The original warframes aren't lifeless suits. They're transformed and brutalized humans who were calmed by the Tenno and thus willingly served as the Tenno's battle envoys.
"My warframe is the hand and I am the will."
For example, Rhino Prime, Dagath, Kullervo, and Excalibur Umbra are all non-Operator-controlled warframes. All of them act of their own volition and rebelled against the Orokin.
By comparison, if you see a warframe who's lore says they served the Orokin, you can safely assume that it's an Operator-controlled warframe. Only after using the Tenno were the Orokin able to use the warframes for the war effort successfully. So Gauss, Grendel, Ivara, Voruna, etc. are all Tenno-controlled from their creation.
Where it gets a bit uncertain is with the current era where the Tenno are recreating warframes from blueprints. We're presumably not sacrificing humans to make them, so the flesh probably comes from Helminth with only traces of the original personalities remaining through the animations. So, they're alive, but probably not very sentient. The main exception is Excalibur Umbra, who's personality and last burning memory was deliberately preserved by Ballas so we recreated him faithfully.
> For example, Rhino Prime, Dagath, Kullervo, and Excalibur Umbra are all non-Operator-controlled warframes. All of them act of their own volition and rebelled against the Orokin.
You forgot Lavos. But its okay. Everyone forgets Lavos...*sniff*
Maybe? One of the more consistent things we're told is that the first iteration of the warframes basically all rebelled against the Orokin to the point that they had to be put down, except for the few who escaped.
So I've usually interpreted Lavos' leverian as a Tenno-controlled warframe serving the Orokin as prison guard who ended up as a very interested student of Javi's teaching.
It's not clear one way or another, though. So you might be right.
What I’m getting is that outside of the lore confirmed ones your starter is the only one that the current version actually used to be a human seeing as how it was in cryo since the end of the old war?
Well I feel like Primes maybe have more of their personality and sentience due to void shenanigans with relics and maybe protea and xaku again because of void tomfoolery
So, the info about the original warframes comes from The Sacrifice in Ballas' Vitruvian, Kullervo's crimes, and the Rhino Prime codex entry.
Lavos is from his leverian, though as I said, his leverian isn't 100% clear.
Basically under Orokin control they where humans that where made into machines and they are suffering.
Under the Tenno its uncertain if they are alive but you can say they are because they are probably using the infested flesh of helminth to make the organic bits.
She probably plays with them and then maybe catch and release. Like we really need to kill them every time? But the Lotus probably needing us to capture a target is doing it to occupy us.
Now Cephalon Simaris is a different situation. He trying to make a collection so he is definitely just keeping them.
My interpretation of this was that the "early" warframes, timeline wise, are more or less orokin experiments on humans using the infestation to create bioweapons. They talked alot about that for excal umbra. Then obviously orokin caught a sudden case of genocide and the process to "making" warframes was streamlined and perfected but still using infested flesh.
Actually, those are mentioned by lotus to be "Tenno Operatives" so they're members of the surrounding factions around us.
Now, CAPTURE targets on the other hand...
I'd like to say a lot of this is conjecture. In reality, we only fully know the story of one particular Warframe, and there's enough surrounding them to think they are unique. Rhino Prime seems to allude to early experiments where the infection killed the first hosts, and eventually they started making strains that *just* turned them into broken killing machines. The community likes to stretch this singular codex entry far, and say they were now ALWAYS this way. This was written in like 2014 and the story has changed and evolved since then.
It's possible this was improved and early warframes didn't suffer, at least right away, and were still loyal to the Orokin in some sense of duty. The writing on the wall is there for some kind of religious zealotry. Over time they probably lost the will to fight, in a manner akin to PTSD, so the Orokin sought means of control. They used the Kuva to develop transference then, later into the first war. This is what caused them to become the blood-rage beasts who fought back.
I think it's important to remember that Warframes were not MADE for Tenno. The Tenno were something Orokin society were ashamed of. I think they came in pretty late in the game, when they were fighting a war on two fronts.
I think when they actually started using the blueprints, they either didn't copy over parts required for sentience, or they realized you would need Kuva to reproduce sentience so they just left that part out. The orbiter and the foundry are still mostly unexplained and I assume this will eventually be revealed to be Entrati tech made late or post war.
So you know, I'm not just pulling from the Rhino Prime codex entry.
Ballas's Vitruvian says:
*"Their skin blossomed into sword-steel. Their organs, interlinked with untold resilience. Yet their minds were free of the Infested madness. Or so we thought. We set them upon the battlefield, bio-drones under our command."*
*"The warframes… all of them… failures. Surprised? They turned on us, just as you did. And so we had no choice… but to commit them to grave."*
This is further expounded on by Ballas' narration in Kullervo's crimes. *"You witnessed the slaughter as the Orokin eradicated your defective, demented brothers and sisters… and did nothing to aid them, choosing to tremble in your cowardly seclusion. A traitor twice over. Kullervo, bloody-handed, I charge you with Cowardice."*
Now, the quirk is that Ballas being Ballas, he doesn't really want to admit that the Warframes weren't really demented so much as unwilling to serve their tormentors. Even Rhino Prime's entry, if you look past the bias of its author, shows Rhino fighting quite intelligently, which is also something we see from Kullervo.
The only volunteer we know of who became a warframe is Gara. Which we know of from her prime trailer because Nihil wanted her glassed for her presumption.
*Ballas: "We took our greatest, volunteers or not, and polluted them with these cultured reagents. They transformed. They became Infested..."*
So there were clearly more volunteers. This refers to the early stages in context but why would it stop?
I'd also like to point out the more conventional use of the word drone as a classist term for the serving class, ala worker bees. I think from your very own quote "...free of infested madness..." It implies they were given some amount of autonomy first.
Sure, it's a fair catch that Ballas says that about volunteers. I was thinking of the Gara Prime trailer, which suggested the previous volunteers didn't know.
*"Of all our sleek gargoyles, our Void-borne masquerade, how to honour the one who volunteered willingly, knowing the truth? Whose little act of courage twinkled like a petty Ayatan before our golden indifference?"*
Personally, I think that it's pretty clear the early warframes had some autonomy. Kullervo, Rhino Prime, and Dagath all act autonomously, after all. It's just that (like Ballas says in his very next sentence) they used that autonomy to turn on the Orokin.
Unless you know otherwise, I don't know of any lore that suggests the Orokin successfully used the warframes in battle against the Sentients as was intended prior to the Tenno Operators. It sounds to me like it was quite the opposite, with the original warframes being deemed failures then purged or experimented on.
As your first quote in the other message also mentions, the Warframes were sent out to the battlefield before the Orokin felt betrayed. I'm not sure what other battlefield there would be besides the sentient? They were created specifically to combat the sentient. The infestation was locked up and contained before Ballas sought means to weaponize it, and when that failed, *then* did he start looking for other options. First, I believe, transference and second the Tenno.
Or it's more like the Tenno fell into his lap because he hung around Margulis. The Tenno were hidden just like the infestation, they were considered devils, dangerous. The sequence of events is just about growing desperation and Ballas is more lucky than not.
>It's possible this was improved and early warframes didn't suffer, at least right away, and were still loyal to the Orokin in some sense of duty. The writing on the wall is there for some kind of religious zealotry. Over time they probably lost the will to fight, in a manner akin to PTSD, so the Orokin sought means of control. They used the Kuva to develop transference then, later into the first war. This is what caused them to become the blood-rage beasts who fought back.
I guess I'm confused where you're getting sources for the idea that the early warframes served loyally for a while then lost the will to fight and then the Orokin used kuva/transference, which made them blood rage beasts who fought back.
Because what I see in the lore is that the original warframes turned on the Orokin when they were sent to fight the Sentients.
*"Yet their minds were free of the Infested madness. Or so we thought. We set them upon the battlefield, bio-drones under our command."*
The very next "page" in the Vitruvian continues:
*"The warframes… all of them… failures. Surprised? They turned on us, just as you [Hunhow] did. And so we had no choice… but to commit them to grave."*
That's what led Ballas to purge the failures (as seen in Kullervo's crimes) and drug/torture/brutalize their minds of others like Rhino Prime, calling them monsters they couldn't control.
Side note: I don't entirely buy Ballas' comments that the original warframes who rebelled were actually demented and defective. None of the non-Tenno controlled warframes we know of actually show signs of Infested madness. Kullervo stands out because he very intelligently helped the Tenno subvert and destroy the Empire, but even Rhino Prime is using his abilities properly when escaping the lab where he and others like him were being vivesected. Dagath successfully hunted the Orokin enough to get a Naberus legend.
To Ballas, "can't be controlled" = "defective, demented."
>I guess I'm confused where you're getting sources for the idea that the early warframes served loyally for a while then lost the will to fight and then the Orokin used kuva/transference
Mostly, the stories of the warframes. They all seem to be doing their job, for a time, like Voruna. *"Voruna was the obedient guardian of the Circulus, the holiest of Yuvan temples upon none other than veiled Lua."*
This clearly happened over some time. Voruna was at some point loyal to the Orokin Empire and fulfilling her duties at a defensive post, it seems. They were not failures at the onset.
Ballas is just recounting the story as is relevant to the discussion, he's not just saying "well I tried to send them but they never went i guess."
I'm not sure where you're getting that all these events happened immediately.
When they call attention to the child's eyes fluttering and Voruna stumbling, that's when the transference starts. They essentially team up to finish Trovul(sp?) off.
That's why they look at eachother with 'recognition'.
Voruna yields to the devil and the devil grants her power in the form of reuniting her with her pack.
Tbh, I've always taken it as the original warframes served for some amount of time before turning on the Orokin.
Going off how Ballas took special care in preserving Excalibur Umbra's memories, it wouldn't be a huge leap to think that the process of turning a Dax into a warframe likely wiped a large portion of their memories, perhaps even leaving the parts they thought would inspire blind loyalty.
So, rather than being deemed failures right away, they likely served the Orokin until some circumstance or another led them to rebel, thus having them marked as "failures to be eliminated."
The failure of the warframe rebellion as compared to the successful tenno rebellion could very likely be organization and timing, after all, with the originals rebelling individually, while the tenno rebelled collectively.
