The true highlight of The Game Awards was Werner Herzog explaining Warframe
What could be better than this?
As I write this, we're roughly two hours into tonight's Game Awards. There have been some major reveals: After two decades, there'll be a proper return to The Old Republic. We now know that Larian was behind Keighley's special desert statue. There will be two Tomb Raiders in the next two years.
That's all fine. I like a world premiere as much as anyone. But the best of those reveals is a distant second in the running for The Game Awards' best moment, because in the middle of the show, Werner Herzog appeared to explain Warframe to the crowd.
If all you know about Warframe is that it's a game with space ninjas, the relentless Wagnerian intensity of a Herzog monologue might feel like a strange fit. But Warframe is beautifully, uncannily strange. As Herzog says during the magnificent work of advertising, Warframe is a story about beings "cursed to walk this senseless universe in living metal, haunted by dreams."
Warframes are an open question about identity, humanity, and utility. They are a riddle cast in razor iron and warped, quivering meat. They are weapons 3D printed from muscle memory, psychic imprint, and arcane force. They can get pregnant.
Warframe is magnificently, beautifully strange, and yet impossibly human. Whether you're intimately familiar with it, or just getting your first taste of how mind-melting it can be, Herzog is the best voice you could've picked.
I guess Total War doing 40K is pretty good, too, though.
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Lincoln has been writing about games for 11 years—unless you include the essays about procedural storytelling in Dwarf Fortress he convinced his college professors to accept. Leveraging the brainworms from a youth spent in World of Warcraft to write for sites like Waypoint, Polygon, and Fanbyte, Lincoln spent three years freelancing for PC Gamer before joining on as a full-time News Writer in 2024, bringing an expertise in Caves of Qud bird diplomacy, getting sons killed in Crusader Kings, and hitting dinosaurs with hammers in Monster Hunter.
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