How do you inject a little romance into a game all about "space ninjas?"
Well, it seems that Digital Extremes has come up with the answer to that question. Announced back at TennoCon in July, Warframe's 1999 update will see players transported back to an era where Y2K dominated headlines while many of us were making lasting friendships through portals like MSN Messenger, ICQ, and AOL's AIM service. If you play your cards right, you might just get a New Year's Kiss.
It isn't a simple matter of just slapping a new system on top of the story that will be told through the eyes of both Arthur and the Drifter come December. Instead, the team at Digital Extremes had been trying to figure out how this could work well before they announced the system, and even before they made a key hire that would help bring it all together.
"It was a matter of us always wanting to try and bring things we like about games into our own game, but doing it in a way that contextually didn't feel forced," creative director Rebb Ford tells me in an interview earlier this week. She continued, "And we know our players love a lot of our NPCs, there's players that love their favorite syndicates, their favorite factions, and we really have always wanted to try and do a romance system."
Ford tells me that when The Duviri Paradox was teased, the team really wanted the Adult Operator to be a "platform to tell more mature stories" and that the time felt ripe for this type of storytelling with Warframe 1999.
"As we started writing quests and developing content for the story and the players hero arc, you know, having a child can put you in really interesting story situations, but never romance, obviously. So, Drifter exists. We had everything set up to go, 'Okay, we have an adult character and we have Protoframes.'"
What makes this work well, according to Ford, is that it's not simply Warframes like we're used to seeing but exploring what exactly makes these characters "not just Warframes with human faces." It is a chance to show characters like Arthur and the rest of the Protoframes in a way that helps to reinforce their humanity.
"I don't think it would have worked as well in any other update," Ford says. She continued, "because we needed to show that the people that are humans, aka the Protoframes that are going to become Warframes, are trying to keep their humanity."
However, to help tell this story, another piece was seemingly needed to help get the romance system off the ground: a USA Today best-selling dark fantasy and villain romance novelist.
Kat Kingsley is a games industry veteran, having worked most recently at Volition as its chief of staff before moving to Digital Extremes after the former Saints Row studio was shut down last year.
Thankfully, Kat had a megafan at Digital Extremes: creative director Rebecca Ford. A LinkedIn message and a phone call later, Kat was brought on to help build the narrative.
"I've been trying to change the language a little bit to call it a relationship system because you can engage with all of the characters fully platonically as well as romantically," Kingsley says. She also notes that interacting with them romantically isn't required, and there's nothing locked away lore or storywise if you don't pursue a romantic relationship with a character.
"I wanted to make sure that [a player] who didn't want to romantically pursue a character like Arthur or Quincy still had the same reasons to talk to them, and didn't feel the need to, like, 'Oh, if I want to get the cool lore tidbit, I would have to flirt with these characters.'"
This is good for someone like me who tends to fail miserably at romance systems in games like Baldur's Gate 3 and others. I have, as my daughter would say, "no rizz." (I can't believe I just typed that, but here we are.)
One of the unique ways that Warframe 1999 is presenting this relationship system is through the window of a 90s-era instant messenger. For people who were around during the late 90s, messenger systems are formative to building online relationships, and for many people, a way to find love.
I know quite a few friends from school who found their significant other on MSN Messenger or AOL and are still together today. When I first saw the news during TennoCon, I was immediately transported back to my old MSN Messenger days or trying to learn ICQ as a middle schooler so I could talk to friends from school, especially those who didn't live on the Air Force base with me.
Text-based was also a way for the team to build a robust romance system, and Rebb said it needed to be both "visually" and "systematically as simple as possible" so the team could actually end up using it in Warframe. Ford describes it as a CRT screen where "ICQ meets MSN" because, like me, she was an MSN Messenger kid, too.
"We knew it was text-based, so that as a screen, the presentation of it, needed to live in a space that a player could log into their 1999 CRT screen and engage with the system without feeling overwhelmed."
This is where Kat's background in game design really helped. Being able to not just write the content for the characters and the dialog trees players would experience when playing but also recognize the design elements and processes that would need to be implemented proved valuable during the process, as Rebb tells it in our interview.
Warframe's upcoming romance system being text-based isn't unique necessarily to Warframe, either, with Rebb listing off quite a few games that have text-based relationship systems in games, from Honkai: Star Rail to Street Fighter 6. However, its 1999-fueled by nostalgia IM system feels true to Warframe's identity in a way that makes it feel unique.
This isn't a skinny system, either. The team, outside of just building out UI, had to also design new elements to inject into Digital Extreme's proprietary engine that powers Warframe, just to support the romance system on offer.
Then, that system had to be able to support the new feature's massive word count.
"We composed it in an online whiteboard system, and we had to break it up into multiple boards because we were lagging it out badly, having all of the characters on one that it was crashing everybody's browsers," Kat explains. She continued, "So we had to break it out to do it just in the word count. I added it all up out of curiosity: it's over 140,000 words in the relationship system. A standard novel is 70,000 words, so the relationship system, all six characters together, is the equivalent of two full novels worth of content."
The other challenge comes from the fact that all of that writing feeds into a branching, interwoven narrative structure that has to support itself.
"All of this is parallel branching," Kat explains. "And it's all branching narrative, which becomes sort of exponentially problematic as time goes on. So you have to end up adding in logic tags, because the characters remember every previous conversation you've had. So every time you talk to them about something, if you want to be able to continue on that conversation, they have to be able to recall what you spoke about yesterday. And if I want to be able to continue a thread that's important and you missed a conversation, I have to be able to catch you up on that."
All of this is to help create a world where the characters feel real and believable. It also has to balance the fact that Warframe itself is still a live service game, and these decisions you make, whether to romance a certain character or just interact platonically with another - and then come to regret it later - need to matter. However, Rebb does say that while you'll need to live with decisions made on this front, there will be an "interval" period where players can change their mind and go back and relive the experience on their account.
"[O]ur problem is we don't have save scumming, and we don't have the ability for the player to go back and change things," Ford explained. "So we had to design this system in a way that your choices matter, but because you only have one Warframe account with no save states, we do need to give the player an interval-based way to change their mind or reset things so that they're not heartbroken for the rest of their Warframe career. So a really important distinction for how we implemented this system is there's weight to it in terms of how you interact, but it's up to the player at a given interval, which we'll talk more about on release, how they want to keep or change what they did."
The system, if you decide to explore its more romantic angle, will culminate in the character you're romancing moving in with you, living with you, and eventually that New Year's Kiss, which as as explicit as Warframe is getting with the romance, at least for now according to Ford. However, each character might have its own unique quirk that comes alive during its pivotal scene.
The team at Digital Extremes is optimistic that players will take the new system, but Rebb admits to feeling "terrified, but optimistic" at the player reaction when Warframe 1999 takes center stage in December. However, it's a sign of a studio that is willing to take risks to do something like this, and if it's something the players latch onto, who knows where the system can go in the future.
For me? I'm really interested in the potential story on offer here. Well-written narrative can make characters jump off of a page - or a screen in this case. And Kat says that the approach to the relationship system was less approaching it like a video game, and more as "character driven interactions."
"I'm hoping that it's unique from most video game romance systems and relationship systems," Kat said. "You may have conversations with the characters that surprise you the first couple of times you talk to them. They may not act like video game characters; they may act more like people."
