Warframe gears up for new chapter with new creative director

war frame and the developer, Digital Extremes, are entering a new world. The MMO shooter has remained a hit for years, thanks to its free-to-play accessibility and steady stream of new content. A major update, The Duviri Paradox, will be released later this year, adding a new open-world environment with rogue-lite elements.

Digital Extremes is also working on a new game, soul frame, a fantasy-based MMO. Keeping one online game running is hard enough. Having two MMO hits is a bigger task.

With the development of Soulframe comes a shift in Warframe’s team as some veterans move on to the new game. Rebecca Ford is now Warframe’s creative director. Ford has been with Digital Extremes since 2011, most recently as a live operations and community director. She is also the voice of Lotus, the character that guides players through the game.

I had the opportunity to speak with Ford prior to Tennocon 2022, which took place on July 16. I asked her about her new role and the future of Warframe. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.

War never changes… well, maybe a little

GamesBeat: You are now the creative director of Warframe. How does that feel? What are your goals?

Ford: Everything I’ve learned from the community and working closely with the development team over the past 10 years, and just in a way that translates into updates and changes that are very impactful for the future of Warframe and what people love about the game . I’m trying to capture it as best I can, but hopefully I’ll have enough experience with the community that, for the moments when I find my way around this new, much more pressure-filled roller, there’s a lot of respect and understanding that it’s a transition period and we all in this together. That’s where my heart and soul lie.

GamesBeat: Will the team simply split in two to support the development of both games, or will you hire to expand both teams?

Ford: We are renting. We hope to interest as many people as possible in both our sci-fi and fantasy endeavors. We have a very early development lead on Soulframe. A close-knit strike team is at work. The team size there isn’t quite as big as Warframe yet, but we hope to grow in that and see what we can do with some fantasy experts in our sci-fi realm.

GamesBeat: I can imagine it’s quite busy at this time of year when you think of TennoCon.

Ford: It is. It’s our seventh year doing it. There is always a different set of challenges. The first year was the challenge, is anyone going to look? The second year was, how do we make it better than the first year? Then you have that competition with yourself to make it an impactful event for everyone who cares about Warframe, or hopefully new people who care.

This year the challenges were, now we’re in a transition in the middle, so let’s see how we can change that. We started the transition into this new role of mine much earlier in the year. The team gave me a big trial period to figure things out with the team, which was great. But this one has had a lot of back and forth, can we even let our own employees watch the show because of COVID? There have been a few heartbreaks this week where another wave is taking place in Ontario. I was about to see 200 of my teammates for the first time in two and a half years, and now we can’t. Those kinds of challenges are a little more emotional because you think you’re going to have this live audience with just your team, who made it all happen, and then just to be on the safe side, I completely understand that we can’t do it.

But then of course there is the demo itself. We always play live gameplay, making sure to polish every bit that can be polished to show the version of the Duviri Paradox that we think this demo is solid, then come right back after it’s all done.

GamesBeat: Is it stressful getting ready to show off so much new content?

Ford: It would have been if we hadn’t made the Duviri Paradox work, because of the power and the world that is Warframe. This is kind of a different time and place in the Warframe canon timeline where we can now leak everything Warframe in this world that just plays at a different pace. It’s a rogue-lite and it’s Warframe. If you can imagine everything you know about Warframe, from the amount of weapons we have – we have over 300 weapons, 50 Warframes, over 500 mods, all these different things, and we’ve thrown them all into a funnel where players get to choose which ones make their build for the day, and for what the game asks of them in a given loop or cycle for the open world experience. We’re really trying something different, but nothing would work without the nine years of legacy content we need to make it work in this shard universe where you start at a completely different power level.

villain world

GamesBeat: You already mentioned that The Duviri Paradox has roguelite elements. How far does it go in that direction?

Ford: There’s a lot I can say and a lot I can’t say, but from a very conceptual standpoint, we want players who are familiar with our franchise to know and feel that when they approach this, there’s an overarching progression that gives them more control. about what the world will bring them.

When we do open worlds, we usually do something called syndicates where you hit a daily limit to surrender and level up. We’re doing it a little differently this time. We are going to grow the player as a player in the world. That gives them more control over what happens as they become more involved with the content. I don’t want to put labels on it just yet. Some players could smell exactly what we’re about to do. But there will be progression points where players will simply be given a wider arsenal to choose from at certain times.

There’s a beat in the TennoCon reveal where your bum walks into a room with three starter Warframes. That’s really to get a few things across in terms of where this might fall in the game, or the fact that you’ll be making such choices in your gameplay experience. As you can imagine, the more you play, the more choices you have at your disposal to fine-tune and transfer your experience.

GamesBeat: Will the progress in The Duviri Paradox return to the main game?

Ford: Yes, we are going to unlock some larger photos for the main experience. There will be equipment and other things that you will take back with you. There are also some small, I’d say more RPG-esque things that we hope to bring back as well. There’s a small house that we have in a certain part of the game, so there could be more for that as well.

GamesBeat: I liked seeing some puzzles in the open world.

Ford: It’s really different with us. For the first time, we’re like, okay, what can we put in an open world that’s going to be a little activity that someone can do to get XP or a perk or something for a particular play session? We’re trying to seed the open world with little optional things people can do to contribute to benefits for that play session.

We play a lot of open world games and we try to make them either feel as sleek and simple as Breath of the Wild’s Korok Seed puzzles, or in the case of the quest you saw, where you can see your younger mirror dimension self from another time. and place, which is very narrative-oriented. There is quite a wide breadth of complexity. The quest you saw is probably the highest complexity for the story, of course, but we’re doing some other little ones so that a player can interact with it, unlock something during that run. They may get another role or blessing that a player who wasn’t involved in that didn’t.

GamesBeat: You also play a lot with color in this world. Everything is black and white unless you start messing with things. How did this idea come about?

Ford: The first thing they had to do was determine the artistic direction and what color actually means and how important it is for players agency. Once you build and germinate a seed of intent, technology follows. Fortunately, our engineering team and our drawing team and our technical artists were able to really make color on demand work. And then of course you need your entire art team to build a world of color under your depth layers so you can activate it whenever you want the player to activate it. Which all worked out very nicely. For just general picks and where that goes, the finale of color will, say, have a lot of splendor and moments for the player to really feel that they have made a difference in their lives in this world.

And further

GamesBeat: Before even Duviri launches, another update, Veilbreaker, is coming out.

Ford: It’s a big surprise because nobody had any idea we were doing it. It’s pretty exciting to show off a trailer for a very, very customized post-New War experience for players. I like to surprise people with where we are going. Veilbreaker for me is an update that brings back the excellence of the new war. The New War was a solo campaign, a four-hour quest that took players through a ridiculously detailed array of assets and characters and world. And then you’ve done the New War. We wanted to make sure everything that stood out in that update gets a second chance in the hands of the player in a way that makes story-wise and is fun to play. Bring in the multiplayer for the boss fights with the Archons, then bring back a beloved character named Kahl-175. He’s back. He goes – players will be able to play as him again and perform some operations that will allow us to further the Veilbreaking cause. Because somehow there are still veils and people still support the enemy faction.

GamesBeat: The game is gearing up to introduce its 50th Warframe. So of all those frames, which one is your favorite?

Ford: Oh, Lord. You’re trying to make my first week as a creative director. Well, not literally my first week, but you’re going to make this dramatic. But right now, as if time had stood still, it would now be Protea. I just really like her. She has gadgets. She has power. She is beautiful and powerful, and I love her.