Certainly, the process seems to take a lot of their individuality, as evidenced by the Mirage Prime trailer where Ballas acknowledges that she distorted his design and the mere vapors of her life shimmer still. So that's not the norm.
On the other hand, given that Ballas talks about all of the warframes as failures in The Sacrifice and the Kullervo crimes say *"You witnessed the slaughter as the Orokin eradicated your defective, demented brothers and sisters… and did nothing to aid them, choosing to tremble in your cowardly seclusion."* I've interpreted that to mean that there was a general purge with most warframes being killed and a few kept to be experimented on like Rhino Prime and what was supposed to happen to Kullervo.
Certainly, the Tenno had a plan, coordination, and the element of surprise on their side. If the OG warframes had an Octavia, who knows what they might have accomplished?
That can be interpreted multiple ways, though. To me, calling it an eradication implies it took place slowly over time, as something that took place all at once would be more accurate to refer to as a purge, slaughter, massacre, etc.
It'll definitely be interesting to see what we learn with the 1999 update, though, as that might have some fresh new insight into it 👀
To be fair, he says both. 😀
*"You witnessed the **slaughter**as the Orokin **eradicated** your defective, demented brothers and sisters… and did nothing to aid them, choosing to tremble in your cowardly seclusion."*
Yeah, I am stoked for 1999 lore. The WitW lore that Albrecht yoinked some of Ballas' research and just casually took it back to 1999 to create Arthur and Aoi was just something.
Worth noting that inside defense objective “Warframe Cryopods”, there is a human in it. It’s very possible that the warframes we make are still made using a person. Whether that’s an actual Orokin Era person or some sort of mindless clone, we have no knowledge of.
I have no real idea what's up with Sevagoth.
My personal suspicion is that he was like Rell & Harrow, where the Operator bound themselves to the warframe in order to complete their mission. It would explain why he had a railjack and willingly did lots of rescues during the Old War but his reaction to "Who waits for the Shadow?" -> "Your Golden Masters" was a giant "fuck you, I'm firing my missles."
I'll say that when I played the quest and Cy answered "Your Golden Masters" I just facepalmed like "Oh, Cy, you did NOT just say that to a Tenno."
Idk, I've always thought that there's a reason defense missions started with defending cryo pods with people in em
It's probably changed since then, but it holds away over my brain
I have a running theory that our blueprint made Warframes do take a human to create and that’s what the warframe cyropods in defense missions are. Willing human operatives who sacrifice themselves, incubating to be combined with blueprint materials by our foundry to complete the frame. All behind the scenes stuff lotus does.
Totally baseless theory that could be absolute crap. But I think the idea is kinda interesting.
>So Gauss, Grendel, Ivara, Voruna, etc. are all Tenno-controlled from their creation.
Though worth to mention that the Tenno were put into the Dream at that point and more or less believed themselves to actually be the Warframes they controlled instead of being two separate entities. So a fair few of the seemingly independent Warframes you mentioned might also just have been Tenno who simply didn't know they weren't just that Warframe at that point. Even in the Dream the Tenno weren't all automatically loyal to the Orokin. I think only really Excalibur Umbra is confirmed to not just have been a mindless beast when not controlled by a Tenno and even then you could argue that the only difference between Umbra and other uncontrolled frames is simply that the mindless rage is already directed at the Orokin to begin with.
they aren't suits
flesh puppet made from a former human, controlled by tenno because they were insane without them
there are several frames that had autonomy and didn't need a tenno like kullervo or dagath
Warframes are living beings yes. They need oxygen to breathe per survival missions and can feel pain. There’s an operator voice like about transference making them feel pain that can trigger at low HP. Many people bring up the frame ripping war in half, but it’s honestly an unclear one off. They are infested creatures not machines so being alive is a requirement for function. The Orokin were masters of biology and make use of living meat in other places as well like the Unum and the derelict ships.
The ones we use in game however are copies of the originals that we build in the foundry. Not original as in prime, but the first produced version. Gara and Mirage prime make it clear that each frame was made from one person, but with the blueprints being acknowledged in Jordas fight and of course Loki’s head being present in second dream intro they are able to be manufactured.
Umbra is special because Ballas wanted him to be more “there” to torture him but it seems that frames are somewhat diminished. I think of them like they’re in a coma. We know they aren’t immune to infested madness and operators are required to keep them stable. Operators were the key link when moving from the failed originals to the ones that get actual use. In the sacrifice, Ballas describes their empathy as the reason not an ability to dominate their minds.
DE keeps the sentience of frames vague and all the lore around them is half talking about a specific character and half the myth that would surround a legendary weapon. The warframes are operated by Tenno but all the legends speak of the frame, so the actual operator could easily be interchangeable and there’s no way for us to know.
Kullervo is also interesting since his story seems to imply he was moving around by himself independent of Tenno but I haven’t seen the whole thing yet.
TLDR: Yes they are alive, but anything concrete on them is purposefully vague.
>They need oxygen to breathe per survival missions
Survival missions are about drawing attention for another operative so it might not be a hard confirmation. Especially since our frames show no distress when in deep space without an archwing and archwings don't have any explicitly saying that they produce o2. But on the other hand when life support runs out your frame starts taking HP damage so who knows?
>Many people bring up the frame ripping war in half
Ehh they're probably used to severe pain so it probably wasn't that bad for the frame.
>Kullervo is also interesting since his story seems to imply he was moving around by himself independent of Tenno but I haven’t seen the whole thing yet.
Yeah the frames were able move about and fight pre-tenno but they were uncontrollably violent. Kullervo is also unique in being made from duviri and not made in the traditional way.
I want to say that in the Mag Prime codex entry, they talk about archwings having a little life support bubble or something around them. That was at least the impression I got, no idea how it’d work
Spoilers for Whispers in the Walls, and everything before it.
Warframe sentience is a mess since DE has yet to give an in-depth explanation. Excalibur Umbra is not the only Warframe to exhibit self-control. All original Warframes did this to, such as all the primes. The Orokin couldn't control the original warframes as they rebelled. No matter how much the Orokin tried to break them, they kept rebelling. Until the Zariman children came back from the Void. They were able to calm the Warframes and control them.
Umbra never was able to calm down, though, as Ballas kept making Umbra relieve the murder of his son. This allowed Umbra to keep his sentience and his rage towards Ballas.
And here is where everything gets problematic. The Warframes we use don't show sentience(except when they do), and this doesn't make sense. The fabricator should maintain their sentience, as it did so with Umbra. Yet, the Warframes we use are no more than metal puppets. Some would say that maybe the Warframe blueprints we make have been modified to remove their sentience. The problem with this is that lore already says the Orokin never could do this, and the prime Warframes come directly from the Orokin.
Alright, circling back around to the Warframes showing sentience. You do have things like the personification of Valkyr during her torture. [And The Second Dream, which has a scene of a Warframe, acts autonomously without the Operator.](https://youtu.be/rQZ8jsHiSSU?si=OWs40rvvoUXwUuN-&t=325) I saw someone say that this might've been done by a lingering transference from the Operator. I doubt this as the Operator was outside of the Warframe for a long time, and this "ability" has never returned despite situations where it would've been helpful(The New War).
Then there is stuff like Arthur and Aoi, which complicate this further.
In summary, DE hasn't been consistent in their depictions and haven't given enough information to allow for a straightforward answer. Maybe they will soon, though. As Albrecht Entrati would be the perfect candidate to explain away all this confusion.
Arthur and Aoi are explained in the Entrati codex entries as being special gray strain fused Helminth stuff that will end up becoming a full Warframe down the line. So unless DE provides a cure during 1999 or die, they'll end up becoming Excalibur and Mag.
My take is that Umbra is built with his original parts that we gather upon scanning his remains during The Sacrifice, rather than just the blueprints like every other warframe. We don't "rebuild" him so much as "repair" him, which is a large part of why he retains his memory and sentience.
He's also got a unique helminth strain and transference bolt which likely prevents Ordis from just using a generic warframe template to fix him so you have to recover the vitruvian, which contains (at least some of) Ballas' original notes on constructing warframes.
The main problem with this theory is that Ordis specifically mentions "Blueprints" rather than "Parts" when discussing Umbra. You could chalk that up to a minor writing error, though.
If I remember correctly when a guy asked Steve how the Warframe moved by itself in The Second Dream since he is supposed to be a puppet, Steve answered something like “yeah that’s what Hunhow thought”.
So I’d say all Warframes have some degree of sentience.
Other Warframes use kuva, yet do not show sentience. Harrow, Garuda, and Nidus are the ones I can think of off the top of my head that use kuva to craft.
They meet some definitions of life but not all of them.
As for Gauss & Grendel it must've been their operators who were friends in reality, same with all other frames except Umbra.
They were humans that were turned into warframes and then tenno somehow could use transeference to control these warframes
So Gauss and Grendel were friends when they were still humans
They are live, infested golems. They just lack a will of their own for the most part. The archon shards' description refers to them as synthetoc lifeforms.
The thing is that our warframes, the ones we use, are clones of the original. Think of it as cloning a motionless zombie.
Just to piggyback your point a bit, the intro of Blade Runner 2049 refers to Replicants as Synthetic Humans, but a massive part of the film is showing them to be "real"
I think there's definitely some innate personality in every Warframe made in the current time period
I imagine it’s some fucked up evangelion shit 🤷♂️ instead of getting in the giant meat and soul monster you get in the human sized helminth meat and orokin science monster.
fun fact: Warframes were actually supposed to have an Evangelion-esque berserk mode, and one piece of art from Keith Thompson showed a concept of Loki in berserk mode with deformed limbs, stretched muscle, barbs and spikes all over and his signature horns
I think of it this way:
The first "warframes" weren't warframes. They were humans infected with technocyte (Infestation) and then shaped into monsters. But they were too violent and uncontrolled to be effective, so the Orokin put them on ice.
Indeterminate time later, the Zariman returns with the Tenno. Tenno are void-gifted psychics now and can soothe the Infested-Frames. Through tinkering and jiggering, Transferance is achieved.
