In the run-up to Warframe: 1999, there were a lot of people wondering if the game was actually Warframe 2, the apparent next installment of Digital Extremes’ incredibly successful third-person action game that lets the average gamer become a superpowered space ninja.
Warframe has managed to thrive in a competitive niche by iterating on its own design, risky world-building ventures, and the passionate union of a developer and community that just won’t quit. Over a decade ago, Digital Extremes found the believers that they needed in the Founder’s Program, a way to fund their dream and develop Warframe, a game that they believed in but that publishers struggled to see a future for.
Now, all these years later, the team has produced an expansion and a story arc that looks so very different from those early days and everything that has gone before that it has made people wonder if it was a whole new game.
I sat down with Megan Everett, Digital Extremes Community Director and a member of the team who has been there since the very start to talk about tough decisions, romantic inclinations, and the new Techrot Encore update that follows Warframe: 1999. I got straight to the point, asking Megan about the glut of inquisitive people who were wondering if Digital Extremes was developing a numbered sequel.
“I really just think it's a testament to all of the creative minds that have molded Warframe for 12 years. I don't think anyone could have ever predicted that Warframe: 1999 would be an update that we would even attempt cause it just seems, like you said, almost like Warframe 2, and a lot of people thought that it was when we did the initial reveal in 2023.”
For the uninitiated, Warframe allows you to perform frantic missions through randomized tilesets, slaughtering hundreds of enemies as you go. If you want, you can head to one of the various open-world areas to mine resources and fish. You can fight enormous, screen-filling monsters made of metal, or meat, or sometimes both. You can visit hubs filled with other players or invite them to your own Dojo, which is built and decorated as you see fit. You can ride around on hoverboards, or motorbikes, or fly through the air with jump packs called Archwings. You can head to space, flying around in your own ship and fighting fleets of enemy fighters, warships, and bombers.
You could do all of these things, but before Warframe: 1999, you couldn’t fall in love. Well, that’s all changed now.
The 1999 update introduced us to the Hex, complex Protoframe characters that exist because of some time travelling shenanigans (don’t worry, we are staying spoiler-free for anyone who hasn’t played the game). The Hex are people, soldiers fighting their own war, turned into something different by a major antagonist who has traveled back from the far-flung future. They have been blended with future tech, and are suffering the impact of such a seismic change to the nature of their very existence.
We head back to 1999 and discover the Protoframes, which are OUR Warframes, but people. They have hopes, and dreams, and fears. And just like that, Warframe, the game about mincing up aliens with a variety of weapons so destructive that there are likely various conventions outlawing their use, allowed us to chat with new characters and try to convince them to date us.
Such a huge change was scary but worth it. Taking the familiar and making it very different to the thing that people have already grown to like is always scary. Needing to find a design that properly showed how interesting the human part of the Protoframes is while staying loyal to years of established design philosophy was an interesting challenge, and when it comes to revealing that type of change to the playerbase, there is obvious risk involved.
“We're like, oh my God, what if they hate it?” says Everett, laughing. “What if fans think we've gone back on everything we’ve ever said?” and that is certainly a valid point. The focus of a Warframe’s design has always been that there is nobody inside. They are, in a way, the essence of a memory made into a machine. The Protoframes are a remarkably smart way to change that. Something familiar but new, a way to humanize the machine. It allows the developers to change the nature of the game in a wonderful way.
“When we were making Protoframes, we really wanted to keep that familiarity of the Excalibur you love, the Frost you love, the Nova you love, and definitely keep those pieces present on them, but give them very unique personalities, and we wanted to experiment with it. It was a really fun process once we saw how excited people were when they first saw Arthur, and we're like, oh, you just wait, you have no idea what's in store,” says Everett.
The Protoframes and subsequent relationship system was a tremendous hit with players, to the point where the new Techrot Encore update brings us four new Protoframes, except these new additions cannot be romanced. Let me tell you, the heartbreak was real for much of the community when that was announced.
“We were like, OK, we need to set the first expectations in bold capital letters that you cannot romance these characters, and we knew that we were gonna get that type of reaction. I think if I could get one thing across about our reasoning behind that, it really is that we want to keep that to the Hex in this update, and the story that you're going to read and experience about these new Protoframe characters will feel like it is enough on its own.”
