Over the past few years, Warframe players have spent much of their time in-game exploring a broken timestream, jumping from one era to the next in their fight against an eldritch space god.

But at its TennoCon 2026 event, developer Digital Extremes revealed a bold new direction for the game: Instead of exploring time, players will soon enter an entirely new part of outer space. The Tau solar system teased in The Old Peace update will soon be accessible during regular gameplay, with multiple new celestial bodies for players to explore.

Live-service games that thrive for years get the rare chance to morph and evolve into something new. When Warframe launched in 2013, it was a simple third-person looter-shooter about deadly robotic ninjas. Now it features raid bosses, an endless roguelike mode, a semi-open-world fishing simulator and even some visual novel elements.

In an industry that seems increasingly reluctant to take risks on new ideas, Digital Extremes continues to reinvent its sci-fi brainchild. Each new update includes creative leaps leading to “out-there” ideas like a living guitar or a spider-themed robot, ensuring there’s no other game quite like Warframe.

Even so, all those zany ideas existed within a single solar system — disparate story threads connected by a common location. The boundaries of the world have always been well-defined by the in-game star chart. In the next expansion, that’s changing for the first time ever.

Warframe Tau feels like the game’s The Final Shape moment

Warframe players have been hacking, slashing and bullet-jumping across the Origin System — a starchart that mirrors our real-world solar system with some sci-fi alterations — for over 13 years. Soon it’ll be time to explore a new frontier: Tau.

It’s difficult to express how massive this change feels without pointing toward the other sci-fi looter-shooter cultural juggernaut, Bungie’s Destiny and Destiny 2.

The Destiny series — first released in 2014, just one year after Warframe — also took place largely within the boundaries of our very own solar system. For years, players battled the forces of darkness across the surface of Earth, Mars and other familiar planets.

But when Destiny 2’s decade-long narrative reached its climax in The Final Shape expansion, players plunged into the heart of the living planet-like Traveler in order to battle the villainous Witness. When the stakes were highest, players were transported to a completely alien locale within the deity-like sphere they’d followed for Destiny’s entire plot, a place where everyone was on equal footing and many long-standing questions were finally answered.

While Warframe’s narrative has flirted with the idea of sending players to Tau for years now, the reality of finally heading to a brand new star chart feels monumental.

This could be Warframe’s version of The Final Shape — and while players may not be putting the beatdown on this game’s eldritch god quite yet, this is Digital Extremes’ chance to build out an expansion to its sci-fi universe that is completely divorced from the imagery and cultural norms associated with our real world. Warframe is already wild, but the Tau system presents an opportunity to explore ideas unbound by the established conventions of the Origin System.

That’s not to say everything will be set in stone when Tau comes to the live build. The new star system will be slowly built out after this initial narrative adventure, which features a distinctly detective-noir vibe, naturally paired with a fedora-wearing, smooth-talking Warframe named Brysko.

When Warframe Tau launches later this year, you can expect to be able to explore Fornax, the Sentient Ring City of Tau, and “maybe one other secret thing,” according to Warframe’s creative director, Rebecca Ford. Then, in the many updates that follow this release, “there will be a whole [new star] system to expand on and explore.”

The Origin System isn’t being abandoned

New players and nostalgic veterans don’t have to worry about the original mission map becoming obsolete.

Though the Warframe Tau expansion launches toward the end of 2026, the development team won’t ignore the existing Origin System star chart once the update is live. Ford said that there are Origin System stories currently “planned and ready to go” for the future.

“It’s not as if you’ll be flying off to Tau and forgetting about some of the unique aspects of the Origin System,” Ford said. “We are going to be providing some deep story beats for the Origin System as well.”

New stories from the existing star chart will still be added in the lead-up to Tau, too. The Iceblade of Narin content update, which will be released this fall, will add a new chapter to the rich tapestry of history already woven through the long-standing solar system. That update’s associated quest will be available to every player who has completed the Angels of the Zariman story, and it’ll introduce a new ice-themed Warframe to the roster.

If you’re new to the game, it’s easy to feel like you might get left behind by a content update that looks as radically transformative as Warframe Tau. But Digital Extremes has recently redoubled its efforts to make the game more welcoming to everyone, reshaping important tutorials and early quests to better explain basic mechanics.

Early- and midgame players will still be able to explore new stories, discover new Warframes and experience new updates alongside a massive multiplayer community. It seems that no player will be left abandoned by the narrative change, which is perhaps the most fundamental factor in any MMO’s continued success.

Narrative Nightwave is coming back in a big way

Warframe’s free Nightwave battle passes are getting a welcome shakeup after so many volumes of Nora’s Mix. The next battle pass is themed around fan-favorite Warframe 1999 character Amir Beckett’s favorite tabletop game: Fables & Frontiers.

While newer players might keep returning weekly for the generous (and free) Nightwave rewards, these reward tracks used to be paired off with more substantial episodic narratives that helped build out the wider world of Warframe.

The first few Nightwave updates added new missions and fearsome foes, like the hulking prison escapee known as the Wolf of Saturn Six. These characters would grow increasingly active in the game world as weeks passed, eventually making incursions into players’ missions, culminating in epic miniboss fights.

Ford previously told CNET that this original iteration of Nightwave was “unsustainable” because it took too many development resources that needed to be allocated to the game’s major updates. Adding more mission and enemy types is a tall order when the live-service game needs new content and maintenance elsewhere.

The next pass, Amir’s Shockwave, feels like it just might be the perfect middle ground between a full-fledged classic Nightwave experience and a generic battle pass. While no new missions or minibosses will debut alongside this pass, the Hex’s personal Dungeons & Dragons-esque narrative will unfold with each weekly task reset as the gang gets together to play an in-universe tabletop RPG.

Players will get a chance to guide the fantasy adventure through the KIM visual novel system established in the Warframe 1999 update, exploring fan-favorite relationships in a low-stakes storytelling environment. Ford previously said that Nightwave could be “the key” to tying more lighthearted stories into the Warframe world, and it seems that’s exactly what we’re getting with this update.

I love Nora Night and her spunky pirate radio broadcasts as much as the next guy, but I’m glad other characters are getting a chance to mooch some of her spotlight. The episodic nature of Nightwave content is the perfect way to explore small-scale happenings and slice-of-life adventures that don’t fit into Warframe’s epic galaxy-spanning narrative players see in story missions, and I hope the feature might get more use as a vehicle to explore this sci-fi universe in the future.