With Destiny 2 now fully embalmed, I find myself wondering—as do a great many others—‘how did this happen?’ A new Game Business interview with Sheldon Carter, president of Warframe developer Digital Extremes, has me pondering that question even harder: It turns out that while Destiny 2 was floundering, its foremost rival was enjoying “a few years of straight massive growth.”
Sheldon said that the original Destiny “really hit us” when it launched in 2014, well over a year after Warframe’s 2013 release, and his initial instinct was to “aggressively” compete with Bungie. But that changed over the years, and like others at Digital Extremes, Carter doesn’t see the end of Destiny 2 development as a welcome development.
“Over time, what happens is developers from their team come on to your team. New people who you started, they learned what looter shooters are and how that works because they put thousands of hours into Destiny,” Carter said. “And so, at our studio, it was kind of a bit of mourning when they released that news. The mood in our studio was pretty dour because of all the connections that you end up having.”
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But while Destiny 2’s player numbers were in significant decline before Sony pulled the plug, Warframe has apparently been headed in the opposite direction. Carter said that “four or five years ago,” Digital Extremes began to worry that Warframe had peaked, and it was time to start thinking about what’s next. That kicked off development of Soulframe, the studio’s second project—but at the same time it also brought about some changes on how the studio handlined Warframe.
“We changed our focus on how we were developing the game, how we were promoting the game,” Carter said. “And now we’ve had a few years of straight, just massive growth … Now we’re in this happy position where Warframe’s really thriving, and that gives us the ability to give Soulframe a ton of rope [and] time to really try stuff out and connect.”
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That’s something else Digital Extremes seems to be doing differently: Where Bungie poured valuable time and resources into numerous “incubation projects” that went nowhere, Digital Extremes is moving very deliberately on a single project—Soulframe—which, four years after it was announced, is still in pre-release and not available on Steam.
“I think one of the things you learn as you do a second game that you’re trying for the same scope as something like Warframe is that expertise doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t make the same mistakes as you did before,” Carter said. “It just means you can recover from them a little bit faster.
“So that’s been the journey of Soulframe—relearning a few of the things that we forgot after so many years, but at the same time using that core [audience], which is just establishing communication, building trust with the audience, and taking our time to get it to a point where we feel like there’s enough content, enough story, enough gameplay that when we release it to a wider audience, um it’s going to have its core.”
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Proof that Warframe has the juice: Werner Herzog explaining the game in the most inexplicable yet cool way possible.
But while Soulframe may be the future, there’s no interest in stepping back from Warframe—in fact, Carter said skyrocketing prices driven by the rampocalypse could actually help keep Warframe relevant for years to come.
“You can play Warframe on your PS5 Pro and it looks sweet, cutting edge. And you can also play it on a four-generations-ago Android phone,” Carter said. “And so for me, I hope that if console demands aren’t able to be kept up with, or people need to look at older hardware because the new stuff is so expensive, they’re still going to have Warframe to play, because it’s a forever game that’s always being updated.”
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