The Nerd flips and flops all over his cluttered little ship, kicking his beach balls from the Dog Days Event around. His Kavat comes in and starts knocking the balls all over the back of the ship. The Nerd smiles as he turns to the camera.
"My cat likes to play with my balls."
He runs to the back of the ship, running into the back center door into his Operator Room.
"Oh yeah that's right, I almost forgot about this guy, the Operator. Now that I have him, what does he do? The Operator, male or female, whatever you want, is a fully customizable magic space teenager. At first, they start off wearing this leather space onesie that looks kinda odd, but after a while, I fit mine out with some cool-looking shit. It's imperative that you next play The War Within, as soon as you have the ability to, first, because it's a pretty engaging story, and second, because it allows you to fully use the Operator on foot to their best ability. Before completing the War Within, all the Operator can do is pop out of the Warframe and shoot some laser, but after The War Within, they become fully controllable, and I guess their muscle degeneration due to the atrophy from all that cryosleep went away.
"Now you're tasked with dealing with this guy, Teshin, he's a Dax soldier, and you find out he's working for the Grineer Queens. You pursue Teshin and eventually wind up on this moving asteroid base called the Kuva Fortress, where you meet the aforementioned Queens. It turns out, it was a trap, and you were lured there so that the Queens could steal your power. They try to mindfuck you, and then you wind up on this spiritual journey on a mountain, I'm not joking. As you explore the caves of the mountain and deal with this terrifying Orokin worm thing, you discover new powers, your void dash, and eventually, you wind up going back to the Kuva Fortress and confronting the Queens and their lapdogs again. You kick their asses, freeing Teshin from his trance-like control, and you kill the fat bitch elder Queen. The quest is over, and you can do what you want with the Kuva, it doesn't really matter. You get some cool weapons outta the deal."
"So yeah, that's two pretty big quests out of the way and now that you have the Operator, you have access to a lot more of the game's content, and can start proceeding with some of the game's later activities, such as getting focus for your focus schools. These have been reworked several times, but what the focus schools essentially do is act as the means of progression for your Operator. After this, you can get your amp, and make your means of attack, the void beam, a little bit stronger, well... a little stronger anyway. The first amp you'll get is from Onkko, the leader of the Quills Syndicate on earth after completing the Saya's Vigil quest. You'll notice that there's quite a bit of content locked behind these solo quests.
"The Mote Amp is complete dogshit; a keychain laser pointer could do more damage. Level it up, gain access to further amps by running Eidolon captures with some much higher-level players, and throw that Mote Amp in the fucking trash where it belongs! The Amp, thankfully, doesn't use mods, although you can equip Arcanes to them to make them, and your Operator, even better. As you level your Operator up over the course of weeks through focus farming, he becomes a lot stronger, and that shitty laser I had before, well, now it's a flamethrower! I use the 777 Amp, the Klamora Prism, Propa Scaffold, and the Anspatha Brace, and it can destroy enemies even as high as level 70, which doesn't seem that impressive until you realize I wasn't even able to tickle level 30s with them before.
"All that's left to talk about on the ship is the Helminth room, which is this creepy-ass room off to the right of the Operator room. It's dark, and there's weird-mutant fish under the glass floor. This room is a visual nightmare. You got this chair in the center that makes it look like the dentist's office of your nightmares, and after you install the Helminth upgrade segment back there, you get his big mouth on the wall that reminds me of Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors, the Rick Moranis one from the 80s. It's so goofy looking. You can actually name it. I called mine Steven Tyler.
"You can use this room to do something really cool, but involves sacrificing a regular Warframe, but I don't want to do that, especially with frames that I've already put Forma and Reactors into, so you know what I did? I farmed every single frame a SECOND time so that I could subsume them, and obtain their powers. This room allows you to put certain Warframe powers on other Warframes, which is a really cool idea. When you subsume a frame, it gets sucked into the wall. Your ship is EATING your Warframes! This game is so fucking weird, but I love it. You can also add a pretty cool buff every week to three random frames, selected by the game. You can get some pretty broken results from this.
"Now, all that's left to talk about is the Living Quarters. This area isn't anything too special, just a place to put more decorations really. One thing that's pretty cool is you can buy an aquarium and put all the weird fish you got from The Cambion Drift, Orb Vallis, and the Plains of Eidolon in there. There's also a music box where you can play any of the songs you've learned from the Somachord segments."
The Nerd brushes the metaphorical sweat from his brow and looks at the camera.
"So FINALLY, after all this time, I can stop talking about my ship and go to some missions. Yeah, there's a market to buy shit and a codex that exists as some sort of index of useful information, as well as some other stations where you fuck with Syndicates, Railjack, and Conclave, sorry, I nearly threw up in my mouth talking about that last one. I gotta get off this ship."
The Nerd walks his Warframe over to his garishly colored, ugly as sin Smeeta Kavat, standing awkwardly in the middle of the floor.
"Alright, Dicktits, you ready to go on an adventure?"
Zoom in to the vacant-looking Kavat as it makes this weird, low-pitched cat noise. The Nerd looks straight into the camera with his usual exaggerated scowl.