The new Protoframes, Minerva (Saryn), Velimir II (Frost), Kaya (Nova), and Flare (a new addition to the Warframe line-up in the Techrot Encore update, Temple) all have stories of their own for us to explore. For example, Minerva and Velimir were married, but it seems some distance has grown between them. Will we be able to play a part in getting these two back on their own romantic track? We can certainly hope so.
While the Techrot Encore update builds out the Protoframes with new additions and develops the relationship systems in ways that don’t result in us kissing people who are partly made of metal, it also brings us something that was planned for Warframe: 1999 but had to be held back—the Technocyte Coda.
These are the mutated versions of On-Lyne, the culturally dominant boy band that seems to be everywhere in Hollvania, the open-world area introduced in Warframe: 1999. Infested with the Technocyte, they have somehow made their way to the future and are now causing all manner of problems there. They also act as Infested Liches, sources of new weapons, which have long been one of the hottest commodities in the game. As such, the delay to this feature was a serious moment for the developers.
“We've tripped ourselves up in the past with putting out content that wasn't necessarily as ready as it could have been. So yeah, when it came to Technocyte Coda, we wanted to announce it at the Game Awards and have it be a moment of, like, “it's live tomorrow.” We wanted to do that, so we had our own deadline that we wanted to hit. Seeing the time that was very quickly ticking down, we had to really have an honest conversation about taking that out of the update.”
This is where the Warframe community comes into play. Out of all the looter shooters on the market, it’s not a stretch to say that the Warframe community has more involvement and impact on the game than any other. As a community, we have designed Warframes, with both Nova and Xaku being sourced from the community design process. The Tennogen program allows any player to download tools and produce skins for the game, and if they get through the design approval process, they will be sold in the in-game store. Sections of TennoCon, Warframe’s yearly celebration of the game, are dedicated to highlighting community creativity and involvement. The aforementioned Founder's Program is what initially gave Digital Extremes the freedom to chase their design dreams.
Over the years, the Warframe community team has done an exceptional job of maintaining a strong relationship between the developers and the players. Part of that is because both devs and the community understand that honesty can be tough but necessary. Delays suck, but it’s not something anyone approaches lightly. The community knows that the team doesn't enjoy these moments.
“We were very nervous about the delay because it's never fun to tell someone that something is delayed. We did a whole Dev Stream about Technocyte Coda stuff, and then we're like, “Just kidding, it's not coming!” That obviously makes us nervous. So we knew we wanted it to come in an Echoes update this year, and now this Echoes update has turned into a major update in a way, which is crazy. It's the biggest Echoes update we've ever done.”
The cause of the delay was a simple manpower issue. The 1999 update was expansive, and not just because of the romance system. There was a lot of work to be done designing new weapons, new enemies, new systems, game modes, bosses, and a whole new open-world area, and just not enough developers to go around. People were even brought in from Soulframe to get 1999 ready to go. As for the community's reaction to the delay?
“They were understanding of it, which was a huge relief, and then yeah, we just got cooking on Warframe: 1999, and honestly, since we launched 1999, coming into the new year, the Technocyte Coda system itself has grown even more. I think the extra time that we gave ourselves to work on it has made the system better than we ever thought we could make it, and more interesting, fun, and unique.”
The Techrot Encore arrived on March 19, and soon after, the team will be on to the next big idea, the next adventure for us eager Tenno to embark on. Digital Extremes is one of those teams that appear to get better at dancing along the delicate lines of game development as time goes on, and this upfront honesty is a key reason why the community is willing to trust and support them so much, to grant them room to experiment, even if that is scary sometimes.
There is mutual respect between the developers and the community that both parties have earned over time, and ultimately, Digital Extremes has never forgotten that it was the community that was there for them when they decided to risk everything on making Warframe.
“We're always willing to get crazy with things and try to take people's thoughts and opinions onboard, and I feel like that kind of goes both ways, internally with people who work here and externally with the community,” says Everett. “It's the game we want to make, but it's also the game that the community wants to play, as well, which is why we take community so very seriously, because it's always been about that first, right? They're the reason why we survived.”
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replyAidan O'Brien posted a new article, Warframe: 1999 isn't Warframe 2, but it's definitely Warframe, too
