RIGHT WARFRAME OF MIND
Chatting design with lead concept artist ERIC VEDDER
Right away, back in 2013 when the game first came out, the thing that stood out to me about Warframe were the titular warframes themselves. Strange, biomechanical bodies that evoked classic ninja archetypes but also their own hybrid of shapes.
Eric Vedder is lead concept artist on the game. He started at Digital Extremes 12 years ago, working on games such as Star Trek and The Darkness II. “A small group broke off and started working on Warframe. This free-to-play and I was like, ‘What’s free-to-play?’ [laughs].” After other projects were wrapped up, Warframe was all that was left. “It worked in our favour because everyone ended up liking this game they were doing, this beta.” Vedder was first brought on to work on props for the game.
“At the time Michael Brennan, ‘Mynki’, was doing most of the character work along with another concept artist Keith Thompson. Very influential.” As the game became bigger, though, whether it was character designs or marketing materials, artists would jump on whatever was needed.
NO LONE WOLF
So how does the process of designing a warframe begin? “Sometimes it’s just a simple conversation, a banter back and forth over a drink or a lunch break or something more official, that’s a paragraph or two.”
Not all warframe ideas come from the studio, however. “We get influenced by a lot of things, mostly by our community. We’re really close to our community.”
From there, nailing a design becomes about collaboration. “Each of the stages, they change,” Vedder explains, describing the concept stage where you have fun before it gets refined with the team into something tangible. “It’ll get sent over to a modeller then they might block it in and then it’ll come back to concept, then we’ll start sketching in over the loose block so we can spin it in 3D and go, ‘Oh, this idea worked as a 2D drawing but as I turn it around, this looks shitty’ [laughs].”
The artists keep trying to push what the game and its heroes can be. “Warframe is always trying to do something a little different, a little weird.” Something that can be seen in its latest warframe, the 51st, Voruna, a werewolfthemed beast which is Vedder’s favourite design to date. “More so because I got to work with my art hero Joe Madureira.” A collaboration that took place at every stage. “I was really involved from the initial conversations to the initial sketches to the refined sketches to the production art, the colour, the final art for it all, everything.”
THE ARTISTS KEEP TRYING TO PUSH WHAT THE GAME AND ITS HEROES CAN BE
Over the years one of the most remarkable things about Warframe, as someone who has played it from the early days in 2013 to the present, is how a really compelling narrative slowly emerged from its shooting and looting. Talk to most fans and they will cite story moments in quests like The War Within as the highlights of the entire game. And every fan remembers The Second Dream twist, which reframes the whole game’s narrative.
LOST IN SPACE
In hindsight it looks carefully planned, but depending on who you ask a lot of it emerged over time. “My recollection and this is my recollection only…” Ford begins telling me, amused at what are sure to be discrepancies between people’s accounts. “Is that Operators and stuff weren’t a thing early on in Warframe.” She recalls that the earliest concepts of the Operators didn’t come about until about two years after the game’s launch, laying the groundwork for the game’s first big audacious twist in The Second Dream.
“It wasn’t like Lost, we weren’t making it up as we going along… I’m kidding, it was that,” Sinclair jests. Though he says they certainly did have some ideas even early on for the game’s themes like the duality of the Tenno as well as The Second Dream twist. Crookes agrees. “There was a foundation there that [Steve and I] would talk about. It’s funny, some players would pick up on these little seeds we were planting.” Yet The Second Dream was a contentious idea in the studio, Sinclair recalls that some in the studio found the twist “scandalous”. “We were scared to do it,” Crookes admits. “We were so excited to do it but we were nervous cause we’re like, ‘Is this gonna turn off a majority of the players? Is this even why they play this game?’”
To play Warframe now, you can arrive at a quest like The Second Dream sooner. An acknowledgement that it really became what a lot of players were invested in. “It even had this unexpected consequence or benefit of we saw a lot of players come back,” Crookes says. “We saw a lot of accounts get reactivated when The Second Dream started getting the word out. That motivated us, excited us and got us to invest in that kind of worldbuilding.”
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And as [The Second Dream] was the first time, between Steve and Geoff and the leadership team, they realised that we needed to have good narrative,” Ford says, of how it redefined the game. “Like, action gameplay is great, but it’s not very emotional, and all of them, as long as I’ve known them, have cared so much about the art of storytelling. They realised very early on that we had an opportunity to tell a story.”
For an action-driven service game like Warframe, a balance does have to be struck, as Sinclair explains. “There’s always this argument as a game designer, the purity versus the story versus the world. Warframe has definitely been experimental for us in toying with those things, getting burned and then having some success as well.” Despite those wins, nobody is more critical of their work than the developers. Sinclair feels like The New War had its issues. “Something like The New War, I possibly took it too far, where that was just so much work. So much animation. Ideally, I could be a bit lighter touch on the size of those scripts. It’s been a really interesting learning exercise. The quality of the writing, obviously we grew a writing staff, the quality of the VO, the acting, just watching those rise through the life of the project.”
Rebecca Ford, in many ways, has been closer to the story than most, having lent her own voice to the Lotus, the player character’s mentor, who guides them throughout the entire game. Joining the company from a local MIT programme as an intern, how’d she end up in the role? “It’s because we had no money,” she admits frankly. “And I was like one of four women on the team at the time.” She was willing to give it a try, but found there were certain things she couldn’t do in place of a professional voice actor. “I remember we had to watch David Lynch’s Dune and they were like, ‘Can you do a British accent? Can you be like the empress at the beginning of Dune?’ I was like, ‘No? I can be a Canadian?’”
But for Ford, it’s not a simple relationship she has with that character. “I was 21 when I recorded my first [lines] for Lotus. I was a young lady. Now I’m ten-plus years older… I love her, like Lotus is in Smash, right? She’s a spirit in Super Smash. I feel like in many ways she’s everything I’m not. I love her as a character, I just wish I could do better for her.”
The future of Warframe’s story is a bright one but also one full of mystery. There are plenty of hints about what’s coming and yet it feels like the game could go anywhere. How do you steer a project like that? “The one thing I have learned that’s been the most precious for me to always look in on,” Ford says. “Is working on a creative team of people that are experts in their field, [is] a comforting truth when you can tell a story together and for me, it’s about what story we’re telling next and I am very excited to get the Duviri chapter out into the world then see where it goes from there.”