COVER FEATURE Ten years of Warframe
Warframe is big. Both in its success and in its scale, a vast action game that is as much about space combat, apartment decorating, pet training, fishing, hover surfing, mech fighting and open world exploration, as it is the central ninja combat that defined its debut. It’s now ten years old, a feat few of its service game and MMO peers can boast. Like its Tenno, Warframe is an underdog that prevailed against the odds.
Digital Extremes itself is almost 30 years old and spent the 2000s doing work-for-hire, creating licensed games for a variety of clients. The Darkness, Star Trek, Dungeons & Dragons… the studio survived by taking whatever work it could. But there was always one dream project, a little sci-fi game the team hoped to one day get off the ground. I asked where the idea came from. “Like every game dev in [2004] they played Resident Evil 4 and they wanted to make their own version of it,” says Steve Sinclair, former creative director on Warframe, before he and fellow director Geoff Crookes both burst into laughter. Every answer they give is with a smile and you get the sense they’re two guys who never take themselves too seriously. But there is some truth to their joke. “Everyone rediscovered third-person,” Sinclair explains, pointing to Resident Evil 4’s success and games like Gears of War, following the era of first-person dominance, making their project seem more viable. “[Warframe] has its roots in what we call the sci-fi version of Dark Sector.”
It was this version they pitched to numerous publishers in what is now dubbed the ‘rejection tour’. “I was on the road pitching for a year, all over the world with a little cube PC that would always get scrubbed by the bomb squads.” Despite the effort, publishers weren’t interested. “Sci-fi was dead,” they were told. “So like a really confident artist… I completely compromised our vision for it [laughs].”
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Dark Sector was transformed into a modern-set story. Biomechanical suits became a mysterious ‘technocyte’ virus, and the player character’s space ninja became a CIA agent. “I remember Steve had to sit me down,” Crookes recounts. “You were so sincere, like, ‘Geoff I think we need to make a game with a helicopter.’” Dark Sector released in 2008 to decent reviews.
It’s clear though that the time following this was difficult for the company, as a seismic shift swept the industry around 2010. “The bottom fell out of all the [mid-sized] developers,” CEO Sheldon Carter says of the time, as publishers shifted focus to huge, triple-A projects. “I’m sure everyone you’ve talked to has told you the same
