Talk:The Sacrifice/@comment-194.213.123.249-20180615063641/@comment-28189408-20180615103610

Lone Tenno 2 is pretty fucking cheesed over the final chapter in the cinematic preamble to the Sentient invasion, so this is more directed at them than the OP. Also partly because I enjoyed the quest but there was quite a lot crammed into it as with the other cinematics, so it feels good to unpack it all for myself by writing out a retort to someone who did not. Spoilers ahead, of course, but:

So what was The Sacrifice 'for' aside from concluding the "what are we?" story arc that began in TSD and completing the development of our character that really got underway in TWW?

The quest delivers that Ballas was an ally to the Sentients this whole time and is the reason Hunhow knew to look for the Reservoir in TSD, that the Lotus as Natah is returning to the Sentients' side and taking Ballas's body with her, a smorgasbord of Orokin culture and lore packed into some artful as fuck perspective sequences, and more.

Who Umbra was? A Dax soldier, veteran of the Old War, who discovered Ballas's plot to betray the Orokin to the Sentients and was unwillingly Infested, turned into Warframe fodder to silence him, and even forced to kill his own son as part of Ballas's revenge. A man who played games with and sang to his children and presumably wanted the best for his kin and the whole of humanity, and was punished for this in the worst of ways.

Who Umbra is? That same man, now a reconstructed Warframe with more than an echo of sentience, wracked with memories of life, pain and punishment. It wants to impress the violence of these feelings on the world and most importantly on Ballas, maybe for revenge and maybe just for resolution, but as we see when we touch the Lotus's helmet, it lacks the presence of mind to defy its creator (which is, of course, where we come in).

Not only does this easily outshine all of the individual backstories we've received in other 'Frame-centric quests, but it also serves to polish our character arc even further as we reach out to the turbulent force of Umbra to calm and focus it, just as the Lotus and Margulis once did for us. We now see the Tenno making decisions entirely for themselves and even going as far as killing Ballas, a principal figure in the greater events of the Origin System both then and now, simply because they wanted to and not because some authority figure suggested it, as had always been the case before these quests. From a certain point of view, we've progressed all the way from child to parent in the span of the cinematic trilogy, and that's awesome enough in its own right to declare The Sacrifice a fitting bookend in my mind.

TL;DR There's way more to The Sacrifice than "here's a free Umbra" and the fact that that was all you got from it is mind-boggling to me. Seriously, replay it ASAP.