TennoCon 2024

After a few days to let the hype die down a bit I feel I can make a quick recap of my trip to London, Ontario for TennoCon 2024. This might be a bit of a mixed chronicle as I will also write a little about London itself. To preface this I must point out that this was my first time in Canada as well as my first international flight.

London, Ontario, was the location hosting TennoCon 2024. The city itself felt rather empty at first. Having been to New York and Boston it felt like a stark contrast. Of course, this is a small city, I would not expect it to be as bustling. The parks were really nice, like the nearby Victoria Park and the parks beside the Thames river. Not that I was able to experience much more of the city as I only spent four days there. Three days, considering I left early Sunday morning. Food was great. Reset Social Cafe being my favorite place. Great coffee and the downtown city vibe really clicked with me.

Now, onto the main event. TennoCon 2024 was essentially split into two parts. The first was TennoVIP. A special event with unique activities, music and karaoke held inside a large tent beside the convention center. Early Friday morning attendees could get their badge and visit the merch store. Both of these had very long lines so waiting was the order of the day. Later that afternoon people started queuing up for the TennoVIP event. Another line, but this time a lot of it was spent under the hot summer sun. Originally I thought it would be fine. Temperatures early that day were fair, but that did not hold as it is obviously the middle of summer. This made waiting to get into the TennoVIP tent a bit of an ordeal. The tent also had a limited capacity, meaning that the line had to be held multiple times to allow people to get through the activities inside. Once inside there was this big party vibe, accompanied by, you guessed it, more lines. Overall the activities were a good idea, but the execution itself felt lacking. These needed to be accessible to everyone, so it would’ve made sense to have these somewhere else, possibly outside the tent. That way, the tent itself could have been the focus for the drinks and the stage.

Saturday was the big day for TennoCon. That day was going to host the big reveals of the next updates coming to Warframe as well as showcase what they’ve been working on with Soulframe. First up was the Soulframe devstream at 12. In terms of visuals a lot of Soulframe looks great. Though there were a few hiccups particularly with a number of particle effects and flashes that often obscured the action. Some combat animations seemed off, but this is part of the nature of an in development game. Especially when it has only been in development for a relatively short time. Afterwards there were two more panels and a cosplay contest. Sadly I missed the art panel because I needed lunch. In it a few neat tidbits were shown. A concept of the next heirloom skin for the Rhino warframe and also the next prime warframe, Sevagoth Prime. Following that we got the sound panel which is brilliant as always. Lots of cool background for their creation of sounds and music. The cosplay contest was next after that.

Finally the main showcase arrived, the Warframe devstream, TennoLive. In it they confirmed there would be a total of three updates coming for the remainder of the year, starting with The Lotus Eaters in August. There were few previews for much of the content, one of which was a rework for the warframe Caliban as well as a new deluxe skin for it. They will also hold another info drop at Tokyo Game Show. Then came the big gameplay showcase for Warframe: 1999. In it we got to see other protoframes, one of which is a new warframe coming with that update (Quincy, Cyte-09). This showcase was brilliant. We got a walkthrough of at least the first part of the quest. A new faction, called Scaldra, was introduced here. The showcase ended with the reveal that a new kind of adversary, the Infested Coda, would make its entrance with this update.

TennoCon was an amazing experience overall. The energy felt in that large auditorium was unlike anything. There is a lot of excitement for the future of Warframe. Meanwhile, for Soulframe, I hope that it can continue to improve and adjust its systems as development goes on. Next year’s TennoCon will be held July 18-19 in 2025. It will be the tenth iteration of the event.