Digital Extremes announced during TennoCon 2022 that it has begun development on an all-new game. Titled Soulframe, the team led by former Warframe seniors Jeff Ross and Steve Sinclair is a fantasy title – a departure from the sci-fi that Warframe has created over the past seven years.
In their place, Rebecca Ford takes on the role of lead creative director of Warframe. In an interview with us shortly before TennoCon, she walked us through the change, as well as how she’s been secretly leading the team for the past six months.
Watch the new Soulframe announcement trailer here!
“It’s a lot. It’s overwhelming, it’s exciting. It’s a fundamental thing that I didn’t know I wanted to do. But now that I’ve been doing it for six months, I feel like I can take good care of Warframe. We’re in this really weird situation that no one knows about, even though it’s been going on for six months. The Digital Extremes team wanted me to know that I wanted to do it. They didn’t want to throw me into a wolf frame, so to speak, and not give me a chance to say, ‘wow, this is not what I expected.’ This is not for me.”
Rebecca Ford will officially take over the reins of Warframe with the announcement of Soulframe. In a press release sent out following the announcement, Soulframe creative director Jeff Crooks wrote: “With Soulframe’s world building and thematic elements, we really aim to go back to our favorite childhood things and take inspiration from the complex fantasy worlds we fell in love with with growth. Our team is really interested in this idea of the collision of nature and humanity, and we will be exploring many of these themes through our own lens as we play with ideas for restoration and exploration.”
In addition to the news of a new game being developed in-house, Digital Extremes also announced that it is starting indie publishing support with Airship Syndicate – the creators of Darksiders, Genesis and most recently Ruined King: A League of Legends Story. The Airship team also teased their upcoming MMO project during TennoCon as part of the announcement embedded below.
You can watch the Airship Syndicate x Digital Extremes announcement here!
According to Ford, Digital Extremes is open to helping create any genre of game, not just MMOs like Warframe, Soulframe and the upcoming title Airship Syndicate. “Honestly, these are just promising projects and a studio that takes pride in its vision and wants to do it the right way.”
For those familiar with Digital Extremes’ history, this is certainly a reversal of fortunes compared to the position they found themselves in with the release of Warframe in 2013. Back then, the game was a last-ditch attempt to save the studio (brilliantly captured in the documentary film No Clip in the studio). Fortunately, the success of Warframe seems to have put the studio in a position to branch out into other projects.
“Honestly, it’s almost more pressure because now you have a history of success to compare yourself to,” Ford says. “It’s a different taste of pressure. It’s like getting off a roller coaster and skydiving. Right now we have people saying goodbye to Warframe. Like Steve, he has worked here for 25 years! Also, in many ways, so are Scott and Jeff. Maybe they thought Warframe was the last thing they were going to do and they could walk away and say we did it, we did what we wanted to do.”
“But now they get another chance and DE gets a chance to enter the fantasy genre. So it’s really more of an opportunity to do fantasy and how do we use the lessons learned from Warframe with their experience to apply it to a different genre? They were comfortable enough with the idea of me running Warframe with the team. You know, we have Pablo, and Megan, and a whole bunch of other people behind the scenes. Some people know, others don’t and trust us. So I trust them to do well with fantasy, and they trust us to support Warframe and do good work, which makes them proud.”
For more on the latest TennoCon announcements, check out our interviews with Rebecca Ford on Duviri’s Paradox, as well as the Velibreaker update coming to Warframe!
Add Comment