Warframe Concept
EUNA
Warframe Concept
This project is for the popular looter-shooter game Warframe by the studio Digital Extremes, which I have played for at least seven years, with over four thousand fours logged on the PC gaming store Steam. This is a concept for a 'Warframe' the main way in which players customise, interact and fight within the game world. Warframes are humanoid and suit-like with special powers, they have four of these powers surrounding a central theme, along with a passive. I have had many ideas for new Warframes and I designed them all out of passion for the game and fun, as I find building concepts interesting and fulfilling. This concept is the one I have spent most time on and have received the most positive feedback about.
Background Concept Art by @UgWubwubmaster
INTRODUCTION
This project began with wanting to create a Warframe based on shepherds. Warframes have often fulfilled traditional roles from Role Playing Games (RPGs), such as tanks, healers and we even got a bard with the music-themed Warframe Octavia. The shepherd is not a common roleplaying class but has been included as such titles as Ultima, an open world fantasy RPG by Origin Systems, Dragon Quest 7, a roleplaying game by Enix and Tree of Savior a MMORPG by IMCGAMES, as well as others.
I looked to the inclusion of the shepherd class in these games to begin thinking of abilities for this shepherd themed Warframe. The shepherd of Dragon Quest 7 has a set of abilities that mainly include healing, reducing damage and lulling enemies to sleep. These abilities were ones that could easily be transferred over to the Warframe setting, as sleep is already an enemy status that Equinox provides in her night form, healing is already provided by the likes of Oberon and damage reduction by Gara among others.
Originally this research built a purely shepherd-based Warframe that I named Pastora who came with an exalted Kubrow (Warframe's version of pet dogs) companion much like Khora comes with her Kavat (Warframe's version of pet cats), named Venari. This was to mirror the usage of dogs by shepherds in herding their sheep. The feedback for this Warframe however was that she was too similar to Khora because of this aspect, despite the other differences in her kit, so I went back to the drawing board and shifted my concentration onto doing a purely sheep based Warframe instead, still with inspiration from the previous research into shepherd RPG classes.
My research spread into things associated with sheep and the uses of wool. For example, in the video game Pokemon the sheep Pokémon Mareep is an electric type Pokemon, supposedly as a nod to the novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?". Sheep Man from the Megaman series also utilises electric attacks. This may be out of sheep's wool appearing as clouds, which can bring thunder storms, or that wool can produce static electricity. Either way, I wanted to include electric damage into the kit because of this. I also wanted to include some sort of harvesting mechanic into her abilities since sheep wool is harvested from them for various uses, including clothes, insulation and mopping up oil. All these things too, could be implemented into the kit.
Finally, this new Warframe would need a name and I thought the name “Euna” would suit her. “Euna” is of Scottish origin, an Anglicised version of the Gaelic “Una” which may be derived from “uan” meaning “lamb”.