking up after that New Year’s Eve and being slightly disappointed that nothing had changed other than the date. But I also remember the relief on people’s faces in the weeks that followed. We’d survived what many thought could have been doomsday with missiles flying all over the planet and casting us back into the ice age.
Warframe: 1999 pulls on Y2K as an inspiration because it’s set on that same fateful New Year’s Eve. However, if you don’t accomplish your mission as Arthur, the world really will end, and the future will be a completely different place. There’s something quite comforting about being able to dive in and see the imagined “what could have been.” There is also something equally terrifying about going back to that exact night knowing that this time, it’s real.
You’ve Never Played a Game With More Style Than Warframe: 1999
I promise you that Warframe: 1999 is the most stylish game you’ll play in 2024 and likely for a while after the year is over. The demo stars a single Protoframe, a cybernetic samurai who pops quips as he kills enemies with a giant sword and machine gun. Ben Starr’s done a terrific job of bringing him to life, and his personality oozes from every inch of the screen.
Even before you set off on the mission, you’re told you’re taking an Atomicycle into battle. It’s an atomic motorcycle. There’s very little that’s more metal than that, and I’m including the Nine Inch Nails song that plays while you fight.
Warframe is a game that gives you all sorts of silly weapons and abilities. There’s a Warframe that uses musical notes to dominate the battlefield, the one Arthur himself is based on is basically a futuristic samurai ninja, but I think Koumei with her dice and links to fate might be my favorite.
Warframe: 1999 strips that back to its most basic form, and it’s still got more style than even the better Call of Duty titles. I ran out of ammo while I was playing, and had to resort to the secondary weapon. This is a pistol that’s pretty powerful, but it’s not until you aim with it that you’ll be hit with just how cool it is.
The silenced pistol has a bright green laser target on it that makes Warframe: 1999 suddenly feel like a Splinter Cell game. No, Splinter Cell didn’t come out in the 90s, but 2002 is extremely close. Sam Fisher’s iconic green hues and fairly basic weapons became bleeding-edge tech in the spy’s hands, and that’s what it feels like Digital Extremes is going for with Warframe: 1999.
This demo is just a small slice of what’s to come, but I’m already sold on the premise, location, and aesthetic based on this tiny slice. It’s fresh and more than a simple retreading of the TennoCon 2024 demo, offering an experience varied enough that you can get a couple of playthroughs out of it.
At a time when many AAA studios are pumping out shooters that have a certain style but fail to hit the mark, Warframe: 1999 is showing the world that you can reinvent the wheel within your own game and still make it feel brand new.
I’ve not felt the things I’ve felt about Warframe: 1999 since I was playing Tenchu, Resident Evil, or Dino Crisis. Those games have unique identities that are entrenched in the decade they were released. The same is true of all games and the time periods in which they’re made. If you’ve not taken the plunge into Warframe or the Warframe: 1999 demo, I really can’t think of a better time to do so. The game may never be on the precipice of such a brilliant update ever again, and you wouldn’t want to miss out.
Before you go
Thank you so much for checking out my feature on Warframe: 1999. We cover way more than just Warframe here, though, so go and check out our Life Is Strange: Double Exposure walkthrough to get your eyes on a narrative experience next.
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