Soulframe, an over-the-shoulder fantasy MMO, is the latest game from Warframe developer Digital Extremes. With slick action, otherworldly customization options, and thick lore, Soulframe is undeniably a Warframe sister project, but it’s also something completely different. Where the 2013 sci-fi game leans into industrial settings and breakneck action, Soulframe takes a more methodical approach with an emphasis on nature, ancestry, and slower combat.

IGN attended a press presentation ahead of TennoCon and the inaugural Soulframe dev stream to get a better look at the studio’s plans. During an open Q&A session, the team explained that Soulframe’s starting island is about twice as big as Warframe’s first open-world area, The Plains of Eidolon. The studio also promised that Soulframe will feature a Mastery Rank system not unlike Warframe’s, adding that it shares some similarities with the Operator Focus School system. While TennoCon 2024 offered a peak behind the Soulframe curtain, we had to know more.

We caught up with Digital Extremes CEO Steve Sinclair, Creative Director Geoff Crookes, and Community Manager Sarah Asselin to learn more about how Soulframe will evolve over the coming years. Our chat revealed more information about potential Warframe crossover content, how Digital Extremes plans to maintain its community-driven approach to game development, and so much more. There’s a lot of work to do, but the team is ready to prove that it’s making something a lot more than just Warframe with a palette swap.

IGN: Tell me about your work on Soulframe and how the idea for the game started.

Steve Sinclair: We wanted to make a very confusing game, so we called it Soulsframe. Then we realized it should be Eldenframe, which would be less confusing.

Dark Eldenframe Souls.

Sinclair: Dark Eldenframe of the Wild [laughs]. This idea had been brewing for a while. We had, I don’t know, two or three people working on it for, like, a year in the shadows. Maybe more than that?

Geoff Crookes: Yeah, about a year. It was tough because Steve and I still very much loved Warframe and working on it. This absolutely didn’t come about from attrition. There was still a lot of excitement we had for where Warframe was going. Maybe we’re even all jealous of where it’s going now, but you know, the studio was at a point where we have great retention at the company, it’s a great studio to work for, and we had a lot of senior people, and it just seemed like a good opportunity to try this. To try to grow the company with another game. That being said, Steve and I are very cautious people, and we’re still very insecure in a lot of ways too. I think, Steve, you might have been cooking the fantasy twist first. I think you presented that.

Sinclair: I had to convince you.

Crookes: You did.

Sinclair: Because it’s a very full genre. It’s kind of one of the fullest ever, right? So, trying to squeeze out a little space in there, my pitch was like, ‘I don’t think there’s a lot happening in the way Warframe evolves and changes and updates and is community-focused as much in the RPG space.’ Obviously, MMOs are a huge angle of that, but the action RPG stuff tends to be in the domain of Path of Exile or Diablo, and that different perspective. I was a Dragon’s Dogma fan, and I was like, ‘I wonder what a Warframe, co-op-y approach to that world would look like.’ I think blending in the Miyazaki stuff was where you wanted to go, Geoff, and the themes of nature and restoration, and the importance of ancestral connections, and the value of the elderly in societies that we don’t have in modernity. So, once I started cooking better themes to present to Geoff, then he was like, ‘Oh, OK, I do like this.’

Crookes: With how we worked on Warframe, we try to find hooks that excite us. That’s what I was looking for when we started talking about this. I think it was when we hit that idea of ancestry and even just how that could form into a multiplayer cooperative game, and how ancestry can be important to players you meet, and how that can affect the game and have some kind of influence, things started to get exciting for us there. Thematically, like we were saying, we were talking about the same things. I know we might not look like it, but we’re around the same age, Steve and I, so we share a lot of inspirations from when we were younger. We started talking about the retro influences we have, and I hope you see a bit of that in how the world is presented. You know, some of those old ’80s fantasy movies and whatnot. The more we talked about that the more bought-in we got, the more excited we got, and then we worked with longtime collaborator Keith Thompson. We quick call pitched him this idea, he whipped up some drawings, and then we were sold. He sent us some ideas of the Envoy and established the conflict we were talking about in the world and we were like, ‘Let’s do this,’ and we committed.

Warframe celebrated its 10-year anniversary last year. After so much time spent in building that game with the help of its community, what lessons that the team learned from that approach, and how is that knowledge being applied to Soulframe?

