"Alright, so I've laid down the foundation for what the game's about, but what's the story about? What are you, and WHO are you? You wanna know what the Warframes are? Oh, they're just humanoid meat suits comprised of technology and twisted leather flesh, telepathically controlled by magical space teenagers that got their powers from a cross-dimensional incident, as their school got pulled into The Void and they made a deal with an ageless immortal Void demon so they could survive. Sounds simple enough, right?"

The Nerd takes a swig of Rolling Rock.

"But Nerd, you ask, we haven't seen any 'teenagers', and that's because we haven't played The Second Dream. This is what is called a 'quest' in Warframe. Throughout the game, you'll play and unlock these quests by completing certain objectives in the game, and as you complete these quests, you unlock more of the game, and eventually, it expands into a ton of different game modes and really opens up. This is where the longevity of the game really comes from... well... that, and the grind, but we'll get to that shit, oh trust me, we will.

"When you start up the Second Dream, The Lotus tasks you with uncovering the whereabouts of your Operator, the kid supposedly controlling the Warframe from far away. Sounds simple enough, pick up little Jimmy from school and bring him onto your spaceship and, boom, done, and that would be the case if you didn't have to deal with this asshole called The Stalker. The Stalker appears similar to a Warframe himself, in fact, he looks like an Excalibur unit, one of the earliest obtainable Warframes in the game.

"This edgelord is a real pain in the ass. Every time you fight and kill a boss on some planet, any faction, The Stalker sends you HATE MAIL! This has to be the only game in history where someone leaves spam in your inbox when you kill a boss! The guy's a real dickweed. You find your Operator, and getting back is slow as shit. You're stuck in this slow, deliberate walk as you carry your Operator that's been dormant for centuries, and who has, therefore, developed really weak bone muscles from the cryosleep and can't walk on his own. And you gotta deal with this jerkoff Stalker while carrying a kid around and firing lasers to ward him off.

"After what seems like forever avoiding this guy, you make it back to your ship with the kid, and the asshole boards your ship! Get the fuck off of my ship, you home invader, before I call the cops! Oh wait, there are no cops. This next part is an ass and a half. You have to very slowly make your way over to the Stalker as he's lunging energy waves at you! Fuck! Ass! Dick! It just keeps going on, and on, and on. You got to make it to the chair in the back of the ship, and you gotta do this SEVERAL TIMES, firing your hand beam to make him fuck off. By some miracle, I make it to him and finish the quest. He goes to strangle your kid, after shoving his big ass sword into your Warframe's chest, but the Warframe gets up on its own, the Stalker is confused and doesn't understand. Your Warframe breaks the big sword, and the Stalker disappears."

"After that, the Lotus, who, up to this point, I thought was just some lady at a command central somewhere, or an AI, comes in, lifts your Operator up, and places them onto the chair. This is the first time The Lotus appears to you in person, and I must say, the story is pretty awesome if a bit convoluted at times. You get a good sci-fi story outta this game, although it can be pretty overwhelming being introduced to new terminologies pretty much all the time".

The Nerd walks around his ship and realizes, he hasn't really talked that much about how the game actually works.

"You know, there's a lot to this game, and I still haven't even taught you how to build Warframes, or weapons, or mod any of this stuff. So first off, let's start with the Arsenal. I've mentioned before that there are other Warframes, at the moment, currently 85, but that's counting regular, and primed variants, as well as a special one called Umbra. All the Warframes play differently and have different powers, strengths, weaknesses, and themes. The earlier Warframes are as simple as Ember, the fire-themed frame, Frost, the ice-themed frame, and Volt, the lightning-themed frame, but as time goes on, more frames were introduced to have much more complex themes, sometimes related to other factions, or even having their own backstory and quest. It's pretty cool how deep the lore goes.

"You can use the Arsenal to do a lot of things with the Warframes and their weapons, such as color them, add accessories, change helmets, skins, the possibilities are just insane. In addition to that, you can use the Arsenal to apply mods. In order to do that, you go to this screen that has a bunch of hollow rectangles on it, some with symbols at the top. You take mods, that are at the bottom, and you drag them into the hollow slots. At the top of the mod screen for the Warframes, you'll notice there are two spots. The left is for auras, which allow your frame to have some sort of passive or active power at all times, such as regenerating energy, or health, or even an aura that reduces enemy armor when equipped. Those are all really useful auras. The auras also supply the frame with a starting boost of mod capacity if the Aura mod has a polarity that matches the polarity of the Aura slot.

"The mod slot to the right, which has a little lock symbol on it by default, is an Exilus slot. You unlock that by applying an Exilus Adapter, which can be purchased with the game's premium currency, Platinum, or obtained through alerts, which are timed events that usually occur on weekends following a stream, called Gifts of the Lotus. Only certain mods can go in the Exilus slot, and they're usually minimally useful mods that give a little bit of power strength or range or some other little boost of help. Those mods have a special symbol on the top center.

"Speaking of symbols, you'll notice the little symbols on the right side of some of the blank mod slots. These symbols are called 'polarities' and what they do is reduce the capacity requirement of a mod with a matching symbol by half. Mod capacity can be seen at the top left-hand corner of the screen and is dependent on a couple of different factors, namely, the level of the frame, or whether or not the frame has what is called an Orokin Reactor, which doubles the available mod capacity, and how many mods have been slotted and their collective capacity requirement.

"It probably sounds like a headache, hearing this from word of mouth, but it's actually pretty simple once you do it yourself. You're able to mod for such useful things as health, shields, and armor, and even control how your abilities work through mods, such as how long your powers last, how much energy they cost, and how far certain abilities will go, or how effective they are. There are also many mods that offer simple, quality-of-life perks to your frame's powers or that make them work slightly differently, called augments."

