'Warframe' Fortuna and Garuda Preview: K-Drive Across Venus In Style

Warframe players will be traveling to the cold, desolate wastelands of Venus in the new Fortuna update. Travel miles underground to a world full of half-robot workers controlled by the evil Corpus overlords. If stopping tyranny really isn't your thing, there's the new K-drive hoverboard to travel or the Garuda Warframe that loves blood plus a ton of other new content players can explore in early November on PC.

Digital Extremes showed Newsweek a bit of the new update and here's what we were able to gather.

Garuda

The latest Warframe coming to help the Tenno is Garuda, a vampiric blood-sucker that's not afraid to get a little messy. Warframe number 37 was designed with gore as a theme and uses blood as her currency. Her abilities all center around using her health pool as a damage resource, while also giving her the tools needed to survive. Her passive allows her to deal more damage the lower her health gets, like Tryndamere from League of Legends .

Garuda's abilities use enough gore to make a B-tier Hollywood horror movie blush. Her first ability creates a shield that she places in front of herself, allowing her to block bullets and projectiles that might knock her health down to zero. Reactivating the ability launches the shield in a target direction, dealing damage to enemies it passes through. Her second ability launches a blood spike through the ground at an enemy, allowing her to siphon the health off of the nearby flailing body.

If you need a bit more energy to use all of these abilities, you can use her third power. This transforms some of her health into energy, allowing you to essentially never stop spamming your powers as long as you don't take damage. If you're in the middle of a fight and desperately need to deal some damage, use her ultimate. Her blades start to whirl around, dealing massive damage and sucking enemies toward the center of the robot blender. The current build we saw showed her floating through the air, but the developers are debating changing her stance to more of a strut.

Fortuna

Fortuna is the second open-world zone coming to Warframe, following the Plains of Eidolon. The developers learned from their first try, realizing that it took players a bit too long to get to the new content. This time around, there will be a lot less grinding needed to access newer items like the mag-fishing pole and K-Drive.

Once players land on the planet of Venus' new open world zone, they'll hear the workers' song shown off in the original TennoCon trailer. Once they clear the cinematic, they'll be able to explore the new, sad world of Fortuna. The dimly-lot cyberpunk universe is full of humans who have become indentured servants to Corpus and who replace body parts with expensive mechanical augments. Like Eidolon, there will be vendors where you can buy new items you can use planetside.

Rude Zuude is a robotic vendor that allows you to make a fully customizable secondary weapon. Like on the Plains of Eidolon, where you could make your own melee weapon, RZ lets you complete customize a smaller projectile weapon of your choice. You can add different augments, like elemental affinity, magazine size or damage, all by changing different parts on the gun.

There's also a new companion Warframe players have been asking for for a while: the Moa. These two-legged walkers have been stomping the ground in every Corpus mission and it's finally time for you to be able to use one of your own. You'll need to collect four different parts by completing Fortuna missions, which can be combined by a vendor. There are also personality chips that can be found that give the Moa unique animations and sounds.

On top of a vent at the top of Fortuna, you'll find a little boy swinging his legs. There, you'll be able to enter the Vent Clubhouse, a new area for upgrading and obtaining a K-Drive. The K-Drive is the newest mode of transportation coming to Warframe. Think Marty McFly's hoverboard from Back to the Future, but way more practical. You can fly over liquids, bash enemies with the front of your board and travel without having to call your pesky Archwing. You won't be able to use weapons while on the board, but that just means you have to be smarter with how you plan your attack. Finding a Vent Clubhouse kid on the surface of the planet will activate a racing minigame, where you have to fly through yellow circles before the timer runs out.

Once you're ready to explore, head onto the elevators in the Fortuna base with up to three other players.The planet of Venus has been terraformed by the Orokin over millions of years, turning it into a snowy wasteland. Coolant rivers flood the planet, full of mechanical fish you can grab with the new mag-fishing pool. The Plains of Eidolon introduced fishing to Warframe and Fortuna adds onto its legacy. Instead of just throwing a spear at your target, you'll need to aim and time the attack to strike at exactly the right time. Mistiming your throw will allow your catch to get away.

Included in this vibrant world are new flora and fauna to collect and tag. You can find animals littered across the map that you can collect and bring back to the Fortuna vendors for new items. Larger animals, unlike any we've seen before, can be captured with a tranquilizer gun. Digital Extreme developers are still debating if they'll allow players to take their animal companions back onto their ships.

The longer you stay outside in Fortuna, the higher the threat level will get. The Corpus really don't like Tenno flipping around and causing a ruckus so they'll do anything to take you down. You won't be able to collect animals with waves of enemies coming at you, so you'll have to disable beacons, clear enemies or wait in the shadows for things to cool down. The Corpus also have giant bases and caves littered around the map, which can be cleared out for rewards. A self-obsessed cult leader has started to capture the lifeforms across the planet and it's up to the Tenno to stop him.

At launch, there will be giant-terraforming spiders walking across all of Fortuna. They will just wander aimlessly for the first weeks of the content's release but will eventually become endgame bosses. The Digital Extremes developers hope to have it up two to three weeks after the first patch launches.

It's unclear if Fortuna will launch with the Nintendo Switch version, slated to release in late November.