Warframe's 1999 expansion has a shopping mall, romance system, and you even get to fight a boyband

Warframe's been fully embracing its weird side over the course of its last couple of expansions, but if you thought its mood-world westerns and long-lost dimension-shifting labs were as far as the free-to-play shooter was willing to go, then you might want to brace yourself: developer Digital Extremes has revealed first gameplay of its upcoming 1999 story expansion and, well, let's just say you get to go into space to kill a 90s boyband.

We've known 1999 was likely to be an odd 'un ever since its tease at last year's TennoCon utterly stole the show - catapulting players away from Warframe's usual far-future sci-fi aesthetic to an eerily familiar Earth-like world of grungy subways stations and retro tech. And now, with TennoCon 2024 underway, Digital Extremes has shared more on its audacious new expansion.

To get a few burning questions out of the way first, yes it's really set in 1999 (New Year's Eve to be exact) and no, this isn't quite the Earth we know - but it's close enough, full of extremely familiar era-appropriate artefacts that feel gleefully incongruous within Warframe's wider world. And that starts with 1999's new hub area: an abandoned 90s shopping mall full of artificial palm trees, arcade machines, and screens belching out cheesy infomercials.

The mall serves as the base of the Hex, Warframe's newest Syndicate, and as Digital Extremes' 22-minute demo begins, we're introduced to its six members, proto-forms of the game's most iconic Warframes. Players take on the role of squad leader Arthur Nightingale (batch designation: Excalibur), working alongside Amir Beckett (Volt), Aoi Morohoshi (Mag), Leticia Garcia (Trinity), Eleanor Nightingale (Nyx and, notably, Arthur's sister), plus Quincy Isaacs, whose batch designation - Cyte-09 - ties in with the new Warframe arriving alongside 1999.

Unsurprisingly, then, the expansion's all about giving players the opportunity to experience some crucial events from Warframe's past - but, really, that's probably the least interesting thing about it. 1999 is almost hilarious in its brazenness: this is an expansion that dares to add a romance system to Warframe, enabling players to forge deeper relationships with their comrades by visiting their beige desktop PC, logging into KOL (KIM Online), and text-chatting to them IRC-style, picking dialogue options as conversations unfold. And yes, you might even get a New Year's kiss if you play your cards right.

And if that managed to raise an incredulous eyebrow, there's more to come. One brisk cutscene later, all six members of the Hex are straddling motorcycles and careening down a neon-streaked tunnel (well, five are on bikes - Volt is running alongside them on-foot), which is unexpected enough. But then the tunnel ends and the gang bursts out into the moonlit, rain-slicked streets of Kulvania - a new open-world environment that feels somewhere between a contemporary US city and Half-Life's City 17. Players can explore its corners from the back of their motorbike once 1999 arrives, all to a screeching metal soundtrack.

At this point in the demo, Digital Extremes switches to something a little closer to Warframe's traditional third-person action. After a run-in with Scaldra commander Major Neci Rusalka, enemies begin swarming the streets and there's a look at 1999's combat, combining classic Earth-like weaponary with flashier sci-fi attacks. Eventually, the battle spills out into a large open plaza where players encounter the boss-like H-04 Efervon Tank, at which point everything erupts into absolute chaos - heavy gunfire, poison-spewing drones, laser blasts, and constant airdrops of new troops ratcheting up the intensity.

But suddenly, a pause as the figure seen at the end of last year's 1999 teaser emerges, and Arthur gives chase - the action soon shifting down into the tunnels of an abandoned subway system full of pulsating biolumicent plants and strangely organic tech. We see Arthur interact with a "security terminal", which players can hack by playing a mini-game reminiscent of mobile phone classic Snake - but failure results in a sudden enemy influx, and more troublingly, the potential to be injected with a Coda worm virus. What's this? Well that's not entirely clear just yet, but Arthur's demo journey comes to an end doubled in pain as a strange bank of screens births a giant creature (think Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors) which then spews out the Warframe version of Excalibur we all know and love. Cue credits.

Except... we then return to the Origin System, centuries later, where something's definitely not right. As a Railjack mission unfolds, pulsating music is suddenly heard over the comms, leading players to an asteroid in the depths of space. Disembarking, they discover the music's source: a huge Earth-like concert stadium that's manifested somewhere it really shouldn't have - seemingly as a result of that earlier Coda virus. We're still not done, though: Arthur enters the stadium and follows its corridors out into the open, revealing a live gig in progress. Lights flash, lasers dance, a convincingly 90s-style pop anthem blasts out over the sound system, and some weird creature is puking five infested members of the (fictional) boyband On-Lyne out onto the stage. Boss time - but, alas, that's where the demo ends.

It's brilliantly ballsy stuff, and Warframe players will be able to see where all this is heading when 1999 launches this "winter". And beyond the story campaign, it'll also introduce Gemini skins - letting players switch between their Warfarme and its fully customisable 1999 counterpart at will - plus the new sniper-focused Warframe, Cyte-09.

There's even more going on ahead of 1999's release, however, with Digital Extremes promising two additional Warframe updates before then. August brings The Lotus Eaters, a "micro-story" serving as a prologue to 1999, and it'll be followed by a second update in autumn - to be detailed more thoroughly at this year's Tokyo Game Show. Expect a new theme, though, plus a new Warframe and various quality of life improvements, including a Caliban rework (Caliban will be free as part of update), new Incarnons, Companions 2.0 Part 2, and more.

But even before all of that - right now, in fact - players can get a taste of Warframe's 1999 expansion in a special in-game narrative experience that'll let them explore a version of its mall hub as part of a Special Relay. It'll be available for around a week following TennoCon 2024.