Warframe’s Koumei & the Five Fates will bring essential QOL improvements for newcomers

Developer Digital Extremes has revealed some of the quality-of-life improvements coming to Warframe with its Koumei & the Five Fates update. Interestingly, there’s a huge focus on streamlining the game for newcomers, something Warframe has seen a lot of over the last couple of months.

The Koumei & the Five Fates update for Warframe launches in late 2024 and brings with it a new Warframe for players to master, as well as additional story content to dig into. However, in a recent blog post, Digital Extremes showcased how this update will also make the game more approachable as a newcomer. The game has seen loads of people join after leaving Destiny 2 following Bungie’s layoffs, so this update couldn’t come at a better time.

Demystifying the basics

There are loads of quality-of-life changes in this update that I wish I had when I was first getting into Warframe, but it’s good to know they’ll be there for new players. For example, stats have been shifted from your starter Warframe to make things a bit less overwhelming when jumping into the experience as a fresh player. A few other things, such as opening hacking puzzles and the time to intubate your first Kubrow have had time reductions to get you into the game and help you understand it much faster.

There’s also going to be much more guidance in the game. A good example of this is when you come to sell unmastered items. You’ll soon be greeted by a popup that tells you it’s better to hit Rank 30 with it before selling it so your Mastery Rank benefits as much as possible from your time played.

New abilities that you unlock will now have their input shown alongside their information on-screen when you first unlock them. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought that it’s great I have a new ability for a Warframe that I have no clue how to trigger.

What might be the best improvement, though, is Relic breakdowns. This is a small tab that’ll appear when you hover over a Relic, displaying the owned and crafted status of their rewards. Relics are an abuse mechanic in Warframe, but they’re essential to unlocking Prime Warframes without spending real-world cash, so they’re a necessary evil. Soon, they’ll just be a little less evil to work with.

It won’t end with Koumei & the Five Fates either. Digital Extremes has explained that future updates will tackle other systems such as the Star Chart and understanding the order of main and side quests. Once you’re into Warframe, these don’t pose much of an issue at all, but they’re definitely a barrier to entry that would be hard to push past without the game’s incredibly helpful community on hand.