Crookes: Everything. Steve, feel free to jump in too, but I would say how we started was a big impact. I think a lot of studios would have just doubled the studio scope and gone silent for two to three years to make something. I think it is a factor of our insecurity, where we’re like, ‘Warframe’s development worked for us.’ That progressive formation of this identity that we grew with the community. We learned how important that community involvement was to the identity of the game as it grew. So, I think the question we asked each other was, ‘Can you still do that in this day and age? We don’t know, but we think so, so let’s try.’ It’s what we know. I think that’s how we started it, right, Steve?

Sinclair: And we kind of stumbled, didn’t we?

Crookes: [Laughs] We sure did. We couldn’t break our current habits of Warframe. You’re right.

Sinclair: We stumbled because we started taking longer between releases, and going dark for longer. Then we just kind of woke up and were like, ‘OK, holy shit. We gotta release something every month and act on what people are enjoying and give them more of that and less of the things that aren’t working.’ Speed is a big part of it. I’m not sure what you would say, Sarah, about how the community stuff is working.

“Of course, it all begins with our community. That is why it’s possible. Sarah Asselin: Of course, it all begins with our community. That is why it’s possible. It’s our community that, I feel, is giving us the chance to build something new, and with Soulframe Preludes, which is what people are currently playing in, it’s a chance to build that beside them. It’s been really cool seeing everyone’s feedback on these really early days, and being like, ‘OK, a lot of people miss Tuvalkane,’ which I heard they still are. So after TennoCon, that’s my priority number one.

Sinclair: I guess some of the things that we would do differently… We’re sharing technology, we’re sharing the back-end servers, we’re trying to make it so that, the way the game is built, generally, you could move between the two teams within DE, and that’s been happening. So that’s been good. That’s like a Dobis business nonsense answer, but when we started and took it seriously, Geoff, I remember we drew a line and we wrote Warframe on this side, and we said ‘Fast, industrial, bleak, apocalyptic, sci-fi, glow-y, cynical,’ right? And then on [the other side], we just kind of wrote the opposites of those: slower, natural, romantic, optimistic, no celebration of gore, and stuff like that. I mean, we did add a little bit more gore last month, but that’s more about the game design and not about chasing the nastiness. So yeah, we did have a mirror and did a reflection of Warframe so that we wouldn’t be just repeating ourselves. We still seem to make mistakes or forget those lessons. On my side, I contributed a lot to the early design of Warframe, and some of those regrets kind of surrounding complexity, and things like that. So, trying to make a simpler kind of game. Sure, it’s gonna have upgrades and all that stuff, but can we boil it down to its most simple essence? I love the modding in Warframe – I made it. I mean, other people have obviously run with it, but some of those things we’re just trying to do differently and just keep ourselves on our toes.

Soulframe has been described as a sister project that will exist alongside Warframe. Like you said, there’s a lot different between the two, but is there any potential for crossover content or stories? Is that something that the team has discussed or is open to?

Crookes: Yes. Nothing we can commit to yet, but we’ve definitely talked about fun ways to see if there are ways to tie these worlds together. See if we can plant seeds that, people who are fans of DE and played DE games, would notice and call out.

Sinclair: Like this company does [points to shirt featuring Disney’s Monsters, Inc.].

Crookes: [Laughs] Like that company does. Yeah, exactly.

Sinclair: There was a two-week window, where it was like, ‘Is this Tau?’ If you know Warframe lore, it’s like, ‘Is this the alternate world that the players have never been to?’

Crookes: It won’t be. We talked about it.

Sinclair: We did talk about it. Some of those decisions, I think, are about avoiding strong coupling dependencies so that the Warframe team can cook and we can cook, vice versa.

Crookes: We do take our world-building very seriously. We try to create rules that we really stick to. I think that’s the thing: if we ever do talk about that and get to the point, we want to make sure it’s something that can fit within those rules we establish.

Asselin: If you know that Ignis Wraith in Warframe, we recently put something in called Ignus Wroth [laughs]. It’s these little, silly ways, sometimes. Maybe it’s a little cheesy, but I think it’s great.

Warframe for a lot of people, myself included, has a pretty steep learning curve. Is that something that the team is considering while developing Soulframe? Is it going to be, maybe, easier to get into, or is it more for people who have played Warframe and know that there’s a lot of these systems that they’re going to have to learn and manage?

