For a game that’s often summarized as “that one with the space ninjas,” Warframe has one of the most daring and backstory-rich stories in gaming today. This weekend at Tennocon, the team at Digital Extremes revealed its next narrative chapter, The Old Peace, and proved that last year’s 1999 chapter was not the long-running live service game’s last big swing.
CGMagazine had the honour of speaking to Warframe‘s Principal Writer, Kat Kingsley, and Lead Writer, Adrian Bott, about the lessons they learned from 1999, plotting complex branching dialog, and connecting the “constellations” that make up the game’s sprawling narrative.
CGMagazine: Tennocon is a little bit extra special this year, as it is the tenth iteration. What is your favorite Tennocon memory from years prior? Kat, I know last year was your first.
Kat Kingsley: It was just so awesome and overwhelming to see the experience for the first time, and to sort of—I don’t know if “bask” is the right word, but just to see the outpouring of the fans and to feel the excitement firsthand. It was my first time going to a gaming convention, and I think Tennocon is a really wonderful experience, especially for us developers. It really is a wonderful opportunity to re-energize us and remind us why you’re doing what we do.
A lot of times you spend a lot of time alone behind a screen, and writing can often be a very solitary experience, even if you’re working with a team. And so, you sometimes can lose detachment from the people that you’re writing for. And so this is a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with the community and say “hello” and “thank you” and just have that wonderful face-to-face interaction.
Adrian Bott: Yeah, it’s my third, and there’s so many wonderful things about Tennocon that I always look forward to. One of them is the chance to just nerd out about the lore and pick up and discuss really obscure points with people who are just as passionate about that thing as I am. So that’s delightful.
But also seeing the creativity from the players is humbling. Whether it’s the costumes or the art or just the things that the players have made themselves and brought along, the sheer joy of it, it’s incredible. We do this because it’s a passion and what we are paid to do. But people who have just given so much of their time on the player-based side for the sheer love of the game…
I’m sure to have your creativity inspire someone else’s creativity must be very special.
Adrian Bott: Exactly. Seeing how people have taken what we’ve put out and made it their own. It really says that people are living and breathing the collaborative world that’s being created.
Warframe took a pretty ambitious turn last year with 1999—going to an era of the game’s lore that was previously considered ancient or lost history, and putting faces on Warframes for the first time. Looking back on it now, what were the biggest obstacles you faced, or lessons you learned, from this chapter?
Kat Kingsley: Oh, boy. I handled the system design and about 75% of the writing for the KIM [Kinemantik Instant Messenger] system, the relationship system. The biggest challenge that I had tackling that as someone who was brought on specifically for that was, the first thing I did was went looking for other live service games with a relationship system and went, “oh no,” because there aren’t any. I went, “how do they handle when you paint yourself into a corner and you want to try again because you’ve screwed up a dialog? Oh no,” because we can’t ask a Warframe player with 9,000 hours on their account to reroll.
We had to figure out what to do with that and how we were going to be able to give players the ability to try again. Because if you look at all relationship systems in other games, you can save scum. You can try in Baldur’s Gate 3 and just go, “whoops, Astarion didn’t like that,” and go back. Or in any other game, you can start fresh. In Warframe, you can’t. Luckily, though, with the Drifter, had the ability to loop the year.
And we also had Techrot and the Infestation, which is this sort of amorphous, what is it? What isn’t it? So we could hand-wavey some of the mechanics there and blame it on the Techrot [laughs]. Or when in doubt, “Entrati did it.”
That’s a fair policy.
Kat Kingsley: We had to make a decision where you can blame game mechanics and where you can blame the lore for something that is a gaming necessity. But the thing that made it so valuable, I think, was to be able to give a human connection to these characters and to really be able to allow the players to experience the story and these characters in a much more detailed and intimate way—not just in a romantic way, but also just in a relationship way.
When we were designing it, I stopped calling it a “romance system.” I started calling it a “relationship system” because I was designing it both platonically and romantically in parallel. The stats for people who don’t date anyone are actually fairly equal to people who have a romantic partner in the game. It’s fascinating to see how people are engaging with it. So that was a very interesting thing to learn as we went through it.
So was the loop element already in 1999‘s plot before that, or did this need influence bringing in Drifter’s abilities?
Adrian Bott: The loop kind of came from the quest. That ties back to Duviri. A lot of the inspiration for the quest came from Steve. That’s where a lot of the coherence and the linking into prior ideas comes from as well.
Kat Kingsley: The reset mechanism was a necessity. The question of how we were going to narratively lampshade that came in later. How the characters themselves were going to understand this in the game had to follow later from a mechanical standpoint because we knew we couldn’t just paint players into a corner and be like, “you’re stuck now. Deal with it, roll a new account.” We couldn’t ask players to do that. How we had to explain it was a responsibility that we had to do later. And so that’s why it was either the Techrot or “when in doubt, Entrati did it.”
