I’ve played Warframe off and on for over four years now. I am not an expert of the game, and I have not progressed very far for playing it on the PlayStation 4 for over 300 hours, the PC for over 400 hours, and the Xbox One for an hour. Yay, I’ve only played on the Xbox One for an hour because the controls are extremely sensitive and I can’t shoot a Grineer giving me a piggyback around Uranus. Besides World of Warcraft, Warframe is the longest I’ve ever played a game. Warframe is the longest I’ve ever played a shooter. There is something about the movement and accessibility of the game that relaxes me after a long day. I can jump into one or two matches and log off feeling like I accomplished something. Even before TennoCon 2017, I was in love with Warframe.
TennoCon 2017 was the first Con of any type I want to, well except my grandmother when she was 78 and was in jail for leaving the department store without paying for the dress she tried on, but that is another story for another day. I always planned on going to either BlizzCon or one of the three PAX’s, but I never seemed to have time to go. When I was asked to go to TennoCon, my schedule cleared up really fast. I was and still am very humbled I got a chance to go to TennoCon. Leading up to TennoCon I was in direct contact with the public relations crew for Digital Extremes, and I was blown away at how amazing they were and how professional they were at all times. I just could not thank them enough for all their help and answer my questions. I just want to thank them all everything they did. I arrived a day before TennoCon just to get my bearing of what to expect from a Con. I got settled into my hotel and later went out for drinks with other members of the press that were invited too.
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On the day of TennoCon the press, VIP’s, and other special guests were invited to breakfast in the Digital Extremes Warframe studio. The breakfast was great, but the highlight of the breakfast was the Stalker showing up to get the fun started.
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After breakfast, the press stayed behind to get a special viewing of the Plains of Eidolon (PoE). Because Warframe is one of my favorite games, I was especially excited to see the direction the game was going in the future and see if that direction was something I was going to enjoy. I think being a fan of a game for so long makes a person overly critical of anything new that comes out for the game. There was a time last year when I stopped playing Warframe for almost a year because I hit a wall with the direction the game was going and what I felt I was enjoying at the time. Instead of force myself to play the game, I quit playing for almost a year. I came back to the game because of the amazing quest in the game like The Second Dream and The War Within. I can’t talk up how amazing the story quests are in this game and how strong the lore has become of the past couple years. With PoE and the new Sacrifice quest for the Umbra warframe, I think the lore has finally reached a full-fledged story a novelist would be proud to be the author of. The game has evolved beyond just being a game and now is a strong IP, based off the initial game Dark Sector.
Watching the cinematic for the first time in Digital Extremes studio theater was amazing, but it was nothing compared to when they announced it to the whole world at TennoCon. The experience of having the fans gathered in an exhibition hall anticipating a minor reveal only to get blown away by PoE, sent goosebumps up my spine. I will get to that later though. During the press demo, we got a chance to ask some questions and watch the developers show off some of the new features that were coming to the game with PoE. The changes like modifiable weapons you can name yourself and the open landscape are what the game needs to assist further the story they are currently developing. The game has gone from a simple hallway shooter to a living breathing universe and to make that universe more believable and engage the players more, they needed to break out of the linear gameplay and build the world open to all possibilities.
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I was able to get into the show early to look around before the crowds poured in. Like I said before, this was my first Con of any type, so I was excited to see what a Con was like. DE had a couple unique features to their Con I’ve never read about at another Cons. First, they had a puzzle room. If you do not know what a puzzle room is, I will give you a quick synopsis: A couple people go in a room to solve complex puzzles. If they cannot solve the puzzle in a specific timeframe, spikes from the ceiling come down, and everybody in the room is sliced up like a lamb on a kabob spicket. That is why I never went in the room because I knew the odds were against me of getting out alive. Another room fun room they had was an archery room. Because TennoCon was in Canada, they had Nerf cutouts of moose. Not really, but I assumed that because I never had time to go to the archery room. I was too busy running around looking at all the cool Warframe decorations.
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Once people started funneling in, the large convention hall seemed a bit too small for the crowd. One thing I noticed right away was the popularity of the content creators of Warframe. Any panel that was hosted by the YouTubers, Streamers, or artists from the community, was packed. The room they had the content creators was just too small for some people that wanted to see them. Unfortunately, I never got to go to any of those panels because the room was so packed, people were standing outside the doors of the room hoping to find out their secrets to success. I hope next year they give the content creators a bigger room or at least split the different medias up into different rooms. The room for cosplay was empty most of the time and could have been used when there was no cosplay preparation needed.
I spent most of my time on the panels on the main floor. I loved the art panel and the new comic book panel with an artist from TopCow. For me, it was amazing to see a game that started out as a Kickstarted campaign with little to no lore, evolves into a game with amazing lore. Every time I play the lore quests A Second Dream and War Within, I get chills up my spine. I am not a very big lore person, but Warframe has some of the best lore I have ever cared about. To this day I only really care about lore from Warframe and Leisure Suit Larry. Larry wins every time!
