For the third year in a row, the team behind Soulframe, Digital Extremes’ upcoming fantasy live-service title, has shown off its beautiful evolving world to Tennocon attendees. This year’s demo showed off a new magic-based fighting style, a boss fight against a corrupted bear (with an unexpectedly vivid conclusion), and a tear-jerking resolution, showing a slice of the game’s broad range.
Digital Extremes then opened access to the Soulframe Preludes program, a “pre-pre-alpha” version of the game that allows players to get in on the very lowest floor and help build it with the company—an iteration of the same approach that worked so well for their long-running title Warframe, and an extension of the studio’s open relationship with fans.
Before the big live devstream, we sat down with Soulframe‘s Community Manager, Sarah Asselin, and Narrative Designer, Sydney Hills, to talk about the game’s uniquely poetic tone and budding community—as well as fans’ fascination with eating Sproutfolk, and some possibilities for the future.
Tennocon is a little bit extra special this year, as it is the tenth iteration. What is your favourite Tennocon memory from years prior?
Sarah Asselin: My first Tennocon was 2019, I think, and that was really special. I was just a baby intern, and to meet Warframe players in person for the first time was magical because that’s when it really clicked, “Oh, this is why we do what we do on community. These people are real, in the flesh; they love our games.” That meeting of people in person always fuels me for the rest of the year to come. But the 2023 Soulframe demo was also really special. It was the first time a lot of people saw our game.
I do think that my favourite ever will be this Tennocon, though, because I am so excited for people to see the Bromius Fable and just everything that went into it. I hope that they like it.
Sydney Hills: I think it’ll be my favourite one, too. But my current favourite was my first Tennocon in 2023. I got to be incognito because I had only been working at DE for two months at that point. So I was just in the crowd watching the demo that I had just barely contributed to. I got to sit within all of the Tenno and look over the shoulder of the guy next to me, who was in his Discord chat being like, “low-key, Soulframe looks cool.” And I was like, “yeah, it does,” [laughs].
For the uninitiated, what is Soulframe all about? From your perspectives, what sets it apart from other games?
Sarah Asselin: Obviously, Soulframe is our sister project to Warframe, except fantasy. And it’s really based on these themes of nature, and redemption, and romanticism. That’s woven into all these really special tales and fables and the lore we are building. It’s much slower-paced than Warframe—if you know, you know. But I think that lends itself really well to this world we’re creating.
Sydney Hills: We see a lot of grimdark fantasy, dark fantasy themes today. I think Soulframe is different in that it’s a very welcoming world, though it is being colonized, there are these alien invaders, and there is this darkness that’s creeping in. We get to see the world while it’s still beautiful and untouched in some places. And this magic that I think we feel we’ve lost a lot in our world today is still there and still powerful and still redeemable.
Sarah Asselin: There’s a thread of hopefulness that I find really special throughout Soulframe. It feels unique. I’ve seen many players write in our Discord that they enjoy just running around in Soulframe, that it has this coziness. I think the themes of redemption really bring that hope out.
I was brushing up on the Preludes four days ago and found myself thinking… I don’t really do Dark Souls, but I like that you go into those territories, and you also have that unique healing aspect. Something else I really appreciated from the first moment I saw the game two years ago is the complexity of the writing—everything is very poetic and deliberate, at a time when most games lean on being quippy. What goes into writing the dialogue and narration in this style?
Sydney Hills: That’s a great question. I’m glad that people are enjoying the complexity of the narrative because I don’t ever want it to come across as a barrier to entry, like, “What the fuck are these people saying? It doesn’t make any sense.” I really enjoy writing in a more poetic and meandering way.
We have the opportunity to do that because of the slower pace of the game. It’s not so much about needing to tell the player in as few words as possible what to do and where to go. It’s creating this ambiance and inviting them into this world where people take their time, and they don’t necessarily need to say exactly what they mean. They can tiptoe around things and throw in some rhymes and some poetics.
