Reflecting on 11 Years of Warframe, And Hoping You Can Love It Like We Do

What Digital Extremes has done is change the engine to layer actions and animations on top of one another. What this means is none of your character’s actions are isolated and have to be performed one at a time. Regardless of being on the ground, in the air, or aiming down sights, your character can flow like a butterfly just moving to the next objective with the smoothest parkour movement I’ve ever felt. Firing weapons in Warframe feels like piercing through stratospheres, with the blast of a shotgun having enough power to deafen a room or an arrow having enough force to fly through a skull ripping it off its spine and attaching to the wall. Everything Digital Extremes has done contributes to this original vision of a space ninja power fantasy. Anything you want to do can be done with such ease. The game that originally came out in 2013 and the one you can download and play today are incomparable. There has been no other action game I have played that could match the visceral feeling I get when I control my Warframe. Warframe’s combat is the most gratifying ballad of violence I’ve ever had the pleasure of dancing to. The game may be overwhelming to look at in its presentation. It can come off as too much; it could even be considered stressful. That’s only how it looks, though; how it feels is a whole different story. Because of how tight all the movement is, knowing this level of destruction is at your fingertips becomes such a cathartic rush that you cannot get enough of.

Now it’s time to get down to brass tacks. What exactly is Warframe? It’s a simple question but one that doesn’t have an “all in one” skeleton key as an answer. Warframe is a third person action game where you control a Warframe, an exosuit with great power, often referred to as Tenno. Every Warframe unit has their own distinctive identity that specialize in different abilities. I really do mean it when I say that all of them really are unique. Initially the change in a Warframe may not feel like much—say, going from Excalibur to Rhino, which isn’t much of a leap. Now compare Rhino to the brand new Dante. They are similar in the sense that both Warframes can utilize Overguard for extra armor, but they play so vastly different from one another you couldn’t tell especially if you know how they play firsthand. This is one of many parts that contribute to the multi-layered cake that is Warframe.

Downloading Warframe today having never played it before is essentially the first day of college. You have your orientation (the tutorial), then you have to figure out where to go, who’s important to pay attention to, how to feel prepared… it can be a lot. Something to understand is this game is 11 years old now, which means you are diving headfirst into 11 years’ worth of content. The quests new players start off with are the same quests seasoned players experienced way back when, all the while new content is being added on top such as the aforementioned Dante. Understand that I am an avid Destiny 2 player, and I was once Team Destiny over Team Warframe. That also means I had the displeasure of watching Bungie “vault” content such as the Forsaken campaign which in my opinion was one of the strongest campaigns ever crafted for Destiny. Now the problem is new players diving in are going to have missing gaps in the story that are integral to sympathizing with these characters as Forsaken was a massive turning point. I mention this to showcase that Warframe isn’t going to have this problem. It just may come across as a bit much.

It’s easy to take a look at the game’s armory menu and codex entries and easily assume that this game is just nonsensical with its needless lore and predatory microtransactions, but that would be incorrect. All the weapons can be purchased with platinum, the game’s premium currency, or you can just buy the blueprint with credits, the plentiful in-game currency, and create the gun yourself for free. You will have to wait for the gun to be crafted while the game tempts you to spend platinum to speed up the process. Those with patience that can wait out the time can earn everything they could possibly want in the game for free. This includes brand new items such as the recent Gauss Prime pack. His weapons cost $50 alone, but through the mechanic of opening Relics to earn Prime (better) versions of those aforementioned blueprints, I managed to get the parts for one of the brand new guns that came with that $50 pack. It takes patience to learn Warframe’s systems and it refuses to hold your hand. Warframe is not a game that comes to you, you have to go to it. Due to the pure ambition Digital Extremes has had for their game, the systems in place help to make Warframe incredibly enthralling once you understand its wealth of content. No season passes or expansion passes or any of that garbage; those who stick with the journey get to experience Warframe’s story and what a damn good one it is. All the platinum will do is speed up the process for convenience but that’s by no means a requirement to absorb the game’s content.

Through concentrated effort, Digital Extremes managed to create the game they always wanted, while listening to the community and maintaining a reputation for hearing all voices. Of course they are not immune to criticism over changes or characters being nerfed, but Digital Extremes willing to have discussions like this with the community puts Warframe in a league of its own. They hear everyone loud and clear and know that they need to make some changes because the last thing they want is for players to be unhappy and refuse to use the new Warframes. Even with occasional criticisms from its fans, playing Warframe truly feels like a part of something grander. This is how a live service game can survive: by showing your audience that this product is worth caring about. It’s making those meaningful changes and letting the players experience the actual service implied with a live-service title, all while feeling like your voice can impact the direction of the future. This is not a case of “release it broken and fix it later;” it’s about evolution, creating something that resonates and expanding upon it as time goes on. That’s how Warframe has lasted this long, and why there’s no end in sight.

Matthew Reyes is a Paste intern.