Warframe Is Leaving the Origin System — Tau Opens a Whole New Star System This December, FREE on Every Platform

Thirteen years after launch, Warframe is doing the one thing it has never done: leaving home. Digital Extremes used its October Devstream 198 to give players their first in-depth look at Warframe: Tau, a brand-new Star System arriving in December 2026 — completely free on PC, console, and mobile platforms.

To appreciate the scale here, remember what Warframe has become. Launched in 2013, the free-to-play looter shooter has grown across multiple console generations into one of gaming’s biggest sleeper hits, with more than 90 million registered players. Every expansion until now has added planets, open worlds, and quests inside the Origin System — our solar system, remixed. Tau is a different star system entirely, with its own Star Chart, and Digital Extremes is treating it as the start of a new era rather than just another update.

The Tau players will visit in December is a paradise lost to war and ruin. Last year’s The Old Peace update (December 2025) showed what Tau once was; Tau the expansion unearths what it has become after eons of conflict. Two locations headline the launch. Perita is a decayed wasteland moon — home to the hostile forces overseeing the ruins and a revamped Survival mission on its Fornax moon — while the ring city of Fornax is a mob-run metropolis where criminal factions call the shots. On Fornax, players will head down to MANIFOLD 90-BF, a new social hub full of new characters, rivals, and lore secrets, and out in the Perita wasteland they will run into The Cleaving Glaive, a new ally Syndicate scavenging the ruins for Tau’s secrets. Digital Extremes stresses Tau will keep evolving with each update after launch — and that the Origin System is not being abandoned, just joined by somewhere new.

Every big Warframe chapter needs a face, and Tau’s is a first of its kind. Brysko, the 67th Warframe, is a detective-noir-inspired frame who serves as the protagonist of Tau’s single-player cinematic narrative quest. He is silent to the world but alive in an inner monologue voiced by legendary actor Matthew Mercer (Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, The Legend of Vox Machina). His kit leans all the way into the noir fantasy: a Hound companion, signature Rain & Shine fist weapons, explosive playing cards, and an Exalted magnum named Corecracker. Brysko also leads an all-new cosmetic class for the game — the Chimera Skin — and, like all Warframes, he can be earned through gameplay or instantly unlocked from the in-game Market when Tau arrives.

The fashion endgame is fed, too. Koumei, the dice maiden, gets her first-ever Deluxe Skin — Koumei Enshoujo — launching alongside Tau in December, and Nezha is next in line for the premium Heirloom Skin treatment, with concept art co-designed with Sumo Digital’s Mati Tapia and Stephan Sotelting ahead of an early 2027 release.

There is even something for board game night: Portau, Warframe’s first card game, is getting a physical Portau Collection and Portau Playmat, both available for pre-order now from the official Warframe merch store — and Digital Extremes is closing out its Princess Margaret Foundation Cancer Quest charity drive with a Portau tournament stream on Saturday, October 31 at 12 p.m. ET on Warframe’s Twitch and YouTube channels.

One more date to circle: this Devstream was only the first of two detailed looks at Tau. The second lands with the next Devstream on November 27, where Digital Extremes promises a ton of surprises still to come. Community Director Megan Everett summed up the pitch to new and returning players alike: the Origin System is not being left behind — Warframe just has more places to tell its stories now.

A free new star system, a cinematic quest fronted by a Matthew Mercer-voiced detective frame, and 90 million Tenno invited along for the ride — December cannot get here soon enough.

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Source: Digital Extremes announcement via GamesPress.

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