The free-to-play section of Steam is getting crowded, particularly with competitive shooting games. Yet despite not being part of our general gaming conversation the way the other competitive shooters are, Warframe, which originally released in 2013, has found an audience alongside Team Fortress 2 and the other residents of Steam’s most-played lists. We spoke to Digital Extremes about how they’ve managed to keep their fans happy for three years and counting.

PC Gamer: You guys are a regular fixture in the Steam most-played games list, but being free-to-play is no guarantee of a continuously engaged audience. After three years, why do you think people are still playing Warframe? 

Rebecca Ford, live operations and community producer: If you compare Warframe from three years ago and Warframe now, you’d see a lot has changed along the way. That’s the key for us to keep players interested: an unabashed fearlessness to mix things up if we feel like it’s needed. Warframe is an ever-evolving experience, so there’s always something new to try or do. We as devs have our hands on the game every single day, so we’re constantly aware that if we’re getting bored of something, players are too. 

Even looking at this past year, two major parts of the game have gotten a rework, with other facelifts along the way. It’s a balance between adding the really alluring parts through quests and new content, while ensuring that the basic aspects of gameplay are rock solid and addicting enough to keep players coming back between updates. 

PCG: You guys debuted Star Chart 3.0 for Warframe in July—what was the reaction to that? 

RF: Whenever we make a change, people will always react in a multitude of ways. It’s pretty jarring to be playing with one system for six months, or a year, or more, and to log-in one day and feel like you have to relearn everything again. But I think we accomplished what we set out to do: to create a more streamlined, easy to navigate, and visually stunning experience for players. After the expected “WHAT DID YOU DO?!” reactions died down, I think that players agree with us on that part as well.

PCG: You’re obviously aware that when you revamp something in the game, it won’t please those players who prefer things the way they are. Do you find these players eventually adapt in any case? 

RF: There will always be those “oh God why” responses to change. It’s going to happen, there’s no helping it. Saying that all players adapt well, or that they all adapt poorly is too much of a blanket statement. Some will like it, some won’t. Them adjusting to it depends on how well we can do our job at making something better but still making it feel like Warframe—while also ensuring it addresses the wants and needs of our fans. I feel like we’ve succeeded in this regard, from day one of these updates, but also in every day after where we are constantly listening and improving these systems to make sure they deliver on what they are supposed to do: make Warframe better. 

PCG: You’ve talked to us before about the difficulties new players might face playing the game, because you’re focused on keeping your existing players interested with updates. Do you have plans to look at that in future? 

RF: Improving new player experience was a large motivator behind the recent Star Chart and Fusion System reworks, and is something that will drive future changes as well. The goal here is to make things easier to understand and to introduce transparency into the game, not to make the game easier as a whole. There are so many facets to Warframe that can be overwhelming to new players, and we want to ensure that whatever we implement in the future will be easier to digest, but still as challenging and engaging as things we’ve done before.

PCG: Longer term, what are your larger plans to evolve or change Warframe? 

RF: Last year we released a cinematic quest (The Second Dream) that evolved and changed the meaning of Warframe’s lore. Just under a year later, the War Within aims to repeat that shift in meaning. As for what’s next, it really depends on player reaction. We invest a lot of time into these cinematic moments. This is the second year we’re aiming to deliver an evolution of lore. Player response to this will determine our next large move. Which means at this time, we don’t know. 

PCG: TennoCon seems to have been a big success for you guys—do you find that super-dedicated audience who wants to talk with you directly growing each year? 

RF: Our community team was just talking about the sheer amount of personal messages we receive on our official forums the other day, and I think that’s a perfect example of how much our player-base has grown. I remember being able to take the time to answer each and every single one, but now that task has grown to astronomical proportions. 

I’m a bit melancholy for the early days, because I do miss being able to reach out and talk to each fan personally, but there’s also something really amazing about how many people we’ve impacted now over three years. Hosting our very first TennoCon was a result of how large our dedicated player-base has grown and while we were nervous that we might be throwing a party no one would attend (with it taking place in our hometown of London, Ontario), we were overwhelmed by the attendance at the Con and now realise there’s no limits to the extent Warframe could grow in years to come.