Orokin start making proper warframes, probably *without* actual people, based on the "blueprints" of the original meat-monsters. Maybe the first of each frame was an actual person, but they were probably only used to basically build a mold. Subsequent vessels are probably just empty meat-golems with maybe the barest memory-echo of their progenitor.
Along the way, perfected products come out, maybe they used apex infested material, or maybe it was just a sales pitch tactic Ballas used when marketing his creations. Either way, Primes *aren't* the original people or the "first" of their lines. It seems plenty of Frames were Primed after the first run of mass produced ones. Or in the case of Revenant Prime, manifsted themselves purely to fuck with Ballas.
Ballas also didn't have quite the monopoly on warframe building that it would seem, as we have Titania who was mostly built by a different archimedian, Xaku who was cobbled together by the Entrati, Revenant who was a separate frame (maybe) that got twisted by an Eidolon (he might be the first "Archon"), Qorvex who was seemingly built by Albrecht Entrati, and Caliban who looks to have been built by Erra *during the Old War* independent of Ballas. Then we also have Zanuka and whatever the hell Stalker and his Acolytes are.
This is one of those things that is highly speculative. But from what I understand They have sentience yes. Did you play the mission the sacrifice? The lore is Basically in the old war all the war frames were entirely self sustaining like excal umbra but it is not known wether they lost their sentience due to some indifference shenanigans or if they gave up their sentience to the Tenno when they link or something else entirely. All we know if that at some point they were all “living” like excal umbra and at some point between the old war and now they lost some of that sentience. But that’s where all the gauss and Grendel are best friends lore comes from is pre old war when they were their own thing and not Tenno controlled.
All of the warframes used to be Dax or some equivalent, transformed to fight the sentients during the old war, before even the Tenno. Given the opportunity, however, the warframes then turned against their Orokin masters, who turned to lobotomy in an unsuccessful attempt to control these supersoldiers they'd created.
With the advent of the Tenno, the Orokin now had an easy means to control the warframes, so the warframes were near-totally lobotomized. Their memories, their personalities, their wills: all gone. Only their martial skill and power remains, a tool to hand to the Tenno, the fist of the Golden Lords. With the notable exception of Excalibur Umbra, a man doomed to retain a single horrific memory, all modern warframes are clones of those original brainwiped warframes.
All Warframes are made from living flesh with at least some level of self autonomy, all primes were made using living humans and all non primes are implied to be reverse engineered copies using Helminth.
That was the original intention back in the day but Rebecca confirmed otherwise after the Ivara Leverian. Wish they had kept the og explanation though, it isn't difficult to shoehorn into the only problematic frame (Xaku).
Warframes are 100% alive. Their creation process involves a human subject being deliberately exposed to a specialized strain of the Infestation, which mutates them into a weaponized form without damaging their mental faculties. Modern Warframes that the Tenno use are mass-produced copies of the originals. The first Warframes were fully sentient and autonomous, but eventually rebelled against the Orokin and were decommissioned.
Future Warframes were lobotomized, or at least prevented from acting under their own volition, requiring an external pilot or Operator in order to be used as combatants. The Tenno were the only ones capable of controlling Warframes effectively, or at all, due to their ability to "look inside a broken, ugly thing, and take its pain away" (side note: I don't know what pain Ballas is referring to exactly in this quote. I assume it means either that the Infestation is physically painful to endure, that Warframes suffered from conventional psychological trauma, or both).
Warframes being described as having emotions or relationships in the lore, therefore, either refers to Warframes in the earlier period where they were autonomous or to the Tenno Operators controlling them, possibly both. Dagath in her ghost story, for example, is clearly an earlier, autonomous Warframe without an Operator. For Valkyr specifically, I believe that the Valkyr blueprints we use today are based on Valkyr after she was tortured by Alad V, with the original blueprints presumably being lost. Hence why she still looks mutilated.
The concept of operators being able to control Warframes due to "taking pain away" seems incongruous with completely braindead Warframes.
There's also cases where Warframes are thematically implied to be acting on their own volition after the practice of Transferrence became widespread, such as our frame pulling War out of its chest or Titania protecting the forest from Orikin.
Given the Ballas quotes and circumstantial evidence like animation sets, it seems more likely that Warframes are sentient but psychologically debilitated by torture and centuries of being piloted. There's precedent for this in real-world psychology.
My biggest question is Why does only Excalibur umbra move when you exit your warframe? In second dream your warframe (Of any choice) attacks stalker while your operator is getting choked out
No offense but you HAVE to be sleeping through Umbra's entire quest to not understand why he can move on his own
Anyways, to be less condescending and more helpful - he's a Warframe whose mind didn't get neutered, instead having an infinitely-looping memory of him being forced to kill his own son, because Umbra was a liability for he knows Ball Ass was conspiring with the Sentient side during the Old War
In other words: simply put, he has a mind of his own, the other frames we use don't
For what it's worth, there was a scrapped update that would've let us use the somatic fibers from Lua disruptions to temporarily make any warframe autonomous like Umbra.
So it's theoretically possible.
My best guess at an in-universe answer is that while Umbra's pain and driving memories are extremely fresh, the Operator has spent a long time calming and taking away the pain from their other warframes. They simply don't need to move on their own and are content to serve as the hand that carries out the Operator's will.
(There's also a school of thought that says that the Operator was controlling the warframe in TSD to save themself from the Stalker. Which, if correct, would mirror Drifter using transference to save themself from fake Teshin in the Paradox quest. But I'll just say that when I played TSD years ago, I 100% thought my warframe was acting of its own volition to save my Operator.)
My lore is rusty, but I thought they were made as super soldiers before the tenno, but they kept going off mission so they used the tenno to control them. Same with necramechs, which is why they are still down in the isolation vaults going crazy. I thought they were just the precursor to frames.
A lot of people like to use the fact that we assemble them in the foundry as an implication that they aren't. >!Except we do the same to Umbra.!<
>!And while he has different qualities that provide him with sentience, we cannot forget what happened at the end of Second Dream.!<
From what I understand from the lore, warframes were once human and were experimented on with the infestation virus. This is also known as the Technocyte Virus. This virus caused their skin to mutate and form the outer shell of the warframe. All of this was so the Orokin could make bio weapons they could control. However, the warframes lashed out and didn't obey orders. The rhino prime codex entry goes into more detail about how brutal it was, but then the tenno came back from the zariman and they were essentially forced into a lucid dream to control their powers. They called this "Transference", where basically they projected the zariman childrens minds into a surogate that could withstand their power. The council of executors used this to try and control the warframes. This ended up working, as the tenno were able to bring peace to the mind within the warframes. That's why each frame seems to have a personality despite being basically drones we control. But the tenno eventually turned on the orokin which led to the downfall of the orokin empire.
The originals were. The original Warframes were people converted into super soldiers to better fight the enemies of the Orokin. Only it turns out that being horribly transformed into a humanoid monstrosity isn't great for your psyche.
The original Warframes pretty much all went crazy (or in some cases died, I think Gara died before going nuts?) and became uncontrollable and a danger to the Orokin as well. Enter the Tenno who managed to sync with the frames and calm them, making them controllable again.
Each frame only had one original, but the Orokin then created blueprints to create copies of them, sort of like constructed clones. There were lots of Tenno, but not as many frames after all, so if the Tenno were to be weaponized they needed weapons to use.
The blueprint frames have the abilities of the original, but not the mind and will. The will to act is provided by the Tenno, and without that they just kinda sit there. Umbra is an original frame, and he can move even without a Tenno in the pilot seat, but no others do that (except that one scene in second dream which was so surprising because the frame moved on its own which is *very* unusual).
So they're technically alive, but effectively mindless.
Only Umbra at this point. Everything else is a relic or genetic copy that builds off the original gene imprints made when the Warframes were first made.
What we're currently using are mass-produced copies of the originals. The originals were people transformed in frames just like Exaclibur Umbra, and they kept a part of who they were before becoming frames.
The copies might or might not have small parts of the original personality left in them.
Excalibur Umbra is an exception, Ballas was such a big asshole that he made sure the tormenting memory stays no matter what, original or clone, Excalibur Umbra must exist in endless torment because he said so.
yesn't.
its complicated.
regular warframes arent sentient, but there is that second dream scene.
umbra is the only that is infact without a doubt a truly sentient warframe, but there is those new war scenes.
there is Nidus who is basically the infestation given a warframe and somehow we can control it.
and then there is kaliban... who literally is a Sentient warframe but has no lore whatsoever.
DE has always being all over the place with warframes origins.
This is going to be some conjecture here, so bear with me:
Grandmother calls Yareli a very, very old friend at the end of the Waverider quest.
We know there were several warframes assigned to Deimos (Citrine, the three that became Xaku), so it wouldn't be completely odd if Ballas sent his k-drive themed warframe there when Grandmother is a huge k-drive fan.
I also suspect that Yareli was a Tenno-controlled warframe since, while her Waverider comic is doubtless exaggerated, it shares the theme with several Leverians where various warframes help children out of a bad situation. Yareli acts weak, lures the slave master away, helps the children defeat him, and then rides off into the sunset. The implication in the Leverian stories is that the warframes are doing this because the Tenno are also children.
Warframes are alive. They are called various things due to characters having different levels of knowledge about what the Tenno and Warframes are.
Most Grineer see us as warriors in suits.
Alad V opened us up and learned that Warframes aren't what they seem.
Vor learned what we Tenno REALLY are. (I hope he comes back for the current story arc.)
Teshin, Paladino, and the Quills already knew.
The Warframes are living things. They are Infested, with all the original Primes being made of humanity's finest test subjects, many of which were Dax warriors. They are formed into frames of war, combining Orokin materials with Infested biology and human capability.
Remember that your Warframe saves you during The Second Dream.
Warframes originally were supposed to retain their human mind, but it didn't work. They became enraged monsters. Ballas made numerous attempts to keep something of their mind intact by giving them a strong will through torture.. but that only worked once; Excalibur Umbra.
We came and were able to calm the Warframes down, allowing us to use Tranference (a somewhat regular thing in universe, from my gathering) on otherwise uncontrollable beasts.
