Techrot Takes The Stage – Warframe Interview With Pablo Alonso

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home March 12, 2025 61 Views 12 Min Read
Techrot Takes The Stage - Warframe Interview With Pablo Alonso



I recently spoke to Pablo Alonso, design director of Warframe at Digital Extremes, to talk about what comes next. After such a crucial chapter in this long-running game, I was curious what the future holds for players with the release of the upcoming Techrot Encore update.

After the great release of Warframe: 1999, players have enjoyed Höllvania and the Hex for countless hours. But what lessons has the development team learned behind the scenes of such a massive content update?

A collage of the six members of the Hex in Warframe.

Related


Warframe: 1999 – Receiving The New Millennium With Rebb Ford

Find out what’s coming up in Warframe: 1999!

“There were a lot of things that we didn’t know how they were going to land – for example, the relationship system,” Alonso confesses. “We were hoping people would like it, but people liked it way more than we expected, so that was great.

“Overall, we discovered that the change in tone from previous updates helped to keep the game fresh,’’ he explains. “After 12 years, we’re always looking to make things feel new without diverging too far because the game loses its essence. The main thing we learned is that the tone change for this one helped make it feel unique while still playing like Warframe.”

An Encore To A Stellar Performance

Arthur Nightingale looking at a stage in Warframe.

While 1999 was a huge chapter, Techrot Encore is unusually large for an update released this early in the year. It made me wonder if there’s anything from 1999 that the team was particularly eager to expand upon in this update.

“I was pretty happy with where we got things,” he explains. “We usually do our big update at the end of the year, and then we do our Echoes updates a bit after. So it doesn’t often happen that we feel like we missed out because, whatever we want to do, if we didn’t manage to fit it into the main update, we would put it in the Echoes.

“We always have a ton of ideas that we want to explore; that being said, I could still be working on Duviri,” he laughs. “There’s that phrase, ‘Artists never finish, only abandon’, and it’s the same for games; I could keep on iterating on some of those ideas forever, but you have to ship it, otherwise, I would probably still be doing The New War right now.

“You gotta find a point where you’re happy with it and put it down and start playing with a new toy. I feel we completed pretty much all of the objectives we had,” he adds. “The only, and this is a very silly thing, but the only thing I can think of that we cut is a minigame I had made about air hockey, that’s the only one.”

While we probably won’t experience that air hockey minigame anytime soon, there’s a lot of new content in Techrot Encore, some of which comes in the form of the new Temporal Archimedea system, where players will get another version of the Deep Archimedea gameplay. On the other hand, mission types like Shrine Defense, Index, and Ascension have only one version each so far, which brings up a question: What’s the priority order when older content is revisited?

“So, going back to Deep Arcimedea was always the plan, to bring it back for 1999 with some changes to it,” Alonso says. “I feel it works well as a challenging weekly activity, it does serve that purpose well. So I don’t put it in the same position as Ascension, for example.

“Before Rebb [Ford, creative director] and I took over, most game modes were everywhere; every planet has a Defense, Exterminate, and so on,” he continues. “But now, while there’s a lot of new game modes, they’re pretty much localized to the kind of the update they came with; that’s where they exist, and some of them are pretty portable, but some others would be a nightmare.

“I would not be opposed at all to adding Alchemy in another place, for example, because the location isn’t part of it,” he adds. “But Ascension is a custom map with a custom logic. That was one of the hardest game modes we’ve ever made, so that would be a challenging one that I don’t think we’ll take on any time soon.”

The Boyband Makes Its Debut

The Technocyte Coda band in Warframe.

With the new Technocyte Coda enemies coming into play, 18 new weapons will be released, and while some of them are new, others are variants of already known weapons. So, what determines which weapons are in need of a revamp, and how does the development team decide which ones to choose to give them the infested treatment?

“We l try to look at what weapons people are not using that much, figure out why, and try to bump those up,” Alonso says. “One of our pillars is variety, so the more viable options that players can use, the better.

“The other aspect is that we try to make a balance between weapon types. Are we gonna go for Critical Damage-based weapons or Status weapons? Then, it’s melee versus secondary versus primary, and sometimes it’ll be like, ‘Oh, it did have a cool gimmick, but it’s just not very viable’, so those are good ones to bump up.”

For new weapons like the awesome Coda Motovore, players can see it following the pizza theme that’s prevalent throughout 1999, and in Techrot Encore, the new Warframe Temple is a rockstar that also fits the setting. But in a game that has been going on for as long as Warframe has, how does the team find new ideas to apply in a game that has already done so much?

“I remember when we were still looking for a publisher, people told us that we would run out of ideas right away,” Alonso says. “And here we are, making the 60th Warframe, right? So, I do not find it hard to find ideas. Ideas come relatively easily, you just have to have fun with them.

“Particularly for weapons, one of the things that helps is that the stakes are kind of low; if we make a weapon and it turns out that our clever idea wasn’t that great, it’s not the end of the world,“ he adds. “I often compare it to the [Leviathan] axe from God of War; it took them three and a half years to make it, and it’s amazing, but if it doesn’t work, your whole game doesn’t work. For us, if one more rifle is not that fun, it’s not a lot, so that lets us experiment with things and try to have fun with it.”

Refining The New Player Experience

The Temple Warframe in Warframe.

In the past, Warframe has been considered difficult to get into as a new player. But over the last few years, numerous changes have been implemented regarding the quality of life of the early stages of the game, succeeding at retaining new players. How have hardcore players responded to those changes?

“We do have a plan of things that we know will change, some of them fairly big for the early game,” Alonso says. “We often do playtests for people that have never played Warframe to see where the painful points are, and we’ve been slowly but surely trying to improve them. The complicated part is balancing between making things for new and veteran players.

“If we just focus on the new player experience, it would be pretty boring for everyone else, right? But the tricky part is that sometimes it’s tough to rework some of the already existing systems without taking anything away from the people that have been around for a long time,” he adds. “We reworked the Damage Types last year, and that one succeeded in getting players to engage more with those elements without diminishing veterans’ engagement, which is what we’re always looking for.

“Now and then, we see one or two comments like ‘oh, what about me? I already did this, and it was a pain.’ One of the examples I can think of would be the Hema, where it got to the point where we had to change the grind around it,” he says. “If I had already done it, I would have been very upset, so we were between a rock and a hard place, but I think that 99.5 percent of the time, most players are happy to hear that the new player experience is being improved.”

Both new and seasoned players will get to meet the new Warframe, Temple, and three more protoframes living in Höllvania during the main story of Warframe: Techrot Encore. And even though the new player experience still has to undergo more changes, you only need to log in and try the wonderful story of 1999 for yourself.

Source link