In Warframes Empyrean everything can go wrong, and it rules

Everything is burning, our ship is blowing on us and two of my teammates have come into the great afterlife. So it can go on in the next extension’s wareframe, Empyrean.

We saw this expansion for the first time at Tennocon, the Warframe Fan Convention. Players build a ship called Railjack, which they can upgrade, customize and equip. From there, the players start into space and experience a completely different combat scope. We’re going from ground battles to the stars, and the railjack is the ship that players with giant space armies a la Star Fox can fight from head to toe.

Empyrean is a co-op spaceship fighter who has five fires constantly and you and your team have four buckets of water. They all control your standard Warframe aboard the Railjack, keep the ship healthy and damage its powerful armament.

This is not the power fantasy of the base game. it’s closer to a fully cooperative version of Sea of ​​Thieves. Work is ongoing and none of the following items, including footage, is final. But the end result of the present empyrean is hectic, desperate and satisfying. The biggest fun is finding out how things can get out of hand.

There are four roles in Empyrean: Tactical, Piloting, Gunnery and Engineering. Players can work hard in a role and get status bonuses and skills, or they can be an all-rounder. In any case, everyone has to worry about the Railjack (the newly added Warframe spaceship), and an existing group of friends will probably slip into roles depending on their ability or interests.

We want Empyrean to feel like an extension of everything people were used to, “says Dave Kudirka, Senior Producer at Digital Extremes. “We looked at the usual tropics of engineering and shooting, because they are nice vessels for people who have played any kind of game that has such things.”

While the developers say that the core game of Empyrean is not to become “crazy”, it is still based on the skeleton of Warframe, a game in which everyone plays a robot ninja who jumps 30 yards in the air creates. I feel like part of a well oiled machine.

Things are a lot more chaotic on the spaceship.

What’s the worst that could happen?

The ship is vulnerable to fire. The hull will break and fires will start aboard. As a pilot, I focus on navigating through debris and firing alien ships with my weapons. The shooters can help and cause as much damage as possible. No matter how efficiently we set ourselves up, we need another body somewhere.

There are only four players, but a lot to do. We can find materials in space to build new supplies for the ship, put out fires and repair fires, jump on weapons, pilot pilots, remove board parties from the enemy, and even set up our own board parties to evict enemy ships. With all of these options, things can go awry in an amazing way. All four people can leave the ship at the same time and let it float. Maybe your buddy gets into an enemy ship, but does not tell you. Oops, you just shot it down and killed friend and foe in flames.

Empyrean removes Warframe from his shooter shooter gameplay and replaces it with something unbelievable and exciting. At times this means playing with Benny Hill-like games as the pilot leaves his post to sprint through the ship and be prone to an urgent injury. In other cases, we would actually solve a problem through teamwork.

Rebecca Ford, Live Operations and Community Director, served as our team’s one-woman boarding party. A mission mowed us through the waves of smaller ships, while Ford’s Ivara Warframe broke through, boarded and hijacked larger ships. I helped navigate and evade, and the other two members of our party were all focused on extinguishing fires and sealing breaches. The reward felt sweeter for the persecution.

Navigate through the mess

Each player has access to a tactical screen, where he can check in with his teammates and issue orders via a ping-wheel. This will be a lifesaver with random groups, but it will remain useful for existing groups.

“At the beginning, it will be difficult for an individual to play a railjack,” says Kudirka. “There are many aspects to manage, many enemies to manage, but a few side gunners, and it will be easier to handle, and you can divide your time between combat and resource gathering, it’s great if you have a dedicated group of friends you’re always with, you’ll find your roles pretty quickly and find out who’s doing what. “

Failure is not a punishment in Empyrean. You will not lose the railjack and your progress will not be meaningfully reset. Instead, it goes back to the drawing board. This could mean that a friend changes to boarding instead of weapons or someone else takes the pilot’s place.

There’s a lot to mix and match in Empyrean, and it feels just like the base game of Warframe. It’s flexible, cinematic and genuinely cool. It’s also an occasional nightmare carnival where things go from 0 to 60 and your friends are in space when you need them most.