Warframe – Plains of Eidolon
MMORPG Expansions that Exploded the Games’ Active Player Base
Warframe has quite the storied history. What began as a game that was meant to be pitched to a AAA publisher has exploded into the best indie free-to-play MMO to date. According to July’s Steam leak, Warframe is the 8th most popular game on Steam, right between Garry’s Mod and Counter-Strike: Source, and it’s easy to see why. Warframe is the ninja simulator we’ve always wanted (no, Naruto games don’t count) but with gun-fu and super-powered suits that make Iron Man envious.
Now, Warframe has been popular since its inception, and it has received plenty of expansions and updates, but one, in particular, flung its popularity so high, it started orbiting Saturn: the Plains of Eidolon.
Before this update, Warframe was a heavily instanced game. Players always visited small, procedurally generated levels made out of various interconnected rooms (and sometimes expanses of outer space), but the Plains of Eidolon opened up a whole new frontier with the game’s first foray into open world levels. Ok, it was just one level, the titular plain, but it was full of all the exploration and danger that comes with the open world territory. Oh, and the update introduced the long-desired ability to craft customizable weapons.
According to Warframe’s Steam chart, the Plains of Eidolon update almost doubled the game’s average concurrent players from 37 thousand to 62 thousand, and peak concurrent populations were almost tripled. And much like The Elder Scrolls Online, this is just the PC version we’re talking about. Given developer Digital Extremes’ roadmap for the future, Warframe’s hype train isn’t stopping anytime soon.
