Interview: Rebecca Ford discusses the upcoming Warframe: 1999 expansion
Before TennoCon, some members of the press, including myself, had the privilege to view the Warframe: 1999 live play demo before its public debut. I was as blown away then as I was on the night. Afterwards, I had the opportunity to speak to Digital Extremes’ Creative Director Rebecca Ford to ask her a few questions, which won’t make sense unless you watched the demo, so circle back if you haven’t already.
Actually, yeah. There was a very heated debate at one point between me and Pablo. Should we call it Warframe 1999 or Warframe Y2K? I was 1999. I'm like, no, it can't be Y2K because that's going to feel too... whatever.
It doesn't translate well for whatever reason. I don't know. I wanted Y2K or 99 as the update name, and then we just committed to 1999 because it felt like we could really play on the idea of that particular year looking right before the new millennium and then doing it in a weird Warframe way.
Every piece of the puzzle came together really rapidly as the ideation and the notes and the concepts for this update happened really early last year. There were no breaks at all on the train for 1999 as early as, you know, I would say January or February last year.
Is 1999 just going to be this one and done one and done project, or is there going to be more spin-off sequels?Our intention is that it's just a major Warframe update that will be part of the game forever. This is the next major story arc.
Many things happen here, and when you're finished with the story content, there's just a ton of post-game content that is there for you, and we'll keep expanding on that. We certainly aren't going to just ship 1999 this year and walk away. We already have plans for next year to expand it further, but we'll talk about those later, but ultimately our goal with this is that it's a huge addition to Warframe.
It's a meaningful story, with meaningful characters, interesting gameplay, and a setting with real stakes for the players. Things matter here, and they matter to the main game. It's all connected.
Are we going to be seeing the characters from 1999 as well, apart from the skins? Are they also going to be travelling over to the origin system in any way?You'll have to play to see. That one I can't give you the direct answer to.
Okay. That one's actually kind of brutal because a lot of players will want to see their Warframe as a proto-frame, but we did make choices based on a couple of competing priorities. We needed to have the starter frame, so Mag, Excalibur, and Volt had to be there.
We really wanted to try something different and release a frame in reverse. So, Quincy, aka the brand new frame, is Cyte-09. So, one of the four proto-frames are actually, they came from 1999, and then you can get Site-09 in the origin system.
And then we really wanted a medic archetype of a character, and we thought that we could do a lot more with Trinity than we had in the past. So, we actually are also doing a kit review for her, so she'll get a little bit of a design review.
And then for Nyx, which is sort of the wild card, that's a little bit of a, we wanted Arthur to have a sibling, and historically, when Nyx first was released, she really just was a gender-bent Excalibur. So, we thought for the final of the six, it should be a family member to one of the proto-frames.
So, if it were to be a sibling, why not use Nyx, and then she as well is getting an upgrade for gameplay?
Are there going to be any differences in gameplay?No, when you use them as skins, they just talk. They interact and talk with the world. It's very much a flavour thing. They're super customisable and when you use your operator, they'll talk and say it's your turn now or something. There's a lot of interactions.
Well, it's a little bit tricky, because that was just the prologue mission. So, what the player can expect is, from that point on, somehow, they now get involved in the story. That's kind of the only time you play as Arthur.
So, the rest of the quest is done with you as the player. Arthur is your entry point to 1999, and if you played Whispers in the Walls, you did it already. You already played as Arthur. So, we're just continuing that, and then things will switch over.
Is that when Excalibur showed up at the end?Maybe.
Gemini skins. That's going to be very exciting. On a functioning level, are you able to use those on the Prime variants?Yeah, you got it. So, if you have Meg Prime, you basically get two fashion frame loadouts with the Gemini skins. Then you can swap between them mid-mission if you want.
Are there any plans in the future to release other Proto-frames?Oh, yes. But we won't say who.
You said 1999 would last around five hours?The New War (previous main Quest) was five hours. I don't think the quest is gonna be quite that long. We're hoping for more, probably in the two-hour mark. A good movie-length story quest, and then the post-quest content with months of stuff to play.
We have a whole post-quest system designed for you to play with, which we'll talk more about it in dev streams come October or November.
So if we look at the Warframes themselves as each individual thing, they obviously come from a lot of different cultural and mythological backgrounds. How do you come up with your ideas?We are in an endless orbit of being inspired by culture, inspired by art, or having an idea. None of them are the right way to do it. We do it every way.
If we have a kit idea, we'll start there. If we have a thematic idea, we start there. For something like Jade, a lot of her inspiration came from choirs and angels, and that really set the pace immediately for her.
We knew who she was right away because of the theme and the art, and the name just came from Warframe lore in many ways. For something like Corvette, or Dante even, we knew we wanted a bookish spellcaster. Let's go. We knew, and that one didn't start with art. That one started the other way. It was like, oh, we really wanted a book frame.
Right this very second, I am back on the Nidus train. I bounce around, but I'm back on Nidus a lot. Probably because I've been so deep in the Infested stuff with 1999 that I was like, oh, where's my Infested Warframe?
The big event, obviously, is coming up, TennoCon. It's the first time it's going to be set across two days. How did you come to the decision to expand it?A much smarter event person than me was like, you should do a two-day event, and I can handle it all. I was like, sounds good.
It was a really good idea from the events team. Beth on the team joined us, and she realized if we did it over two days, we could really help with the player experience by giving them more time to see the event versus having to jam the whole thing in a six-hour window. So, we all just went with it.
Are you excited for it?I am. It's a day that kind of defies a language of what it means to the team, where we've come from as a team, where we are now. It's a lot of work, don't get me wrong.
There's a lot of snippy days between me and the guys at the end of the day, where I'm like, I'm done with that. In good spirits, but it's stressful. We just don't want to disappoint anyone.
It's such a precious concept to have people care about what you're doing. Our biggest concern every year is that we've disappointed our players, so we just try and push ourselves and hope for the best, that we've entertained them in some way because that's our job.
It's the ninth one this year. Were you expecting it to continue for this long?Nope, not at all. I think that's kind of perhaps a saving grace of this, is none of us expected any of this, so we can never be disappointed. Obviously, we don't want to fail, but we're just holding on as long as we can to what we think people want, and if that changes, we'll try and change, but for now, we are just absolutely committing to the visions of our games for our studio.
I hope so. I'm going to try. We've got to do some crossover content.
I think it would be really cute if Soulframe was a book series in 1999, and you walk past it, and Soulframe was, you know, just a cute little thing.
There's also the Steam easter egg that you mentioned, the Gordon Freeman one. Are there any of those easter eggs from other series dotted around?I'm working on it. Nothing to share yet, but I'm working on it.
