Digital Extremes’ Team Is Bravely Letting Me E-date Warframe 1999 Baddies

Warframe is a game that’s full of surprises. At first glance, the team at Digital Extremes is simply making a free-to-play space ninja game. Once I started digging past the surface, I was continually shocked with some new feature coming out of left field: a fighting game, a character creator for a new form, or a different game mode with deep progression trees and unique rewards.

The next big Warframe expansion, Warframe 1999, is going to offer even more big changes, like a climactic battle against a boy band in space. But the new feature I’m most interested in is a romance system. As the game’s protagonist, the Drifter, explores the world of 1999, they’ll meet the Hex. The Hex are six proto-Warframes who live in the abandoned remains of a mall, and if you play your cards right across a series of IM conversations on old-school CRT monitors, you can smooch one of them on New Year’s Eve.

“We always wanted a deeper relationship system in the game — not necessarily romance proper, but something you could be more immersed in,” said Rebecca Ford, creative director on Warframe, in a call with Polygon. Ford then provided examples of the developer’s inspiration: Stardew Valley, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Fire Emblem. In the early stages of Warframe 1999, the team realized that the framework would allow for a contextual romance system. 

“It just happened that during COVID, I read about 25 of [Kathryn Kingsley’s] books,” said Ford. “On the back of all her book covers, it said she was a romance author as well as game designer. I wondered if she would want to take a stab at this, so I just messaged her on LinkedIn, and Kat right away was like, ‘I’m in.’”

Kingsley, after joining Digital Extremes, beseeched her own Discord community for help. The Warframe fans in the Discord gave her a crash course in the setting, like the identity of the Drifter, the secrets of the Warframes, and the political factions fighting over the galaxy. Writing around the canon of an 11-year-old game is a tough task, one that Kingsley compared to balancing a Jenga tower.

So, the Drifter arrives in this alternate timeline, meets the six members of the Hex, and then gets to chatting. Each member of the Hex has their own typing style, set of interests, and sense of humor. “We wanted to make sure these characters were identifiable, even if you couldn’t remember whose usernames were which, just by the manner in which they speak,” said Kingsley. “So one of the very first things we came up with was a style guide on how each character types.”

The player can revisit and redo the events of Warframe 1999, which means that while a decision might determine the events of that particular campaign, the player isn’t locked into any permanent choices. “Whatever happens, it’s not permanent, if you choose to not let it be permanent,” said Ford. “When we set out designing the experience, we went to look at other live service games with a romance system and quickly found out that, oh, there aren’t any.

“It became very quickly clear that we needed an easy way for our players to roll back on choices and give them the freedom to explore and feel safe enough to click choices without having to Google the answers to everything.”

The relationship between the Hex and the Drifter isn’t all sweetness and light. The Drifter drops in on their lives with some heavy alternate-universe lore that makes the group question everything they know. “We were really trying to make this a relationship system in parallel to this being a romance system, so you can go through fully platonically and get just as much lore and conversation without having to flirt with or date the characters,” said Kingsley. 

The Hex maintain a group chat, where the player can find the recognizable progression systems. But the individual IM windows offer their own possibilities, and the player can poke each character about lore, ask probing questions, or try and interest them in some flirting. There are no cosmetic or gameplay rewards associated with romance through the IM system, but after the New Year’s kiss, your love interest will move in with the Drifter and offer some custom dialogue. 

That opt-in impermanence means that the devs at Digital Extremes felt comfortable giving the players some opportunity to put their foot in their mouth or say something downright rude. “You can definitely be an asshole. I was ashamed at some of the things I’ve said to characters,” said Ford.

“I approached these six characters as individual little romance novels — not for video game characters, but actual people. And so there are times where you can say really mean things to them,” said Kingsley. “Sometimes it’s the right thing to do, sometimes it’s the wrong thing to do. You have to know these people well enough to know if it’s the right decision. But the first time [Ford] showed anyone on the team one of my conversations, I swear I thought I was fired.

“This isn’t your average video game,” Kingsley went on. “If you ask the character to dump his backstory on you in your first conversation with him, it’s not going to go well. I got told off, and that’s fine. I recovered. It was but a road bump in my blooming romance.”

Warframe 1999 has a demo available through Warframe, and is set to arrive free on all platforms this December. Developers at Digital Extremes are also continuing to work on Soulframe, a similarly structured open-world game with slower combat and a big Elden Ring vibe.