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There are plentiful resources out there to help push you through the difficult early days into the rewarding mid and late-game, including our own Warframe mods guide (opens in new tab). But why should players have to leave behind their ‘maybe robot, definitely ninja’ bodies to find their way to fun? This will sound counterintuitive, but the answer to that question is also the same reason Warframe is still drawing new players in five years after launch.

When developer Digital Extremes started working on Warframe in 2012 and 2013, keeping the whole project modular wasn’t about futureproofing. It was about survival. The nascent Warframe team comprised only around eight people, with the rest of the studio finishing work on Star Trek (opens in new tab) (a side-story adaptation of the 2013 film, published by Namco Bandai Games). The team had a frighteningly brief window to prove the idea could work, but it couldn’t create enough levels by hand to sustain player interest in what was essentially a last-ditch experiment.

“So our very first thing was like, ok, let’s pretend the levels are PVC pipe,” Senior Producer Dave Kudirka explains to me at TennoCon. “And if you have 30 pieces that means you have thousands of possibilities. […] And we kind of leaned on that system until we could grow the game into something that was generating enough revenue to make more, but also enough to say that this is a game we can continue – let’s make the next level!”

Since then, Digital Extremes has added new environments and factions with their own “tilesets” (an old video game term referring to all the pieces used to make up a map), as well as pre-built open-world areas like the Plains of Eidolon and the Fortuna expansion’s upcoming Orb Vallis. At the base level, the procedural level generation system hasn’t changed too much; it just has many more pieces of pipe to work with.

A similar idea guides the rest of Warframe. Digital Extremes has never made a clean break to fundamentally rework the game (that’s why we’re not playing Warframe 2 or 3 right now), instead opting to alter individual parts as new ideas come or old standbys fray. That’s not to say the game hasn’t changed substantially, it just may be the closest thing the games industry has to a Ship of Theseus (opens in new tab).

“That’s kind of the design philosophy that [we] go by. Don’t lock us into something. Let us be able to expand it,” Kudirka said. “Our original mod system was like, you pick nodes and trace a path to get to the thing you want. Once we opened that up to instead make it look more like a chemistry set where you’re putting in different things and configuring it, then we were like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s totally scalable.’ Every Warframe will have base stats that are different when you put that configuration on it. And then you switch out one mod and you’ve got a totally different setup for your character. We saw that early on as being a strong point and just latched onto it.”

 What to do when there’s too much of everything 

Here’s the problem with replacing parts of your ship and bolting new bits on instead of making a new one: you rarely get a moment to stand back and say, “This is how everything should fit together so that it makes sense from the outside, too.” Over five years of updates, Warframe has built up a heap of marginally explained, semi-interacting systems. The core experience of leaping around and killing bad guys as a customizable space ninja has never been better, but so much is layered around it that many newcomers are daunted.

I picked up Warframe when Digital Extremes invited GR+ to attend TennoCon 2018 (technically I was returning to the game, if you count an unimpressed half hour or so spent in the beta). I enjoyed the cinematic tutorial missions, but I felt uncomfortable as soon as the game kicked me out onto the broad star chart. Where am I going? What should I do next? Why does the game let me wander around this space station if barely any of it is relevant to me? Why is there so much stuff that I can’t do yet and nothing telling me what I need to do first?

“As a new player you like a little bit of guidance,” Kudirka said, admitting that Digital Extremes has had difficulty providing it. “The struggle for us is: do we put people on those systems, improving the early part of the game, or do we put our team on the later systems because we know the people that have joined us have stuck around, and they’re looking for something new and fresh?

“For us, if we give the veteran players something new and fresh to play that they’re excited about, they bring a lot of new players in and help those players gain interest in our game. And all of a sudden you have a community of players who are helping new players onboard and stuff. We’re eternally thankful for our player base, and how welcoming they are to new players. So I think for that reason we might spend a fraction more time on the new stuff that will excite the players that have been with us for a while.”

As soon as I got to TennoCon I was able to ask my more Warframe-seasoned peers (and yes, some of the developers themselves) about what I should focus on first. Turns out I should just keep working through new nodes of the map, ignore the weird space station bits for now, and try to unlock the heavy-hitting, damage-absorbing Rhino suit. Simple! But most players won’t have the benefit of being submerged in a Warframe-wisdom-enriched environment for several days in order to figure out the game. They probably do have web browsers though.

Where does Warframe end and the community begin?

Fun fact: two Dark Souls games have come out since Warframe went live in 2013 (three if you count Bloodborne (opens in new tab)). Their influence on game design is self evident from Watch Dogs 2 (opens in new tab) to Hollow Knight, but another element beyond PvP invasions and punishing combat is just as important: the Souls games are deliberately opaque. Their understated lore and unexplained mechanics are meant for people to not just play through but figure out, and for players to share their findings far beyond the rudimentary forms of in-game communication. For many Souls players, fan-made wikis and other guides are required reading to get everything they want out of the game.

As far as I could tell from talking with Kudirka, Warframe doesn’t intentionally obscure its inner workings from players in the same way a Souls game does. The confusing newcomer experience is an unintentional result of the game’s piecemeal expansion. But the resulting community of players who come together to pool knowledge and welcome in newbies who weren’t around for the discovery process is similar.

