Angels of Zariman, the latest major content update for Warframe is coming. It’s listed as a special one that takes place directly after the events of the climactic New War quest that shocked the community, and introduces another hub for players to socialize and explore. What secrets are hidden in the dark corners of this long-lost ghost ship? I do not know. No one will tell me. We’ll have to find out when it goes live later in the week of April 27th.
To get through this volatile period without new weapon upgrades and Warframe farming, I sat down again with Warframe’s Field Operations and Community Director, Rebecca Ford, to walk me through some of the major additions to the new player hub, and Some of the more interesting aspects of the Zariman update.
iGamesNews: What lessons have the team learned from previous hub areas, and how has this impacted the latest additions?
Rebecca Ford: Well, I can say this is one of the most challenging we have to do. Because as far as we know, the Zarriman is a ghost ship. So how do you populate a hub without a population? So we have to bring life into it in other ways. After completing the mission, you will see how many people are there.
The sensible lesson is that we need to make sure that RPG characters are critical to their upcoming gameplay. So we really wanted to build three pillars for our hub. The first is standing, we want to make it feel better and understand how players like to use the standing system. The second is weapons – everyone loves our weapons products. And then there’s the bounty, which is a major open world hub, but how do you do it in a world that isn’t open? So on Zariman, there’s a lot of new additions, as well as a combination of a lot of things that have worked from past hubs.
iGamesNews: Tell me about the parts of the Zariman ship that are not within the safety of the hub? where the player will complete the quest etc.
Rebecca Ford: Zariman is a huge colonial ship. What will happen is that the player will actually walk into the elevator and this time they will choose the floor they want. In Orb Valis, you go to the ground and go to the ground, and here you can choose, depending on which floor you choose, they all have tons of world building flavors.
You’ll also learn a lot about the ship as you travel around it and how Orokin will create this colony ship full of experimental guinea pigs! What does the boat have? it doesn’t have anything? Who are the colonists? How were they selected? What luxury do they get?
It’s a bit of a joke too, but we give Lunaro a backstory, you know, I don’t know if you follow our PvP attempts over the years. But yes, there are some fun little Lunaro nods to its source, so watch out too!
iGamesNews: What’s up with these new missions? It’s been a while since we played a new type of quest.
Rebecca Ford: We need new gameplay. I love the game mode I’ve been playing, but we’ve been playing for years. When we took this opportunity to build Zariman, we knew we needed to provide new ways to actually engage in your instant quests, and we still had some classics like Extinction Not Going Anywhere, which was a great way for players to tune their own rhythm The way. But despite that, we’ve added three new game modes, which is probably more than we’ve added in the past two years combined.
It has to happen and you need new ways to interact with the world. This is absolutely necessary so we can bring new ways to play because you can’t just keep doing the same tasks.
iGamesNews: So now that new missions are something the team thinks are a little problematic, can we expect new missions added to Zariman to spread to different planets throughout the system? Or at least a new twist on traditional tasks in the future?
Rebecca Ford: I agree. But for this particular update, they’re so closely tied to Zariman’s state that it’s hard to take some of them off the ship just because they’re narratively tied to it in some way. I mean, if they do go somewhere else, that means something really bad happened!
iGamesNews: Let’s talk player housing! As someone I know with an orbiter full of stuff, can you shed some light on whether like-minded players will be able to transfer all their stuff to their new home?
Rebecca Ford: We made a very careful decision to make sure that anything that can be adorned on your orbiter can also be placed here, so players can go from the same library, the same inventory, anything you can put on your landing craft Everything can be put in your place.
iGamesNews: Are there plans to expand this feature to different areas of the Warframe universe so players can get extra pads for all their stuff?
Rebecca Ford: Now, it’s very contextual and meant to be included in Zariman’s experience. This is part of the exploration. It’s all connected. I must have been engaged in house hunting. I struggled to get a house in another game I don’t want to be named, and after about a day I couldn’t use my hands because I had to click too much.
iGamesNews: The last major addition to the Zariman ship is of course the ever-evolving weapons. How exactly have these weapons evolved, and how challenging do we expect them to be?
Rebecca Ford: Yes, it caters to that. In terms of intensity, if this is chili rice, we’re not super spicy. We are in jalapenos at most. We really don’t want you to fail, but we do want you to let you know how to use these weapons. Not as simple as you know, get 100 XP with this weapon because that’s passive. They do need to be active, but they’re not the Carolina Reaper.
iGamesNews: Are there any challenging research in the system plans like evolving weapons, maybe you can only unlock at max prestige in Zariman’s Syndicate? Is it suitable for players who want to grind for a long time to earn special rewards?
Rebecca Ford: One of the things we’ve been working on is having players show some level of commitment or skill. We have a taste of it, but nothing but some Steel Path emoji.
But merit-based gear or gear that’s locked behind these types of things, we haven’t really perfected. We’re exploring options to make players feel like they’ve won something and get them into a, you know, not a bracket because we’re not a competitive game, but we just want people to be able to pass them in the game other things done in to express yourself. So, there will be more in this direction.
If you want a full look at everything in the Zariman update, check out our recap of Warframe Devstream 161, which looks back at everything in this week’s update.
