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.