Warframe gets Unreal Tournament weapon skins to celebrate its launch on the Epic Games Store

Warframe creator Digital Extremes and Epic Games have a storied history: they co-created Unreal and Unreal Tournament back in the late '90s. Eventually, the two studios parted ways, with Digital Extremes becoming a mid-tier work-for-hire developer before gambling and finding big success on Warframe. But now both Epic and Digital Extremes are having a little reunion.

Announced during The Game Awards, Warframe is coming to the Epic Game Store and giving away some pretty neat weapon skins modelled after Unreal Tournament's most iconic weapons. You can watch the trailer above, but the anyone who logs into Warframe via the Epic Store before December 25 will get the Rocket Launcher, Flak Cannon, and Shock Rifle skins along with the requisite Warframe weapons to actually use them. If you log before December 14, you'll even earn some in-game boosters that give you extra credits and Affinity (basically experience points but for your weapons and armor).

What's pretty neat is that, because Warframe already has an enormous arsenal of guns, these skins are for weapons that pretty much behave the same as they would in Unreal Tournament. The Drakgoon, which comes with the Flak Cannon skin, is literally just a flak cannon.

Even if you already play Warframe on Steam (or using its own launcher), you're still eligible to claim these bonuses, Digital Extremes confirmed. You'll just need to create an Epic Games account, download the game, and log in. Because Warframe is free, you won't have to pay anything, but you will have to download it a second time it sounds like.

It's a fun little holiday treat, and I like that it's a crossover event that doesn't break the aesthetic of Warframe like you see in a lot of online games. If you haven't played Warframe yet, you should. It's an excellent free-to-play game, and it also won't take up tons of precious hard drive space now that Digital Extremes has shrunk it.

If you want to see the skins up close, here's some screenshots.

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Warframe — (Image credit: Digital Extremes)

With over 7 years of experience with in-depth feature reporting, Steven's mission is to chronicle the fascinating ways that games intersect our lives. Whether it's colossal in-game wars in an MMO, or long-haul truckers who turn to games to protect them from the loneliness of the open road, Steven tries to unearth PC gaming's greatest untold stories. His love of PC gaming started extremely early. Without money to spend, he spent an entire day watching the progress bar on a 25mb download of the Heroes of Might and Magic 2 demo that he then played for at least a hundred hours. It was a good demo.