For many fans, Warframe’s greatest moments are tied up in its music and its sounds. Each expansion solidifies what a sonically unique world they’ve created. Two people responsible for a forging that identity are composer Keith Power and audio director George Spanos. Though they each worked at Digital Extremes many years before Warframe, working together on Dark Sector, they both go way back. “To our earlier lives doing music and audio for advertising,” Power says. Spanos reckons they started working together in 2000.
“It’s more of a collaborative thing, even at the start, of ‘What do you think Keith? What do you think this could be?’” Spanos explains. How did they find those initial, iconic sounds? “You had to be able to iterate quickly,” Spanos says, describing the began. “Early on, listening to player feedback. Taking that in and thinking to ourselves, ‘OK, how does that fit into the landscape we want to create?”’ began with just two factions but they are still both a huge parts of the game’s character, in no small part thanks to their sound design. “Grineer are these mechanical, old world, oily type of sounding guys where as Corpus are more high tech,” Spanos puts it simply. “We recorded a lot of sounds in the studio, organic sounds, metal, clothing sounds, all that kind of stuff for the Grineer. And Corpus, a lot of it is made in the computer. Digital, processed sounds. That goes for the voices too.”