It’s a lot of fun for me to write. I love writing poetry, and Steve [Sinclair, Digital Extremes CEO and Soulframe Director] is really into it as well. We really clicked on that when I first started working. It’s been really fun to experiment and create something that feels nostalgic and old-timey, but also weird and alien in some areas.
Yeah, Soulframe feels very deliberate so far, and you have to actually engage with it versus a lot of other contemporary games where you’re just on autopilot and subconsciously sifting through superhero movie banter. Was there any particular poetic influences that you, or Steve, or the rest of the creative team have drawn on?
Sydney Hills: Steve often cites The King of Elfland’s Daughter. That’s one of the older fantasy works that is thought to have influenced The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s work.
I take inspiration from a lot of different things. Modern stuff, I really love Jonathan Safran Foer. He’s a poet, but he’s also a novelist. I love the way he writes about the past. The world is filled with metaphors, and it’s less about reality and more about how things feel and sound, and I really enjoy that. I also read a little bit of this, I don’t remember the name now, this Finnish epic Kalevala that has this bear, Otso, in it that inspired Bromius a little bit.
Speaking of influences, were there any games or narratives that steered your direction for the world in particular? Were there any particular influences from the world-building or setting side of things?
Sydney Hills: Yeah. Game-wise, definitely ICO and Team ICO was a big one. They put you in this giant world and say, “Go on, it’s yours.” There’s not a lot of direction, lots of exploration. But narrative-wise, Guy-Gavriel Kay, he’s the Canadian writer, Tigana, we all… Steve, Geoff, and I all read it, all loved it. It has a really nice balance of historical influence and real themes of colonialism, but also magic and brightness and fantasy, which I think we’re really trying to hit that balance with Soulframe.
Soulframe has a massively multiplayer online approach, similar in many ways to its big sibling, Warframe. Are there any particular obstacles in applying this loftier tone of writing to this style of game?
Sydney Hills: Live service is its own thing because you’re often writing these episodic moments. You don’t always know what the future of the game is going to hold. Warframe has evolved so much over the years. Especially since Soulframe is so early in development, there’s still so many core game mechanics and systems that we’re figuring out, and the writing has to be able to accommodate that without feeling disjointed. It should all feel like a cohesive experience.
For me, it’s been a lot of planting seeds for future stuff. I love writing lore entries and weapon descriptions and in-game text because that’s such a fun place to, every once in a while, just throw in, “there’s this other island outside of Midrath called Orrel, and it’s where Verminia is from, and it’s French-speaking.” Just that slow, additive worldbuilding, just throwing little things in here and there. I have a feeling eventually we’ll come back to them and want to investigate them more.
Kind of like Tau for Warframe! Sarah, the title of “community manager” is becoming more and more prominent throughout the games industry in recent years, especially at Digital Extremes. Can you tell us a little bit about the responsibilities of the role and what goes into it?
Sarah Asselin: With our games at Digital Extremes, community has always been the core of what we do, and I think that can be really seen with the history of Warframe. So, for me personally, I really wanted to apply that to Soulframe.
I see it as a connector between the developers and the players, whether that’s taking all of the Preludes feedback from a recent update and turning that into bite-size information our busy developers can eat in a one-hour design meeting, or bringing back those decisions and communicating that to our players with patch notes or dev streams. Whether it’s through events or forum posts, streams, or our upcoming Tennocon demonstration, I really aspire to be the connection between our players and the developers and continue to have that transparency that we’ve always had as Digital Extremes with the community, because I think that’s really important and special and unique to us, and I want that to live on.
It builds a lot of trust.
Sarah Asselin: Definitely. It’s a symbiotic relationship where we are able to really hear players and use that to make our games better, but then also level with them and say, “Hey, this is what’s going on. This is why.” And they can feel that trust both ways. Hopefully, that’s the goal.
One highlight of all the devstreams and previews so far is the banter between you, Geoff, and Steve. What’s it been like working with two of the main veteran devs at Digital Extremes?
