Warframe is a tenured, battle-tested beast of a live-service game. Digital Extremes’ 2013 Hail Mary is now celebrating its 11th anniversary, and its latest content update, Dante Unbound (or update 35.5, as it were) is one of the biggest content updates yet. The patch notes, specifically, are absolutely immense.
Much has already been said about the most important ongoing Warframe news, from the mysterious 1999 project all the way to the upcoming Jade Shadows update, but the thing that’s most flabbergasting of all are the patch notes, which clocks in at over 20,000 words in total. This, as Redditor Yggdrazzil has figured out, is a fair bit more than the game’s full EULA document. There’s quite a lot to take in when you’ve got 85 pages’ worth of patch notes to sift through, and this is driven home and underlined about twenty times over by Digital Extremes’ own update 35.5 patch notes on Reddit, which stretch over more than half a dozen additional comments on top of the original post itself. It’s a lot.
Digital Extremes has gone all-out with Warframe’s 35.5 patch notes
The fact that Digital Extremes has gone to such an extent immediately pinpoints two important things: that the team behind Warframe is still keen on going all-out for the game’s major content updates, and that this immense effort extends over to keeping tabs on all the things that have been changed. All in service of keeping the community entertained and kept up-to-date, even if they do need to read a Bible’s worth of text to come to terms with it all.
This sits in stark contrast to Arrowhead Studios’ Helldivers 2, where we specifically praised the team’s insistence on keeping things hidden and tucked away so that the players themselves discover new stuff along the way. Neither approach is bad or wrong, mind, it’s just meaningfully different: context matters a great deal, and Warframe is simply far too big not to document everything that’s actively being iterated upon.
There’s a good reason why Warframe keeps being included on lists of the very best live-service games and, even more commonly, looter-shooters: Digital Extremes’ Warframe team is extremely well attuned to the community, and though few of the game’s updates have been perfect or come even close to universal acclaim, people are generally happy with them. Update 35.5 adds the mysterious Dante Frame, a surprisingly large batch of new weapons, missions, and features, bonus customization features, a full rework of the Inaros Frame, minor reworks for Mirage, Gara, Loki, Yareli, and heaps more.
It’s a wonderful time to be a Warframe player, from the looks of things.
