First announced at Tennocon 2018, Fortuna is an ambitious and lovably absurd expansion to Warframe that introduces a whole new open-world zone, hoverboards, a new weapon crafting system, and a lot more. But what is Warframe: Fortuna's release date? When Digital Extremes demoed the new Venus zone on stage at Tennocon, they didn't commit to a specific release date but instead said that Fortuna will be coming in autumn of 2018. More recently, however, the studio committed itself to a slightly-more-distant release target of November—not exactly a precise launch date, but getting there.
Hopefully it'll be worth the wait, as Fortuna looks like Warframe's most ambitious expansion yet. The new open-world landscape of Venus is a stunning iteration over the Plains of Eidolon. It's a much more diverse and wondrous area, with alien-like coral formations and massive orb-like spiders crawling over the mountainous terrain acting like mobile boss fights. It's big too, which is why Digital Extremes is giving players hoverboards that'll let them zip from location to location. And, yes, you can do badass tricks on them.
There's a lot of weird stuff coming in Fortuna too—which is right on par with Warframe's bizarre blend of cyber-ninja-meets-post-apocalyptic fantasy. On Fortuna, players can participate in conservation efforts of its endangered wildlife through a minigame where they track monsters, mimic their calls to lure them out, and then sedate them and relocate them to a wildlife sanctuary. There's also a colony of human-cyborgs that like to sing Disney-like chain-gang songs while they work.
Still, the most impressive aspect of Fortuna won't be arriving until much later. The Railjack update, which doesn't even have a release date window, will let squads of players seamlessly pilot a ship into space to do battle against enemy capital ships. You can think of it like a third-person FTL, where each player mans a station on the ship but also has to repel enemy invasions, put out fires, and repair broken modules. Likewise, players can also invade enemy ships and sabotage them from the inside while their friends provide support by hacking automated defenses or opening doors. It all looks pretty great.
Hopefully this all works as well as it sounds, but I guess we'll have to wait for when Warframe: Fortuna releases in late summer or early fall and Railjack comes some time beyond that.