The Nerd exits the Warframe mod screen and enters the weapon mod screen.

"Modding weapons works pretty much the same. On the melee mod screen, there's a mod slot equivalent to the Aura slot called a Stance slot. Putting a Stance mod with a matching polarity into the Stance slot will offer additional starting capacity, and such factors as mod capacity and level apply the same way here as well. The Stance mod effectively changes what kind of combos you're capable of executing with your melee, and different stances function in different ways and with different levels of effectiveness. As with a Warframe, the starting mod capacity of a weapon can be doubled with what's called an Orokin Catalyst."

The camera pans back to The Nerd, who has a puzzled look on his face.

"Why did they do that? Why did the creators decide to make two separate resources that serve essentially the same function? Why do we need an Orokin Reactor AND Catalyst if they both do the same thing? Why not have one of them and have it apply to all modifiable things? It makes no sense, and only further complicates the game in unnecessary ways. I suppose that's a nitpick, but it really squeezes my balls.

"For consistency's sake, at least modding is still relatively consistent otherwise. Weapons are all modded for various aspects of functionality, including total damage output, attack speed, reload speed, recoil, and basically anything you could think of. It's very open and in-depth, and there are thousands of different mods.

"When you run outta mod capacity on something, you can apply what's called a Forma, but you can only do that once the thing you want to mod reaches level 30, or what would be considered the maximum level at that time. Some things can go up to level 40. What applying a Forma essentially does is reset the thing you want to mod back to level 0, but allows you to apply one of a couple of different polarities onto a mod slot.

"The idea is that you use a Forma, which resets the level, but you're allowed to strategize by adding the polarity that matches the ideal mod of which you want to use. This is useful for those really high-capacity mods that cost a whole lot to use. The higher the capacity requirement of a mod, the more capacity it takes by default, but it also means the more the requirement gets cut in half, so a mod that costs, say, a capacity of 14 for example, now costs 7 when placed onto a slot with a matching polarity. Through leveling, Forma, Reactors, and Catalysts, you can maximize your mod layout with a full set of mods to your liking.

"But there's a caveat. If you're looking to maximize, it's very possible that the game's meta can change, and builds that were good before, become inferior, so just remember that your mod setup may not be permanent and optimum forever."

The Nerd takes another swig of his Rolling Rock. He now looks tired and reluctant to keep explaining.

"But wait, there's more. Most weapons you're going to want to modify specifically to maximize your damage output. There are many different mods for weapons: ones for base damage, which is additive, multishot which is sort of multiplicative in relation to how much damage each bullet does, critical chance, and critical damage, which is pretty self-explanatory if you're familiar with how crits work in RPGs, and status chance, which is your likelihood to proc a status, or a lasting damage effect, on an enemy.

"In addition to baseline damage types, such as slash, which can cause bleed, impact, which can cause staggering in enemies, and puncture, which can reduce enemy damage output, there are various elemental and combined elemental damage types, such as heat, cold, electric and toxic, which combine to form six additional damage types: gas, magnetic, corrosive, viral, radiation and blast.

"But it's not enough to simply rely on what mods do to mod properly, you also wanna check how the weapon you're using functions. What are the strengths and weaknesses of your weapon? Is it a high status chance weapon, or a high crit chance weapon? Is it both? Should I mod for one, or the other, or try to get both? These are the questions you'll ask yourself when all this modding comes into play. This is stuff you'll have to figure out, whether you're modding Warframes for their powers, or weapons for their functionality. To people that are used to playing RPGs, that stuff might be elementary, but to people that don't, it may come across as overwhelming, especially because many of these aspects are not explained.

"This is why you'll have to turn to the community for all of your advice. Warframe has a great community of people that have played the game for eons that are more than willing to help newer players to grasp the complexity of modding. Oh, which reminds me, I never even told you how to rank up mods!

"You rank up mods in the modding station by selecting the mod and applying a relatively common resource called Endo. You'll get Endo practically all the time, either in its raw form as these glowing blue and golden orbs or through converting these things called Ayatan Sculptures into Endo at a place called Maroo's Bazaar, a special relay located on Mars. Firstly, you want to collect the sculptures, then you want to add amber and cyan Ayatan Stars into them. I don't know why they're called Ayatan Stars, as they look nothing like stars. Those will increase the total Endo output when they're converted. Either that, or you could use them to decorate your ship. They do move when you put Stars into them, so they're pretty cool to look at, but I'd rather use them for practical reasons. We'll get into 'Ikeaframe' later."

"For now, let's talk about what's probably the most important aspect of your orbiter, the Foundry. On the left side of your ship, adjacent to the modding station, you'll see what looks like a table with some floating cube shit. This is where you build things. In order to build things, you need resources, some of which are accumulated naturally as you progress through the game, and others, you gotta go outta your way to get. Some of the resources, which you can acquire from the open world, are used to craft other refined variants of that resource to build other things.

"There are so many fucking resources in this game, it makes my head spin, and new ones are introduced with every update, so this game is also a collect-a-thon. You can make all sorts of shit with the Foundry, from Forma and Orokin Reactors and Catalysts to weapons, to even the Warframes themselves. You'll soon find the Foundry becoming chocked full of things to build. Don't worry, it has infinite space, and it's very straightforward and organized to find where your blueprints are and how to build from them.

"The Foundry serves an additional function in that it's also where you can combine Arcanes. Arcanes are kind of like mods in the sense that you level them up and they serve the purpose of making you even more powerful, but unlike mods, they don't require a capacity or Forma to use, although some types of Arcanes require you to install some sort of adapter to use, which is kinda garbage, as those adapters exist solely to artificially elongate the need to play a certain mode to keep getting them. Still, most Arcanes aren't too bad to get, but they are later game content, not meant for you to worry about right away."