Turns out Warframe 1999 can still haunt you even outside the game. Warframe‘s developers have been dropping some strange URLs and web pages to prepare for the upcoming expansion, Warframe 1999. It began earlier in the week after the latest Devstream. These are not just marketing web pages, but they also include a puzzle-solving ARG (augmented reality game). The ARG has since turned the Warframe players into detectives scrambling for clues and uncovering secrets.
The whole ARG puzzle and Easter Egg hunt typically takes place on Warframe‘s website. There’s a special section for Warframe 1999 in the main domain that opens into an old, late-90s web page. This web page thus contains archives, hidden sub-sections, and even a search engine that only answers specific search queries.
Lore Bombs Everywhere
More importantly, there’s also a chat room record on the ARG web page detailing interactions of the Proto-Warframes or the characters of the upcoming Warframe 1999. You can likely piece together some chat dialogs to reveal some interesting lore about Warframe 1999. Some of them lead to clues about the characters.
But what’s really making the player base suspicious are the pages in the ARG that lead nowhere. Most results are “Access Blocked” errors. Others are “encrypted”. Some of the budding Sherlocks of the Warframe community are convinced that they can open these sections through some obscure commands. Thus the ARG secret hunt begins.
You can try to solve it yourself, of course, but you might as well join the community effort to decrypt these locked lore puzzles. You’ll find no shortage of obsessive decoders on Reddit.
Surprisingly, this might just keep the players busy enough until the eventual release of Warframe 1999 in December 2024. After all, the Warframe 1999 demo and the teaser were notably short and lasted less than five minutes each.
Not the First Warframe ARG
Funny enough, this was not the first time developer Digital Extremes introduced an ARG and cryptic web page for Warframe players. They notably did it back in 2018. In it, the players had to decrypt and unlock an elaborate secret about the in-game city of Fortuna.
Warframe puzzle lore games have been around in the past, and have kept players busy and guessing (as if Warframe lore wasn’t cryptic enough as it is). But this time around, Warframe 1999 is poised to be the biggest update for Warframe this decade. Thus the current ARG’s purpose and theme are more significant and fitting.