WarframeThe New War Quest is here on all platforms and it is the end of a story that has been going on for years. It’s one of the wildest tales in the entire game world, so much so that players have carefully guarded the wild twist in The Second Dream quest that prepares the events of this long-awaited expansion.
If you take a look Warframe, you can’t see its depth. The game plays with futuristic space ninjas who mow through waves of fearsome extraterrestrial forces and space capitalists. But once you have the surreal aesthetic and the faceless, voiceless protagonists behind you, it is easy to get into the flow of things. Especially when new players find their feet Warframe pulls the rug away from under them with a compelling, personal, and deeply human story. The New War finally ends that story and ushers in the next era of adventure.
Polygon spoke to Rebecca Ford, Live Operations and Community Director at Digital Extremes. She is also the voice of the lotus, that of the. affectionately called Space Mom Warframe Community.
[Editor’s note: This interview contains spoilers for The Second Dream.]
As the voice of the lotus, I imagine it was pretty emotional for you to go through and record voice over.
Rebecca Ford: Oh yeah. I think when I first read through the script – without spoiling anything – I definitely ended up crying. The opportunity to read the script and then even come up with a suggestion or two was very enjoyable for me because we could see the journey this character went through and come to a place where everyone involved felt the doing right things for the right reason.
The Lotus and its relationship with the operator were a central pillar of Warframe. We loosen parts of it and move on to new things. Have you had any concerns about closing this chapter? Or was it a relief to leave the cliffhanger behind and discover new things?
That depends on who you ask, and you ask me, so you just get my answer. From my point of view, we did The Second Dream 2015. The game wasn’t even two years old. We thought, “Really? We do story content? Honey, let’s go. ”We didn’t really know where we were going, we just knew what emotions we felt able to get rid of them. And then The Second Dream went better than we’d hoped. And we said, “Okay, it’s time to bet on something human in this very ridiculous world.” Well no Not ridiculous. I love art. It is very …
It reminds me a lot War hammer 40,000 in scope and scale. And just like … the amount of bodies thrown into the meat grinder.
Yes! So how do you get mom and dad to get involved in the body grinder? Well, we had to tell it in a way that is clear Warframe. And frankly, now that we are at the point where this story is effectively coming to an end, let’s say with The New War – we know we are poised for a very interesting next step.
When it comes to online gaming – and I think this is a problem that a lot of developers are grappling with – how do you combine the new content with the old stuff without it being an increasingly unstable jenga tower?
There are business terms such as vertical integration or horizontal integration. And if you’re a game as a service, you have to do both. Otherwise you will either become suburban, a suburban nightmare where there is only horizontal growth everywhere, or your vertical growth cannot support its own weight.
We are in this really strange situation … we say “dilemma”. But we have this really lucky scenario where everything we did in terms of spread actually formed like a climax in The New War, where your Railjack matters, the open worlds matter, everything in Deimos is established, what matters is what is practical.
Originally, Deimos was supposed to be coming after The New War – or not at all – but we had to post something with COVID bans last year, and The New War was a year off. Now it can be what it is today. This would be a whole different quest if released in January 2020.
There are characters who aren’t Tenno or Operator – Tenshin, Kahl-175, and so on. Were you surprised how much people love the supporting actors and even the enemies of this game? The people who say, “Oh, I’m here for the Corpus, I’m the # 1 Corpus fan.”
It’s funny you mentioned Warhammer 40K because of it does give me the same vibe – when the people are super loyal to a Warhammer army, how they love their Chaos armies or their little rats and all that stuff. I don’t think we expected it this early. In Warframe
Oh, for sure. I can imagine that sometimes it’s a collaborative process with characters like Clem.
Yes, the Clem story was a meaningful integration of a community meme into the game.
As we head into The New War, the narrative is one a lot more complex. They talk about philosophy and decision making, which is a big departure from the early days when it was called “Go Shoot Gun and Do Flip”. How are the world-forming elements of Warframe designed, especially as it gets more complex and intermeshes things in The New War?
I had the privilege of repeating our early quests last week and the week before. When I went back and looked at all of the established elements there, I needed everything to not just turn around in my chair like, “How did we set it all up?” The deliberate world building to make The New War work was so conscious. Our story doesn’t have as much exposure as other games – and that’s not a bug, I’d like to hear a good explanation – but the actions that go into Warframe that lead to The New War are like that precise in determining the conclusion of this arc, from the moment you hear a particular voice in Chains of Harrow, to the betrayal in The Sacrifice.
So I repeated them all and did them more I now feel like I finished The New War and have come back. So the Weltbau was deliberate and consistent, and the elements in The New War should make sense because everything is there.
How do you as a team decide what to pull, what should stay, which events are limited in ti me, etc.? What is the decision-making process behind it?
These are probably the hardest decisions we make. What we did with Orphix Venom was that we knew the event had introduced a really important concept, which is that Sentients have the ability to repel Warframes and break the broadcast. We thought: “Okay, that works for us – can we integrate this permanently into Railjack?” We succeeded in doing this so that a player who deals with Railjack can play it whenever he wants.
Scarlet Spear was an event with huge lore elements, custom areas, and Erra as a character. And if you weren’t there, you can’t play it, and that’s really hard for us – sticking with that decision. The only reason Scarlet Spear doesn’t exist right now is because we’re not sure we are giving it the constant attention it needs as a sustainable content picker. Which is a shame, because in the end it turned out to be something great. But realistically we’re not a huge team. [Maintaining Scarlet Spear] must be something someone solves in the new year. So the decision is made on the basis of a quote from Mr. Spock – the needs of the many outweigh those of the few.
Away from the technical side of things, you’ve been playing the lotus for years. Space Mom holds a special place in the hearts of many players. There are people whose hearts are broken no matter how this story ends. What is it like to be part of this story and see how the lotus has this effect on the players?
It’s strange … it’s fun. It’s … I don’t know. I don’t know what it’s like. I never feel like I’m really 100% internalizing this experience that I’m living because it feels like one of those things that when I touch it, it disappears. I’ve never really internalized the reality of the system I’m in. Where I work, I play a character, interact with our players as a mebut sometimes they see me as someone else. And I’m very careful not to stare too far into this side of my life because I’m scared of it. I’m scared of what will happen if I let it close.
But at the end of the day, as a creative person with a creative team that is capable of things, I am just lucky enough to be part of it. I’m fortunate that the experiences we’ve had together have been so positive that, like me, I can add extra touches to the development of the story with the team – which we’re sure to have a lot of fun with after the quest is finished.
And in the end, I could never express what it all means to me. And at the end of The New War, with all of this said and done, I don’t know how I will feel or how I will react. I don’t know what the players are really going to think. I don’t know what to think. I really don’t.