year 2013, digital limit Take a gamble. Its previous game, Dark Sector, didn’t turn out as well as the studio hoped, so it took the assets and designs it still stashed away and released Warframe in search of redemption in the then young free-to-play market. Ten years later, it turns out…that was a great idea.
It’s been one hell of a ride for a sci-fi action grindathon. The game — which quickly caught on and transformed as the turbulent environment the studio found itself slipping through — has managed to soar through several drastic changes in the industry and escape live-service no-man’s land with a loyal player base, unique The spreading content of its peers in the MMO space, and (of course) the Harrow case.
As we approach Warframe’s 10th anniversary, I wanted to ask Creative Director Rebecca Ford if he could sneak me a Wolf Sledge Motor. But instead, we talked about the game’s past, its future, and where the game stands in the eyes of the industry a decade after its conception.
“It felt like it should be an achievement — and it was! — but it was also incredible,” Ford said. Warframe now finds itself at the beginning of a new journey, both narratively and in terms of its leadership. Of the many motions expressed by Ford, fear is perhaps the most modern:
“I think in this industry, where we were babies, now we’re part of a legacy of a very significant shift in gaming. We’re one of the first games to shift this western PvE game as a service model. We’re doing something different thing, and now in our tenure, we’ve seen every mistake and every success we’ve made go against an industry that wasn’t even sure it liked games-as-a-service.”
10 years later, it’s a very different world. The idea of persistent free content was a boon to the average gamer before, but now as the genre ages, the sight of a battle pass or a cosmetic shop is starting to feel like a nuisance. Live service burnout is here to stay, putting extra pressure on the Warframe team to keep things interesting.
As Ford puts it: “The pressure just builds every year, and you don’t want to let the new year stagnate…you say ‘hey, we’ve accomplished a lot in the last 10 years, we want to You have 10 left around! But what does that look or feel like?”
Answer? Hybrid formula. While old Warframe fans want more content in the form of a 40-minute Ash farm or an all-night run of extraction farms, modern tastes demand occasional deviations from familiar paths. “If you keep giving people what they expect, you’ll never surprise them,” laughs Ford. “So you have to drive on this highway that’s at the core of ‘fun’ Warframe, and every now and then you’ll come across this crossroads where you can go into the world of Railjack or Duviri.”
Ford noted that Warframe’s gameplay, bullet jumping, and air gliding have entertained many fans over the past 10 years, and it’s a solid foundation on which the team can build new and exciting content.
This approach, combined with the challenges COVID has brought to game development and everyday life, resulted in the toughest patch in Warframe history, according to Ford: the release of Railjack. An ambitious new adventure that takes players into space, the project will kick off what Ford calls a “post-Railjack COVID storm,” and the team must pull out all the stops, “picking up the pieces of Railjack and trying to keep going.” A new challenge for a long time, predictably, with no easy answers.
But that’s not to say it’s all an uphill struggle to keep the engine running. If that’s the case, it’s been an impossible 10 years for the studio. With a touch of nostalgia, Ford cites countless community moments that ignited the fire for the team: the first TennoCon (and the fact that people actually showed up), the explosion of popularity with narrative dynamite during the “Second Dream” quest in 2015, and the Lotus Making her into Super Smash Bros. in one spirit.
However, it was at the tail end of the COVID lockdown that the team launched The New War, a dramatic addition to years of story threads and narrative teases. In Ford’s mind, this represents the other side of the coin and her proudest moment at Digital Extremes…that is, until they make a new update.
Ford teased “the next 10 years” in our chat – but what does the future hold for Warframe? The story of the Lotus and The Second Dream is over, so we can expect an exciting continuation of the Stinger at the end of the new war, as well as more details on the development of the narrative at this year’s TennoCon. Ford exclaims: “To me, how does the arc of the next five years look to get us there with weird and interesting gameplay? It’s all set!”
When it comes to future gameplay, Ford wants to up the ante. “I think the gameplay has to feel like Warframe, but we need to change the player’s stakes while respecting the player’s muscle memory,” Ford said. “That’s one of the biggest challenges, the infinite power of Warframe is both a blessing and a curse. When the content is too simple, people burn out. So it’s like ‘well, we’re going to make sideways type content’ Orthogonal
Ford continued: “Since Archangel Zariman, our quest design philosophy has been feeding the beast. So stick with what makes the core Warframe quests interesting and come up with more designs to incorporate that.”
I wonder what Ford thinks of Warframe and Digital Extremes’ reputation. In the eyes of the industry, where does she think this team is? Now that the game is a veteran in the service game space, how well-known does she think the game is?
“I picture a cafeteria, and it’s high school,” Ford muses. “You know who’s the cool kid, you know their table. And then you have this weird table on the side where we sit. We’re nice to everyone, we’ll give you lunch money, no one thinks we’re going to bite People or trouble. But we sat there the longest, maybe helping everyone with their homework. We’re not the teacher’s pets, but we’re a pillar you can always count on.”
It felt like a mission statement; an expression for Digital Extremes: “We’re not going anywhere, we’re going to keep going at our own pace.” Warframe has long been different from a lot of other games—a little weird, a little abnormal, And that seems to be something Ford values.
“At this table, we’re also always wearing weird stuff — like a latex suit, which makes you think ‘what’s going on over there?'” Don’t expect that to change anytime soon.
