I’m out at TennoCon 2025 in London, Ontario, the ten-year anniversary of Digital Extremes’ Warframe expo, and the future looks bright.
The team behind the long-running free-to-play action game is clearly proud of what they’ve got in store for players in the coming months, and they’re not shy about it: this year’s event is the biggest TennoCon ever, with some massive reveals and an entire live concert event (dubbed the ‘TennoConcert’) celebrating the music of the Warframe universe.
I’ll get straight to the good stuff: we’re going to Tau, baby! Departing from the solar system and travelling to the distant Tau System – home to the sometimes-antagonistic Sentients – has been something Warframe players have been begging to see for years now, and it’s finally happening. Well… sort of.
Altered histories
See, Tau ‘proper’ is coming in 2026. What we’re getting near the end of this year is a sort of sneak peek: through mysterious means, we’re going to astral-project ourselves into a past time period of Tau, seeing the Sentient civilization before everything went drastically downhill. This update, scheduled for late 2025, will be entitled ‘The Old Peace’.
In an extended live gameplay demo (which you can watch in its entirety right here), we saw a friendly Sentient named Adis enrolled alongside the player at the Tauron Academy. Adis trains with us, with one training session involving a showdown with an enormous Sentient mech named Hunhullus. We also see friendly Sentient teachers, pre-collapse Grineer soldiers in resplendent golden armor, and a brief glimpse at the next frame to get the Primed treatment: Caliban Prime.
It’s not all classes and friendly sparring at Tauron Academy, though: this is a military outfit, and when separatists start causing trouble, we’re dispatched via orbital drop into a warzone. Here, DE showcased a few new tricks: a long-anticipated update to the parkour system with improved wall-running, new enemy types, and a new Focus school, which comes with a spectacular ability that involves summoning a ridiculously gigantic energy sword. The devs described it to me (unofficially – no lawsuits for you here, Square Enix) as a ‘limit break’ sort of power, and confirmed in a press Q&A that they would be looking to revamp the existing Focus system to match the power of the new Tauron Focus school with new ‘ultimate’ abilities.
There was also a moment when one character broke into song, because of course there was. It’s Warframe: the game about space ninjas that also boasts an inexplicable passion for musical numbers. After all, the last major update featured evil clones of a 90s boy band.
The devil’s in the details
Digital Extremes’ Community Manager Megan Everett confirmed to me that The Old Peace won’t be quite as expansive in terms of gameplay content as the actual Tau update coming in 2026, but it still looks to be a fairly meaty expansion to the game. A navigation console seen in Tauron Academy appeared to show at least three separate locations, and the one explored in the live demo was fairly large in size.
The Old Peace will also feature what DE is calling a ‘side story’, focusing on mad scientist (and terrible boyfriend) Albrect Entrati. Entrati was responsible for creating the human ‘protoframes’ seen in the Warframe 1999 update, and more are on the way – but these new characters apparently won’t be hanging out at Höllvania Mall with the other protoframes.
Instead, this ‘side story’ will focus on the Devil’s Triad: two new protoframes named Father Lyon Allard and Marie Leroux (modelled on existing warframes Harrow and Wisp, with some frankly rather horny medieval Catholic aesthetics), along with an entirely new frame, the devil-themed Uriel. DE weren’t ready to share anything beyond his appearance just yet, but confirmed that Uriel will be the 63rd frame added to the game. The Devil’s Triad will tie into the main narrative of The Old Peace, but it’s unclear exactly how at this point.
That’s (not) all, folks
Any serious Warframe fans may have picked up on something important there: we’ve currently only got 61 unique frames. That wasn’t a typo, though: there’s a currently-unnamed Fall 2025 update landing before The Old Peace, which will feature a smaller handful of new content.
Chief among the new additions is the 62nd frame, and we know more about Uriel than the one we’re actually getting next. Megan was steadfastly resistant to my questioning about frame No. 62, only repeatedly offering the tidbit that “he’s a fun guy”. So… mushroomframe, here we come?
The Fall 2025 update will also feature the long-awaited rework of the Oberon warframe (something that was met with riotous cheers during the live presentation), a very stylish deluxe skin for Lavos, and a new narrative quest, The Teacher. This quest is designed to slot into the new player experience, providing a sort of canonical tutorial for Warframe’s infamously complex modding system.
Although the benefits for long-term players like me will probably be fairly minimal, I can’t fault this at all: as much as I enjoy the game, there’s no denying that its complexity and sheer wealth of content mean that it’s not the most friendly to new players. In order to get a true outside perspective, DE actually outsourced the design of this quest to UK-based studio Sumo Digital.
More to come?
As someone who actually plays the game – and has put plenty of hours into multiple similar live-service titles over the years – it’s consistently impressive to me how DE is able to up the ante at every possible opportunity. From humble beginnings as a gray corridor shooter to hoverboards, space combat, and time-travelling shenanigans, the game seemingly never lets up, with something newer and cooler constantly around the corner.
As for the full Tau update next year… it sounds like a big one, perhaps the biggest update the game has ever seen. Megan and the team were canny when it came to answering press questions about Tau, although she did seem to let slip that we might be seeing a new large-scale open-world area – something we haven’t seen since the Heart of Deimos update way back in 2020 (although the 2023 Duviri update did arguably feature a pseudo-open-world space).
Needless to say, DE is hard at work on Tau. CEO (and former Warframe game director) Steve Sinclair noted in the press Q&A that The Old Peace serves as a stop-gap of sorts, giving the team more time to perfect the 2026 update while also letting players get an early taste of Tau. It sounds like the present-day Tau system we’ll be visiting next year won’t be quite as pleasant, however…
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christian.guyton@futurenet.com (Christian Guyton)
