The hit free-to-play online shooter Warframe, developed by Digital Extremes, is a game about awesome space ninjas... and it's also a game about former child soldiers trying to transcend their origins as the super weapons of an ancient, advanced, mad, and abusive precursor civilization. And that's just the tip of the iceberg: dialogue, codex entries, and scenes with ing characters throughout the main campaign reveal a tale of trauma, where every character and faction in Warframe - player characters included - are slowly healing from the abuse of their ancient creators.
The far future solar system of Warframe is not a nice place – if it was a nice place, the Tenno protagonists of Warframe wouldn't be so desperately needed. The scattered cultures on Earth, Venus, and the other worlds are threatened by the imperialistic Grineer, exploited by the hyper-capitalist Corpus, and consumed by the swarming Infested.
Enter the Tenno, clad in advanced suits of armor, wielding technology indistinguishable from magic, who infiltrate, assassinate, and sabotage these hostile powers on behalf of Warframe's maps and levels, are relics of the Orokin, an ancient, advanced civilization destroyed by its own creations in the distant past...
...and they deserved every inch of their fate.
Warframe's Orokin Civilization: A Golden Age For Them Alone
In the present setting of Warframe, the Orokin people are (mostly) dead and gone. Players (and by extension, their amnesiac Tenno avatars) mainly hear about this long-gone civilization second-hand – through item descriptions and codex entries, along with testimonies from the few long-lived beings who survived the Orokin Golden Age.
The general consensus is that the Orokin ruling class were cruel to the point of insanity, brutally experimenting on their own servants and stealing the bodies of children in order to live forever. Each Orokin-made antagonist in Warframe – their Sentient terraformers, their Infested bioweapons, their Grineer clone slaves – eventually rebelled against their cruelty and abuse...even the Tenno, their ultimate enforcers.
The Villains of Warframe and Their Cycles of Pain
The tragedy of many of the enemies in Warframe is that they successfully overthrew their Orokin creators only to wind up mimicking their behavior. The Grineer clone race overthrew the masters that controlled them, only to form a conquering empire that blindly worships a pair of undying Queens. The Corpus, descended from an Orokin merchant caste, devolved into an interplanetary consortium devoted to endless profits and the exploitation of their workforce. Even the noblest remnants of the Orokin civilization – the Lotus, the Tenno, and their Warframes, among others – are haunted by the violent actions of their past, troubled by the thought that their current decisions are still colored by what their former masters made them to be.
"The Sacrifice" expansion of Warframe, released in 2018, included a quest line with a scene that perfectly sums up a core theme of the game: the player's Tenno character encounters a feral, raging Warframe, a man-turned-suit of armor driven mad by grief and loss. The Tenno pacifies this living weapon not with force or violence, but (in the words of a villainous Orokin narrator) by using their talent to "see inside an ugly, broken thing...and take away its pain."
This pivotal cutscene emphasizes Warframe's themes of trauma while also balancing it with the possibility of healing – the idea that the scars of your past can be transcended with empathy and kindness from and to those who understand your pain. It's this very ethos that makes the wall-running, hoverboard surfing, gun-toting, blade-swinging protagonists of Warframe the heroes of their far-future Solar System, and not just really cool space ninjas.
Sources: Digital Extremes, Massively Overpowered, Critical Hit