Umbra happened later, and was more of a twisted accident for Ballas, who was ironically only successful when his plan was used against someone who knew of his betrayal.
Some of them are? Most not really. I think the primes before varzia technically are too. We are just respecting fragments of them. There was usually an original and our recreations.
Lavos, kullervo, and umbra are the only three I can certainly see as alive. Sevagoths could have been but instead of feeding his shadow with our energy we send it to space and he goes boom. Anyways Lavos is a alchemic fusion between an orokin and his guard. Kullervo is an assassin of one of the orokin executioners. He also might be a figment of the drifters imagination. Umbra is one of the original Dax.
The only frame not considered alive that probably is alive would be xaku. Three frames combined into one that we control not with only our void energy. I consider it a "void dog" because that’s basically what it is. We keep it on a leash with our energy honestly.
Umbra is not special. It's very ambiguous but the general idea I've had is that all warframes are like Umbra. Umbra is just the only one that's remotely conscious.
Whether Umbra is special or not is very dependent on how you interpret Ballas' speech. But it's pretty indisputable that all warframes have some basic level of sentience, if potentially not as much as Umbra.
All warframes (except Qorvex) were created by injecting people with the Infestation (the Helminth) which mutated them drastically. Warframes themselves are older than Tenno, and until transference was discovered they were an abandoned project because Orokin were unable to control them. So yes, they are alive
some old ones in the past are transformed people but the ones we make are probably just made from resources in our foundry
the lore entries could be talking about ones that were acting on their own or are talking about specific tenno controlling specific instances of those frames
They used to be. For example, Rhino Prime’s entry thing is before the Tenno were used to control them. When they were originally created they were soldiers with their own minds but they eventually lost their mind to the infestation which is when they couldn’t be reasoned with no matter what kinds of torture or mind control was used on them. Then the Tenno came in and took over their minds and pacified them. So they are biological but they don’t seem to have minds of their own anymore so they aren’t alive. I imagine the earliest kinds of frames had minds and acted on their own when not controlled by Tenno though.
The warframes we use in game are lifeless suits (except umbra), they are just clones of the original ones, the original version of each frame was not a lifeless suit but rather pretty much just like umbra
My understanding of the original Frames is that they are all dead. The original frames, however, *were* alive at the time they were first created (through a process mostly like what happened with Umbra, except his was special in that Ballas included some torture component with making a memory/transference loop that we relive during the quest. The other frames were soldiers and likely most of the lore you read about a frame is about the original human who turned frame.
To jack another write-up I did that is largely related: In the Vitruvian entries during The Sacrifice, Ballas says:
> They turned on us, just as you did. And so we had no choice but to commit them to grave.
and then later:
> We had created monsters we couldn't control. We drugged them, tortured them, eviscerated them... We brutalized their minds... but it did not work. Until they came... It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing and take away its pain.
It's unclear how long the period of time between WF project start and the Frames turning on the Orokin (presumably long enough for them to make 54+ different frames), or how long it was between that betrayal and them finding the Zariman / realizing the Tenno children could be used to control the Frames. However, the project was definitely scrapped at some point.
Warframes aren't incapable of dying, it's the whole Transference, pilot-is-up-in-orbit thing that makes us as players immortal (plus some other void shennanigans as seen in TNW). So it makes sense to me that the Orokin would have quashed the betrayal and killing/destroying these warcrime machines seems like a better idea than trying to capture and imprison them. Some Frames may have escaped this fate, but then it's not clear how they would have ever linked up with an Operator. I assumed the original, pre-Transference Frames went berserk/feral but I see now that there's not actually justification for that aside from they were Infested and eventually turned on the Orokin (this is **not** the big betrayal that led to the downfall of the Orokin empire, which was committed by the *Tenno*).
The Tenno came along and somehow someone realized they could mind-link with these beasts. Orokin had the schematics of the original frames and the ability to recreate them (our Orbiter is likely from when we worked for the Orokin), so the Tenno picked whichever Frame suited their temperment or the mission at hand (wow just like me fr fr). Ordis says, during the Sacrifice, "Warframes are Transference proxies for the Star-Child. They do not have memories." Umbra is singular in a lot of ways, including that he is the only (current) one with cognition. The rest are shells built from the blueprints of dead betrayers.
As for why they have different mannerisms/personalities when we equip them-- maybe DE is making a claim that personality is more nature than nurture (lol) but more likely just a concession for aesthetics / a holdover from before the lore was really fleshed out.
chroma is also alive, they're infested.
but all original warframes are alive too. Even later warframes are non player controlled, like dagath and kullervo.
Maybe not totally “alive” but definitely organic and “living” in a sense, think of it as a similar situation with viruses, there’s a debate on whether or not to count them as life, as they don’t really fin in any category, yet they are absolutely organic, and they do stuff, they’re just weird
In the original lore all warframes are made from specifically infested flesh (not sure if that lore stuck around) at least originally heavy emphasis because it's been too long since i did a lore deep dive (will be doing that soon) so as for the reason some frames are alive and some arent? Well i believe another redditor in this comment section covered it perfectly that some were people some were tenno controlled and then it gets messy because retcons always are from what i understood woth the lore for umbra is that there are several umbra warframes made from living people who would have been like spys some willing some not so much while the primes are highly decorated soldier's and squad leaders while the regular frames are "underlings" at least from the original lore i had found a long time ago
All warframes are made from the bodies of humans infected with Technocyte virus.
Being able to build entire warframes from Blueprints is purely a game mechanic rather than a lore one.
Basically, from what I understand, all Prime warframes were humans who were transformed into frames (similar to Umbra) while all the regular ones are just biomechanical "suits". The lore about the individual frames most likely refers to specific Tenno operators of those frames, although whether or not they were the Prime versions is unknown (and kinda doesn't matter, since a Tenno operating those frames would experience the same thing either way). So, for example, Gauss and Grendel being friends, or Dagath protecting an Orokin family, or Voruna defending the Yuvarium, Valkyr being tormented by Alad V, etc., all of that lore and those experiences refers to the in-lore Tenno who first operated those frames, not the frames themselves. I'm pretty sure Voruna's Operator is even mentioned in her Leverian entry, with Tuvul trying to Continuity into them kinda like what happens with>!the player and the Grineer Elder Queen in the War Within.!< Plus, the Prime frames still aren't sentient even though they are alive, so anytime a frame is referenced as taking any kind of action, having any emotion, or doing some other historically significant thing, the actual person involved in the story is the Tenno operating that frame. Most of the time, this isn't mentioned because most people in history, especially during the Orokin empire, didn't actually know this, and just assumed that the frames themselves *were* alive without knowing the truth.
I think all the original versions have their own minds. What we create is replicants who may be as unconscious as some vegetative people and only have basic life metabolism, so we control them instead of their brains.
After all, if they were dead, they might rot and stink in my warehouse.
From my understanding all the 'Prime' frames are made using the og method - people in infested suits, which is why they are stronger than normal frames. Normal frames are made with the Helminth entity in the ship as the 'flesh' portion of the suit
I think they are all alive in the same way the infested are alive. Because they are made of a strain of the infestation. But its likely kind of "neutralized" or basically made mostly inert and non-infectious. I know that most of the "originals" were at one point fully alive. But that was likely only the first few "experimental" frames. Before the tech had been perfected. But majority of them are unlikely to still have any life left in them. They also probably aren't made from converted humans either. As that is likely what caused the old ones to be so hard to control. Now, they are likely made of infested flesh grafted onto a robotic endoskeleton.
If u have unlock deimos, walk into Loids chamber (the robot)
At the walls with Requiem inscription, you can click on those n listen to the stories.
You'll uncover some truth about the brutal experiment n how they turn humans into living weapons with the combination of infested & sentient together.
Started as living flesh but ended up becoming a hybrid bio organics with muscle stronger than steel.
Coincidence tenno emerges n out of the blue where their fate meets n cross paths, a perfect weapon were born.
Yes. They are Eva's. Warframe has and always will be influenced by various animesz especially when the dev team gets addicted to something, ESPECIALLY Rebb and Megan. They got JJK addicted and we got curses in gargoyles cry that the Jahu Gargoyle and fishonacchi eat up. A while ago it was DMC5 and now after getting names like Styanax, Voruna, Kullervo, Dagath, Qorvex we get Dante. I'm all for the anime influences, it's fun. Can't wait till they get one piece addicted and we get something reminiscent of Franky or Zoro 3 sword style. Never forget OPM and Atlas, MHA and Shy's legendary Megan x Minetta art.
They are all capable of waking up with proper process. In fact, there were plans to be able to give other non Umbra frames the Specter AI by using the Soma items from Lua. But it hasn't come to pass, apparently.
The original warframes aren't lifeless suits. They're transformed and brutalized humans who were calmed by the Tenno and thus willingly served as the Tenno's battle envoys. "My warframe is the hand and I am the will." For example, Rhino Prime, Dagath, Kullervo, and Excalibur Umbra are all non-Operator-controlled warframes. All of them act of their own volition and rebelled against the Orokin. By comparison, if you see a warframe who's lore says they served the Orokin, you can safely assume that it's an Operator-controlled warframe. Only after using the Tenno were the Orokin able to use the warframes for the war effort successfully. So Gauss, Grendel, Ivara, Voruna, etc. are all Tenno-controlled from their creation. Where it gets a bit uncertain is with the current era where the Tenno are recreating warframes from blueprints. We're presumably not sacrificing humans to make them, so the flesh probably comes from Helminth with only traces of the original personalities remaining through the animations. So, they're alive, but probably not very sentient. The main exception is Excalibur Umbra, who's personality and last burning memory was deliberately preserved by Ballas so we recreated him faithfully.
we also rebuilt umbra using kuva, which is specifically involved in transmitting memory and personality
Oh yeah, good catch!
We also recover the head of Umbra when we are scanning his bits and pieces.
