Romance. It comes in many forms: wine and chocolates, a bashful serenade, buying someone an expensive League of Legends skin (it was DJ Sona) – it’s unique to the individual. But, in the wake of megahits like Baldur’s Gate 3, love has become a core component of many videogames, too, including the likes of Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Digital Extremes’ upcoming Warframe 1999. Inspired by ‘90s messenger apps and blossoming high school romances, 1999’s system looks to be a fresh take on the traditional RPG dating framework, and I caught up with creative director Rebecca Ford and principal writer Kathryn Kingsley to chat all things amour.
Now, I’ve chatted to Ford about romance before, where she cited Baldur’s Gate 3 as the “push over the cliff” when it came to adding a dating sim to Warframe. But it wasn’t a case of just taking those systems and transplanting them into 1999; instead, the team took the essence of what Larian did right and reimagined it for their own multiplayer game – a challenge, given Warframe is, of course, a live-service actioner, not a sprawling Dragon Age-style RPG.
“When I set out to do research I was like ‘I’m going to research live service romance systems – ohhh noooo,’” Kingsley recalls, prompting a series of giggles. Specifically, 1999’s dating sim is largely text-based given the focus on Y2K-style communication, so I can only imagine some of the results that turned up. But Ford notes that “there have been some really interesting developments [in the live-service romance space]. I’m going to pull up something really embarrassing for the sake of this interview, but there are live-service romance games that actually exist, so I installed a few for research. It’s a remarkable corner of the games industry.
“There are mobile games that are clearly directed towards women – I’m not going to say which game because I have a 79-day login streak with one that’s entirely a relationship game. It’s eye-opening because it’s not what I usually play and it’s not what I’m used to, but when I see it put in different contexts, I can see how we can learn from it, and what an audience that likes this might want. We were able to do things the Warframe way, but we were also able to learn a lot.” As for what game it is? That secret is safe with me, Rebb.
Kingsley notes that the team also wanted to stray away from the relatively binary systems of portraying romance as a series of colored icons or plus or negative points. “You’re trying to express something very non-analog in an analog way – in a one to 100 score, or in hearts, or you’re earning [romance levels] in a sort of vending machine kind of way. I think that romance in games is still very much in its early days.”
As we go through the top 20 games on Steam, only two – of which Warframe is one – have any dating-based mechanics. Most of those games, however, are live-service like Warframe and don’t feel like spaces where interpersonal relationships would fit naturally. I ask the duo if the addition of 1999’s romance system is a risky choice, and Ford tells me that “more people should do it if it makes sense to do so. I can assure you that people didn’t play Warframe for a romance system, so we didn’t want to do it in a way that felt alienating.
“The element that makes it natural in 1999 is the formative relationship-building over the internet – it went from ‘we don’t talk to strangers on the internet’ to now where you can just date online, and 1999 is a really big turning point for people. They created lifelong friendships, found their partners – for us, it’s real.”
Ford has confirmed to me before that, of course, your romantic (or non-romantic – you can make friends too!) decisions will not have a long-term impact on Warframe given it operates as a live-service title, so I ask how your choices will affect the overarching 1999 story, and how the team makes them feel weighty despite their non-permenance. “A player shouldn’t emotionally be turned away from Warframe forever if a character dumps them, but at the same time we want things to have meaning,” Ford says.
“I don’t want to spoil the soul of what makes 1999 playable, but ultimately we’ve given players an ‘out’ at an interval if they aren’t happy with how things have gone.” She clarifies that this “isn’t a monetization thing: you can’t pay 60 Platinum and wipe their memory,” which I’m sure elicits a collective phew. As someone who also, to borrow Ford’s words, “lost 60 hours of progress to go back to Act 1 and make Astarion love me” in Baldur’s Gate 3, this sounds like the perfect compromise.
But the thing that made Baldur’s Gate 3 so special was its characters. Each member of your questing party felt like a real person, as opposed to an awkward stereotype or robotic romance NPC. With Warframe, however, we’ve known all of these characters (except new frame Cyte-09) for years, and grown alongside them. I ask Kingsley how she goes about reimagining the characters we know and adore.
“It was very important to me that each character not only sounded and felt different, but played differently as well. You have to approach them differently because they are unique people – the way that you’re going to approach speaking to Arthur is going to be very different to Amir or Quincy or Lettie. I took them more as the people and less as the Warframes, because they were people before they became their Warframes.”
But Kingsley highlights that there’s a balance to be struck between flirting and friendship, as each of Warframe 1999’s characters can be wooed as a romance option or treated as a pal. “It was about making sure the player was the one opting into those reactions,” she tells me. “Characters will flirt with you then immediately go ‘hey, is that okay?’ The player has the option to say yes or no, and if they say I’m really not into this, the character stops. The player can opt into those flirting interactions again and change their mind, but the character never steps over that line. It was important to me that we give our players a reason to interact with characters that they’re not romantically interested in, because there’s a lot of lore, background, humor, and just fun engagement to be had.
“The word count in the relationship system is about 140,000 words, so two full-length novels,” she smiles.
While it’s Warframe 1999’s aesthetic that’s largely piqued my interest, I can’t help but be enticed by its romantic endeavors – especially in the wake of 2025’s last dev stream (it explains why Ford once told me that one option is “kind of disgusting”). While the official launch date still remains a mystery, I suspect we may be able to snuggle up with our Protoframe baes as soon as the clock strikes midnight on December 31; romance is oftentimes poetry, after all, and that’d feel pretty fitting. Honestly, that sounds great to me – cocktails are too pricey these days anyway.