With over a decade of live-service content under its belt,Warframehas understandably earned a reputation for being challenging for new players to dive into. There are over50 Warframes to choose from, along with countless weapons, mods, and other systems to learn about, which can be an intimidating prospect for someone who hasn’t been on board for the entire ride. The game’s latest major content update, The Duviri Paradox, seeks to alleviate this issue by providing players with an all-new starting point.
Game Rant spoke withWarframeCreative Director Rebb Ford about how The Duviri Paradox strives to be approachable to new players while offering veterans an entirely different way to play the game. Digital Extremes has also managed to cleverly weave the new player experience into The New War narrative so that players can dive straight in without necessarily “skipping” the rest of the cinematic story.
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The Duviri Paradox is Designed With New Warframe Players in Mind
Gameplay in The Duviri Paradoxinvolves players being offered a random selection of Warframes and weapons to choose from, rather than relying on their own builds and collections. By recontextualizingWarframewith roguelike gameplay elements,Warframegives new players the chance to immediately hop in and experiment with items they might not own yet. Rather than having to figure out the meta or chase down specific items, both new and veteran players must make do with the available choices.
Every task starts with an idea, and this one really was made in a sort of offhand way. Then, it turned into a full system designed for us to tell people that if you’ve been intimidated byWarframe, this is the best update to start with, because everyone is going to be normalized with Duviri. It’s new to everyone, and you can access it right away. You don’t need to go through 20 hours of cinematic quests to get there. It’ll just be there.
Since The Duviri Paradox is largely isolated from the rest of the game’s systems, its learning curve is practically nonexistent. Players can master the game’s core movement and combat mechanics before being introduced to the Focus system, Archwings, Railjacks, Riven Mods, and so forth.Newly released Warframeswill also be “prioritized” in the random pool, which will give players a decent chance to try out the latest additions for themselves.
The Duviri Paradox Eases Players Into The Rest of Warframe’s Story
Although new players can choose to start with The Duviri Paradox, this choice doesn’t lock them out of the 20+ hours of cinematic story content that has preceded the expansion. Without spoiling too much, there is a paradoxical relationship at work in the narrative that makes it flow shockingly well when “working backward” from The Duviri Paradox into the earlierThe New War content. Players who choose this start can fluidly move over to the original introductory quest, Vor’s Prize.
So if a player chooses Duviri, they basically finish the quest and then Teshin will ask them “Do you want to stay or go?” If they choose to stay, they can just play in Duviri, but there will always be a nagging waypoint like, “Oh, someone needs your help on the other side,” and then you’ll go up to a door, and then the door will turn in to your escape portal to start Vor’s Prize.
So you can stay in theory, but I suppose if you find that little blinking thing annoying, you’ll eventually be motivated to go to the other side. But once you do that, you can go back to Duviri any time. There are no hard cuts for the player.
Existing players can also begin playing The Duviri Paradox immediately, so players currently working through the game don’t need to worry about unlocking any prerequisites if they’d like to check outWarframe’s open-worldroguelike content.
Warframeis available now on Nintendo Switch, PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