Tom Marks caught up with Rebecca Ford back in September to discuss the game's future, you can watch that interview here.

Joe sat you down and spoke to you about Warframe's The War Within update a few weeks ago, and he made it through the whole thing without confusing it with edgy Prince of Persia sequel 'Warrior Within'. It's all I can hear, now that I've made the connection, but I'll bravely carry on to bring you the news that Warrior...Sorry, The War Within is live now. Developer Digital Extremes describes it as "the year's most anticipated Cinematic Quest", and because 'Cinematic Quests' are a thing Warframe has seemingly invented, no one can take that claim away from them.

You can find all the details about The War Within on Steam here, but the short version is that this mahoosive update bungs in that aforementioned quest, one that involves the Grineer Empire, and that takes place in a friendly sounding place called The Queen's Fortress. There are also some new set design elements, weapons, enemies and customisation parts, along with a new map to squabble on.

The War Within is "available to all Tenno who have completed the Second Dream and have unlocked the planet Sedna", and here's what's in store if you've done all that:

Considered a "rogue success story" by Digital Extremes' Rebecca Ford, Warframe has went from strength to strength over the past four years by way of continuous iteration. First teased at this year's inaugural TennoCon, the free-to-play third-person shooter's latest major update named The War Within will launch on November 9.

Following on from last year's The Second Dream, The War Within requires you to have played its forerunner quest and to have unlocked the planet Sedna by way of completing the Pluto-Sedna Junction.

"Digital Extremes is also encouraging players to ready their loadouts and don their best-dressed Warframe and Operator prior to the update as both will be incorporated into the cinematic journey, personalizing the experience," reads an update which accompanies the following trailer:

As for the quest itself, here's the official word from Digital Extremes:

"The War Within Quest, will have players embark on a chilling journey to the Grineer Queens' Fortress, where both their Warframe and Operator will be pushed past their limits as they slowly unravel mysteries about the Tenno s past and their true capabilities. In addition to the cinematic quest, The War Within update also includes new weapons, enemies, and a few secrets that will be revealed closer to launch."

Ahead of The War Within's release two weeks from today, Digital Extremes plans to run bonus weekends which will offer players double resources, credits and affinity. More information on all of that can be found via the game's official site.

Warframe's The War Within quest is due November 9 check out Tom's conversation with Rebecca Ford at PAX West in the meantime.

Ubisoft Toronto level design director Matt West will never approve a four-meter-high wall. Three-meter-high walls look scalable, he told me over the phone, and five-meter-high walls look unscalable, but four meters high? That s a confusing wall. You ve got to run up to it and mash a key to find out if you can climb it screw that, get rid of it.

West works on some of Ubisoft s big open world games, including Far Cry 4 and Far Cry Primal, which feature vast environments. At the same time, another level designer, Nina Freeman, is wondering what someone s bathroom might look like. Freeman started her career studying poetry in New York, where she developed an appreciation for 70s and 80s poets and vignettes about ordinary life and people s life experiences. She s now a level designer at Gone Home developer Fullbright, working on science fiction exploration game Tacoma, and thinking about how people live on a spaceship: What s on the dinner table? Who left a sock on the floor?

Freeman probably thinks about wall height too, but level design is such a broad pursuit that gunfights and Jeeps and mountain tops and stray socks exist in the same discipline. It involves psychology and storytelling and logic mechanisms and architecture and ecology. Rand Miller, one of the creators of Myst (along with his brother, Robyn Miller) and the recent Obduction, was designing levels nearly 30 years ago as black and white still frames, and says he still hasn t really figured it out yet completely.

I interviewed West, Freeman, and Miller as well as a couple other level designers over email looking for commonalities in their work. I wanted to see what sort of tricks they use to guide players. Putting a light at the end of a hallway, according to West, will nearly always attract the player s attention and that s the sort of thing I was after. But 10 wild and wacky tricks level designers use to totally Criss Angel mindfreak us didn t turn out to be exactly the story I found. What fascinated me is how much else these designers share in common, whether they re making a firefight or a puzzle or a crumpled note on a kitchen floor, and how they seek to gently guide us toward clever thoughts.