Sinclair: At least the first few – knock on wood – years of Soulframe, we will be trying to go simpler. I mean, even Warframe was simple. It was like a Dead Space mod system in the ancient days. Of course, we had to change it because you had a fixed number of permutations, and that’s great for a single-player game, but for a game that someone is going to sink 500 hours into, going, ‘I’m done,’ is just not engaging over the long term. So, we talk a big game about making Soulframe simpler [laughs], and I think we’re just trying to keep a lid on it, but it’s boiling and we’re like, ‘Come on, don’t make it more complex than it needs to be!’ But we are making a slower game. A game that, I think, is less twitchy if you want it to be. If you’re into the melee combat, there’s parry windows, and there are dodge i-frames, but it is not a Soulsbourne type of game. It’s more in the spectrum of something like Ghost of Tsushima or Breath of the Wild. It’s not quite that far. We do love action, and we do love combat, but as we develop the game, we’re going to also be creating a larger space for people that don’t have those great timing skills and can’t beat the Godskin Duo without help. There’s gonna be that kind of spectrum of a casting type, you know, bow mains that might want to sit back and be using support abilities. I think it’s sort of going after a slightly different audience there.

Crookes: There is a power fantasy in Warframe. We want to still keep a taste of that in Soulframe.

Sinclair: Yeah, where you can sort of grind and overcome anything if you’ve got to crank it up. Warframe has that, of course, in spades. We were talking about this yesterday after looking at our two demos. It’s like, Warframe enemies live for, like, a few seconds. Maybe not. We call it popcorn, right? In Soulframe, our biggest challenge on the design and presentations side, which has been a massive uphill battle for us, is how long a single enemy lives on screen. How to make that look good. There’s new pressure on animation, on where their head is turned, because you have all this time to soak it in. Things that, you know, Nintendo and Fromsoft or Sucker Punch know well, but for us, it’s like, OK, usually, those guys are on the other end of a machine gun. Now, we’re dueling and slowly waiting, and he’s tiring out. So, that’s been our biggest challenge, but I think that affords, maybe, a little slice of a different audience, I hope.

With that in mind, how does co-op work, then? These enemies are on screen longer, but in Warframe, you throw another player in there, and the enemies are just melted quicker. So, how does co-op factor into Soulframe’s gameplay experience? Is it drop in, drop out?

Asselin: You can invite people into your party in a very similar way right now. Something we’re working on, design-wise, is how they are going to function together as a team. So, perhaps, in the future, some Pacts will feel more supportive, whereas other ones can be like a sneaky Pact.

Sinclair: It’s borrowed stuff from Warframe, and it’s kind of like grouping up in Cetus a bit, but we hope to make this a lot more seamless. My dream is, when you go into that soul mode, and you can see the energy stuff and you can see the ancestors, that you would see a radius of other players who might be open for grouping up, and that you could kind of just jump into their instance and vice versa.

Crookes: We have ambitions, too. I kind of spoke about the ancestry stuff where, we’re gonna have an ancestor tree in our Nightfold that might keep a record of players you’ve met, people you’ve played with, and you can look back and almost make a family tree in the game, to see where you came from. Maybe there might be some perks associated with that, depending on how you line up. So, things that we’re trying for that can reinforce the themes.

The Nightfold reminds me of Warframe’s Orbiter, so then is it a space that we can customize like that?

Asselin: Yes. Someone you’re gonna meet at Tennocon is Verminia, who is our rat queen fashionista. She’s gonna be where you can customize things, and at the end of what we’re demoing, you will see a little bit of that. I know fashionframe is a really big part of our community in Warframe that’s very well-loved. Even really just the lore of Soulframe, there’s so much that could go into that which would make sense.

Crookes: Our goal is to put more wandering ancestors in the world, and these people can hang out in your Nightfold. We have ambitions to let ancestors that we have in there now walk about a little bit, and then yes, like different ways that you can kind of decorate and set up that personal space of yours.

Is the fashionframe community something the team considered when creating Soulframe?

Crookes: Top of mind, for sure. It’s even a personal investment, myself. I make sure to critique everyone who plays our games, like on the dev team, I’m just like, ‘What are you doing? Put some clothes on.’ It’s like any game. You give the option to wear underwear? I don’t know, I don’t understand it [laughs].

Sinclair: There’s something hilarious about fighting a giant monster stag in your underwear.

One thing that’s kept me coming back to Warframe is its monetization model. It’s something that most Warframe players who stick around adore about the game. How will Soulframe compare to its sister project in that regard? I’m curious if there will be something like Platinum or if Platinum itself will return, and if in-game markets will be available for players to trade items between one another.

Asselin: Stay tuned for more!

