Warframe's big, weird Whispers in the Walls expansion out next week

After a big old information splurge at the end of last month, developer Digital Extremes has announced Warframe's fascinatingly weird Whispers in the Walls expansion - which introduces a new story campaign, a new Warframe, cross-save, and more - will launch for Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, and PC next Wednesday, 13th December.

Whispers in the Walls, in case you haven't been following along with Digital Extremes' previous showings, promises to reveal the "proverbial big bang" that kicked off every event in Warframe - and it all starts with the long-hidden (until the expansion's arrival, that is (laboratory of Albrecht Entrati, deep in the bowels of the planet Deimos.

Its feature list is a long one, promising the likes of new mission types, NPCs, bosses, factions, a new hub known as The Sanctum, and a new procedural tile set for Albrecht's aforementioned (and gothically gloomy) laboratory that serves as the expansion's primary new location.

Here, for instance, fearless Tenno will encounter a much-expanded Necramech faction they can battle using Whispers in the Walls' new page-flinging secondary weapon, the Grimoire - and then there's the Murmur, a nightmarish new faction of Eldritch creatures that make their presence known whenever players are whisked to the vast Eldritch desert that serves as the home of the mysterious Man in the Wall.

All this new stuff is introduced in an hour-long story campaign - which includes the jaw-dropping sequence shown at this year's TennoCon, in which players suddenly take control of new character Arthur and battle their way through a subway station to the sounds of Nine Inch Nails on New Year's Eve in 1999 - before becoming available for more traditional Warframe action.

Alongside the above, Whispers in the Walls brings new missions types - Alchemy, Netracells, and Swarm - plus the new Tennokai melee modding system, an expansion of Warframe's end-game Archon Shard system, and the new Arcane distillation system, which essentially serves as a form of transmutation for Arcanes. Plus! It also introduces 55th Warframe Qorvex - a brutalist concrete creation wrapped round a radioactive Void Core.

And, of course, Whispers in the Walls heralds the arrival of Warframe's long-awaited cross-save feature, which will be rolling out to players in phases with an eye on making it available to everyone by the end of the year. This, Digital Extremes explained previously, is to avoid risking timeouts caused by high players demand, something that could potentially be catastrophic for a feature as sensitive as account merging.

Full details on all the above can be found elsewhere on the site, but if you'd prefer to just dive straight in, that's an option too, seeing as everything in Whispers in the Walls will be available on PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, and PC starting next Wednesday, 13th December.