Clear, but not obvious

West describes level design as the practical counterpart to game design s theoretical art if a creative director decides what kinds of decisions and experiences should be in a game, the level designer creates specific decisions and experiences. Even on the practical side of game design I found that there s a lot of theory, but wall height is important too. In the practical work and testing, you see echoes of the big ideas.

When there are boundaries that aren t walls, for instance, Warframe s lead level designer Ben Edney tries to make them clear, but at the same time, not obvious through differences in materials and lighting. Before having heard that, I coincidentally asked Miller how he makes his obscure worlds, which hint at puzzle solutions, clear, but not obvious. He laughed and acted flustered. That s one of the challenges he s been experimenting with throughout his life.

It s all experimental, as far as Miller is concerned. He got his start designing levels for children s games such as The Manhole. The advantage we had is it was just a mouse and one button, and we could sit a kid in front of it and watch what they do, and it was amazing how kids and adults did the same thing in front of those early games, said Miller. They d click on the same spot, you could entice them to click somewhere, entice them to go somewhere, and we had to figure out how to give them continuity, connect all the dots.

As a puzzle designer, Miller has a somewhat unique perspective he wants players to be stumped, at least for a little bit but the dots should all be there to see so we can connect them. At one point in Obduction, the player is asked to restore power to a building (aren t we always) and the solution is to look up, see a powerline, and follow it, a literal connection.

It s amazing how many people, though, walk out of that hut and don t see it, don t put that together," said Miller. "But at some level, then, it s not up to me anymore. We did our job.

In that case, the powerline was enough. But watching testers fumble to make sure they only fumble so much does often lead to changes. The week before Obduction was released, for instance, Miller and the team added a license plate to a desk. We put it there because we were seeing a lack of connection, and hearing it from some of our testers, and that small little change gives people, a lot of times, just the push it might even be subconscious a subconscious push to make a connection to something that was important in that space.

Finding a path

Aside from keeping players on track with well-placed license plates, I heard a few things that might be called tricks that Criss Angel headline isn t bad, so don t count it out for the future such as using enemy pathing to direct the player. But what I found more of were good old fashioned architectural principles, such as what Warframe s Edney calls hierarchy of space.

This is essentially designing our crazy sci-fi levels with the same considerations one might plan a new building in the real world, Edney wrote. Main through-paths are open, clear of obstacles, and generally inviting when first entering a room. Side rooms and access hallways are tighter, more defined in their usage and utilitarian.

The same goes for Freeman and Tacoma. She s concerned with spaces people live in, and how they re laid out in our world be it natural or cultural, it s what we already experience. Bedrooms are typically tucked away in the backs of houses, not the front. More fundamentally human, if you find a kitchen, you should probably find a bathroom somewhere in the same area. Granted, Tacoma takes place on a spaceship, so there s also room for set pieces that aren t going to be totally plausible but as long as they re plausible enough the player can get around with their already-learned understanding of architecture.

Good architecture is one aspect, but designers have to support the game design as well, and give players the opportunity for clever solutions a game where you can scale walls would suck if 90 percent of walls weren t scalable. And there s balance to find between complex mazes and stifling linearity.

Earlier in West s career he worked on Splinter Cell: Blacklist, which he describes as linear, but Splinter Cell linear meaning that there was always more than one way to approach a problem. There d be a center path, more brightly lit and obvious than the others, for instance, and contrasting paths to either side. Maybe one goes to the left and below and the other to the right and above. And all of them should feel like good choices.

In the world, there definitely are dead ends, and I ve had level designers kind of glibly inform me of that fact, said West. But in a game, it just takes the wind right out of your sails. The whole thing is about making players feel smart, making players feel like they re intuitively selecting good routes, but then smacking into a wall? That is a personal pet peeve of mine.

Now that he works on open world games, West has many more paths to think about than he did with Splinter Cell as many as the players want. Out there in the wild, big landmarks in the distance give guidance, and that s a major principle of Obduction s design as well: there s literally a big red beam on the horizon. You can t even see what the source is, said Miller. But we knew when we put it there that everyone would head over that direction, of course they do.