“The thing that makes me so enamored to write for Warframe is that you have these over-the-top, absolutely ridiculous characters in these far-flung, ridiculous stories telling absolutely amazing, emotionally grounded stories.”
Adrian Bott: Speaking of, one of the things that we did have to do fairly early on—which is actually prior to 1999 itself, with Whispers in the Wall, when we first meet Arthur and hear from Aoi for the very first time.
We knew that if people saw what seemed to be a Warframe with a human face, the natural assumption would be that that was the original Excalibur. But of course, the Protoframes are something very different. We had to lay the table for 1999 by making it crystal clear that this is a result of Entrati taking the Helminth Serums back from his time to 1999 and inoculating these “volunteers” with these serums and transforming them, catalyzing the Techrotthat was already in their bodies, into what they are.
We deliver that particular piece of exposition in multiple ways. There is the illustrations on the walls of the Entrati Netracell that the art team handled. There’s also the codex fragments that you can collect, which spell out quite specifically exactly what was done and why it was done and how. But we also had the the comic that Cam Rogers wrote and Karu illustrated, which was really helpful laying the table pre-backstory. All of that was with the intent of giving players the idea of what this new thing called a Protoframe is, that’s not quite human, not quite Warframe, but in some intermediate state.
I know that was a particular topic for speculations.
Adrian Bott: Yeah. It’s perfectly understandable that a player would look at that and say, “wow, is that the OG Excalibur?” And the fact that he’s called Arthur as well? You have to unpack things a bit just to explain that. But once people have the idea of what a Protoframe is, the players have really seized on that and brought their own imagination and creativity and ideas to it as well.
Now the game is about to take a similarly earth-shattering turn in the late-2025 update, The Old Peace. Obviously Tau has been a huge element of Warframe‘s lore for a long time and means a lot to established players, but what do newcomers need to know about this era, and what can they expect?
Adrian Bott: Oh, boy. I think lore-wise, you’d need at least a basic grounding in the ideas of The Old War era, the idea that there were multiple attempts to get to Tau from the Orokin side of things. So the Sentients set out to build the bridge, the solar rail between Earth and Tau. It took a long-ass time. Various other factions within the Orokin were impatient. So the Zahriman project was another attempt to get to Tau, which is different. But the Zahriman, as we know, never got there.
Everybody, when they’re starting out, whether they know it or not, the first port of call is The Second Dream, which is that big revelation that everybody quite wonderfully keeps secret from their fellow players. You have to go through it yourself. It’s not something that you want to spoil. But I think even players who are very well-versed in the lore and have assembled everything up to now and have a really clear grasp of the timeline, I doubt any of them would have expected the idea of a temporary ceasefire and a peace in the middle of The Old War, which is what we’re looking at here.
That’s really quite an audacious and bold turn to take. I can say that because it wasn’t my decision [laughs]. This is stuff which has come from a Steve and Rebb directorial level.
But once you internalize the idea for a brief time, the image that always comes to mind with me discussing it is the image of soldiers in the first World War, fighting and then playing football across the trenches on Christmas Day, and that moment of recognition of common humanity and the fact that the people on the ground had their own families, they had their own reasons for going on living. And they weren’t mere tools in the hands of the imperial powers to be just sent out to die at a whim.
“Rebb calls and says, ‘hi, I’m at a party. I’m in 1999. Come get me.’ And I’m like, ‘fire up the Story TARDIS.'”
I think all of that comes home. And it was, again, Steve’s idea to have this thematic invocation of trenches and that familiar battleground as well, and the idea of the flowers which bring to mind remembrance and poppies and so forth. So all of that, I think, is very, very strongly there.
And I think all you need to know, really, is that there was an old war, and it was against the Sentients. We know approximately how it began, and we know very much more clearly how it ended, with various, very large scale events, the Sentients destroying the Orokin system end of the solar rail, the whole business about the Sentient attack on Lua, Lua being put into the void… [laughs] It ended in an Orokin victory, and at the celebration, the Tenno turned on them, and so on, and so on.
The point is, if we see a temporary period of peace, we know it’s doomed. We know just because of the context, that regardless of how much optimism, and joy, and commonality we see between the the Tenno, and the Sentients and the Orokin, we know it can’t last. So that underscores everything, that sense of pathos.
There’s a moment in the demo where we see the Operator and Adis bonding, and you think, “oh no, this can’t end well.”
Kat Kingsley: The trick is, how does it go wrong? How does this all end poorly? The thing that I love about Warframe, the thing that makes me so enamored to write for Warframe is that you have these over-the-top, absolutely ridiculous characters in these far-flung, ridiculous stories telling absolutely amazing, emotionally grounded stories.
