This one has been in the works for a long time now and to say it was highly anticipated among the community is putting it lightly. A friend of mine kept checking Warframe every few hours to see if the patch maybe got released slightly early.

And looking through the list of additions it is easy to see why any Warframe fan would consider this patch so important. It has everything, from a new Warframe and tile set to complete game mode overhauls and new weapons and functionality. I won't go over all of the changes but here's what I feel are the most important ones.

The continuation of the Natah quest which revealed a whole lot of lore about the world Warframe inhabits and now with the new quest, called The Second Dream, we are going to get further explanation on who or what the Sentient are and what was the role of the Tenno (us, players) in all of it. If you've been reading any of my other articles you'd know that I love a good story and with Warframe they've been dragging on the mystery for years now so to finally get even a glimpse of truth feels very exciting.

Login rewards have gone through a complete overhaul. Your chance for better loot will increase with every day you log in, but thankfully won't decrease if you miss any, so the more dedicated you are the better the odds of you getting something cool out of it. Your mastery will also affect your odds. Each mastery level adds a flat 5% bonus to your "get rare stuff" chance though be realistic here, a 5% increase from a low number is still not massive. But even if you are unlucky you have a guaranteed reward to look forward to as your 100th daily reward, an exclusive machine pistol, only for the most diehard fans.

There is also a new Warframe, Ivara the huntress, who can be obtained through easy, medium and difficult spy missions which is quite generous of them given that those missions can be completed fairly quickly with an organized team. Along with Ivara there has been a rework of how sniper rifles work, no longer will they be the butt of all jokes. The biggest change is the kill streak bonus. For each consequent kill in a brief period of time you will gain damage on your next shot so if you're a true marksman you could in theory work your bonus up by killing small enemies only to then show true punishment to more resilient foes such as Bombards or Heavy Gunners.

Ivara isn't someone you want to end up alone in the dark with, or given her getup maybe you do, I won't judge

One of the biggest changes as far as longevity of the game is concerned are the poorly named Sortie missions, extremely challenging quests you can attempt to do solo or in a group. They reset once every 15 days which gives you plenty of time to complete three connected missions in order to get a potentially awesome prize. I've done Warframe's challenging events in the past and these things can get quite bloody hard so I am definitely looking forward to testing my battle prowess once more.

Given that I expect to be dying a lot in these challenge modes its a good thing the Revival system is getting an upgrade as well. Instead of having 4 revives per character per day you can now die a total of 4 times in a mission with each resurrect incurring an experience penalty which is far better than simply throwing out new players because they didn't have enough characters to cycle through.

And the final important change, at least in my eyes, is the addition of an Infested Excavation mode as well as a heavy rework of how mission rewards work. In general hard missions have received much needed buffs so you won't find yourself playing for 30 minutes only to realize you've done it all for absolutely nothing. Also while this is a small addition I do appreciate that you now have 30 seconds after finishing an Interception wave to pick up all of the loot strewn about.  Its usually trash but nothing feels worse than leaving your hard earned loot behind because the end-screen popped up too quickly.

That is it as far as my overview of the changes goes, for full patch notes you can head over to the Second Dream Update page. And if you're looking for a game to lose a few hours with, or a few thousand, you really can't go wrong with Warframe.