So long, space Kawasaki.
There’s a lot to love in Warframe 1999, the latest major update for the free-to-play scifi action game about magic space ninjas, mutant biotechnical horrors, and more pregnancy than you might expect. The free expansion launched last week, sending players back in time to an alternate-history 1999 to battle alongside—and potentially romance!—a squad of misfit, proto-Warframe-wearing supersoldiers. It also added sick motorcycles, which quickly proved to be even sicker than intended.
Shortly after starting the primary story quest for 1999, players gain access to the Atomicycle: a Y2K-era sports motorcycle that’s been heavily modified to let it employ some of the same traversal tech as Warframes. The motorcycles can bullet jump and aim glide. It’s excellent. Before 1999’s launch, Warframe developer Digital Extremes said that once players completed the 1999 quest, in addition to using the Atomicycle in the expansion’s Höllvania tileset, they’d be able to summon their bikes in Warframe’s open world areas as well.
That proved true. However, it didn’t take long for players to realize that they could also summon their Atomicycles everywhere else.
A widespread bug allowed the unrestricted deployment of souped-up motorcycles in any Warframe mission tileset, including the many missions taking place in the narrow corridors of spaceships and orbital installations. Warframe can already move extremely fast thanks to its suite of gravity-defying parkour traversal mechanics; now, any of the three other players in your mission who can already launch themselves across the map faster than you can track might, a moment later, be drifting around corners on their customized, nuclear-powered Yamaha.
It was nonsense—extremely radical nonsense. Luckily, extremely radical nonsense is well within acceptable design parameters for Warframe.
On Monday, Digital Extremes made an announcement on the Warframe forums to say that the Atomicycle situation was fine, actually. “As lots of you have reported, the Atomicycle can be spawned and used in ALL missions, not just 1999 and Open Zones like we originally intended,” Digital Extremes said. “After some internal discussion, we’ve decided to not change this. It’s rad and cool and we enjoy seeing you whip out the bike throughout the Origin System!”
However, DE said it would be removing the ability to summon the Atomicycle in missions intended for the already-existing Archwing vehicles—missions that tend to take place in zero gravity, in the vacuum of space. Motorcycles don’t function well in three dimensional combat encounters, it turns out. DE also said the bug-turned-feature will only apply to Atomicycles; Archwings and the K-Drive hoverboards remain relegated to Open Zones.
I didn’t expect to get much use of my Atomicycle outside of 1999 missions, but I’m looking forward to taking my bike on a tour of the solar system. If only to confuse any new players who might not be expecting a motorcycle to come screaming through the bulkhead of a Grineer cruiser.
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