Warframe Teases Upcoming Hub-City Venus

By Rebecca Smith,

Digital Extremes' Warframe was released on PC nearly five years ago. Throughout that time, the developer has constantly supported the game with new content and updates. That content is set to continue in the future and the latest development stream introduced Venus, an upcoming hub-city, as well as revealing more details about an upcoming expansion. You can watch the entire DevStream below if you choose, although we've summarised some of the key points too:

The next landscape to be introduced into the game will be Venus, but it will be a more fantastical approach to Venus than you know it now. Before the Orokin fell, they were turning Venus into a habitable space with terraforming. Now the Corpus is trying to finish the job and they've used coolant to cool the planet's surface. Floating islands have been created where glaciers have formed around golden orbs — these will eventually fall to the ground and shatter.

Whereas the game level-gates on Earth by using night cycles, Venus will instead have winter storms. These increase the difficulty of traversing the landscape. Despite these storms, there are still patches of vegetation that have sprung up.

Of course, terraforming requires a work force. Solaris United is the unhappy work force that is employed by the Corpus, and they're responsible for processing and refining the coolant. While there are some buildings above the surface, they actually live underground.

You can take a look at more concept art in the video below:

It wasn't just Venus that was showcased during the stream. Octavia's Deluxe skin was shown off with two new Zaws, a scythe and a katana. You can check out that clip here. There was also a quick glance at Corpus Spiders. Of those shown, the smallest creature can leap off walls and has blades for legs. Meanwhile, the largest spider will fire goo.

Moving away from the upcoming expansion, the team also promised that separate Prime Vault Accessories packs will definitely be coming. Although they're not sure exactly what form these will take, they're hoping for at least some of them to arrive for the Summer Vault. You'll also be able to install two Arcanes per Warframe as long as you're at Mastery Rank 5 or above. This may arrive on PC "as early as next week".

Finally, the stream revisited some old topics:

Khora: new design is still being worked on, and is completely decoupled from the Damage Rework.
Kingpin System: It’s still in development but has changed a lot since we last talked about it! It might not even use the original room anymore. We want to condense it down to the essence of a custom, persistent enemy who gets better over time.
Dark Sectors: the rework we showed last stream feels less and less like a Dark Sector successor and instead a new system altogether. At its core, it’s a standalone leaderboard-based arcade mode for Vets, with a timeattack or speedrunning feel.
We’re revisiting some aspects of Kuva acquisition, stay tuned for a Dev Workshop outlining the changes!
Still want to return old wallrun animations but we don’t have time at the moment.
Umbra is still coming – we promise!

There is currently no release window for any of this new content (with the exception of two Arcanes per Warframe), but we'll be sure to let you know as soon as that changes.

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Written by Rebecca Smith

Rebecca is the Newshound Manager at TrueSteamAchievements, TrueAchievements and TrueTrophies. She has been contributing articles since 2010, especially those that involve intimidatingly long lists. When not writing news, she can usually be found sharpening her very, VERY, pointy grammar stick in anticipation of its imminent use. Outside of TSA, TA and TT, she works in an independent game shop so that she can spend all day talking about games too. At home, with a variety of PCs and consoles on hand from which to choose, starting with a ZX Spectrum, games are never far away there either. However, as you're not supposed to have an unhealthy obsession with just a single subject, she also likes to read and dream about owning her own tribe of minions. She'll occasionally go outside.