Opening up

For West, open world level design is about getting out of the player s way, letting them tell their own story. It s almost like you re dressing kids to go play outside in the winter, he said, recalling a conversation with a recently-hired junior level designer. You re giving them scarves, hats, and boots and all that stuff, but eventually they re going to go outside and throw snowballs. So we re just preparing them so that they can do that stuff, but we re not telling them to throw exactly 13 snowballs and then take cover behind a tree.

He has another metaphor: a buffet table with all the different types of foods the player could want. The food is actually elements of the game design and different playstyles, of course so if the player wants to stealthily eat a banana, it s there. If they want to throw a steak at someone, that s an option as well. I might be mixing up his metaphors. The point is that West tells young designers to pull back on any urge to design specific action sequences.

The player is the best storyteller, said West. If I see this kind of elaborate set up, and the level designer is saying, Enemies are going to come in from here, and then there s going to be a big swinging scythe, and then you have to jump to this spot, and turn and fire, I will just turn around and tell her, No, we re not doing that. We re going to say the scythes can be there, and the enemies can be there, but there s got to be three or four or five ways to get out of this situation.

Miller also employs open areas and branching paths, and our conversation took West s thoughts about preparing players further. Miller compares games to trips to foreign countries, in that the unfamiliarity can be stressful at first.

We realized that providing people completely wide open space to start with, with options in every direction that you can just click anywhere and do anything is not a very reassuring way to start a game, he said. People don t respond well to that. They feel a little inhibited, they are uncomfortable with so many options.

As a result, Obduction begins in a cave which is very similar to Fallout 3 starting in a vault with only one direction to go. Outside of the cave, there s a canyon that begins to widen. (West also mentioned that widening paths attract players, while narrowing corridors do the opposite.) As the canyon widens, there s still only one way to go the world is expanding, but the player is still comfortably going in one direction and then a man gives you a goal: go to the house with the white picket fence.

It was very deliberate that we gave you the goal before we branched open the path, said Miller. Because now you have the assurances of, Well I have the white picket fence in my pocket, I know I can go there eventually, and you feel the freedom to start making some choices without anxiety. Now it s interesting to see what players do depending on their style, whether they re rebellious and like, Screw you, I m not going to the white house with the white picket fence, I m going over here to the second path that you didn t tell me to go on.

Well, they can act all rebellious but the fact of the matter is they re only doing that, they only have that rebellion in them, because they have the security of the little goal in the distance.

Plausible spaces

Freeman is less interested in how players might find their way through a canyon, and more interested in the little details of life. She loves the bar in the game Catherine, for instance, where the player can sit with friends, go to the bathroom and look at their phone, play an arcade game. It s all these little, little moments, and I like that stuff because that s just what I do every day, she said. And I think ordinary life is interesting and I like to see the ways in which these game designers are putting their characters into those situations, and what those spaces are like. I m always just like, Put more bars in your videogames!

Her focus on Tacoma is making spaces that feel lived-in, and it was her previous game, Cibele, that led her to Fullbright. The kind of level design I was doing on [Cibele] was, How do I design an in-game computer that feels plausible and feels lived in, very similar to how someone might design a bedroom in Gone Home or something, said Freeman. She had never designed a 3D level before joining Fullbright, but a penchant for designing around authentic stories was there. Tacoma is definitely about ordinary lives and people who feel like you could know them, like they could be your neighbor. That s what we share despite coming from different backgrounds.

While Freeman s focus is heavier on tasking players with putting together the remnants of an ordinary life connecting dots in a different way than in Obduction, or in Far Cry 4 all three designers share a desire to build plausible spaces.

"The puzzles have to fit the world as best as possible, at least the way we do it," said Miller. "Jonathan Blow loves to feature the puzzles, so his levels, the puzzles that are there just in some ways can be arbitrary, because the thing is the puzzle. But I think what we've done and what we've gotten to in our little niche, what we do, we're trying to balance all three of the legs that I think are interactive: the environment, the puzzles, or whatever the friction is, and the story."

He added later that it s a pain in the ass.

