As we’ve previously established, Warframe – originally a cooperative multiplayer shooter about space ninjas – now contains just about every system known to man. Fishing? Yep. Hoverboarding? Absolutely. A full-blown dating sim? Yes, thanks to the recently-released 1999 update, Warframe even includes that. You might examine the game’s feature list and conclude that Digital Extremes is weeping, for there are no more worlds left to conquer. But in that regard, you’d be wrong.
During an interview in LA last month, I asked creative director Rebb Ford about the Warframe team’s pie-in-the-sky system ideas. What, I wondered, are the most off-the-wall mechanics they could plausibly implement? And where do the intimidatingly bounteous sci-fi opus’ limits lie?
"I like to think that it's usually a reflection of the things I'm actively playing," Ford told Aftermath. “And because I've played so much Balatro, I'm prone to say something with the cards [you use to modify equipment] beyond modding would be cool. But we do pitches. We look at, like, what if the mods in Warframe had a playable aspect to them? You get so close to committing, and then you're like 'Well, who's this for? And why are we doing this? So let's just focus on what people play Warframe for.' But yeah, the temptation is always there."
Ford added that there’s a “shadow of a card game” that exists in internal documents at Digital Extremes, as well as a “shadow of a Vampire Survivors-style thing” in design director Pablo Alonso’s build of Warframe.
"But I do feel like our responsibility as custodians of Warframe is to make things that the audience probably came for in the first place and take, like, one risk per update – like the dating system,” Ford said. “So measure and try, because if you stray too far, you end up making no one happy."
We look at, like, what if the mods in Warframe had a playable aspect to them? You get so close to committing, and then you're like 'Well, who's this for? And why are we doing this?'
As for additions that are unlikely to happen on Ford’s watch, she pointed to a regularly-requested feature: overhauled PVP.
"We have been tempted by redoing [PVP mode] Conclave,” said Ford. “I think true PVP, done better than we do, would be very difficult for us to commit to just because there's some things we're never going to change – like our networking architecture, dedicated servers, [etc]. We can't compete with the Valorants of the world, and I'd rather play Valorant or Fortnite, right? I'll just go play that and then come to Warframe for a totally different flavor. As heartbreaking as that might be for our Conclave community – I say this apologetically, not cavalierly – I just don't see us saying, like, 5v5 team fights are on the table.”
Warframe’s teetering tower of systems might suggest a throw-shit-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks mentality, but maintaining the game is a careful balancing act. Some modern triple-A games boast development team sizes in the thousands, but not Warframe; Ford estimated that around 280 people are working on the game currently. Keeping it alive 12 years and countless updates after release requires careful planning.
"We typically try and have unique features with each major update we do, and if it's gonna be good and people like it and it has legs, we will push it into newer stuff,” said Ford. “We plan, but we plan to adjust. We already know all of [2025's] major updates, but what isn't started is where we have to add or remove things based on reactions to Warframe: 1999. … One thing we haven't accounted for is reception to [the dating sim and character interaction] feature. And if it goes over well – if, I would say, more than 80 percent of people really like it – we will need to change plans for [2025]. But if it's just a cool-enough thing that added to the world, we'll do what we have to do to make other features."
This approach, Ford believes, explains a common complaint in the Warframe community: Not every system in the game gets the same amount of attention, and some feel like they’ve been abandoned.
"I think abandonment is a fair perspective for some features,” she said. “It's in the eye of the beholder. Like 'Oh, they abandoned PVP.' Actually, yeah, we kind of did, because none of us at the new leadership level are playing PVP games. You don't want PVP made by me. You really don't. ... I think that's a reasonable truth to share with our players, and we do. And then the [features] that we want to come back to, we only talk about when we're sure."
“It’s a big game,” Ford added. “12 years of tech debt, and everything has to work. We do our best.”