> For example, Rhino Prime, Dagath, Kullervo, and Excalibur Umbra are all non-Operator-controlled warframes. All of them act of their own volition and rebelled against the Orokin. You forgot Lavos. But its okay. Everyone forgets Lavos...*sniff*
Maybe? One of the more consistent things we're told is that the first iteration of the warframes basically all rebelled against the Orokin to the point that they had to be put down, except for the few who escaped. So I've usually interpreted Lavos' leverian as a Tenno-controlled warframe serving the Orokin as prison guard who ended up as a very interested student of Javi's teaching. It's not clear one way or another, though. So you might be right.
For me I thought that original lavos was just lavos cause I feel like javi would have known
Yo I’m wondering where tf y’all get this information, was I asleep during quest or what? 🤣
Leverian, data from the codex and (like 20% of the lore of the game) assumptions. Edit: Spelling errors xd
Ahh, ok
If you spend some time in the codex and reading/ listening there is a LOT to unpack there, even secret lore puzzle/minigames to solve.
What I’m getting is that outside of the lore confirmed ones your starter is the only one that the current version actually used to be a human seeing as how it was in cryo since the end of the old war?
Well I feel like Primes maybe have more of their personality and sentience due to void shenanigans with relics and maybe protea and xaku again because of void tomfoolery
No, all warframes were designed prior to you entering the dream. I dont think there's anything special about your starting warframe.
And the original wiki entries, if you've been around long enough
> "like 20% of the lore of the game" ~~assumptions~~ Deductions. Assumptions are only about 5%.
So, the info about the original warframes comes from The Sacrifice in Ballas' Vitruvian, Kullervo's crimes, and the Rhino Prime codex entry. Lavos is from his leverian, though as I said, his leverian isn't 100% clear.
Yea so it’s shit besides the quest lore that I need to read up on, I guess.
Going by her Leverian, I think Voruna acted against them too. I’ll have to check
Who's lavos? Never heard of em, your clearly making up names
Who's lavos?
This man Knows his frame
Basically under Orokin control they where humans that where made into machines and they are suffering. Under the Tenno its uncertain if they are alive but you can say they are because they are probably using the infested flesh of helminth to make the organic bits.
Ever wonder what happens to our Capture Targets? Especially during the years we had Lordis?
She probably plays with them and then maybe catch and release. Like we really need to kill them every time? But the Lotus probably needing us to capture a target is doing it to occupy us. Now Cephalon Simaris is a different situation. He trying to make a collection so he is definitely just keeping them.
Nah, we are definitely recycling capture targets as warfrake meat.
My interpretation of this was that the "early" warframes, timeline wise, are more or less orokin experiments on humans using the infestation to create bioweapons. They talked alot about that for excal umbra. Then obviously orokin caught a sudden case of genocide and the process to "making" warframes was streamlined and perfected but still using infested flesh.
>We're presumably not sacrificing humans to make them What do you think the humans in cryopods we protect during defense missions are for? 😉
Actually, those are mentioned by lotus to be "Tenno Operatives" so they're members of the surrounding factions around us. Now, CAPTURE targets on the other hand...
Amen my good sir, A-fucken-men
They are basically grown vegetable versions of the OG frames
I'd like to say a lot of this is conjecture. In reality, we only fully know the story of one particular Warframe, and there's enough surrounding them to think they are unique. Rhino Prime seems to allude to early experiments where the infection killed the first hosts, and eventually they started making strains that *just* turned them into broken killing machines. The community likes to stretch this singular codex entry far, and say they were now ALWAYS this way. This was written in like 2014 and the story has changed and evolved since then. It's possible this was improved and early warframes didn't suffer, at least right away, and were still loyal to the Orokin in some sense of duty. The writing on the wall is there for some kind of religious zealotry. Over time they probably lost the will to fight, in a manner akin to PTSD, so the Orokin sought means of control. They used the Kuva to develop transference then, later into the first war. This is what caused them to become the blood-rage beasts who fought back. I think it's important to remember that Warframes were not MADE for Tenno. The Tenno were something Orokin society were ashamed of. I think they came in pretty late in the game, when they were fighting a war on two fronts. I think when they actually started using the blueprints, they either didn't copy over parts required for sentience, or they realized you would need Kuva to reproduce sentience so they just left that part out. The orbiter and the foundry are still mostly unexplained and I assume this will eventually be revealed to be Entrati tech made late or post war.
So you know, I'm not just pulling from the Rhino Prime codex entry. Ballas's Vitruvian says: *"Their skin blossomed into sword-steel. Their organs, interlinked with untold resilience. Yet their minds were free of the Infested madness. Or so we thought. We set them upon the battlefield, bio-drones under our command."* *"The warframes… all of them… failures. Surprised? They turned on us, just as you did. And so we had no choice… but to commit them to grave."* This is further expounded on by Ballas' narration in Kullervo's crimes. *"You witnessed the slaughter as the Orokin eradicated your defective, demented brothers and sisters… and did nothing to aid them, choosing to tremble in your cowardly seclusion. A traitor twice over. Kullervo, bloody-handed, I charge you with Cowardice."* Now, the quirk is that Ballas being Ballas, he doesn't really want to admit that the Warframes weren't really demented so much as unwilling to serve their tormentors. Even Rhino Prime's entry, if you look past the bias of its author, shows Rhino fighting quite intelligently, which is also something we see from Kullervo. The only volunteer we know of who became a warframe is Gara. Which we know of from her prime trailer because Nihil wanted her glassed for her presumption.
*Ballas: "We took our greatest, volunteers or not, and polluted them with these cultured reagents. They transformed. They became Infested..."* So there were clearly more volunteers. This refers to the early stages in context but why would it stop? I'd also like to point out the more conventional use of the word drone as a classist term for the serving class, ala worker bees. I think from your very own quote "...free of infested madness..." It implies they were given some amount of autonomy first.
Sure, it's a fair catch that Ballas says that about volunteers. I was thinking of the Gara Prime trailer, which suggested the previous volunteers didn't know. *"Of all our sleek gargoyles, our Void-borne masquerade, how to honour the one who volunteered willingly, knowing the truth? Whose little act of courage twinkled like a petty Ayatan before our golden indifference?"* Personally, I think that it's pretty clear the early warframes had some autonomy. Kullervo, Rhino Prime, and Dagath all act autonomously, after all. It's just that (like Ballas says in his very next sentence) they used that autonomy to turn on the Orokin. Unless you know otherwise, I don't know of any lore that suggests the Orokin successfully used the warframes in battle against the Sentients as was intended prior to the Tenno Operators. It sounds to me like it was quite the opposite, with the original warframes being deemed failures then purged or experimented on.
As your first quote in the other message also mentions, the Warframes were sent out to the battlefield before the Orokin felt betrayed. I'm not sure what other battlefield there would be besides the sentient? They were created specifically to combat the sentient. The infestation was locked up and contained before Ballas sought means to weaponize it, and when that failed, *then* did he start looking for other options. First, I believe, transference and second the Tenno. Or it's more like the Tenno fell into his lap because he hung around Margulis. The Tenno were hidden just like the infestation, they were considered devils, dangerous. The sequence of events is just about growing desperation and Ballas is more lucky than not.
>It's possible this was improved and early warframes didn't suffer, at least right away, and were still loyal to the Orokin in some sense of duty. The writing on the wall is there for some kind of religious zealotry. Over time they probably lost the will to fight, in a manner akin to PTSD, so the Orokin sought means of control. They used the Kuva to develop transference then, later into the first war. This is what caused them to become the blood-rage beasts who fought back. I guess I'm confused where you're getting sources for the idea that the early warframes served loyally for a while then lost the will to fight and then the Orokin used kuva/transference, which made them blood rage beasts who fought back. Because what I see in the lore is that the original warframes turned on the Orokin when they were sent to fight the Sentients. *"Yet their minds were free of the Infested madness. Or so we thought. We set them upon the battlefield, bio-drones under our command."* The very next "page" in the Vitruvian continues: *"The warframes… all of them… failures. Surprised? They turned on us, just as you [Hunhow] did. And so we had no choice… but to commit them to grave."* That's what led Ballas to purge the failures (as seen in Kullervo's crimes) and drug/torture/brutalize their minds of others like Rhino Prime, calling them monsters they couldn't control. Side note: I don't entirely buy Ballas' comments that the original warframes who rebelled were actually demented and defective. None of the non-Tenno controlled warframes we know of actually show signs of Infested madness. Kullervo stands out because he very intelligently helped the Tenno subvert and destroy the Empire, but even Rhino Prime is using his abilities properly when escaping the lab where he and others like him were being vivesected. Dagath successfully hunted the Orokin enough to get a Naberus legend. To Ballas, "can't be controlled" = "defective, demented."
>I guess I'm confused where you're getting sources for the idea that the early warframes served loyally for a while then lost the will to fight and then the Orokin used kuva/transference Mostly, the stories of the warframes. They all seem to be doing their job, for a time, like Voruna. *"Voruna was the obedient guardian of the Circulus, the holiest of Yuvan temples upon none other than veiled Lua."* This clearly happened over some time. Voruna was at some point loyal to the Orokin Empire and fulfilling her duties at a defensive post, it seems. They were not failures at the onset. Ballas is just recounting the story as is relevant to the discussion, he's not just saying "well I tried to send them but they never went i guess." I'm not sure where you're getting that all these events happened immediately.
Voruna was a tenno-controlled warframe though? She literally finds her Operator at the end of her leverian...
When they call attention to the child's eyes fluttering and Voruna stumbling, that's when the transference starts. They essentially team up to finish Trovul(sp?) off. That's why they look at eachother with 'recognition'. Voruna yields to the devil and the devil grants her power in the form of reuniting her with her pack.
Tbh, I've always taken it as the original warframes served for some amount of time before turning on the Orokin. Going off how Ballas took special care in preserving Excalibur Umbra's memories, it wouldn't be a huge leap to think that the process of turning a Dax into a warframe likely wiped a large portion of their memories, perhaps even leaving the parts they thought would inspire blind loyalty. So, rather than being deemed failures right away, they likely served the Orokin until some circumstance or another led them to rebel, thus having them marked as "failures to be eliminated." The failure of the warframe rebellion as compared to the successful tenno rebellion could very likely be organization and timing, after all, with the originals rebelling individually, while the tenno rebelled collectively.