We have people who are in charge of those aspects. So the art guy may come up with a visually stunning looking piece of equipment, but the story guy goes, That doesn t make sense, that couldn t be in this world, and we have to figure that out. The same goes in any direction puzzles that don t fit the story, story that doesn t fit the art. It must be cohesive.

For West, a level design could start as a sketch on a soggy bar napkin (he actually once approved a bar napkin scrawl as an initial design) or an MS Paint drawing, but from there he believes collaboration with artists is vital so that they don t get handed this dodecahedron that s done in this gray flat texture and get told to turn it into a carousel. He wants to see plausible spaces, and he makes a point of saying that it s a team effort, that the best level designers are the ones who work well with their artists.

A typical level designer can be seen as a balancer of Miller s three legs environment, obstacles, and story which I prefer to call 'Miller's Pillars.' The other part of their challenge might best be summed up by that phrase I stumbled on earlier: be clear, but not obvious.

In Cibele, Freeman wants players to discover a folder of photos on a desktop, and later put together themselves why it s there and what it means to the character. Miller wants players to have a cognitive rush as they discover how his puzzles and worlds fit together, without ever telling them explicitly how it all works. West wants players to choose their own path and feel good about it without being guided too closely to know where to go, but to tell their own personal story on the way.

These level designers don't want to tell us what to do or think, but to guide us gently like good parents. I think it s telling that Miller delights that there s no difference between what adults and children click on, and West thinks of the player as a kid getting dressed to play in the snow.

It's a good principle, but of course these are hardly the only game design philosophies. Miller doesn't make puzzle games like Jonathan Blow makes them, for instance. A favorite game of mine, Lovely Planet, forces players to perfectly execute the designer s vision in an entirely implausible world a very strict parent in an abstract shapeland. West would never design a shooter like that. Miller would wonder if the planet could actually be three planets, connected by giant gears. Freeman would add a bar.

So there are methods but not rules, and every level designer brings their own experiences and ideas to the task. But however I'm guided toward a designer's conclusions, I like it best when I'm shown the way, but not told.

I met up with Rebecca Ford of Digital Extremes at PAX West this weekend to talk about the state of Warframe. We chatted about the game s recent Silver Grove update, the upcoming War Within update, what else is coming next, and how the simple changes they ve been making to the game can have a big impact on its accessibility. Watch the video above to see our whole conversation.

In early 2013, Digital Extremes finally released the free-to-play space-ninja shooter it had wanted to make for over 13 years, but that doesn t mean it was a happy time for the studio. Every publisher with an opportunity to back Warframe had passed, and most even said outright it would fail. With no investors and a couple of other subpar launches around the same time, employees were laid off and morale was low, but the game was being made.

Almost four years after players first got their hands on it, you won't see a Warframe booth at PAX or E3, or ads on billboards. You won't find reams of op-eds about it on mainstream gaming sites not like similar games such as Destiny, at least. What you will see is weekly updates and patches, and a regular spot among the top 15 most played games on Steam by concurrent players. With 26 million registered users worldwide, Warframe is one of the most popular free-to-play games available. Digital Extremes did what no one thought it could, and the naysayers are now coming to them for advice.

The idea for Warframe existed as early as 2000, though back then the project was called Dark Sector. According to its first press release in February of 2000, the goal was to merge "the intense action elements of Unreal: Tournament with the scope and character evolution of a persistent online universe." It didn't happen, and the Dark Sector that released in 2008 was something altogether different and according to an interview with Giant Bomb, the message from publishers was clear: don't do sci-fi. But Digital Extremes never forgot about the original concept.

This concept trailer for Dark Sector from 2004 looks more like Warframe than the actual Dark Sector game released in 2008.

Before Warframe, Digital Extremes was a work for hire studio being contracted out by larger developers. It was partnered with Epic Games (then Epic MegaGames) to make the very first Unreal, working on the series through Unreal Tournament 2004. It worked on the first BioShock and developed the multiplayer for BioShock 2. One of the last games Digital Extremes made before starting work on Warframe was The Darkness 2, which creative director Steve Sinclair describes as a bit of a swan song for us in the old world of You re a work for hire studio.

