I would say Warframe has been release-ready and effectively released since The Second Dream in 2015. It’s been a complete game that you can play for a long time and have lots of fun for about that long. The Second Dream is the first really big and meaningful main quest that definitively ended a chapter of the game’s story. You can finish The Second Dream and say “That’s it, I’ve experienced Warframe’s story, and I’m satisfied. That was cool and interesting.” Everything from that up until The New War would have been Warframe 2 under a traditional release model. And we’d currently be playing Warframe 3. Warframe just happens to be an MMO using the live service model, so we get 3 full games’ worth of story for free instead. Because Warframe is awesome.
I would say Warframe has been release-ready and effectively released since The Second Dream in 2015. It’s been a complete game that you can play for a long time and have lots of fun for about that long. The Second Dream is the first really big and meaningful main quest that definitively ended a chapter of the game’s story. You can finish The Second Dream and say “That’s it, I’ve experienced Warframe’s story, and I’m satisfied. That was cool and interesting.” Everything from that up until The New War would have been Warframe 2 under a traditional release model. And we’d currently be playing Warframe 3. Warframe just happens to be an MMO using the live service model, so we get 3 full games’ worth of story for free instead. Because Warframe is awesome.