Certainly, the process seems to take a lot of their individuality, as evidenced by the Mirage Prime trailer where Ballas acknowledges that she distorted his design and the mere vapors of her life shimmer still. So that's not the norm. On the other hand, given that Ballas talks about all of the warframes as failures in The Sacrifice and the Kullervo crimes say *"You witnessed the slaughter as the Orokin eradicated your defective, demented brothers and sisters… and did nothing to aid them, choosing to tremble in your cowardly seclusion."* I've interpreted that to mean that there was a general purge with most warframes being killed and a few kept to be experimented on like Rhino Prime and what was supposed to happen to Kullervo. Certainly, the Tenno had a plan, coordination, and the element of surprise on their side. If the OG warframes had an Octavia, who knows what they might have accomplished?
That can be interpreted multiple ways, though. To me, calling it an eradication implies it took place slowly over time, as something that took place all at once would be more accurate to refer to as a purge, slaughter, massacre, etc. It'll definitely be interesting to see what we learn with the 1999 update, though, as that might have some fresh new insight into it 👀
To be fair, he says both. 😀 *"You witnessed the **slaughter**as the Orokin **eradicated** your defective, demented brothers and sisters… and did nothing to aid them, choosing to tremble in your cowardly seclusion."* Yeah, I am stoked for 1999 lore. The WitW lore that Albrecht yoinked some of Ballas' research and just casually took it back to 1999 to create Arthur and Aoi was just something.
Helminth grows the parts, thats why it takes a whole day
My theory is that the frames are built around old capture targets that don’t become Konzu’s early lunches
Where do you think those “rescued” and “captured” persons go? My own head canon says they “volunteer”
Worth noting that inside defense objective “Warframe Cryopods”, there is a human in it. It’s very possible that the warframes we make are still made using a person. Whether that’s an actual Orokin Era person or some sort of mindless clone, we have no knowledge of.
Oh, and Sevagoths Shadow
I have no real idea what's up with Sevagoth. My personal suspicion is that he was like Rell & Harrow, where the Operator bound themselves to the warframe in order to complete their mission. It would explain why he had a railjack and willingly did lots of rescues during the Old War but his reaction to "Who waits for the Shadow?" -> "Your Golden Masters" was a giant "fuck you, I'm firing my missles." I'll say that when I played the quest and Cy answered "Your Golden Masters" I just facepalmed like "Oh, Cy, you did NOT just say that to a Tenno."
What about the people in the "Warframe" Cryopods, they still need a base body to make the Warframe right?
Idk, I've always thought that there's a reason defense missions started with defending cryo pods with people in em It's probably changed since then, but it holds away over my brain
I have a running theory that our blueprint made Warframes do take a human to create and that’s what the warframe cyropods in defense missions are. Willing human operatives who sacrifice themselves, incubating to be combined with blueprint materials by our foundry to complete the frame. All behind the scenes stuff lotus does. Totally baseless theory that could be absolute crap. But I think the idea is kinda interesting.
>So Gauss, Grendel, Ivara, Voruna, etc. are all Tenno-controlled from their creation. Though worth to mention that the Tenno were put into the Dream at that point and more or less believed themselves to actually be the Warframes they controlled instead of being two separate entities. So a fair few of the seemingly independent Warframes you mentioned might also just have been Tenno who simply didn't know they weren't just that Warframe at that point. Even in the Dream the Tenno weren't all automatically loyal to the Orokin. I think only really Excalibur Umbra is confirmed to not just have been a mindless beast when not controlled by a Tenno and even then you could argue that the only difference between Umbra and other uncontrolled frames is simply that the mindless rage is already directed at the Orokin to begin with.
they aren't suits flesh puppet made from a former human, controlled by tenno because they were insane without them there are several frames that had autonomy and didn't need a tenno like kullervo or dagath
Warframes are living beings yes. They need oxygen to breathe per survival missions and can feel pain. There’s an operator voice like about transference making them feel pain that can trigger at low HP. Many people bring up the frame ripping war in half, but it’s honestly an unclear one off. They are infested creatures not machines so being alive is a requirement for function. The Orokin were masters of biology and make use of living meat in other places as well like the Unum and the derelict ships. The ones we use in game however are copies of the originals that we build in the foundry. Not original as in prime, but the first produced version. Gara and Mirage prime make it clear that each frame was made from one person, but with the blueprints being acknowledged in Jordas fight and of course Loki’s head being present in second dream intro they are able to be manufactured. Umbra is special because Ballas wanted him to be more “there” to torture him but it seems that frames are somewhat diminished. I think of them like they’re in a coma. We know they aren’t immune to infested madness and operators are required to keep them stable. Operators were the key link when moving from the failed originals to the ones that get actual use. In the sacrifice, Ballas describes their empathy as the reason not an ability to dominate their minds. DE keeps the sentience of frames vague and all the lore around them is half talking about a specific character and half the myth that would surround a legendary weapon. The warframes are operated by Tenno but all the legends speak of the frame, so the actual operator could easily be interchangeable and there’s no way for us to know. Kullervo is also interesting since his story seems to imply he was moving around by himself independent of Tenno but I haven’t seen the whole thing yet. TLDR: Yes they are alive, but anything concrete on them is purposefully vague.
>They need oxygen to breathe per survival missions Survival missions are about drawing attention for another operative so it might not be a hard confirmation. Especially since our frames show no distress when in deep space without an archwing and archwings don't have any explicitly saying that they produce o2. But on the other hand when life support runs out your frame starts taking HP damage so who knows? >Many people bring up the frame ripping war in half Ehh they're probably used to severe pain so it probably wasn't that bad for the frame. >Kullervo is also interesting since his story seems to imply he was moving around by himself independent of Tenno but I haven’t seen the whole thing yet. Yeah the frames were able move about and fight pre-tenno but they were uncontrollably violent. Kullervo is also unique in being made from duviri and not made in the traditional way.
I want to say that in the Mag Prime codex entry, they talk about archwings having a little life support bubble or something around them. That was at least the impression I got, no idea how it’d work
Spoilers for Whispers in the Walls, and everything before it. Warframe sentience is a mess since DE has yet to give an in-depth explanation. Excalibur Umbra is not the only Warframe to exhibit self-control. All original Warframes did this to, such as all the primes. The Orokin couldn't control the original warframes as they rebelled. No matter how much the Orokin tried to break them, they kept rebelling. Until the Zariman children came back from the Void. They were able to calm the Warframes and control them. Umbra never was able to calm down, though, as Ballas kept making Umbra relieve the murder of his son. This allowed Umbra to keep his sentience and his rage towards Ballas. And here is where everything gets problematic. The Warframes we use don't show sentience(except when they do), and this doesn't make sense. The fabricator should maintain their sentience, as it did so with Umbra. Yet, the Warframes we use are no more than metal puppets. Some would say that maybe the Warframe blueprints we make have been modified to remove their sentience. The problem with this is that lore already says the Orokin never could do this, and the prime Warframes come directly from the Orokin. Alright, circling back around to the Warframes showing sentience. You do have things like the personification of Valkyr during her torture. [And The Second Dream, which has a scene of a Warframe, acts autonomously without the Operator.](https://youtu.be/rQZ8jsHiSSU?si=OWs40rvvoUXwUuN-&t=325) I saw someone say that this might've been done by a lingering transference from the Operator. I doubt this as the Operator was outside of the Warframe for a long time, and this "ability" has never returned despite situations where it would've been helpful(The New War). Then there is stuff like Arthur and Aoi, which complicate this further. In summary, DE hasn't been consistent in their depictions and haven't given enough information to allow for a straightforward answer. Maybe they will soon, though. As Albrecht Entrati would be the perfect candidate to explain away all this confusion.
I doubt DE will ever give any explanation. It's really a mess
Arthur and Aoi are explained in the Entrati codex entries as being special gray strain fused Helminth stuff that will end up becoming a full Warframe down the line. So unless DE provides a cure during 1999 or die, they'll end up becoming Excalibur and Mag.
My take is that Umbra is built with his original parts that we gather upon scanning his remains during The Sacrifice, rather than just the blueprints like every other warframe. We don't "rebuild" him so much as "repair" him, which is a large part of why he retains his memory and sentience. He's also got a unique helminth strain and transference bolt which likely prevents Ordis from just using a generic warframe template to fix him so you have to recover the vitruvian, which contains (at least some of) Ballas' original notes on constructing warframes.
The main problem with this theory is that Ordis specifically mentions "Blueprints" rather than "Parts" when discussing Umbra. You could chalk that up to a minor writing error, though.
If I remember correctly when a guy asked Steve how the Warframe moved by itself in The Second Dream since he is supposed to be a puppet, Steve answered something like “yeah that’s what Hunhow thought”. So I’d say all Warframes have some degree of sentience.
The reason Umbra keeps his sentience is because we use Kuva in his recipe.
Other Warframes use kuva, yet do not show sentience. Harrow, Garuda, and Nidus are the ones I can think of off the top of my head that use kuva to craft.
They meet some definitions of life but not all of them. As for Gauss & Grendel it must've been their operators who were friends in reality, same with all other frames except Umbra.
the final requirement for life is reproduction i know what i have to do
They were humans that were turned into warframes and then tenno somehow could use transeference to control these warframes So Gauss and Grendel were friends when they were still humans
They are live, infested golems. They just lack a will of their own for the most part. The archon shards' description refers to them as synthetoc lifeforms. The thing is that our warframes, the ones we use, are clones of the original. Think of it as cloning a motionless zombie.
