Warframe

Warframe is an online action game that includes elements of shooters, RPGs, and stealth games.

The player starts with a silent protagonist in the form of an anthropomorphic biomechanical combat unit called a Warframe, possessing supernatural agility and special abilities, a selection of weapons (primary, secondary, and melee) and a space ship called an Orbiter. The Orbiter is supported by a Cephalon, a type of artificial intelligence created from the minds of living people. The Cephalon in the player's Orbiter is named Ordis, and refers to the player as Operator. The player's primary goal from this point is to explore the Origin System.

Warframe is set in a far future version of the Solar System, now known as the Origin System. At the start of the game players are given control of members of the Tenno, warriors who have awoken from a millennia-long cryosleep on Earth by a woman called the Lotus, who acts as a guide for the player. They join an interplanetary war between the Grineer, a violent war-driven matriarchal race of militarized human clones; the Corpus, a cult-like megacorporation dedicated to profit; the Infested, disfigured victims of a zombie-like virus; the Sentients, a race of self-replicating machines made by a long-dead transhuman race known as the Orokin; and the Corrupted, brainwashed variants of the previous three factions' units defending ancient Orokin towers.

All of the factions encountered in the game, including the Tenno, were created by or are splinter groups of the old Orokin Empire, an ancient fallen civilization and former reigning power in the Origin System. Although virtually all of them are long dead by the time of the Tenno's awakening, their lingering presence can still be felt throughout the Origin System. Before their fall, the Orokin had realized the Origin System was becoming dangerously depleted of resources, and their solution to keep their empire alive was to colonize new star systems. The Orokin sent out colony ships through the Void, a trans-dimensional space that enabled faster than light travel between stellar systems.

The origins of Warframe came out of Canadian studio Digital Extremes' original vision for their previous game Dark Sector. Before that point, Digital Extremes was known as a work-for-hire studio, working alongside other studios to help complete development; this included working with Epic Games for Unreal Tournament (1999) and its sequels Unreal Tournament 2003 and Unreal Tournament 2004. Epic had looked to bring Digital Extremes into their studio, but found there would be issues with the Canadian government that interfered with the merger, and the studios agreed to go their separate ways. This was the major reason the physical disc copy for the game was discontinued.

Wanting to establish themselves as a lead studio, Digital Extremes came up with the idea of Dark Sector, which they first announced in February 2000, describing the game as combining "the intense action elements of Unreal Tournament with the scope and character evolution of a persistent online universe". In early interviews, Digital Extremes said that the gameplay for Dark Sector would have had players as bounty hunters and assassins in a dark science fiction setting, with each character having a bounty on their head, making them targets for other players.

On release, Warframe received "mixed or average reviews" on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC, while the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5 versions received "generally favorable reviews", according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. GameZone's Mike Splechta said of the PlayStation 4 version, "If you already enjoy games like Monster Hunter which require you to farm for items to craft better ones, Warframe follows that very same formula, except with much more satisfying and faster-paced combat." However, as of 2018 PC Gamer said that "Warframe's growth doesn't resemble a well-tended plant—it's more like a mutant science experiment. Game systems are haphazardly stitched onto one other in ways that are sometimes incoherent, but oddly charming all the same."

The game is one of the most-played games available on Steam. Digital Extremes attributes the success of the title by being a F2P game. Digital Extremes describes the game as a "rogue success", as the game can secure and sustain a large number of players without gaining significant attention from other people. More than 26 million players had played the game since launch by April 2016, and by March 2018, five years from its open beta, had reached 38 million players.