The Old Peace Signals a New Era with Primes and Ultimate Abilities

Warframe: The Old Peace is nearly here, and it’s promising some of the game’s most ambitious lore and gameplay refinements to date. The content update blends the long-buried history of the game’s origin system and a real-world reinvention of Primes and Focus (some of the title’s oldest systems), alongside plenty of new content, so there’s naturally a lot to unpack. Thankfully, every new addition in Warframe: The Old Peace doubles as service to something far greater: Tau, an entirely different system and expansion that’s very much on the horizon.

Unearthing the Truth Behind The Old Peace

The upcoming content update is the clearest step yet toward understanding the mysteries of Tau, the star system that acted as a main theatre of The Old War, Warframe‘s central lore conflict. Fought between the post-human Orokin empire and the mechanical Sentients they once sent to terraform Tau, the Operator (or the player character) witnessed that conflict firsthand, and their memories of the conflict were so terrible that they’d been intentionally erased. These memories are a key element of The Old Peace.

According to Warframe‘s lead writer, Adrian Bott, “the Solar Rail between the Origin System and Tau…was initially used for war,” but within The Old War was an all-too-brief, forgotten era of peace. Through reliving these memories, the Operator will discover “how The Old Peace died.” What that means in gameplay terms is one of two new major activities, The Perita Rebellion, and a highly anticipated expansion to the Focus School system.

Perita Rebellion Gameplay and the Tauron Focus School

The Perita Rebellion and ‘Focus 2.0’ are two central elements of The Old Peace‘s gameplay loop. Via a new system called Albrecht’s Dark Refractory, players will relive memories of the World War 1-inspired Perita Rebellion in 12-minute cycles, completing a series of objectives before a final encounter. During that loop, players can find Tektolyst Artifacts, which will be essential in unlocking Warframe‘s Tauron Strikes (or new ultimate abilities) at the Tauron Focus School.

In The Old Peace, the Tauron Focus School orbits Perita, and with its rediscovery, the Focus skill trees gain new upgradeable branches. These branches culminate in Tauron Strikes, powerful abilities unique to each tree. Tauron Strikes promise to bring the Operator and Drifter’s power to new heights with the kind of power Tau will eventually require.

The Arrival of Tauron Strikes, Warframe’s Ultimate Abilities

Though players have only seen one ability in action so far, each of the trees in the revamped Focus system has its own unique ultimate ability. According to Rebecca Ford, Warframe‘s creative director, these ultimate abilities are inspired by Shonen anime battles like Dragon Ball Z and Jujutsu Kaisen:

​​​​​​​”A super quick sword that leaves dozens of delayed slices in the air, a huge hammer that leaves a shockwave, a flurry of fists faster than the eye can see, an enormous staff summoning a nuclear magic blast, a single arrow shot skyward that erupts into a flurry of rain, or a cursed grimoire brimming with energy that overflows into a giant beam.”

This imagery is what the studio wanted to evoke most, and the results in The Old Peace‘s gameplay trailer speak for themselves. That said, the real value of these new ultimates came in the ability to re-examine the Focus system after nearly a decade since its release. Ford expressed that the ultimates and the Tauron Academy allow Digital Extremes to make Warframe‘s Focus trees’ “power sets feel more engaging, more alive, more rewarding to utilize in the heat of battle.”

The Future of Warframe’s Primes

The Old Peace also marks a turning point for how Digital Extreme will handle Primes, the game’s Orokin-upgraded Warframes, both narratively and mechanically. Beyond the upcoming release of Gyre Prime plus her primed Alternox Pulse Cannon and Kestrel Boomerang, Rebecca Ford explained that “since this is the first time we are diving into Warframe‘s enigmatic history, it felt like it would be a missed opportunity not to do something fun with our Primes.”

As such, Excalibur Prime, a frame long considered an untouchable relic of Warframe‘s early days, will also be temporarily playable during a mission for the first time in years. The recently released Caliban Prime also appears as an environmental set piece within the story, seemingly signaling that Primes can now play an active part in future quests. This kind of experimentation extends even further with the introduction of the Prime Vanguard.

Primes and the Vanguard Threat

A new boss threat in The Old Peace, the Prime Vanguard is an enemy that commandeers powerful Prime Warframes and folds them into The Old Peace‘s newest enemy faction, a militant splinter cell of the Orokin Empire. In an effort to tighten the link between the available Primes and the current in-game story, these enemy Primes will also make their way into the next Prime Resurgence rotation. It’s a relatively elegant way of keeping older frames relevant while giving players a compelling new reason to revisit their collections ahead of the journey to Tau next year.

Warframe: The Old Peace Has Even More on Offer

Even with its massive suite of additions (not all of which could be mentioned here), Digital Extremes is framing The Old Peace as a foundation for Warframe‘s next era, one that stretches beyond the origin system and toward Tau itself, rather than a finale. Rebecca Ford emphasized that the team’s guiding principle is experimentation in all things. Even with something as iconic as Primes, “Honestly, the sky is the limit.”

Released

March 25, 2013

ESRB

M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Violence