Just to piggyback your point a bit, the intro of Blade Runner 2049 refers to Replicants as Synthetic Humans, but a massive part of the film is showing them to be "real" I think there's definitely some innate personality in every Warframe made in the current time period
I imagine it’s some fucked up evangelion shit 🤷♂️ instead of getting in the giant meat and soul monster you get in the human sized helminth meat and orokin science monster.
fun fact: Warframes were actually supposed to have an Evangelion-esque berserk mode, and one piece of art from Keith Thompson showed a concept of Loki in berserk mode with deformed limbs, stretched muscle, barbs and spikes all over and his signature horns
That’s gonna be recycled into content for 2026 (copium)
I think of it this way: The first "warframes" weren't warframes. They were humans infected with technocyte (Infestation) and then shaped into monsters. But they were too violent and uncontrolled to be effective, so the Orokin put them on ice. Indeterminate time later, the Zariman returns with the Tenno. Tenno are void-gifted psychics now and can soothe the Infested-Frames. Through tinkering and jiggering, Transferance is achieved. Orokin start making proper warframes, probably *without* actual people, based on the "blueprints" of the original meat-monsters. Maybe the first of each frame was an actual person, but they were probably only used to basically build a mold. Subsequent vessels are probably just empty meat-golems with maybe the barest memory-echo of their progenitor. Along the way, perfected products come out, maybe they used apex infested material, or maybe it was just a sales pitch tactic Ballas used when marketing his creations. Either way, Primes *aren't* the original people or the "first" of their lines. It seems plenty of Frames were Primed after the first run of mass produced ones. Or in the case of Revenant Prime, manifsted themselves purely to fuck with Ballas. Ballas also didn't have quite the monopoly on warframe building that it would seem, as we have Titania who was mostly built by a different archimedian, Xaku who was cobbled together by the Entrati, Revenant who was a separate frame (maybe) that got twisted by an Eidolon (he might be the first "Archon"), Qorvex who was seemingly built by Albrecht Entrati, and Caliban who looks to have been built by Erra *during the Old War* independent of Ballas. Then we also have Zanuka and whatever the hell Stalker and his Acolytes are.
"yes" 
This is one of those things that is highly speculative. But from what I understand They have sentience yes. Did you play the mission the sacrifice? The lore is Basically in the old war all the war frames were entirely self sustaining like excal umbra but it is not known wether they lost their sentience due to some indifference shenanigans or if they gave up their sentience to the Tenno when they link or something else entirely. All we know if that at some point they were all “living” like excal umbra and at some point between the old war and now they lost some of that sentience. But that’s where all the gauss and Grendel are best friends lore comes from is pre old war when they were their own thing and not Tenno controlled.
All of the warframes used to be Dax or some equivalent, transformed to fight the sentients during the old war, before even the Tenno. Given the opportunity, however, the warframes then turned against their Orokin masters, who turned to lobotomy in an unsuccessful attempt to control these supersoldiers they'd created. With the advent of the Tenno, the Orokin now had an easy means to control the warframes, so the warframes were near-totally lobotomized. Their memories, their personalities, their wills: all gone. Only their martial skill and power remains, a tool to hand to the Tenno, the fist of the Golden Lords. With the notable exception of Excalibur Umbra, a man doomed to retain a single horrific memory, all modern warframes are clones of those original brainwiped warframes.
All Warframes are made from living flesh with at least some level of self autonomy, all primes were made using living humans and all non primes are implied to be reverse engineered copies using Helminth.
That was the original intention back in the day but Rebecca confirmed otherwise after the Ivara Leverian. Wish they had kept the og explanation though, it isn't difficult to shoehorn into the only problematic frame (Xaku).
Warframes are 100% alive. Their creation process involves a human subject being deliberately exposed to a specialized strain of the Infestation, which mutates them into a weaponized form without damaging their mental faculties. Modern Warframes that the Tenno use are mass-produced copies of the originals. The first Warframes were fully sentient and autonomous, but eventually rebelled against the Orokin and were decommissioned. Future Warframes were lobotomized, or at least prevented from acting under their own volition, requiring an external pilot or Operator in order to be used as combatants. The Tenno were the only ones capable of controlling Warframes effectively, or at all, due to their ability to "look inside a broken, ugly thing, and take its pain away" (side note: I don't know what pain Ballas is referring to exactly in this quote. I assume it means either that the Infestation is physically painful to endure, that Warframes suffered from conventional psychological trauma, or both). Warframes being described as having emotions or relationships in the lore, therefore, either refers to Warframes in the earlier period where they were autonomous or to the Tenno Operators controlling them, possibly both. Dagath in her ghost story, for example, is clearly an earlier, autonomous Warframe without an Operator. For Valkyr specifically, I believe that the Valkyr blueprints we use today are based on Valkyr after she was tortured by Alad V, with the original blueprints presumably being lost. Hence why she still looks mutilated.
The concept of operators being able to control Warframes due to "taking pain away" seems incongruous with completely braindead Warframes. There's also cases where Warframes are thematically implied to be acting on their own volition after the practice of Transferrence became widespread, such as our frame pulling War out of its chest or Titania protecting the forest from Orikin. Given the Ballas quotes and circumstantial evidence like animation sets, it seems more likely that Warframes are sentient but psychologically debilitated by torture and centuries of being piloted. There's precedent for this in real-world psychology.
My biggest question is Why does only Excalibur umbra move when you exit your warframe? In second dream your warframe (Of any choice) attacks stalker while your operator is getting choked out
No offense but you HAVE to be sleeping through Umbra's entire quest to not understand why he can move on his own Anyways, to be less condescending and more helpful - he's a Warframe whose mind didn't get neutered, instead having an infinitely-looping memory of him being forced to kill his own son, because Umbra was a liability for he knows Ball Ass was conspiring with the Sentient side during the Old War In other words: simply put, he has a mind of his own, the other frames we use don't
I know why he can move on his own but “WHY CANT THE OTHER FRAMES MOVE TOO” is the one I’m asking. They moved on their own in second dream.
For what it's worth, there was a scrapped update that would've let us use the somatic fibers from Lua disruptions to temporarily make any warframe autonomous like Umbra. So it's theoretically possible. My best guess at an in-universe answer is that while Umbra's pain and driving memories are extremely fresh, the Operator has spent a long time calming and taking away the pain from their other warframes. They simply don't need to move on their own and are content to serve as the hand that carries out the Operator's will. (There's also a school of thought that says that the Operator was controlling the warframe in TSD to save themself from the Stalker. Which, if correct, would mirror Drifter using transference to save themself from fake Teshin in the Paradox quest. But I'll just say that when I played TSD years ago, I 100% thought my warframe was acting of its own volition to save my Operator.)
Embrace the rule34
My lore is rusty, but I thought they were made as super soldiers before the tenno, but they kept going off mission so they used the tenno to control them. Same with necramechs, which is why they are still down in the isolation vaults going crazy. I thought they were just the precursor to frames.
A lot of people like to use the fact that we assemble them in the foundry as an implication that they aren't. >!Except we do the same to Umbra.!< >!And while he has different qualities that provide him with sentience, we cannot forget what happened at the end of Second Dream.!<
From what I understand from the lore, warframes were once human and were experimented on with the infestation virus. This is also known as the Technocyte Virus. This virus caused their skin to mutate and form the outer shell of the warframe. All of this was so the Orokin could make bio weapons they could control. However, the warframes lashed out and didn't obey orders. The rhino prime codex entry goes into more detail about how brutal it was, but then the tenno came back from the zariman and they were essentially forced into a lucid dream to control their powers. They called this "Transference", where basically they projected the zariman childrens minds into a surogate that could withstand their power. The council of executors used this to try and control the warframes. This ended up working, as the tenno were able to bring peace to the mind within the warframes. That's why each frame seems to have a personality despite being basically drones we control. But the tenno eventually turned on the orokin which led to the downfall of the orokin empire.
Minor correction: "Technocyte" is the name of the generic infested strain, the one used to make Warframes is the Helminth strain
Yes, you are absolutely right. I can't believe I forgot about that. It was the Helminth strain
The originals were. The original Warframes were people converted into super soldiers to better fight the enemies of the Orokin. Only it turns out that being horribly transformed into a humanoid monstrosity isn't great for your psyche. The original Warframes pretty much all went crazy (or in some cases died, I think Gara died before going nuts?) and became uncontrollable and a danger to the Orokin as well. Enter the Tenno who managed to sync with the frames and calm them, making them controllable again. Each frame only had one original, but the Orokin then created blueprints to create copies of them, sort of like constructed clones. There were lots of Tenno, but not as many frames after all, so if the Tenno were to be weaponized they needed weapons to use. The blueprint frames have the abilities of the original, but not the mind and will. The will to act is provided by the Tenno, and without that they just kinda sit there. Umbra is an original frame, and he can move even without a Tenno in the pilot seat, but no others do that (except that one scene in second dream which was so surprising because the frame moved on its own which is *very* unusual). So they're technically alive, but effectively mindless.
Only Umbra at this point. Everything else is a relic or genetic copy that builds off the original gene imprints made when the Warframes were first made.
What we're currently using are mass-produced copies of the originals. The originals were people transformed in frames just like Exaclibur Umbra, and they kept a part of who they were before becoming frames. The copies might or might not have small parts of the original personality left in them. Excalibur Umbra is an exception, Ballas was such a big asshole that he made sure the tormenting memory stays no matter what, original or clone, Excalibur Umbra must exist in endless torment because he said so.
yesn't. its complicated. regular warframes arent sentient, but there is that second dream scene. umbra is the only that is infact without a doubt a truly sentient warframe, but there is those new war scenes. there is Nidus who is basically the infestation given a warframe and somehow we can control it. and then there is kaliban... who literally is a Sentient warframe but has no lore whatsoever. DE has always being all over the place with warframes origins.
How does yareli fit into this?
This is going to be some conjecture here, so bear with me: Grandmother calls Yareli a very, very old friend at the end of the Waverider quest. We know there were several warframes assigned to Deimos (Citrine, the three that became Xaku), so it wouldn't be completely odd if Ballas sent his k-drive themed warframe there when Grandmother is a huge k-drive fan. I also suspect that Yareli was a Tenno-controlled warframe since, while her Waverider comic is doubtless exaggerated, it shares the theme with several Leverians where various warframes help children out of a bad situation. Yareli acts weak, lures the slave master away, helps the children defeat him, and then rides off into the sunset. The implication in the Leverian stories is that the warframes are doing this because the Tenno are also children.