You re not an employee within some publisher beast, Sinclair continued, You re work for hire, and you re disposable. Digital Extremes studio GM Sheldon Carter lead the Darkness 2 team and echoed the frustration of not having full control. I work on Darkness 2 for three years with nothing except for a few publisher people and QA guys looking at it, he said, and then it comes out, and it s polarizing but there s nothing you can really do about it. You just have to let it sit there and watch it rot.

You will fail

So when Digital Extremes decided to give the original Dark Sector concept another shot with a new name in early 2012, it was a project filled with passion. We had one month to make a prototype because James [Schmalz], the owner of the company, was going to GDC to show it [to publishers], said Sinclair, Holy shit, were we ever proud of it. They went all out on that first prototype, even getting the netcode and infrastructure working just to show they could pull it off. They set up meetings with companies he describes as the most powerful in the free-to-play world in 2012 and began to shop Warframe around.

Not a single publisher said yes. Most of them said outright that the game was doomed to fail. In many cases, the pitch meetings were over before they could even start. Sinclair told me about a meeting they had set up during GDC, saying it once again all came down to Warframe s theme. The executives walk in and say I can t wait to see what you have today, this is great, he recalled, and they turn, see the screen and see sci-fi, and it s riiiiiip goes the record needle and oh it s too bad it s sci-fi, and the meeting was over.

But they kept trying, next going to Korea. Sinclair wouldn t say exactly who, but he took a meeting with the creator of the largest free to play game in the world, and I m not talking about League [of Legends]. He showed a now expanded prototype of Warframe, and despite the publisher being impressed with its graphics, the answer was the same: You will fail.

Western game companies can t make free-to-play because they don t update them, they said, according to Sinclair. Because they spend way too much time making the graphics good, and they spend way too much time making a type of game that can t grow and evolve.

That was his opinion, that we were absolutely going to fail because we looked too good, and we wouldn t be able to sustain a game like that. And then he left. At this point, Warframe was out of suitors. We were just kicked in the ass repeatedly. This is gonna fail, this is gonna fail. It was an absolute crisis of faith. Sinclair even remembers at one point thinking, This was a mistake, we re doomed. But Digital Extremes didn t give up, and decided to continue developing Warframe without a publisher a move Sinclair said was definitely a Hail Mary.

[James] had a lot of faith in the people working on it, Carter said. He was willing to risk, and when you have someone who has enough foresight, or trusts the people who are working on it enough to let them spend his money pursuing something that a few people have said is going to fail because he believes in them or he believes in what s happening ...he believed in it, so he let it keep going. Without any outside funding, Digital Extremes had to lay off staff to make the game. It was all-in on Warframe, Sinclair said, and it was dark days.

We were laying people off who had worked here a long time who we loved, said Carter, describing the time as the worst days of the company. Digital Extremes found even more trouble after its Star Trek game released in early 2013 and was critically panned. "Star Trek almost ruined us," said VP of publishing Meridith Braun. Digital Extremes later told me it let 48 of their roughly 180 person staff go around the time Warframe entered open beta in March and Star Trek shipped in April.

It was a fight for survival, it really was, said Sinclair. I remember even dark places where I was, where we needed to buy servers and people wanted to get the better servers because concurrent counts were rising. And I was just screaming at people, Get the cheap shit, because we just laid people off and it s not like we re going to spend beyond our means here. Well-intentioned people on both sides, but it was very nerve-racking.

But there was good news: Warframe's Founder s Packages early buy-ins for dedicated fans were selling. A small but passionate community was forming, and once the ball started rolling, it never stopped. Despite being repeatedly told they were going to fail, Sinclair said they never felt like they had made the wrong choice once they committed, partly because of that founder support. That initial surge gave us the energy to say OK, we re going to do this, and that let us go all-in. Even with the supposedly doomed sci-fi theme, Warframe was finding its audience.

Learning from rejection

Some of the credit for its success might actually go to the publishers who rejected it. Because they were so blunt with their doomsaying, Warframe was able to avoid its prophetic failure. Digital Extremes had the largest free-to-play developers in the world telling them exactly what they shouldn t do, and Sinclair said they used that to their advantage. We broke it down, Why are we going to fail? he recalled, and that became part of the early foundation of the game, which is why you see a game with procedural levels, which is why you see a game with a lot of permutations and a lot systems that work together.

