I love the small things about Warframe's design so much. Like, the Duviri architecture.
[Spoilers!]
The houses obviously are just wall parts of the Zariman, arranged to look like settlements/towns. The same goes for many of the harvestable plants, that also mimic Zariman design elements (especially noticeable with the cactus-like Ueymag, that has an unnaturally symmetrical shape, mimicking the often repeated tuning fork-shape).
Duviri has multiple bioms, plains, snowy mountains, a desert, but they are all way too small to exist naturally.
All this paints the picture of a world created by the mind of a child, who might have never seen anything else but the inside of a spaceship. They might have never seen other architecture, so all houses have to look like they were ripped straight out of the Zariman's structure. They know that mountains and deserts exist, but they do not understand their scale, so they become just one more small piece of Duviri. Just like cartographs back in history they fill the unknown of their world with set pieces and the skeletal structures found all over Duviri lend themselves for a comparison to this "Here there be dragons" mindset.
Children build and recreate what they know all the time to learn and better understand it, but also to express their wishes and creativity. This gives the idea of a child, confined in space, wishing to get to be somewhere else, visiting the places they have heard of.
We get to see quite a few rather large settlements in Duviri, but the amount of houses and people does not seem to match. In general, only very few people seem to be roaming the streets. This is not an adult doing extensive worldbuilding, this is a child with a lot of building blocks but very few dolls building a world on which they can project their emotions and memories onto.
Most of Duviris normal inhabitants are just decorations, not existing to be characters, but because a town "needs to have people in it". They are not defined by who they are, but by what they do- and what they do is react to the player, sit around, talk and cower in fear when enemies approach.
The simple shapes of the buildings are very close to the concept of real life building blocks. Paedagogic toys often are simple, to allow for easy handling and more creative freedom.
The theme of death is also omnipresent. Every animal resembles a carcass build from metal plating and even the Dax enemies are skeleton-like, the Gladius' helmets lower part even resembling a rabbit skull. We obviously know how the story of the Zariman ended and the skulls and bones might be just an indicator of potential danger, but what if the skeletal design of Duviri's inhabitants are not supposed to indicate not (just) death, but an infinished state? They are walking skeletons, yet missing a skin, their shape, just like the fractured bodies of the townspeople, not fully formed out in the child's head. Since the townspeople are humanoid though, they look more finished, while all the child might have ever seen of sheep, cats, dogs, horses and owls could have very well been just pictures in a school book, maybe next to a diagram of their underlying anatomy (after all, one of the few things we get to experience of the daily life on the Zariman, is school).
There is also an enemy called the Dax Herald. A Herald was a specialist in ceremonies, making sure that they were held correctly (besides also having diplomativ tasks). Their head resembles a security camera, adding a layer of oppressive social norms normal humans certainly suffered under in the orokin empire
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tired of navigating the labs on foot? dont have energy to walk 2 hours to fabrica anatomica and back? got heavy vitriol vials to transport and dont feel like pulling the cart yourself?
well do i have a solution for you!
the necrakaithe!
originally bred by the entrati family to serve as warmounts, now repurposed to work within the hazardous laboratories instead
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Transformers x Warframe AU
Soundwave frame !
Random idea I had this week, I thought "I can draw both transformers and warframe, I'm in both fandoms. Why not combine them." And ended up making Soundwave a warframe lmao
I think his ability would be similar to Banshee's and that he can summon his kids. I still need ideas on his overall abilities as a warframe tbh I don't know 😭😭😭 I need to design Rumble and Frenzy next. Mini warframes !
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Addendum to my previous post, because I forgot (sorry!):
As an example how the inhabitants of Duviri are not real characters, just templates:
Remember the guy we have to save from the Dax? Even when we save him, he keeps the shackles around his hands. He stays captured, even when we rescue him. Because that is his role. He is not a prisoner. He is *the* prisoner and he always will be. He also says something like "Isn't it strange how things always work out?" Of course they do, because this is a child's fantasy. This character was created to be saved and saved again, giving the child the feeling of being a hero. It has to work out, if not, the fantasy collapses.
The guy who challenges us to a Kaithe duel looks exactly like the driver of Acrithis carriage. These are two people looking exactly the same, because they serve the same purpose, they are riders, they tend to the horses.
As much as it may cause issues later in life, putting people into categories is important for children; otherwise they have trouble understanding the world, they can't work with fine nuances yet. You can actually easily observe this when asking children of different ages to sort toys into boxes. At first all blocks are blocks, then they may be sorted based on color and later based on their shape.
Duviri and Deimos are so important to me; I worked as a nursery school teacher and family mediator and Duviri as a whole and the Entrati family conflict hit so close to home sometimes. And what is Warframe but a story about stories of broken families? A power fantasy, something so many children in abusive situations need to stay alive.
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