Sinclair: We suffered our bruises in 2012 as we were launching the game, and I made a whole bunch of mistakes, like charging people to uncap their max level and stuff like that. The community, rightfully, gave me a huge earful. I always remember the story of reading a very angry forum post about this feature. It’s called Supercharge, I think. Of course, I looked up the player’s account, and they had spent a ton of money in the game and supported it. They weren’t advocating for themselves, they were advocating for the other people they wanted to play with. They were more than happy to throw money at the screen, at the cool stuff that we were offering, but they did not like the fact that it created a two-class system have ‘I paid so my max level is 30, and yours is 15.’ Then, we ripped it out. So, we’ve learned those painful lessons, and we have scars to remind us.

Pivoting back to customization, I love how nature in the environment is incorporated. It’s such a pivotal, important part of Soulframe. We’ve seen our mount and the bird. Can these creatures be customized in any way?

Crookes: Oh, we’re definitely having hats for the bird. For sure. I’ve already been talking to Rosa [Lee], who’s our art director. We’re going to be making little outfits for the bird, the wolf has the necklace and the earrings that we can swap out, we have our paint patterns. Yes. 100%, yes. We want to reinforce that in any way we can for sure.

Is the mount usable in Preludes yet?

Crookes: [shakes head no] It’s functional. We’re purposely holding it back because we’re slowly growing the world of Preludes, and we don’t want to step on the function of exploration too early. It’s not quite big enough yet. I know players that are in Preludes are so excited to get it. I don’t know, maybe we just need to make a track room in the Nightfold where you can run on a treadmill with your mount. I love it to death. It’s just… we need the world to support the faster mobility that it can offer.

I was also curious, then, if there’s any desire to create other traversal options. Obviously Warframe has a list of ways to get around. Is that something that Soulframe will offer?

Sinclair: The wacky thing about Warframe, if you recall, Geoff, we had coptering.

Crookes: Yes.

Sinclair: But the levels had been built for a third-person shooter with no coptering. It was a button hack to project yourself forward at a crazy fast moment. Zoren coptering, it was called, and we didn’t love it, so we redid it. That’s where the aim gliding and the bullet jumping and all that stuff came in, but the poor level designers, they built so much of the game without that movement system and without those movement hacks in mind. They sometimes still have to deal with the consequences of it. I just saw a video yesterday of the [Warframe 1999] stuff with wall-running problems. I think we are probably going to be a little bit more reserved. That’s the beautiful flow of Warframe, and I think we’re going to try to do something different that. Going back to that line we drew, there’s more methodical stuff. We’re going to try to respect the level a little bit more. I think that’s one part that’s absolutely stunning from FromSoft games, is the level design just matters so much. The topology and the puzzle of it, and ‘How do I get there?’ We want to try to explore that a little bit more than just ‘I’ll just jump and bullet jump down there and just glide for a bit.’ So, I think we are kind of going a little bit different. That said, there’s still cool Garron moments and other kind of short-term things, right?

Crookes: And I am sure we’re going to explore animal Pacts. We have some designs on paper right now, even, but I’m positive we’re gonna have some animal Pacts that will give a taste of this as well.

Still looking at level design then, you hesitated to talk about the term open world during our presentation yesterday. I’m curious why that is, and if it’s not an open-world game, then what is it?

Crookes: Steve, what is it? You said it. [laughs]

Sinclair: It’s an overworld game!

Crookes: We do have a big map, a big island, let’s call it for now, that is traversable, but we’re trying to figure out our progression system and locking and scaling and how you grow your access to the world. I think we’re hesitant to call it open world because unlike Zelda, you can’t just walk out of the cave and go to the other side of the map. We want to put in barriers, we want to put in gates that you have to earn access to, and within each of those, we have our procedural levels. I think we call them dungeons right now, but we have our forest proc and our under-city proc, and we’re building a few others that are pretty expansive and then I think eventually also will be conduits from one part of the world to another part that you can only get through there. So, we don’t want to undercut that effect by being able to just go over top and get to it.

“I think I’m hesitant to say open world because we’re putting a lot of effort into the understory of that island. I don’t want to paint a picture in someone’s mind of like, Far Cry. Sinclair: I think I’m hesitant to say open world because we’re putting a lot of effort into the understory of that island. I don’t want to paint a picture in someone’s mind of like, Far Cry. You know what I mean? It’s more like, there’s exploration and that’s a big emphasis in the game, but there’s also a lot of Diablo or Warframe-esque procedural dungeon content, about as much. So, I guess that’s maybe why I’m avoiding that term. Plus, it’s kind of an abused term, isn’t it? I’ve seen I’ve seen games called open world, and it’s just like, tunnels. There’s a tree so it’s open world, I guess? One of my favorite parts of the game right now, that we just added, is you have these encounter systems, tasks that are popping up as you play Preludes. So, once you clear the quest, it’s gonna be like, ‘Oh, there’s a, there’s a big VIP, or there’s like a hunting party nearby. My favorite thing to do in the game is fire it up and just run through the overworld, waiting for these things to crop up, how the night falls, it gets more spooky. That’s the type of player I am in MMOs as well, which is, ‘Leave me alone. I’m just gonna go for a run by myself for this whole session.’ So yeah, it does have those elements, but I think we’re just being stubborn and trying to be like Starbucks about it. It’s not large, it’s Grande. I can’t help myself.