“It gives us a little bit of a comfort level to say, ‘Gamers are smart, they’ll figure it out, they have the resources available to them,'” he said. “As game developers we don’t want players to go to the Wiki to figure out how to pass a level or do that kind of thing, or learn how to mod your weapons. But at the same time we’re kind of comfortable that enough people have been coming through and figuring it out.”

Digital Extremes doesn’t want players to have to leave Warframe proper to figure anything out. You should always be able to work through things on your own, even if it’s kinda rough going. But if wikis and guides are what players feel comfortable with, and it’s readily available to everybody… Maybe that’s part of the game, too?

“I think we’re in an age now where people consume their media so much differently,” Kudirka said. “Me and my wife watch Westworld on HBO. That’s the type of show where you watch the episode and then you rush to the internet to see what the theories are (opens in new tab), and what people think is gonna happen. I find comfort in that there’s a lot more people that can play their game but can also jump back and forth between their community involvement and things that are outside the game, but they’re still in that culture of Warframe on the message board or somewhere else. I take comfort in the fact that people can go outside of the game and come back, and we shouldn’t feel bad that they had to go outside to learn something.”

Find more to look forward to in our list of the new games of 2018. (opens in new tab) 

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Adding this kind of a massive new gameplay experience would be sequel territory for many games; making a clean break to give the developers time and resources to build this cool new idea into their game concept, hoping fans enjoy it enough to make up for whatever might be left behind with the previous game. But when I asked Warframe senior producer Dave Kudirka if the team ever took other big ideas and put them on a shelf labeled “Warframe 2” instead, he responded with an exuberant “never.”

“We don’t shut ideas down,” Kudirka said. “That’s not the way our studio works. We’re like, ‘Let’s try this. Let’s prototype it, if it gets somewhere we take it to the next stage.’ We have people on the team that continue to release the updates that players expect. But when we have an idea like an open world or the Railjack and we believe in it we’re gonna give it the best shot we can.

“We’re gonna make a prototype. We’re not gonna write it on paper and say, ‘This is what it does!’ We’re gonna make the gameplay, get it in our hands, and we’re like ‘Does this feel good?’ We don’t shy away from things, we don’t do anything like that. But we will be realistic on what timelines things will be on.”

Speaking of which, developer Digital Extremes definitely did not give a release date or window for Railjack. Heck, the demo barely made it onto the stage for TennoCon 2018. 

15 days ago entire RailJack section of the demo was going to be cut. Broken, incomplete, flawed. But our team went all-in. I’ve wanted this type of gameplay since I was a boy. Solaris sing “we all lift together” and I choke up because the song and it’s message became real for me. pic.twitter.com/mLpXUcaeKZJuly 8, 2018

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Contrary to what that time crunch may lead you to believe, the idea behind Railjack has actually been circulating around Digital Extremes since about… oh, 2001? Skip to 1:12:00 in this video if it doesn’t automatically take you there.

When Warframe came out in 2013 as a procedurally generated corridor shooter, turning it into a seamless ship-to-space-to-ship combat game probably felt a little overambitious. But I’m glad that idea never went on the sequel shelf. Honestly, it sounds like Digital Extremes doesn’t even have a sequel shelf. Or if they do they just use it to store collectible statues or something.

Creative director Steve Sinclair said in a press-only preview that Warframe: Fortuna is currently planned to arrive in the fall, with Railjack following sometime later. You can start playing right now, of course, but I wouldn’t blame you if want to wait for Warframe to hit Nintendo Switch (opens in new tab) so you can do your space ninja thing wherever you have wifi.

Warframe ranks highly on our list of the best free games (opens in new tab) – see what else made the cut!

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How to watch TennoCon 2018

You can tune in to the YouTube embed above to catch the official stream of Tenno Live, the main event of TennoCon. Tenno Live will be held on July 7 from 6pm to 7pm EDT (3pm to 4 pm PDT / 11pm to midnight BST). It looks like the other panels won’t be broadcasted, but you can follow along with official livestreaming partners as they play the game at the London Convention Centre.

What is TennoCon?

TennoCon is a day-long convention that brings together fans of Warframe, the developers of the game at Digital Extremes, and prominent members of the player community. There are panels, cosplay contests, merch, and streamer sessions. It’s all capped off with Tenno Live, a glitzy event in which Digital Extremes makes big announcements about the future of Warframe.

Naturally, you also get in-game swag for attending the convention, or by buying a swag-only TennoCon Digital Pack. You’ll have to settle for the latter option if you’re just finding out about TennoCon now – IRL admission tickets have been sold out for a while.

Oh, and it’s called TennoCon because the heroes of Warframe are called Tenno. WarframeCon would have been too on the nose.

What will be announced at TennoCon?

Warframe developer Digital Extremes is keeping its planned announcements for TennoCon 2018 under wraps – understandably so, since it wants you to watch Tenno Live! But the description for the YouTube stream above does tease this: “Did you think our Plains of Eidolon announcement was huge? Just you wait, Tenno…”

If you’re not familiar with the Plains of Eidolon, it was an entirely new open-world addition to Warframe that went live back in October 2017. It was easily the biggest update the then four-year-old game had seen, and Digital Extremes is saying that whatever it plans to announce this year will be even bigger. Personally, my money is on a new kart racing area, complete with craftable vehicles. Not really. But maybe really? I mean, a huge open-world area would have sounded about as likely this time last year…

Not sure how to get into the game? Check out why now is the best time to play Warframe (opens in new tab). 

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