“Wait, so what kind of game is Warframe, exactly?” is a common refrain among people who don’t play Warframe, upon hearing someone try to explain Warframe. So here, let me help: The sci-fi space ninja shooter’s previous expansion took players to the year 1999, where – by dating a bunch of hot people and listening to boy band music – they uncovered key revelations about the nature of the universe. How do you follow that? Easy: World War I-inspired anime fights.
This only makes slightly more sense in context than out of it, but the beauty of Warframe is that it is constantly, sometimes to its own detriment, trying shit. The end result is a broad emotional palette, a decade-running narrative that can detour into tongue-in-cheek ‘90s-stalgia before pivoting back into a tale of war, woe, and what happens when one group attempts to subjugate all others. The game’s next narrative quest expansion, The Old Peace launches later this year and takes place during the war between the Orokin, the ancient civilization that set the game’s whole story into motion, and the Sentients, Orokin creations that ultimately turned on their masters after being thrust into the dangerous Tau system. The Tenno, Orokin child soldiers forced to psychically pilot flesh mechs (and Warframe’s player faction), end up stuck in the middle.
Ultimately, Warframe will head to an entire new solar system – the aforementioned, long-whispered-about Tau – in 2026, but this quest sets the stage by letting players venture into Tau’s past.
“We're really going to lean into themes of true war, and that's the state you left this moon and Tau in,” creative director Rebb Ford told Aftermath. “That way, when you go back there, you'll recognize everything in the same way a battle of old would be recognized."
True to Warframe’s name, other narrative quests have already depicted the conflict that took place during that era; this one explores a brief, brittle period of peace. A demo, which debuted today at TennoCon in London, Ontario, shows one of the game’s lithe not-quite-cyborg ninjas sliding and soaring through trenches straight out of World War I as fire rains down. This turns out to be a training exercise between a Tenno and their Sentient schoolmate Adis, but the choice of imagery is no coincidence. World War I influences, creative director Rebb Ford told Aftermath, are more than skin deep.
“I’ve been kind of addicted to reading World War I novels,” she said. “[We’re going to explore] the idea that war happens so quickly when people make a decision that impacts the peace and armistice.”
As far as players understood previously, the Orokin and Sentinels fought bitterly, the Tennos turned the tide, and that was that. The idea that the two sides buried the hatchet, even briefly, is new to this expansion.
"I liken it to the moment in World War I where you have soldiers playing football on Christmas day across the trenches,” lead writer Adrian Bott told Aftermath. “That all-too-brief moment of commonality between enemies and recognizing something in one another – the idea of playing in this environment of trenches and devastation."
Of course, The Old Peace is not a 1:1 World War I story (space ninjas tend to get in the way of that), but the developers at Digital Extremes want players to recognize that every war past and present is a tragedy – specifically, a human one.
"I learned to be a storyteller through tourism and teaching history, and in that sense, when you forget to tell the human story inside history and abstract it to just names and dates, that's where teaching history in schools goes wrong,” principal writer Kat Kingsley told Aftermath. “When you just say 'Then this number of people died, and it happened on this day,' it just goes in one ear and out the other. One thing I think Warframe does really well is, it takes these epic sci-fi fantasy stories and tells them from a human aspect. It connects them to human emotions, even if they involve the wildest science fiction characters. I think with this update, we're telling a war story from a [place] of human emotion."
That all-too-brief moment of commonality between enemies and recognizing something in one another – the idea of playing in this environment of trenches and devastation.
As a result, the developers focused more on studying individuals’ battlefield horror stories, rather than the history books.
"I've not delved into things like historical records, the kind of thing that could distance you,” said Bott. “I've really tried much more to refresh my familiarity with [war poets], the men who were on the ground describing things. I think the idea of war poetry in itself might seem ironic, but it's not rendering something brutal whimsical in the slightest. It was finding a way to communicate what Wilfred Owen calls 'the pity of war distilled.' ... Drawing attention to it and saying 'This is the reality of what we suffer. This is what war is. This is what we went through.'"
Warframe also boasts a long history of using music to bolster its space opera – up to and including full-band songs with lyrics and lore, so many of which now exist that this year’s TennoCon featured a nearly-stadium-sized concert with multiple vocalists and a pyrotechnics show (Ford played bass in the band). The Old Peace leans into this particular penchant, albeit in a more somber way than 1999.
"The song sung by the Sentients to one another as they crossed the deep gulf of space [to Tau], it's got that kind of pioneering vibe to it, but it's also got a fatalistic vibe,” said Bott. “There's a direct inspirational link between 'There is some corner of foreign field that is forever England' and 'Who but we shall distant die on that far shore forlorn.' It's that same sense of 'We know that we are fated to eventually perish on some literally alien landscape,' but that is our nature, that is our destiny.'”
"'We've been made to die,'" added Kingsley.
It’s a stark tonal shift away from Warframe’s previous expansion, but the developers at Digital Extremes are confident in their ability to navigate it.
"Warframe tries to never repeat itself beat for beat, and because 1999 was more tongue-in-cheek and was goofier and more humorous, this is more of a return to form," said Kingsley.
"I think [giving people something like 1999] would have been an easy thing to do, but that's why we didn't do it,” said Bott. “The intent is to deliver something that is, palette wise, completely different than what we just did, and that is something we have done again and again.”
If nothing else, it’s relevant subject matter, considering the ever-worsening state of the world. But as far as Ford is concerned, that’s always been the case.
"My mom is a very eccentric woman, and she sent me a text about two months ago. She was born in the 50s, and she said 'Ever since I've been born until the day I die, the world has been at war,’” Ford said. “She's only known war her whole life despite living in the most peaceful times, and there's never been more peace. But you can't really say that with the world we have where everything is so accessible, especially stories of what's going on with conflict and war."
"The inspiration for taking a slice of time where a treaty should have happened and what's going on, it of course is coming from anything the globe can put in front of us.” she added. “We can look at it and we can say, 'How can we make this human story about space kids that control robots be rooted in the truth of all war?'"