"Yeah, I named my Kavat Dicktits."
The Nerd throws on his diarrhea brown and barf green-colored Excalibur that looks utterly horrendous and fires up a Capture mission.
"In order to initiate a mission, you have to go to the Navigation console. At the Navigation console, you have access to the entire solar system of planets, including some moons, The Void, and other areas. As you do missions, you unlock the mission nodes surrounding that node. As you follow the mission path, you'll eventually stumble across Junctions that can only be unlocked by completing certain criteria, including objectives that involve crafting, farming, or even completing certain quests. To unlock the Junction, you have to fight an AI-controlled Warframe and win. When these were first introduced, I was already well into the game, and I slaughtered every Warframe blocking my path, but for new players, I'm sure certain ones, like Mag, were a real pain in the ass.
"Let's talk about some different mission types. There are a lot of different types of missions in the game spread across a whopping 17 planets in the star chart and another 6 totally dedicated to Railjack. The most basic, after Exterminate, which we've already covered, is Capture. All you have to do is find the target on the map, beat the shit out of them, and then press the action button over their incapacitated body and your frame starts to suck them into their hand while some special effects take over the screen. The captive screams in horror as they're taken away. How painful is that extraction? Damn!
"Up next is a Rescue mission. A Tenno operative got captured by the enemy and is being held hostage, and it's up to you to rescue them, sounds simple enough, but then I get to the holding cell, and the guards see me, and now a timer is counting down while they gas the captive! I gotta be real quick, and that's why I use my Ciphers. In the Foundry, you can craft these things that will auto-solve hack sequences, otherwise, you gotta do these little puzzles. Granted, they're not hard, but they waste so much time, so I made Ciphers, thousands of them, and I use them all the time. Fuck those puzzles. So I rescue the captive, and at first, they're grateful for being saved, but then the next sentence out of their mouth, they demand a weapon!"
Camera zoom in on the female captive shouting "I need a weapon!"
"Excuse me? I rescued your dumbass and you demand a weapon? Why in the world would I give you my precious gun? You've already proven to be stupid enough to get captured by the enemy, you're a liability, as far as I'm concerned, and you expect me to give you a fucking firearm?! No way, go to hell! Fuck you!"
The Nerd allows the captive to get downed and he teabags them until the captive dies, letting the mission fail on purpose.
"Worth it."
He fires up another new mission.
"Next up is Spy, and this is the exact kind of shit I made all these Ciphers for. Spy missions are ass juice. I'm supposed to break into these vaults and hack computers to steal useful enemy Intel, but every time I get seen by some stupid camera, or a tattletale robot, or one of those laser doors, and then I gotta rush to save the data. I always just bumrush it and use a Cipher, fuck it. They give you practically an eternity to fix your error anyway, so why not?
"Sabotage missions are a little more varied and elaborate, changing objectives with each mission. The goal can be as simple as taking an object to put into a computer and leaving, which is actually remnants of an old mission type called Deception, to destroying tanks that go down with one bullet, to something as insane and elaborate as Void Sabotage, which involves activating a portal to warp to a different area altogether so that you can destroy the Grineers' means of getting back into The Void. My favorite type of Sabotage mission is the kind where you gotta destroy some machine that activates a self-destruct sequence. Makes me really feel like I'm fucking over the enemy big time.
"In fact, a lot of what you do in this game involves screwing over or tormenting the other enemy factions. The Tenno are like the assholes of the galaxy! No more is that apparent than with Hijack missions, where the sole goal is to take some big piece of equipment by luring it on a leash from point a to point b so that we could steal it! The easiest way to run this shit is to just stand on top of what you're trying to steal while it slowly moves on its own like you're on a Macy's Day parade float except everyone is trying to kill you.
"Most of the time, what you're doing is attacking something, but sometimes you're tasked with defending something, like with Mobile Defense, where you're carrying these keys from terminal to terminal, while Lotus breaking into the enemy's files, so contextually, it's kinda like Spy, except the enemies finally got a firewall and The Lotus needs time to breach it. You really want a frame that has some sort of crowd-controlling ability, or that can kill effectively with their powers, otherwise, you risk fucking it all up if the enemies prove to be too ornery for you.
"If you really want to fuck up the other factions, you could always just go mano a mano with one of their head honchos in an Assassination mission. Ass-ass-ination missions appear on all major planets, and you can go and fight any of the major dickheads running the factions. Practically every one of these boss fights drops parts for Warframes, so you're gonna want to play these to get the frames, even if it means you have to incur the wrath of the Stalker. It's no big deal, he's a total wuss, and can be easily killed by an even remotely competent party. It's a shame that all he seems to drop is his bow and arrow. The guy has 4 different weapons to collect. There's this one guy on Europa who's the most pathetic boss in the entire game, and that's the Sergeant. His name used to be Nef Anyo, but the guy's such a joke that he's just the Sergeant now and Nef wants nothing to do with him. I honestly don't even consider this guy a boss. He's such a fucking weakling that I literally killed him by complete accident while looking for him. He's actually surrounded by other units that are significantly stronger than him. It's pretty sad."