One of the things that we’ve been handed down from Steve is the “ten steps to writing for Warframe“—drive it like you stole it. If it doesn’t dangerous, you’re not stepping on the gas hard enough. Also, it has to be grounded in a human feeling. It has to tell a human story. Where other games go big and bombastic, we have to stay small and personal.
We could have told The Old War with big ships blowing up in space, but we’re not. We’re telling it as a story between two children of war, and where that goes wrong. I think that is just absolutely beautiful. That lullaby, every time I hear it, I’m thinking about it, I’m getting goosebumps. Every time I hear it, I tear up. It’s just astonishing.
The reason why I asked, too, is that I walked out the preview of 1999 last year and texted a friend, “You need to play Warframe, this expansion is right up your alley.” I know that a lot of people run into that same mode of, “how do I get into this thing? Oh, I have to go through all this.”
Kat Kingsley: While [Adrian]’s been working on The Old Peace, a lot of what I’ve been doing has been the critical path rework at the beginning of the year, trying to streamline it. We took 30 hours of face-grinding out of the game of the Necromech grind and redrawing a lot of the Star Map and how you have to trigger “Natah” because that was like an Easter egg hunt. There’s going to be more work being done as we continue on in this year and as we go on.
With a live service game, you’re playing Jenga. You’re constantly stacking things on top of each other as content gets added. Every once in a while, you have to then take the whole tower down and rebuild it. It’s a game, though, of making sure you’re feeding your current players and also rebuilding what’s been done before. As you do that, though, you’re constantly breaking things.
Adrian Bott: Oh, we break stuff all the time [laughs].
Kat Kingsley: Oh, all the time. Because you change a light Shader over here, and oops, we broke a quest we released seven years ago, because for some reason, this Shader over here is connected to this thing back here. And it’s just… Welcome to game dev.
Adrian Bott: Now my operator has a flower pot on her head. What’s going on?
Kat Kingsley: But it’s important because if you want to be able to make sure you can smooth this out. There are plans that we can’t speak of, but we will continuously be improving this new player experience, and it is something the company is very passionate about.
Plus, in the process, you can’t lose the impact of what you built, right?
Kat Kingsley: Exactly. There’s always a balance. You don’t want to strip the game dry of all of the content that we’ve made, but you also don’t want to make it such a long and painful experience that people can’t get to the new exciting thing we just released that’s 150 hours in.
A moment ago you mentioned that the decision to do Tau was a directorial thing, but what is it about now for the game that made Tau seem like the right choice? Is there something you can speak to that?
Adrian Bott: I’m not sure how much we can speak to that, honestly, because that’s so much of, as I say, a Rebb-level thing. We tell the story, but we don’t steer the ship; that comes from Rebb’s vision. So it’s like we are waiting for the phone call to say, “hi, guys, this is where I am.”
Kat Kingsley: “Come pick me up.”
Adrian Bott: Rebb calls and says, “hi, I’m at a party. I’m in 1999. Come get me.” And I’m like, “fire up the Story TARDIS.” This is how we need to now craft not only what’s coming ultimately, but also what leads up to that, to make that seem like a natural and inevitable next step to take.
Kat Kingsley: I was in a long survival mission with a bunch of players, and they were like, “oh, you’re a dev. What team are you on?” I’m like, “I’m on the narrative team.” And they were like, “oh, can you tell us what’s going to happen next?” I was like, “guys, I don’t make the decisions. I just explain them.” I need that on a mug [laughs].
It sounds like it’s a bad thing, and it’s not. It’s like somebody else has put the stars in the sky and made the constellations, and it’s our job to tell the stories about them. It’s an honor to do it. It is a humbling experience.
When the KIM system was announced last year, I lurked the Reddit like a champ. 75% of it was memes, 15% of it was like, “dear God, no, please don’t do this,” and 10% was “let them cook.” But when it came out, everybody met it on an open playing field, and everybody went into it with an open mind.
I do not know of another community that would have done that. I do not know of another game where people would have gone into it and been like, well, actually, this is pretty cool. I will write for a community like that happily until the heat death of the universe. I will write for this community for as long as I’m able because it is such a joy and such a pleasure.
Adrian Bott: Seeing people say, “we trust ye” means so much.
As you were saying that, I was thinking of at least one or two other examples of other games where, yeah, I don’t think players would have been so cool about it.
Kat Kingsley: Because they would have gone in with a preformed opinion, and there would have been nothing I could have done to change that. But the community here went in and went, “well, actually, this is not what I would have expected.” They met it on an open playing field. I’m just blown away and humbled by that. It’s just been such a joy and such a wonderful experience like no other I’ve ever had in my professional career. It’s amazing.
