Back at Tennocon last July, Digital Extremes called on Tenno to help #LiftTogether to help the people of Solaris. You might have seen my posts here on Steemit from Tennocon (Remember the giant Rhino?), so you probably know how I feel about Warframe. Hell, I even wrote about it recently! Well, Fortuna just hit PC last Thursday. I spent a fair amount of time in Orb Vallis over the weekend, even streamed some of it despite illness. It's a beautiful realm with tons of content, aaaand...I'm gonna talk about it here.
Fortuna is a debtor's colony founded by Nef Anyo, a corpus villain famous for his love of money. The Solaris work to pay off their debts, and hopefully keep the taxmen at bay long enough to avoid repossession. Scary, stuff, honestly. The initial story quest leaves you feeling for the Solaris. I played it on stream, if you want to check it out. It's kinda spoilerific, so I'm not going to discuss it in too much detail here. I caught a pretty obvious Anonymous reference in the story quests, though. It amused me.
What blows me away about Fortuna, however, is the sheer size of it. It's roughly four times the size of the Plains of Eidolon! It's huge! And there's tons to explore in the area. Corpus bases can be captured, bringing up a Solaris agent who can assign bounties to you. This is handy, because you don't have to go back in to keep fighting. It makes the rep grind much faster, and definitely more worth the effort. It's a nice Quality of Life addition that shows Digital Extremes listened to feedback on the Plains.
The bounties themselves are almost cookie cutter identical to the bounties on the Plains of Eidolon. Go to this point, hijack the drone, kill enemies, defend this location, you get the idea. The formula works, don't get me wrong. I just hope they add more than what we currently have. Because if the Plains are anything to go by, we're going to get very bored, very quickly. They're fun now, because they're just different enough. But that will change in about 2 months. At the very least, they added additional bonus conditions that will get you double reputation for completion. The screenshot above shows me defending this coildrive and making sure its health doesn't drop below 70%. Obviously, this scales with the number of people in your squad. More people means more enemies coming at you. Nice way to keep the challenge up!
Fishing and Mining return in Fortuna, but they're different. The fish on Fortuna are robots! The normal fishing spears from the Plains won't cut through the metal exteriors of the servofish that roam the liquid coolant of Orb Vallis. There's a new spear that produces an electric pulse, which temporarily disables the fish long enough to pull it out. This leads to a fun little minigame, adding another layer to fishing. Of note is that all fish can be caught without bait, but some fish spawn much more often when there is bait in the water. Still, it's nice to see that they've put some changes into the mechanic to keep it interesting.
You can tell there's still more content on the way. Certain enemies are invincible with no clear feature to tell you how to beat them. I have a sneaking suspicion that they're going to make that an event like the infested boil on the Plains.
But enough about this boring stuff! Let's talk about the things that matter! Things like Kit Guns!
Oh yeah, check out that baby! Much like the Zaws from the Plains, you can make your own custom sidearm. There's plenty of options, once you get your rep up. In the mean time, I made a machine pistol with a huge ammo capacity and a high rate of fire. I look forward to ranking up my rep with the Solaris and unlocking more kitgun parts, as there are some seriously interesting combinations at my disposal!
And then there's the Moas! Yes, you can make your own Moa companion! They're adding a bunch of new mods that are only available to machine type companions, and some that are only available to beasts. It's a nice little change that will add some more variety (and give people reasons to run things besides carriers).
But I digress. Blueprints are purchased just like kitgun or zaw parts and need to built in the foundry before assembling into a Moa. The build time on the components is 24 hours, so be ready to wait a bit before using one. You'll also need lots of fish parts and minerals.
Speaking of minerals, mining is so much easier on Venus than on earth. Seriously, so much easier. Mining sites show up on the minimap when you have the mining laser equipped, and actually pulling them out of the rock is easier, too! Instead of the squiggly lines on the Plains, you have a timing based minigame that has you releasing the laser at specific points. An hour's worth of mining can yield some seriously solid results. I already have enough Thyst for one of the Garuda parts, I just need to get my rep up so I can cut and polish them into refined gems. Seriously, though. It doesn't get much easier than this. I'm very happy with the changes to mining, they made it much easier to work with this time.
So, the overall verdict for Fortuna is more of the same, but with enough things different to make it worth your while. The location is pretty, there's enough content now to keep you interested, and you'll find yourself looking forward to Railjack and the timed events. I know I am! Speaking of, I'll be streaming more Fortuna when it hits consoles, as well. Make sure you're following me at my links down below!
