Warframe's red text comedy championships

Warframe is a free-to-play combination of a third-person shooter and action RPG. It’s available from Steam.

In the game, you take on the role of a Tenno, an ancient warrior in the far future, and you’re battling the matriarchal Grineer, the Corpus mega-corp, the Technocyte virus and the self-replicating machines of the Sentients.

The game has evolved since it launched in 2013 from when it scored 4/10 from Eurogamer to the “Very Positive” reviews it has from a quarter of a million Steam players.

The red text

Warframe, like so many other games, makes use of hot patches. A hot patch is a small update but not necessarily a bug fix. For example, introducing a small event like a water pistol fight in a social area might be introduced as a hot patch rather than a more significant upgrade.

Hot patches, like all upgrades, require players to download the new code and add it to the game.

However, as Warframe is a multi-player shooter there’s another consideration. Players might be engaged in missions for those few seconds the servers are busily upgrading from pre-hot patch to the latest edition of the code. Digital Extremes, who run Warframe, don’t want players to log out during that window as they risk loosing their progress.

The solution is to tell players that a hot patch is being applied. When Digital Extremes do this ‘red text’ appears in the game.

And it’s often weird. And funny.

The most popular redtext – 25.5.3

The Warframe Reddit community has taken to archiving the stranger of the redtext updates from Digital Extremes.

The latest hot patch, 25.5.3, has just become the most popular with over 5K upvotes and Digital Extremes pretending to investigate whether or not there’s a correlation between people who make use of exploits and people who complain about the game being boring.