Before we explore The Old Peace, we’re taking a detour for a “Entrati side story” featuring “the Devil’s Triad.” Is there anything you can tease about this story and Uriel at this point?
Adrian Bott: This is where I get to say, “that’s what Kat’s doing” [laughs].
Kat Kingsley: I don’t think I’m allowed to say anything for the embargo, except that it’s going to be a lot of fun and I’m very excited.
To conclude with the Operator and the Drifter, what’s it like writing for these two very similar but very different characters, especially since they’re extensions of the player?
Adrian Bott: That’s, again, something Kat can speak to more than I, because she did so much more of the KIM system writing than I did. But I will say that part of what she did do with the KIM system was to absolutely bring the Drifter to life not that they weren’t already a realized character, but she was able to give the players the option to craft who their Drifter is through the options that they choose to a far deeper degree than we’ve been able to do previously.
Kat Kingsley: It was roleplay-light, sort of deciding, did I have a sibling? Did I not? What happened to my parents? That kind of stuff. And then being able to set the the Boolean tags in the background there. This has all been leaked online, so I can talk about how the system works—the “Kimulacrum,” if you will. The only reason I’m cranky about that is that you can see what the tags are named, so I can’t name them silly things anymore because that’s how I remember them in my head.
Anyway, so it’s there so that I can recall. The tags are set. I don’t think they will ever be used in main gameplay, but they’re there so that I can recall those choices later on in conversations.
The Drifter is both, in my mind, the more adult version of the operator, but has somehow suffered less than the Operator. The Operator, I almost feel, is more traumatized in my mind, but is somehow more of a child.
Adrian Bott: They both have trauma of different kinds. I think the Operator has had to do a lot of extremely traumatic growing up, which they weren’t necessarily ready for. I think because they had this formal military training and were taught to fight with honour in the Tenno schools and to pilot Warframes and all of that very disciplined, formal, hierarchical training. That would have meant that a lot of what was vulnerable and human about them was repressed.
I actually was privileged to show a different side of not the Operator, but a Tenno in the Jade’s Promise Feathers, where we have the case of a Tenno who is just unable to rise to the martial occasion which is demanded on them. Drifter was trapped in an environment from which they could not escape, which was all to do with fulfilling an escapist childhood fantasy. So in a way, the Drifter had a surfeit of escapist childhood, and the Operator had an absolute drought of that exact same thing. So I see them a little bit in that way. That’s an overly simplistic way of putting it, but they both have very messed up pasts.
And I think the Drifter needed, I think, a family structure, and that’s what they find in the Hex. They needed peers and people that could provide the life experiences they’d never had a chance to have. Whereas I think the Operator… They need to be honored for what they’re doing. Eleanor says, “a child is a child,” and it was interesting to me how divisive that was on the player base because a lot of them said, “don’t patronize my Operator. They know what they’re doing. They are up to it.” Others were like, “well, that’s a very human offer, and I love her for saying that.” There were no right answers.
The player experience is too, right? What you go through in your own life is going to inform your perspective on this.
Kat Kingsley: I wrote Arthur first because he was our vertical slice of “how is the KIM system going to work?” So he was our test case, and I was exploring the Drifter psychologically through also writing Arthur. It was two soldiers trauma-bonding and unlocking each other’s pasts, trying to figure out how to talk to each other.
There’s that big conversation at the end where if you look at it visually, it is literally just four ways to get through an argument with Arthur of this giant branching mess that then suddenly narrows down to either you saying “eff it, I’m out,” which is just an end, and then like, “okay, fine, here’s the story of me and Duviri.” That, to me, was one of my favorite conversations to write, because it’s that whole conversation where the Drifter goes, “I am Duviri.”
It’s that confession moment of, “you don’t understand, I was doing this to myself. I was stuck in Duviri, killing myself for how many centuries because this was my creation all along.” That, to me, was one of the most fun things to write—setting variables as you’re going through Arthur, where you get to decide which of tthe mood spirals was your primary mood spiral, whether or not you blamed it on Wally, or whether or not you blamed it on yourself or the Orokin and all of those things were tracked as you went. It would all flavor which version of the conversation you got.
I can’t imagine the map you must have ended up working off of.
Kat Kingsley: We’ll wait till you see the narrative panel tomorrow. There’s a movie that plays that shows just exactly how complicated the KIM system was. The whole video because I had to manually film it in Illustrator. It is a manual zoom out being filmed in OBS because every time I tried to animate it in an actual video editing software, my computer overheated and crashed.
Adrian Botts: By Wally, of course, we mean the Great Indifference.
Kat Kingsley: Yes, the great Xipe Totec, the Smiling One. Sorry. Yes, I shouldn’t refer to him as Wally. Sorry, sir.
CGMagazine: Wally for short.
Adrian Bott: “No, no, no. It’s quite all right.”