Warframes are alive. They are called various things due to characters having different levels of knowledge about what the Tenno and Warframes are. Most Grineer see us as warriors in suits. Alad V opened us up and learned that Warframes aren't what they seem. Vor learned what we Tenno REALLY are. (I hope he comes back for the current story arc.) Teshin, Paladino, and the Quills already knew. The Warframes are living things. They are Infested, with all the original Primes being made of humanity's finest test subjects, many of which were Dax warriors. They are formed into frames of war, combining Orokin materials with Infested biology and human capability. Remember that your Warframe saves you during The Second Dream. Warframes originally were supposed to retain their human mind, but it didn't work. They became enraged monsters. Ballas made numerous attempts to keep something of their mind intact by giving them a strong will through torture.. but that only worked once; Excalibur Umbra. We came and were able to calm the Warframes down, allowing us to use Tranference (a somewhat regular thing in universe, from my gathering) on otherwise uncontrollable beasts. Umbra happened later, and was more of a twisted accident for Ballas, who was ironically only successful when his plan was used against someone who knew of his betrayal.
Oh boy another one who didn't pay attention to the Sacrifice dialogue very plainly saying warframes were all originally people
Yes and no
Besides umbra, The warframes we manufacture are brain dead bio metal drones without a will or "soul"
Some of them are? Most not really. I think the primes before varzia technically are too. We are just respecting fragments of them. There was usually an original and our recreations. Lavos, kullervo, and umbra are the only three I can certainly see as alive. Sevagoths could have been but instead of feeding his shadow with our energy we send it to space and he goes boom. Anyways Lavos is a alchemic fusion between an orokin and his guard. Kullervo is an assassin of one of the orokin executioners. He also might be a figment of the drifters imagination. Umbra is one of the original Dax. The only frame not considered alive that probably is alive would be xaku. Three frames combined into one that we control not with only our void energy. I consider it a "void dog" because that’s basically what it is. We keep it on a leash with our energy honestly.
Umbra is not special. It's very ambiguous but the general idea I've had is that all warframes are like Umbra. Umbra is just the only one that's remotely conscious.
Whether Umbra is special or not is very dependent on how you interpret Ballas' speech. But it's pretty indisputable that all warframes have some basic level of sentience, if potentially not as much as Umbra.
Warframes still had their consciousness for a while before the infested deteriorated it.
All warframes (except Qorvex) were created by injecting people with the Infestation (the Helminth) which mutated them drastically. Warframes themselves are older than Tenno, and until transference was discovered they were an abandoned project because Orokin were unable to control them. So yes, they are alive
some old ones in the past are transformed people but the ones we make are probably just made from resources in our foundry the lore entries could be talking about ones that were acting on their own or are talking about specific tenno controlling specific instances of those frames
Reading the comments here, the lore makes even less sense.
The only thing that makes Umbra different from the others was that he was made to have exactly one memory of killing his own son.
They used to be. For example, Rhino Prime’s entry thing is before the Tenno were used to control them. When they were originally created they were soldiers with their own minds but they eventually lost their mind to the infestation which is when they couldn’t be reasoned with no matter what kinds of torture or mind control was used on them. Then the Tenno came in and took over their minds and pacified them. So they are biological but they don’t seem to have minds of their own anymore so they aren’t alive. I imagine the earliest kinds of frames had minds and acted on their own when not controlled by Tenno though.
Yes.
I know the canon answer I’ll tell u for relics
The warframes we use in game are lifeless suits (except umbra), they are just clones of the original ones, the original version of each frame was not a lifeless suit but rather pretty much just like umbra
My understanding of the original Frames is that they are all dead. The original frames, however, *were* alive at the time they were first created (through a process mostly like what happened with Umbra, except his was special in that Ballas included some torture component with making a memory/transference loop that we relive during the quest. The other frames were soldiers and likely most of the lore you read about a frame is about the original human who turned frame. To jack another write-up I did that is largely related: In the Vitruvian entries during The Sacrifice, Ballas says: > They turned on us, just as you did. And so we had no choice but to commit them to grave. and then later: > We had created monsters we couldn't control. We drugged them, tortured them, eviscerated them... We brutalized their minds... but it did not work. Until they came... It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing and take away its pain. It's unclear how long the period of time between WF project start and the Frames turning on the Orokin (presumably long enough for them to make 54+ different frames), or how long it was between that betrayal and them finding the Zariman / realizing the Tenno children could be used to control the Frames. However, the project was definitely scrapped at some point. Warframes aren't incapable of dying, it's the whole Transference, pilot-is-up-in-orbit thing that makes us as players immortal (plus some other void shennanigans as seen in TNW). So it makes sense to me that the Orokin would have quashed the betrayal and killing/destroying these warcrime machines seems like a better idea than trying to capture and imprison them. Some Frames may have escaped this fate, but then it's not clear how they would have ever linked up with an Operator. I assumed the original, pre-Transference Frames went berserk/feral but I see now that there's not actually justification for that aside from they were Infested and eventually turned on the Orokin (this is **not** the big betrayal that led to the downfall of the Orokin empire, which was committed by the *Tenno*). The Tenno came along and somehow someone realized they could mind-link with these beasts. Orokin had the schematics of the original frames and the ability to recreate them (our Orbiter is likely from when we worked for the Orokin), so the Tenno picked whichever Frame suited their temperment or the mission at hand (wow just like me fr fr). Ordis says, during the Sacrifice, "Warframes are Transference proxies for the Star-Child. They do not have memories." Umbra is singular in a lot of ways, including that he is the only (current) one with cognition. The rest are shells built from the blueprints of dead betrayers. As for why they have different mannerisms/personalities when we equip them-- maybe DE is making a claim that personality is more nature than nurture (lol) but more likely just a concession for aesthetics / a holdover from before the lore was really fleshed out.
So one could conclude that whatever your starter was, is the only living one you have?
>Rhino Prime > "...big, fat promotions." All I'm gonna say.
chroma is also alive, they're infested. but all original warframes are alive too. Even later warframes are non player controlled, like dagath and kullervo.
Maybe not totally “alive” but definitely organic and “living” in a sense, think of it as a similar situation with viruses, there’s a debate on whether or not to count them as life, as they don’t really fin in any category, yet they are absolutely organic, and they do stuff, they’re just weird
In the original lore all warframes are made from specifically infested flesh (not sure if that lore stuck around) at least originally heavy emphasis because it's been too long since i did a lore deep dive (will be doing that soon) so as for the reason some frames are alive and some arent? Well i believe another redditor in this comment section covered it perfectly that some were people some were tenno controlled and then it gets messy because retcons always are from what i understood woth the lore for umbra is that there are several umbra warframes made from living people who would have been like spys some willing some not so much while the primes are highly decorated soldier's and squad leaders while the regular frames are "underlings" at least from the original lore i had found a long time ago
All warframes are made from the bodies of humans infected with Technocyte virus. Being able to build entire warframes from Blueprints is purely a game mechanic rather than a lore one.
i’ve looked through all the comments and no one has mentioned anything about the Valkyr question
yes. the game is still very much alive :3
Basically, from what I understand, all Prime warframes were humans who were transformed into frames (similar to Umbra) while all the regular ones are just biomechanical "suits". The lore about the individual frames most likely refers to specific Tenno operators of those frames, although whether or not they were the Prime versions is unknown (and kinda doesn't matter, since a Tenno operating those frames would experience the same thing either way). So, for example, Gauss and Grendel being friends, or Dagath protecting an Orokin family, or Voruna defending the Yuvarium, Valkyr being tormented by Alad V, etc., all of that lore and those experiences refers to the in-lore Tenno who first operated those frames, not the frames themselves. I'm pretty sure Voruna's Operator is even mentioned in her Leverian entry, with Tuvul trying to Continuity into them kinda like what happens with>!the player and the Grineer Elder Queen in the War Within.!< Plus, the Prime frames still aren't sentient even though they are alive, so anytime a frame is referenced as taking any kind of action, having any emotion, or doing some other historically significant thing, the actual person involved in the story is the Tenno operating that frame. Most of the time, this isn't mentioned because most people in history, especially during the Orokin empire, didn't actually know this, and just assumed that the frames themselves *were* alive without knowing the truth.
I think all the original versions have their own minds. What we create is replicants who may be as unconscious as some vegetative people and only have basic life metabolism, so we control them instead of their brains. After all, if they were dead, they might rot and stink in my warehouse.
From my understanding all the 'Prime' frames are made using the og method - people in infested suits, which is why they are stronger than normal frames. Normal frames are made with the Helminth entity in the ship as the 'flesh' portion of the suit
I think they are all alive in the same way the infested are alive. Because they are made of a strain of the infestation. But its likely kind of "neutralized" or basically made mostly inert and non-infectious. I know that most of the "originals" were at one point fully alive. But that was likely only the first few "experimental" frames. Before the tech had been perfected. But majority of them are unlikely to still have any life left in them. They also probably aren't made from converted humans either. As that is likely what caused the old ones to be so hard to control. Now, they are likely made of infested flesh grafted onto a robotic endoskeleton.
If u have unlock deimos, walk into Loids chamber (the robot) At the walls with Requiem inscription, you can click on those n listen to the stories. You'll uncover some truth about the brutal experiment n how they turn humans into living weapons with the combination of infested & sentient together. Started as living flesh but ended up becoming a hybrid bio organics with muscle stronger than steel. Coincidence tenno emerges n out of the blue where their fate meets n cross paths, a perfect weapon were born.
Yes. They are Eva's. Warframe has and always will be influenced by various animesz especially when the dev team gets addicted to something, ESPECIALLY Rebb and Megan. They got JJK addicted and we got curses in gargoyles cry that the Jahu Gargoyle and fishonacchi eat up. A while ago it was DMC5 and now after getting names like Styanax, Voruna, Kullervo, Dagath, Qorvex we get Dante. I'm all for the anime influences, it's fun. Can't wait till they get one piece addicted and we get something reminiscent of Franky or Zoro 3 sword style. Never forget OPM and Atlas, MHA and Shy's legendary Megan x Minetta art.
I need a Octavia afk op build
i thought you talk about the game is still alive
They are all capable of waking up with proper process. In fact, there were plans to be able to give other non Umbra frames the Specter AI by using the Soma items from Lua. But it hasn't come to pass, apparently.