Sarah Asselin: I think it’s just the start of something new for them. I mean, a couple of years now, but it’s still a new game. And it’s a really exciting time to be on a project like that because it feels like a little startup within the Digital Extremes ecosystem. Although we are DE and we have our history with Warframe, Soulframe is a much smaller team, and we really do feel like we’re building it from the ground up. So super exciting. A lot of work to be done, but I’m just privileged and grateful to be there.
Digital Extremes has a very passionate community, and passionate online communities have a knack for finding things to fixate on and elevate to meme status or inside jokes. What is the most unexpected thing you’ve seen Soulframe’s community latch onto so far?
Sarah Asselin: We had this bug with ladders at the very beginning of… I can’t remember which Preludes number it was in, but they were scaling ladders improperly, and it looked hilarious. They started calling themselves “the Ladder Crew,” and they still sometimes post the ladder emoji on my messages. Whenever I see it, I know they’re referencing back to that.
But I think something so silly and meme-like that just goes to show how we’ve had dedicated people from the very beginning that care about our game enough to continue on these little memes. There’s a lot of funny bugs that come out in something like a pre-alpha. Discovering all of these with the community and laughing at them is one of the meme-iest, exciting things right now. And the outcry of, “Keep this in, keep this in.” I would if I could! Geoff and Steve won’t let me.
Sydney Hills: Where does “Hyper Avo Dump” come from? Is that a community thing?
Sarah Asselin: No…
Sydney Hills: Oh, that’s internal?
Sarah Asselin: There’s a lot of Avakot memes, Sproutfolk memes, turning Avakot into cabbage that you can eat, a lot of people want to eat the Sproutfolk…
See, I thought from the demo that people were going to be really horrified by what happens, with them being corrupted. But maybe fans will be more on board with it.
Sarah Asselin: The aspiration there is that the Sproutfolk turn into these cabbages and have a new life, right? So there’s some redemption within them. Those little guys are hilarious.
Sydney Hills: They’re so cute.
So far, Soulframe has revolved heavily around the major episodes or missions dubbed Fables. Can you walk us through the process of creating a Fable from concept through to integration in Preludes?
Sydney Hills: The Bromius quest is, I think, the Fable that we’ve been working on the longest. Usually, in the past, it’s a pretty quick turnaround from writing it to getting it into production. But Bromius, we actually started writing around a year ago, and it just came up based on the concept. We had this concept of this Omen Beast who’s a bear, and he’s got this big jug beside him. Okay, first question is, “What’s going to be in the jug? What’s he drinking? Is it a pot of honey? Is it something else?” And it just snowballed from there.
We know always that we want to have a story that comes from… It’s got to have a big redemption in it. It’s got to have a sympathetic character who has been turned into a monster against their own will. It’s the same with Deora and Garren. Same with Orengall. The state of the world has turned them into something that they’re not, and they need to be redeemed. Once you have that laid out, what is Bromius’s struggle? What is he going to be redeemed from? The rest of the story just flows.
It’s a really iterative process. We had many versions of the script focus on the trees, and then the focus was on suddenly this Mendicant Wazzard character who came in because we needed a punchy villain. And it’s just the way that things all accumulate. And that’s one of my favourite things about writing for games, is that there’s always these structures to work with them. Now there’s this new villain. How does he work within the story? And often you come up with stuff that’s way more interesting than you would ever just think of.
Once you have these mechanics thrown in or these characters because of a cool mechanic that we want to show off or a fun moment that we want the player to have, things narratively snowball in a way that I think is super unique to games. You can’t really get that in movies.
The collaborative nature of the greater process together, too.
Sydney Hills: Exactly. The whole team is working on it.
So far, we’ve been able to see little personal touches that the staff have put into the game, like Steve’s new “training manual” approach to skills. Are there any particular elements you’ve championed that have made it into Preludes so far, or anything you’d like to tease for upcoming updates?
