Digital Extremes has been teasing the Sentients’ home turf for years, and at Tennocon the studio finally pulled back the curtain on Tau — Warframe’s first brand-new solar system since the game launched back in 2013. If you were expecting something bright and hopeful, think again. Tau looks like a biomechanical fever dream that swallowed a noir film and never bothered to digest it.
The star of the show is Fornax, a sprawling ringed city where the rain itself corrupts everything it touches and the inhabitants are hopelessly hooked on a substance called the Bloom. Picture a metropolis built inside something that used to be alive — if it were alive, it wouldn’t be happy about it. The streets are less streets and more like organic tunnels, and the architecture has that unmistakable H.R. Giger-meets-downtown-Manhattan vibe going on.
Leading the charge through this nightmare is Brysko, a chain-smoking detective-type Warframe with a grappleshot and a flair for throwing explosive playing cards. He’s voiced by Critical Role’s Matt Mercer, which honestly tracks — the character seems tailor-made for dramatic monologues delivered between gunfights. Brysko reports to Albrecht Entrati, so if you’ve been keeping up with Warframe’s increasingly wild lore, this all connects.
Fornax itself is split across three vertical tiers. Down low, you’ll find the Bloom addicts huddled in tunnels, a stark reminder of what unchecked dependency does to a place. Higher up, hovercars that look suspiciously like vintage American roadsters cruise through bone-colored canyons. And at the top? A neon-soaked casino where you can play Portau, Warframe’s very first in-game card game. There’s a crimelord called the Hunra who runs the place — part goblin, part beetle, all attitude.
The development team has said Fornax draws heavy inspiration from real-world addiction and gambling, so expect those themes to run deeper than just set dressing. Digital Extremes clearly wants to tell a story that hits harder than your typical loot-and-shoot fare.
Tau arrives later this year, though new players will need to put in serious time with the existing storyline before they can access it. In the meantime, there’s plenty to keep veteran Tenno busy: a smaller expansion called Iceblade of Narin drops this autumn with a new frost-based Warframe and a long-overdue Banshee rework, plus a mini RPG side story called Fables and Frontiers lands in August featuring a new track from the in-game boyband On-lyne. Yes, Warframe has a boyband. At this point, the game contains multitudes.
Jordan Hayes is a staff writer at SteamGamer.net covering PC gaming news, hardware, and the latest from the Steam ecosystem. When not writing, Jordan is probably buried in a roguelike or arguing about GPU prices.
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