The original design still had procedural levels, but called for story or quest missions to occasionally have static, hand-crafted maps. That idea was thrown out after being told in Korea that they wouldn t be able to update their game fast enough. I m glad that happened, Sinclair said, because otherwise we would have done things differently. We would have moved slower. And he s right to be glad, because a massive part of the reason Warframe is still growing almost four years later is how frequently Digital Extremes updates the game.

Carter explained that the most recent update was actually broken into three pieces to allow players to get some of the new content quicker. We had this grand ambition for it, he said, and we realized that to realize the grand ambition of it was going to take two or three months. Two or three months for a large update would be blazing fast for some other games out there, but in Warframe s world of weekly patches and frequent changes, it s a lifetime. Digital Extremes has an in-house sound studio and its own motion capture room, and many of the voice actors are employees at the company, allowing the team to record VO as late as the day before it s being put into the game.

And it s not just about adding more content. That s another lesson we learned from those people we talked to that said you re going to fail , said Sinclair, they were saying you ll stagnate. You won t evolve, you won t innovate. Last year Digital Extremes did a complete rework of Warframe s movement system affectionately known as Parkour 2.0. Just last week it completely redesigned the star chart and mission select screen, giving it a clearer progression path. With even fundamental game mechanics in flux, I asked Sinclair if he was ever worried about alienating current players.

That is the every day conversation, Sinclair said. The status quo is so seductive. 'Just let it go. Just keep adding guns and don t change a thing.' But Carter expressed that it s important not to get too comfortable. Let s just redo the whole star chart and change how people flow through the entire game, he said, and that s going to alienate a lot of people, but then they re going to get mastery over it and they re going to love it. Sinclair continued by saying that deep in the core of Warframe is this idea that change is good, even though it s painful for some of our players.

While at TennoCon, Warframe s first dedicated convention, I spoke to many of the game s most passionate fans. I asked why they re still playing after so many years, and frequency of updates was one of most consistent answers I got.

Now Digital Extremes has grown back up to a 260-person company, even hiring back some of the people let go in 2013. Despite what the publishers said, Warframe is still on the rise. We hear from those [publishers] now," Sinclair said, "and they re saying can you help us figure out Western free-to-play? Because for some reason we figured it out on accident, and they want to know how.

But even while asking for advice, Carter said those same publishers treat Warframe like a bubble just waiting to burst. It was almost like they thought we were at the top of the graph, and now we re going to bottom," Carter explained, "and we always just keep going further up. Digital Extremes indicated that Warframe hits roughly 100,000 peak concurrent players across all platforms each day, and that those numbers aren't dwindling. Sinclair described the game s growth as sort of a staircase pattern, saying every major update breaks [a record] compared to their previous highs.

A rogue success story

Despite its large player base, Warframe's success remains low-key. A lot of people haven t even heard of the game nearly four years later, and Digital Extremes recognizes that. I think we are a little bit frustrated by how well known the game is here and there, Sinclair said, and Carter agreed, adding, We all think the game can break through and break out bigger, because we have the same feeling. We have this great game and we have tons of people playing it and loving it, yet it doesn t feel like it s registered yet to the greater community.

For one, Digital Extremes doesn t do much large-scale marketing for the game, possibly a symptom of the frugal origins of Warframe s development. For example, they held a panel at this year s PAX East but didn t actually have a booth on the floor like many of the game s competitors. If we had a big booth, would that make it seem like we re more real? Carter asked. But that flies in the face of what Steve was talking about before, which is we re not going to spend money there, we re going to put everything we can into the game. Carter pointed out that maybe that s changing, citing a Warframe cartoon they announced last weekend, but Sinclair says those trade-offs have been agonizing.

Another reason for Warframe s lack of widespread interest could be its high barrier to entry. A lot of criticism has been focused on the new player experience, which Sinclair admits they prioritize less than making content for current players. It s kind of why the new user experience of Warframe kinda sucks, he said, because every update it s like well, we have our players what can we do to engage them now? Do I worry about the marketing that s going to pull in the new users and that first hour that they have? Sinclair went on to say that they just want to make [Warframe] more interesting, but that the strategy does make the game harder to learn.

