Digital Extremes Debuts Heart of Deimos at TennoCon 2020, Announces Cross-Platform Availability on Xbox One August 25
At Digital Extremes’ fifth annual TennoCon Saturday, the Warframe development team debuted a live, 30-minute demo of its brand new open world, Heart of Deimos. Densely packed with a grotesque yet beautiful geography and seething with slithery space insects, Heart of Deimos is an open world based on a single Warframe enemy faction, the biomechanical pathogen known as the Infested.
Unlike the gentle rolling hills of Plains of Eidolon or the billowing purple skies of Fortuna, Heart of Deimos is smothered in the Infested. Do you like the sight of vicious two-story tall centipedes? The sound of boots stepping in wet mud? Sticky, gooey things? A plethora of horrific space bugs? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you’re going to love Heart of Deimos. Even more, we hope you’ll like that it will arrive on Xbox One simultaneously with all other platforms Tuesday, August 25. Yes! And, like always, it’s free.
With Heart of Deimos, Warframe will begin a new era. With three fully inhabited open worlds (Heart of Deimos, Fortuna, and Plains of Eidolon), players can jump into wildly different physical locations, each with their own backstory, geographies, and enemy faction. There is a lot of territory to cover!
When we deliver this new open world later this month, we’re adding in the Cinematic New Player Experience, or, simply put, a brand new introduction. This gorgeously imagined CGI introduction — which debuted at TennoCon 2019 — sets up the story for the last seven years of Warframe updates into asix-minute glimpse through history, giving players a sensational background in which Warframes exist, who they’re up against, and how powerful they can be.
There’s more. This expansion is giving players a brand new Warframe, Xaku, our 44th Warframe, and one of the game’s most profound customization features ever, the Helminth Chrysalis System. All of these things tie together to make Warframe more accessible, varied and customizable than ever before.
Enter the Hivemind of Deimos
Located on the Star Chart near Mars, one of the earliest accessible planets, Deimos bubbles with exploding plant pods and is layered with sticky fronds. It’s constructed with hive-like towers and terraces, gaping trenches, grottos, and goopy canyons. Heart of Deimos challenges players with the unsettling idea that the Infected is neither plant nor animal. Deimos is a planet covered with a living infestation. More densely packed than Fortuna, and blending an open world on its surface with a procedurally generated network of tunnels underground, Deimos feels full and alive.
Left over from the planet’s former inhabitants, the Orokin Entrati family, the planet harbors ancient technology and a dark story about the Entrati’s whereabouts. What happened to them? You’ll quickly learn what’s left of them, as they become your narrators and quest givers. One of the creations they left intact is the “Necramech”, a giant, mechanized combat machine, aka a mech! These giant war machines might have served multiple purposes in the past but it’s clear they play a key part in players’ survival against the relentless Infested.
Open-world gameplay elements players enjoyed in Plains of Eidolon and Fortuna such as conservation and fishing make a return here (though fish fly on Deimos!), and you’ll have your trusty Archwing at hand to cover vast distances. But conservation comes with different options now. An ambient creature resembling a dragonfly, the Velocopod, roams the valley floors. You can capture and save it, or ride it. The Velocopod is a living K-Drive, upon which you can zip around the geography, pull off stunts and tricks with, and now shoot enemies. Using a secondary weapon on it, players can whisk across an area packed with enemies and blast them on your ride.
The New Player Experience
The Cinematic New Player Experience is a new introduction to Warframe. It ties together connective narratives and events from the past into the six-minute cinematic with beautiful graphic fidelity while foreshadowing future events. It rolls out director Dan Trachtenberg (10 Cloverfield Lane, Black Mirror: Playtest, The Boys) and Digital Extremes’ vision of an older era in the Warframe when, in the Old War (the Orokin Era), the original Warframes rebelled against their Orokin masters. We think it will paint a sweeping new feeling and tone for new players in the game.
Xaku, the Void-Powered Warframe
With this update, you’ll experience a fresh new Warframe. Through the open spaces of Deimos, you’ll be able to earn the all-new, community-created, gender-neutral Warframe, Xaku. A hybrid Warframe powered by the Void and constructed from three different Warframe components, Xaku is the 44th Warframe and the second one of 2020 (following Protea). Xaku is wild!
The Helminth Chrysalis System
If you’re a veteran player, you probably yearn for more control, customization, and variety. Have you ever wanted to change the fundamental make-up of your Warframe? Ever wanted to make powerful decisions with one quintessential upgrade? In Heart of Deimos, you can. Implementing one of the deepest customization features ever in Warframe, Digital Extremes has created The Helminth Chrysalis System.
Already in your Orbiter (that creepy, Infested room at the back of your ship), The Helminth Chrysalis has two main services: infusing a Warframe with a Helminth exclusive Ability… or consuming a Warframe and unlocking one of its predetermined Abilities for another Warframe of your choice! The exchange comes at a cost, though. Tenno must feed the Helminth (a charming/hideous mouth protruding from the room’s back wall) resources gathered from across the Origin System to extract the other Warframe’s Ability. And the Warframe whose Ability is extracted is truly consumed in the process. The final result powerfully re-balances the new Warframe’s Abilities and combat dynamics to create a fresh new experience.
Heart of Deimos is a powerful new expansion that’s coming to Xbox One Tuesday, August 25. If you loved the open, rolling hills of Plains of Eidolon, the purple gaseous atmosphere and witty characters of Fortuna, the sticky, crawling world of Deimos is right up your alley. Tell us what you think in our Forums or below in the comment sections, and ready your Frame for a completely new wild ride.
Warframe
Digital Extremes