Warframe Interview: “Any Loose Ends In The Overall Narrative Are In Our Sights,” Says Dev

Rebecca: Hello! My name is Rebecca Ford, and I’ve been the current Creative Director of Warframe for the past two years, but before that, I started out as a community intern 13 years ago! In that time, I’ve bounced around to Live Ops Producer and eventually Community Director roles; it’s been a great ride.

Rebecca: There are a few layers that play into this in my mind. For one, our community team is so intrinsically tied to every aspect of the game’s development. Almost everything goes through a community/player lens. This team is not just a reactive arm for us at DE.

Secondly, we try to learn from our mistakes and stay humble. We fully recognize that we wouldn’t still be here if it wasn’t for our players, and we take their feedback seriously; they are basically the final boss we all want to please!

Thirdly, piggybacking off of the second point, we truly believe the game is just plain fun to play. That’s thanks to so many factors: our talented dev team, our community for honing us in on what works, and everyone’s overall taste in what a “fun” game looks like.

Lastly, our approach to microtransactions definitely isn’t the industry standard. Almost everything in our game can be earned through gameplay. Give players the choice between investing between their time or money or some mix of both; they will all have a different answer, and that’s okay!

Rebecca: Experiences should be designed for multiplayer or single-player (or both!) from the get-go. Forcing multiplayer into a solo game or vice versa will always force the creatives working on the project to compromise on their vision. We are very proud that Warframe has stood the test of time as a cooperative multiplayer title, but it has single-player elements in there, too; that was always the intention and remained at its core.

Those two elements and how they play off each other were never an afterthought. Single-player moments create impactful, emotional scenes that feed into the overall story and create designed breaks from the onslaught of multiplayer missions. Warframe is a dense, complex beast that requires lots of cooperation to navigate, but pacing is important, and that’s hard to do when everything is a 4-player mission all the time.

Rebecca: It’s been much higher than we anticipated! We are kind of hard on ourselves for major additions like a whole new platform and take on huge weights of responsibility we create for ourselves. It’s because we know the expectations players have for us. That being said, we weren’t stoked by the number of bugs that went out with the launch; we do wish that had been cleaner. But the coverage from the press, content creators, and the player base, while overall positive, has still been so helpful in honing us in on those major issues, and we have thankfully been able to handle them immediately, thanks to our amazing partners at Nitro Games.

Rebecca: We lead by characters and story; we have a firm destination we want our characters to go over the next 5 years. We know what we want the player to see and feel. It starts to get a bit blurry beyond that, but that’s how we operate. We latch on to a vision that feels right, and I am excited to figure out the next decade along with our team and players.

Rebecca: Over the past 11 years, we have found a formula that works for us and works for our players in tandem. We have around 4 new playable Warframes each year that are tied to some kind of content update. Those content updates follow somewhat of a structure where one or two are bigger cinematic releases, and others might build on the story, with lots of QOL along the way. If you’ve ever read our patch notes for Updates, you will know our team is pretty thorough, and no stone is left unturned.

We also have frequent in-game events tied to IRL holidays and bespoke ones in the world of Warframe that provide fresh rewards and reasons to reconnect with friends. Warframe is more than an epic sci-fi saga to escape into; it’s also a social hub to deepen relationships and forge new ones. We want Warframe to be a reason you can come home at the end of the day, and maybe you will log in, and your day will end just a little bit better than it started. When we meet that mission, we’re happy.

Rebecca: A recent one that stands out would be our Cinematic Quest: The Duviri Paradox. We wanted to make a new entry point for new players so they could choose their way to start their Warframe journey while also introducing very different types of combat, and it didn’t necessarily pan out the way we thought. We ended up walking it back as a starting point, and it is now another fun Quest to dive into once you get past the Awakening Quest. The overall experience, while very fun and fresh, missed the mark a bit for players getting into the game for the first time.

It plays around with slower-paced combat, offers a vast open area with rogue-lite mission types, and introduces characters that you really won’t see again until you’re much farther in Warframe’s main story. We saw much higher sentiment from players who dove in midway through their Warframe journeys as they felt it was a nice detour from the usual experiences. We learned a valuable lesson about player expectations there, but it also shows that we are not afraid to play with existing ideas and see where we can take them. Our standard that we’ve adhered to since day one is: Be bold, try new things, and get weird, but do not lose sight of everything that works around us in the process.

Rebecca: I can’t! Spoilers! But I’ll try not to leave this question empty… Let’s say that any loose ends in the overall narrative are in our sights, and we plan to try to wrap up the ones that feel relevant to current events in-game. I may have already said too much, so I’ll leave that there!

Rebecca: I get asked this all the time by fans, and my answer is always the same: I can’t pick a favorite child! I love them all; from their designs, ability sets, and movement styles, we get a little bit of everything at the buffet. Someone recently asked me, ‘Which Warframe would you date?‘ to which I said: ‘All of them! Give me the robo harem,’ hahaha. Another more broad one was “Which NPC would be your best friend?” and I had a hard time finding a suavely plutonic answer for that one, so I caved and said Little Duck. I would love to just chill with her, drinking beers on a night out. Perfect vibes.

Rebecca: Expect the unexpected, keep an open mind, and we are very excited to come back to one of the biggest fan-favorite characters of Warframe. Stalker has been a part of Warframe’s story since the early days; we had a very, very limited budget for things like tutorialization, so we made the decision to lean into the “player discovery” angle very early. Stalker would send you threatening inbox messages after you beat a boss and start randomly invading you during missions as a secret boss fight. We really avoided talking about that as a real system for years! Stalker created some very memorable organic gameplay moments that rightfully landed him a special place in everyone’s hearts, truly a legendary figure at this point. He’s been overdue for a comeback, and players have absolutely wanted to learn more about him.

Rebecca: It’s been, by far, one of the most exciting parts of 1999. Not just working with such talented people but revisiting these iconic, classic Warframes and remixing them into new characters. When doing recording sessions, a producer will usually have our actors do a few line readings in whatever cadence they want. Just to see what angle they may have in their mind we never thought of.

Rebecca: Spoilers! Maybe tune in for new info at TennoCon and how our favorite scientist, Albrecht Entrati, played a role in their creation :)

Rebecca: Our PAX Devstream gave a pretty general overview of what the year will look like for Warframe: Dante Unbound, Jade Shadows, and 1999, but we do have a few smaller surprises that we can’t talk about just yet.

Rebecca: We want to thank all of the Tenno in the Qatar and the Middle East regions. We love having you in our close-knit community and making life-long memories alongside everyone.