Edward Richtofen

Edward Richtofen is the character the Aether storyline is built around. A Group 935 doctor whose experiments with Element 115 open the door to the Aether, he spends the saga pursuing control of forces that are consistently a step beyond him — and the saga spends its length dealing with the consequences.

Two Richtofens

The single most common source of confusion about this character is that there are two of him, and they want opposite things. The community names come from the crews rather than the games.

Both appear across the series, sometimes on the same map, and the story treats them as genuinely distinct people rather than one character at different ages. If a plot summary seems to contradict itself, checking which Richtofen it means usually resolves it.

Group 935 and Element 115

Richtofen’s work with Group 935 — the research organisation behind the teleporters, the Wunderwaffe and much of the technology the maps are built from — is where the story starts. Element 115 is the substance that makes all of it work and is also what reanimates the dead, which is the central irony of the whole setting: the mode’s enemies are a side effect of its equipment.

His relationship with Ludvig Maxis, the group’s head, and with Maxis’s daughter Samantha, drives most of the early conflict. The consequences of that conflict are what the crew spends the rest of the saga trying to contain.

Where you encounter him

Richtofen is playable in the original World at War maps as part of the Ultimis crew, and again in the Black Ops III maps as part of Primis. Between those he appears through radios, cutscenes and ciphers as often as in person — a lot of this story is told by things you have to go looking for rather than things that happen in front of you.

Der Eisendrache is one of the clearest places to see the Primis version driving events directly, and its main quest is largely his plan.

A note on continuity

The Aether storyline was written across roughly a decade and multiple studios, and it has been retconned more than once. Details that seem contradictory sometimes genuinely are. Where this site is uncertain about a story point it says so rather than picking the tidiest reading and presenting it as settled.