Warframe's The Old Peace skip is "sh*tty" for some, but it's Digital Extremes' "survival strategy" in a busy crowd

In the past year alone, I've plowed well over 50 hours into Warframe. Whether it's farming materials, decorating my Orbiter, or going back and forth on what color really looks the best on Oraxia, it's very easy to find yourself awake at 3am bopping Grineer and watching the damage numbers soar. But, as a newer player, I found the initial grind to be quite the hurdle - while things pick up with the Natah quest, the initial Awakening missions feel like a series of disparate parts that have no real rhyme or reason to them. As someone who has been desperate to get to the Warframe 1999 content and is invested in the MMO's world, I'm happy to put up with the grind, but I understand why some others would play a few hours and call it a day.

Coming into The Old Peace, however, Digital Extremes is letting players skip hours-worth of content to try out the update's two new game modes, Descendia and The Perita Rebellion. New players will encounter streamlined versions of both missions (although some spoilers may slip through), akin to the Warframe 1999 demo we saw ahead of that questline's release. You'll have to be above Mastery 10 to play, otherwise you'll need to be "'taxied by a friend." If you're above the level requirement, you can enter the public matchmaking queue.

In an Old War press pre-brief, creative director Rebecca Ford "heavily encourages [players] to do the [precursor story] quests," noting that, if you skip, you'll "just be able to do the gameplay, you won't be able to see the post-gameplay quests, the Triad: this is just purely a way for your friend to jump on in and play with you."

But this is the first time we've really seen a content skip in Warframe - the 1999 demo was woefully short, and while The Duviri Paradox can be played at any point during your journey, it follows its own unique storyline and feels very different from the base game. I ask Ford why the team has implemented this now, especially after her previous concerns about doing so.

"It's a survival strategy," she tells me. "This is the equivalent of the fish developing gills: you have to evolve to stay relevant. As shitty as it might sound to someone who treasures the Warframe story as much as we do - we want everyone to play the quest and feel what we felt - there are people who just want to try out the game at its best and see if it's worth investing in.

"It's kind of like the equivalent of a demo of the newest looking, playable content," she continues. "People can make decisions in reverse: they can try [Descendia and The Perita Rebellion] out and say 'oh, that's totally worth getting into, I'm going to start my quest journey.' If you don't evolve to do that, it's only going to get worse for us, because every time we add a new quest at the tail end of the game, the amount of new players that are going to be willing to get there is going to be diminishing.

"That's a hard spot to be in in a market where new games are coming out all of the time," she laments. "There's new games that release that are clearly inspired by Warframe, so much so that you do raise your eyebrows and think how, if someone never wanted to play Warframe, but heard that there's a game exactly like Warframe, they're going to go play that if it just came out.

"So [the Old Peace content skip] is a bit of a survival strategy," she continues. "I think it's a good compromise between what our mission statement is and what players expect from games in 2025 and now going into 2026. I like doing experiments that can make more people play Warframe; fundamentally, if the scientific objective of this is 'hey, more people are going to play Warframe and give it a try,' that's a really good thing. If this is the one way to do it, let's find ways to make it better next time we try."

When asked in the pre-brief Q&A about whether the team would consider offering similar, content-skipping access to other quests, Ford says that "we would probably go back with it to 1999 if it was super successful, but at the very least we would keep doing it for future updates. I don't know [how] we would decide on what makes it successful; we don't really have an ideal participation value, but we'll definitely do it in the future if it's good."

Digital Extremes has confirmed that Warframe's The Old Peace update launches on Wednesday December 10. New players will be able to play both the Descendia and Perita Rebellion modes, while those who have played the entirety of Warframe's story will have access to the rest of the content.

As someone who was initially put off by the grind, I've really fallen in love with Warframe's story. The removal of the Necramech requirement for The New War certainly helped, but the narrative itself really does pick up post-Awakening. So I too would, to borrow Ford's words, "heavily encourage" you to tear your way through the Plains of Eidolon and experience it for yourself - plus, then you'll be able to romance Marie.