Developer Digital Extremes’ game has become so successful that they’ve created their own annual convention called TennoCon, now in its fourth year. This year, Creative Director Steve Sinclair announced on stage the new warship-battling Empyrean expansion, showed off a brand new Hollywood-quality cinematic and got fans hyped for the new shiny content that’s on the way.
With Warframe constantly adding new content, some of the game’s less popular or polished features get lost in the shuffle. Before his keynote address, Sinclair sat down with Newsweek to discuss how his team prepares for the future while also not letting the past rot away.
(The interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
How has Warframe evolved since its inception?
Warframe has gone from one Corpus repeating tile set and a few Warframes to a game with two open worlds, cinematic quests and stories. But we are still the same studio making it. It is a wild experimental game where we see what interests us. The way we keep sustained, and energized, for so long is to ask “what do we find interesting in the next few months?”
With more content getting constantly added, how do you keep concepts or past content from falling by the wayside?
The reason why anything in Warframe (like the Archwing) is in a sad state is because something else has the Sauron eye focused on it (Laughs). Just look at the last two years of TennoCon. If you have something that isn’t quite landing, do you keep grinding on it or do you try something new? I was really curious if we could pull off a semi-open world thing, which is a devourer eating up all your resources, engineers and time.
What are some parts of Warframe that you feel haven’t quite worked out?
PVP gets crapped on. We have a very small and misunderstood audience. We need to audit that whole system and make it viable. Raids just got shut off. We weren’t happy with what we were doing and we were having massive problems with them. Those two things are on my mind and we have a fire pile that sort of grows.
How do you keep that pile from growing out of control?
You just close the closet door and hope that the hand doesn’t break through (Laughs). You have a great community team integrated with the developers. They have a seat at the table and can say that we need to pull the emergency brake or we need to fix this to address this issue. Every week we get updates, here’s where the community’s head is at, here are the longstanding things. Leading up to TennoCon, we ignore it. But after it clears, we tend to do phases like a two week quality of life sprint.
Is there a roadmap or idea where the developers want to take Warframe?
We do a lot of reworks, revisiting old assets, so we have to strike this balance between creating novelty and this hodgepodge of things we’ve left behind. I can’t point to any kind of map for us. Once Warframe started taking off, I realized that usually I’d be working on a different game by now. We don’t have a lot of precedents. You can look at MMO games as inspiration, and they have the same problems. The development team is stuck in this paradox of you need new blood, we can can bring them in with a cinematic quest but that doesn’t create sustainable gameplay. It’s like sugar, it’s not a meal.
How do you keep the train from flying off the tracks?
“Sometimes we do well and sometimes we totally mess it up. There are some updates we’ve had where the train was not on the tracks. I’m just going to Twitter and writing I’m sorry, we f—ed up, I have no other words to say, It’s awful.’ Warframe began as this experiment to be radically honest with our players and to look them in the face and say “we are human, we screwed up, we will try.” We don’t sweep it under the rug. If there’s a live stream and the comments are going “when are you going to address this?” We will face it, our honesty and humanity, connection to the players is how we keep it barely running.
Warframe fans can be very passionate about their game, how do you deal with that?
I don’t like developers who are condescending to people who don’t understand. If you bring your car into the garage, you don’t want to be treated like a 1950s mechanic talking to a wife. “It’s okay sweetie.” Let me explain to you what you are asking for, what it means and what we would lose if we did this or that. You want to be honest and not dismiss it.
Can you think of a fan interaction example?
Earlier today someone came up to me and said “At last TennoCon I asked you for a non-humanoid Warframe, when can you do that?” I said, that would be awesome, but every animation in the game would have to be redone, because the skeleton drives how all the animation works.
Being the figurehead for your company and Warframe, how do you deal with the backlash when it hits?
There are times when the vitriol gets so high, you have to get some distance to it and say “what are we going to do to turn that around?” There are times when I will take breaks from reddit and Twitter. I know my threshold, and pace how much I consume. Rebbeca and her team are our protective layer. They don’t come and say “hey Steve, you’re a stupid prick because you did this.” They say “players are mad because you have to roll over this UI to see a thing and there’s a time pressure to do it.”
What do you do personally do to deal with the pressure?
I will literally delete Twitter. Phones are habit forming, I tell myself that I can check it when I’m at a PC but you don’t need to refresh it every second. If I get a holiday I’ll delete a few apps I’ll use it to communicate with the team.
Warframe is playable on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox and Nintendo Switch.
