It’s been a while since I fell hard for Warframe, but I always knew it was going to happen. Many years ago, I tried the game out for Choose My Adventure and quite enjoyed it, but I also knew that once I got into it, I was going to get into it hard. And while I’ve talked a lot about the game over the past several months, I haven’t really talked about what made it appeal to me or why I knew that I was going to fall deep into its well as soon as I really gave it an honest shot.

And yes, that is a play on words because the game is one of the best shooters ever made.

I don’t just mean that it’s one of the best shooters in that it feels really good to take your space gun in the space ninja game and shoot things, although that is also true. I mean that in the sense that this is an amazing shooter on every level. It’s an amazing game front to back in almost every respect, and if not for the fact that it is somewhat impenetrable to a new player, it’d be basically flawless. And ironically, that impenetrability is also part of what makes it outstanding.

Here’s the thing: Warframe does not take place in our world. It tricks us into thinking it does early on by giving us planets and names that are familiar to us. The Origin System appears to be our solar system, after all, and all of the names seem to be derived a step or two from normal familiar human speech.

But the 1999 update makes it clear that’s not the case. This world was never ours. Oh, it was similar to ours in 1999 and was closer to our world then, but the nations and religions and ethnicities aren’t the same. At that point any similarities are mostly a matter of a point of reference rather than being meaningful distinctions. This is not our world, and it never was ours.

For a certain kind of person, that is absolutely catnip. It’s not just that the setting is weird; it’s that the setting is weird in a way that is so familiar to its residents that it doesn’t even register as unusual. The only way to grasp it is to just… play, be confused, and figure things out from inference.

To be clear, this is not an unfamiliar experience to me as a fan of frequently serialized science fiction shows and comic books from back in the day. This may seem alien to people now, but there was a long period of time when you started watching a show by just turning it on and puzzling your way through the episode. You picked up a comic book off the newsstand, and you did your best to follow it, and then maybe afterwards you could find some back issues so you could catch up on the stuff that characters alluded to happening in the past. Hopefully at some point it all starts to make sense.

My point here is not that this is somehow a superior method of storytelling. It is a good thing that this isn’t how we have to experience media on the regular any more. But it also does mean that there’s a fun to it, of just diving in and trying to pick up enough from the sidelines and only later being expected to actually understand how everything fits together.

Once you do understand, you’re rewarded with a really interesting story on a whole. The fact is that the player character gets to occupy a somewhat unique role in the story. You’re indisputably a heroic figure, but you’re a heroic figure who is also constantly beset by a world that is infinitely crueler and more savage than you are. This is a world where idealism does not overlap with pacifism in any fashion, but you are also indisputably a figure making sure that if power flows from the barrel of a gun, you are where the power comes from.

And that’s before you get into the actual gameplay, which is just outstanding even in its simplest form of mowing your way through corridors of enemies.

The interesting thing is that Warframe as a game was clearly built to try accounting for playstyles ranging from going weapons hot and loud to being stealthy, but at this point the stealthy approach has basically been fully deprecated – not because the mechanics don’t work, but because it’s just not as much fun. It’s more satisfying to go gliding through maps with your extensive movement arsenal and unload your weapons on everything.

And that could become repetitive, but the challenge becomes not about killing individual enemies but horde management. It’s about understanding what each enemy is capable of and what groups can do and moving to take care of them in the correct fashion. Your individual warframe makes a big difference here; it determines whether your approach is to push everything back or make a single path and then clean up the rear or even support the rest of the team.

Every shooter is fundamentally built on that basic tension. You go from high-energy shooting segments to slower moments to provide contrast, and Warframe consistently paces those well by giving players what amounts to a remarkably full-featured MMORPG experience between missions. You’ve got housing to decorate, the game’s primary advancement method is crafting, you have equipment to manage and stories to advance, and between that you get into high-energy and high-octane shooting segments that test your group management and ability mastery.

That’s not to say that it’s flawless, but it consistently feels good mission to mission. Yes, it can be hard to adapt at first. You are dealing with a story that doesn’t explain a whole lot of itself right off the bat, and you’re expected to just cope with having loads of vocabulary tossed at you from the hop. I don’t exactly blame people who listen to a series of discussions of capturing the kavats held hostage by the Grineer to free the Ostrons in the name of the Tenno and say “please start using a single word I recognize instead of proper nouns that make no sense.”

But I think part of what makes it worth it is knowing that it does feel like a barrier to entry and on the other side is something that’s worth it. If you make it through the early confusion and having to learn to swim by jumping in the deep end, you’ll find that swimming is actually great. It rewards you with elaborate gunfight sequences as good as any game I can think of on record, inventive settings, engaging characters, and beautiful visuals – enough to keep me coming back time and again now that I have pushed through the parts that didn’t even pretend to make sense at first.

For the record, a kavat is a combat-worthy cat that’s about a meter tall at the shoulder. We don’t know what happened to smaller cats; all we see are kavats. They’re pretty cool.

There’s an MMO born every day, and every game is someone’s favorite. Why I Play is the column in which the Massively OP staff members kick back and reminisce about all their favorite MMOs. Whether it’s the new hotness or an old fan favorite loaded with nostalgia, each title we cover here tugs at our heartstrings and keeps us coming back for more.