As more is added, the complexity of different systems interacting with each other increases. Warframe is in a constant state of renovation, Sinclair said. We always want to make it feel like you can play this game in 2012 or you can play it in 2016. It s still going to be relevant, it s still going to feel modern. It s going to still feel like we care about it every day. It s not abandoned. That comes with those downsides. Sinclair also explained that they do retire certain features as they go stale, but both he and Carter admitted even they can t remember all the stuff they ve added to Warframe at this point.

Digital Extremes focus on the very things people said couldn t be done is, for the most part, what s made Warframe so successful. It looks gorgeous, it kept the sci-fi theme ironically, a setting that's all the rage right now and when somebody said they would never be able to update it fast enough, they overcompensated by making the entire game about updates. In a way, Warframe has been designed as a frame for whatever new type of weapon or system designers such as Sinclair and Carter can think to throw into it.

I asked if there would ever be a Warframe 2, and they both smiled. That s our joke, man, Sinclair said. We always joke about that. This is our Warframe 2 and Warframe 3 and Warframe 4 and all those things. There s probably some marketing angle to be tempted to do what you re talking about, but I don t think so.

Last weekend was TennoCon, the first ever fan convention for Warframe, and as you might expect, it was packed full of the game's most dedicated players. But what keeps those superfans playing a game they affectionately describe at "War-farm"? Instead of guessing, I decided to ask. Watch the video above to hear why some of Warframe's biggest fans have stuck around for so many years.

You can also check out our interview with creative director Steve Sinclair at TennoCon, where we talked about what's next for Warframe.

Last weekend I went to the first ever TennoCon, a convention in Canada dedicated entirely to Warframe hosted by its developer Digital Extremes. I met up with Steve Sinclair, creative director on Warframe, to talk about a couple of the game's recent (and very large) updates. We also talked about what might be next for Warframe, including esports around its new ball sport Lunaro, its next story update The War Within, and lots more. Watch the video above to see what he had to say.

We'll have a couple more stories from TennoCon going up this week, so if you're a Warframe fan keep an eye out.

Digital Extremes announced a new and surprising bit of content for free multiplayer shooter Warframe at the PC Gaming Show during E3 2016. It's called Lunaro, and it's a team sport involving a ball, two goals, what appear to be futuristic jai-alai scoops.

It has a bit of a Rocket League vibe the arenas, players zipping around, the explosion upon making a goal only with Warframe characters instead of jet-powered cars.

That's not all! Digital Extremes and PC Gamer have an exclusive Dark Split-sword Dulus skin just for you. And for anyone else who wants one. But mainly for you. Take a look below.

To get the skin, head to warframe.com/promocode. Login (or create an account, and then login), and use the promocode: PCGAMINGSHOW2016.

You can use the code until June 17 at 10:00am, at which point the offer expires. So use it now, and get slicing and dicing.

Welcome back to The PC Gamer Show, our weekly livestreamed podcast. You can catch the show live on Wednesdays at 1 pm PDT on our Twitch channel, or after the fact at any of the links below.

This week we'll be joined by special guest Rebecca Ford, live operations and community producer at Digital Extremes, developer of Warframe.

We'll be taking a look at the recent No Man's Sky delay and the reaction surrounding it, discussing Payday 2's announcement that it will remove microtransactions, talking with Rebecca all about Warframe, and lots more including our usual Twitch chat Q&A.

This week's topics: 

1. What we've been playing recently.
2. No Man's Sky was delayed, and the reaction was upsetting.
3. Payday 2 is removing microtransactions.
4. We talk all things Warframe!
5. We take your questions from Twitch chat.
6. Space Mom graces us with her presence.

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Last week's episode

Your flapping heads for this episode:

Tom Marks

Anthony Snyder

Special guest: Rebecca Ford - live operations and community producer at Digital Extremes

The awesome images we use for the show were made for us in Source Filmmaker by Ness "Uberchain" Delacroix. You can find her DeviantArt page here and her Patreon page here.