“You're getting a motorcycle!” Rebecca Ford's eyes light up as she talks about one of the most important new elements in Warframe 1999, and players are eagerly awaiting this update. As the Creative Director for Warframe and having worked on the game for the past 13 years, you'd think that would take away from the excitement of another step on the game's impressive roadmap, but there's none of that here.
Perhaps it helps that the marketing for Warframe was absolutely on point in 1999 with the reveal trailer, with the Nine Inch Nails-backed announcement sending collective chills down the spines of Warframe's massive fanbase, telling us, “This is the wild and weird content update; our biggest in many, many, many years.” Wild and weird sounds right, and seeing that motorcycle ride through the alien landscapes we've come to expect from Warframe creates a dissonance that's both completely off-kilter and utterly Warframe.
It definitely doesn't end there. “There are boy bands, motorcycles, music – the boy bands are monsters too,” Rebecca adds casually, her smile getting wider. “Warframe is like this faceless hero game, but in 1999 there are these people who suffer a pretty tragic fate where they turn into Warframes. So as a character you have to go back in the future and help them and find out what's going on.”
It sounds exciting right away, not least because of the new-old setting. When asked what came first, the story or the 90s, Rebecca laughs: “The 90s! We had the style and then we immediately had the immediate plan. It was like a perfect storm, 22 atoms collided with great force and then this was born!”
Style is obviously important to Warframe, especially since their free-to-play business model is based on selling additional skins to their most loyal players. Warframe 1999 changes things up by letting us see characters' faces for the first time, and that's a big deal that the current player base might not quite like, but the team has an answer for that: “These are skins that transform, so if you prefer to play as a voiceless, faceless character, you can stay that, or you can transform and become one of the human bodies, and that gives you the opportunity to argue with each other.”
It's clear that the team can flex their creative muscles in 1999. Rebecca continues: “It was a lot of fun because we've never done this before. It's just a little bit more, it's for other people, right? Who knows if people will love it – maybe, maybe not – but we're working with really cool actors like Ben Starr from Final Fantasy, Alpha Takashi from Cyberpunk and Amelia Tyler from Baldur's Gate 3.”
Warframe 1999 is pretty deeply rooted in Warframe's history, but Digital Extremes is working on an entirely new new player onboarding experience to better handle all the new players this update is likely to bring. “We're updating the beginning with this new player experience – we're excited to announce it's called Koumei and the Five Fates.” Rebecca continues, “This is a Japanese-inspired update that will fit early in the game, and it's going to have some really inspiring graphics.” Fans won't have to wait too long to see this in action, as the team will be revealing more at this year's Tokyo Game Show in September.
The team knows this is a big change for Warframe, but they hope it resonates with fans. Rebecca told us, “It was very risky because the biggest risk is this: players who have spent 12 years or even a short amount of time with their favorite characters don't want them to have faces or talk. But they are optional characters, and even though that was the risk, the response to it has been great.”
However, they double down on the risk: “I think the most surprising thing is that we actually make them dateable. So there's this romance system. In the '90s, there was AOL, instant messenger, and in our game we have a fully functional chatroom where you can build romance with these characters and have romantic optional content.” Again, that doesn't sound like Warframe, and yet it does.
It's clear that Digital Extremes is having a lot of fun with the 1999 update, and that even 13 years into the Warframe journey, there are still new and exciting ways to reinvigorate the formula. Whether you're a dedicated player, a former fan, or a newcomer, Warframe 1999 looks like a must-play experience that we can't wait to try. We're so excited, we'll be telling all our AOL friends about it.