Sarah Asselin: I feel that I am a woman of the people, and I champion the top things our players really want. I don’t claim anything particularly personally at this time, but I’m trying to get them to add fairies, and I want them to be voiced by myself.
Sydney Hills: I would love that to happen.
Sarah Asselin: That’s my dream. I also want romance, but apparently, I have to wait for that.
It only took what, eleven years for Warframe?
Sydney Hills: We’re working on it, one day…
Sarah Asselin: I guess we will work on our core game systems and get those set, and then we can come back to that [laughs].
Sydney Hills: I will say, though, we do have characters that we know will be romanceable that are already in the game. They’re not yet, but one day.
Beyond the push toward a more open beta—which obviously took a big step this weekend—what can players look forward to or expect from the next year of Soulframe?
Sarah Asselin: There are some really core systems to the game that we want to get right and feeling good before we open it up entirely. When we were discussing the new player experience, for example, we need to find this sweet spot between exploration and discovery and that unique feeling, but also not allowing players to miss core systems like the crafting system, for example—which has improved slowly over the last year, but it’s still something we’re working on, as well as the upcoming mote system, which we’ve been teasing. We have tiered Joineries coming up, which will allow players to shift their Virtue.
I would say we have a real focus on these core game systems before we wanted to open up to everyone. Part of the reason we’re doing our open doors on Tennocon for everyone that has ever signed up is a bit of a nod and a thank you to, perhaps, that player that signed up a year and a half ago. This is us saying, “Hey, even though this is Preludes, pre-alpha still, it’s not in that perfect state where we want it to just be open. If you’ve been wanting to come test out what it is today, come on in. Come join it.”
We want to just respect and say thank you a little bit because this continued interest and passion we have from all these people is such a privilege, and that’s how I view it. We really just want to value that.
As soon as the fairies are in, you’re launching it?
Sarah Asselin: As soon as the fairies get out [laughs]. To be clear, I have not received any approval of this idea. It’s just my manifestation.
Sydney Hills: We can make this happen.
Sarah Asselin: Between the two of us. “The fairies coming to Soulframe, confirmed.”
Sydney Hills: We have alluded to Pictrix, these pixie characters.
Sarah Asselin: Yes, the Pictrix powder…
Sydney Hills: That’s right. There are Pictrix in the lore. Perhaps we need to meet them.
Sarah Asselin: I can voice them. Tell Geoff and George [Spanos, Digital Extremes Audio Director]. I want to voice them.
That would be perfect. So, be honest, and this is a safe space, but whose idea was the big conclusion of the Bromius fight? That camera change in the demo shocked us all, I think... It seemed like a Steve joke.
Sydney Hills: I know what you’re talking about. That was a Steve thing, absolutely.
Okay, I thought so. Lastly, Warframe has expanded its narrative over the years with supplemental material like comics and animated shorts. Do you foresee this happening for Soulframe as well, and what would your “dream” tie-in look like?
Sydney Hills: Dream tie-in, Soulframe tarot card deck. I’ve been thinking about that.
A tarot system would be perfect.
Sarah Asselin: I would love some short story compilation. But it’s a long way to go. There’s also just so much beautiful concept art already. So some kind of artbook. [laughs] I know I’m going to start the ten-year-long artbook project, but that would be amazing.
Yeah, you’ve shown off a lot of stunning work so far.
Sarah Asselin: It’s so pretty. Rosa [Lee, Soulframe Associate Art Director] and her team and the whole concept art team are just really masterminds, lines with their creations. It’s so cool to see that get created in the game and run around and play in it. And the new Neath’uns tileset is one of those moments where it’s like, “Wow, it’s real!”
[Soulframe‘s Preludes program, available only on PC, is available by invite-only; you can join the waitlist on the game’s main website. (Or, if you registered before Tennocon 2025, double-check your email inbox for your access code from the brief open-access period over the convention weekend!)