I totally get that. It definitely feels like Warframe in that regard, and it didn’t really hit me until I was deep in a dungeon. I was like, ‘Oh, it’s like I went on a mission, but I took myself there.’

Sinclair: Yeah, and I think one of the cool things we did in the latest Preludes release is in [earlier versions] you go into a dungeon and we generate the layout kind of like Warframe and you get to the end you teleport out. Now, they’re connected back into the overworld in interesting places, so when this went in I was so surprised because I went down into the dungeon, did my stuff, opened all my chest, came out, and I was right inside this fort, and it was just crawling with enemies. I was, like, behind the bookshelf, like some sneaky Lannister character. It’s such a simple change but such a great feeling that it made it feel — it was sort of an illusion — like it was all connected like that. It felt a little bit different than Warframe, which is a session. You play the mission, back to the Orbiter. Play mission, back to the Orbiter. So yeah, I was pretty proud of that. I didn’t do anything for it, but I was proud.

So, if we can start from one entrance and then exit from another side, is it possible for players to go the reverse way through the dungeon?

Crookes: We’re circling back.

Sinclair: Curse you for asking that.

Crookes: Yeah [laughs].

Sinclair: No comment.

That’s totally fair.

Crookes: You made it sound so cool, Steve.

Sinclair: The problem is the bookshelf only opens from the other side. Haven’t you guys watched the movie Clue? There’s no switch on the other side or fireplace. Yeah, right now, those are one way. We’ll work on that. Maybe the next release will have something like that.

Crookes: That bookshelf you’re talking about, I’ve seen some updates [laughs].

Sinclair: Oh, OK. So there’s a lever on the outside, now?

Crookes: We gave you a taste of our prologue that we’re working on, with the bird flying to the mother. That’s a big task we’re working on this year, where you’ll get some insight into the antagonists in the story, and what they’re bringing to the game and the kind of what’s causing the pollution. Then hopefully, from there, we’ll be kind of broadening what those missions and those adversaries are. We have another faction in the works that represents what happens to this corruption when it goes too far. Which, there’s some hint at the art that we kind of showed in the demo for where they’re coming in. So, we’re going to be leaning heavily into that. I think Steve and I are still scratching our heads about how to give the player meaningful change, being a force of change in this world, and having it persist in a multiplayer world. That’s something we’re really trying to figure out that we have ambitions for, for sure.

Sinclair: Does anyone remember Okami? The game where you have to draw? Oh, my god. So, you’re playing, you play, you play for hours, and then you get that open part that’s not really open world, you fight the thing and you draw stuff and then suddenly, the grass just goes green. It’s just so wicked.

Crookes: You just reminded me, we’re working on our next omen beast quest, which is the bear. I’m not sure if you’ve seen the bear, we showed it PAX, a little footage of it, but it’s going to have a big role. A big theme of it is what you’ve healed and what you restore back to the world after that quest.

Lotus is a really important character in Warframe. She’s a character you spend so much time talking to and hearing. Does Soulframe have a Lotus equivalent, and will they be voiced by Rebecca Ford?

Asselin: She wishes! [laughs]

Crookes: She’s mad at us. She claimed ownership of our rat queen, and we went around her. We cast someone. So, yes and no. Our grandfather, who you might have heard some narration by, he’s going to be a bit of that figure, but we’re probably not going to lean into someone so individualistic like we did in Warframe. I think, again, just to reinforce the themes of ancestry, you’re absolutely going to have people that play that role, but we’re spreading out the function of it. That’s why in last year’s quest we had Orlick guiding us through what we need to do to heal Garron. With Verminia, who is the rat witch, she’s giving us some insight into Bromius, our corrupted bear. So yeah, we want to reinforce the relationships we have with the ancestors and helping them as a progression path for the player as well. It’s important to tie those two together.

This is a bit of a goofy question, but it’s ca