Warframe‘s next big update, Techrot Encore, will coincide with its 12th anniversary. After such a long time on the market, Warframe‘s development has undergone some major evolution.
The 12th anniversary of Warframe will officially be March 25th, but celebrations are already underway in-game, with a variety of rewards rolling out in the lead-up. The release of Techrot Encore will also take place in the anniversary period (launching March 19th), and a number of Digital Extremes developers have spoken to Game Rant about their experience working on a live service title for well over a decade. Those spoken to include design director Pablo Alonso, community director Megan Everett, and creative director Rebecca Ford.
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On The Eve Of Techrot Encore, Here’s How Warframe’s Development Has Changed Over 12 Years
Managing More And More Features
Techrot Encore will add a lot to Warframe, a game that already has 12 years of missions, enemies, loot, and lore for players to unearth. In discussing the issue of sifting through all of that content, Everett (while not in favor of cutting down the overall content total) mentioned that “The more you add content, the farther you push that accessibility for a new player to jump in and play.” She went on to talk about how the team is dealing with this struggle, saying, “We’re always looking back at older systems […] In Techrot Encore, we’re simplifying the actual star chart to get people to at least The Second Dream and get them accessing that pivotal moment a lot quicker.”
Alonso went into more depth on the issue, touching on the problem of everything players need to know about Warframe already. He was able to go into detail on issues like feature creep, which is a real concern considering Warframe‘s sheer scope:
“It’s a very complicated balance, to be honest. Part of what our players love about us is that content that came out ages and ages ago, we keep refreshing. For example, right now, we’re reworking the way certain weapons and certain abilities work, which will be touching almost 10 different Warframes that have been around for years. Part of that is to keep going back and refreshing the older stuff so that it’s not neglected—so that players feel happy in something that they invested in eight years ago.
Then, we have to balance that with adding new stuff. How exactly do we do it? Honestly, it depends on the update. With some updates, we focus a lot on the past. With some of these, we focus a lot on the future.”
The Rise of Echoes Updates
An ‘Echoes’ update in Warframe development is a type of update that follows from another, typically adding content intended for the first half. Ford went into great detail about how this trend started, beginning with a follow-up to Heart of Deimos:
“The year was 2020, it was COVID, and we had a Tennocon planned that we had to turn digital. We had to change everything, and we ended up delaying our digital COVID Tennocon. We revealed to the world Heart of Deimos, which was our third open world. Then we had a whole bunch of stuff that we had no idea how we were going to ship in that update, so we came up with a second swing at the same content, and we called it Deimos Arcana, which was our first formal follow-up update. That was a direct result of COVID and trying to figure out how to develop Warframe remotely, as well as how to do a Tennocon remotely.”
Ford added some more details about how Warframe‘s New War expansion influenced the rise of Echoes updates. She mentioned, “We knew we were going to do an Echoes of War because the staff change happened then; Steve and Jeff shipped The New War and then handed over Warframe to the new leadership team.”
- Released
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March 25, 2013
- ESRB
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M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Violence
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