Warframeis getting a major expansion later this month in the form of Techrot Encore. Building onWarframe’s previous 1999 update, Encore will add a new Warframe, a new boss event, and much more.
Warframe’s Techrot Encore updatewill release on March 19th, dropping a smorgasbord of content on the doorstep of fans. Taking place in the same era as 1999, Techrot Encore’s content will center on Technocyte Coda, a group of infested liches mimicking a 90s boyband. Game Rant spoke about the upcoming update with design director Pablo Alonso, principal writer Kat Kingsley, community director Megan Everett, and creative director Rebecca Ford.This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Warframe Devs Go In-Depth About Techrot Encore’s Design, Writing, and Direction
Technocyte Coda, New Warframe, And Warframe Reworks
Q: What’s been the biggest design challenge you’ve faced with Techrot Encore?
Alonso:Trying to bring a fresher version of Deep Archimedia, which is a more challenging version of Warframe than we did for Entrati originally. We had this idea even before, back when we did it for that, that we would bring it back in a future update and try to find a way to, like, bring it back, but also freshening it up and making it feel new for this content. Yeah, that was probably one of the toughest parts.
Q: What are the big ways in which the Technocyte Coda will differ from prior adversary systems?
Alonso: Before, the previous system had more of you having to unlock a key code to figure out the right way to defeat the enemies. All of that doesn’t exist in this version. The actual cycle that you have to go through to fight them is different. Then, the huge difference is that, instead of being just one, now you have five. Now you get more variety in the fight—when you’re doing the fights in the mission, you have what we call Duets. You get two of them at a time, and the combinations change, so it can keep the gameplay fresh. When you fight them at the very end, it’s all of them at once, and it does make it a little more spectacular to have those gameplay moments.
Also, instead of being randomized weapons, like on all the other ones, this is a token system, so you may get the tokens and then get the weapon you want directly.
Q: Techrot Encore will be coinciding with the game’s 12th anniversary. With the amount of new content that’s come toWarframein that time, including with what’s coming in Encore, how does the design team work around existing features to avoid bloat or feature creep?
Alonso: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 touchingalmost 10 different Warframesthat 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. It’s like trying to keep a balanced diet of content, but it is tough. Right now, with some of the changes we’re doing, it’s a lot of “Oh, remember that mod we added 11 years ago? It collides with the design of blah, blah, blah.”. It’s a lot of things like that which you have to keep in mind.
Q: It was mentioned that Techrot Encore was once envisioned as part of Warframe: 1999 but was then split into its own update. How did the new features of Encore develop once it split into its own update? Do you see Encore as a completion of 1999’s design, or do both stand updates stand on their own?
Alonso:So we’ve taken to this tradition of doingwhat we call ‘Echoes’ updateswhenever we do our big yearly update. Generally, we have a billion ideas, right? We attempt to do all those ideas in one go. Generally, as we start developing those updates, and they get closer, we start thinking, “Okay, you know what? We have to move this off.” We cannot complete this for that time period. Then we start grabbing little bits of our 100 ideas and saying, “Okay, let’s put this into the Echoes update.” I think this is our fourth year of doing this Echoes concept and, generally, we see it as the first big update comes out, and it has all the core components, and then the rest are all the things that we were passionate about, but we just couldn’t fit into that first one.
I don’t know about ‘complete’ because for us, they say “art is never complete, only abandoned.” I feel like that about our updates, generally. If I had a clone, I’d probably put him to work on an update we did three years ago, just because I still have ideas I could never get around to doing. I don’t know about ‘complete, ' you know? Maybe we’ll do more stuff around this eventually. It definitely concludes with this first batch of large ideas we had.
Q: The new Warframe, Temple, has a kit based around the beat of their Metronome passive, with abilities getting a buff when used on the beat. How is this kit balanced around the passive? Are players expected to get the timing down regularly, or is the power boost meant to be something that takes considerable skill to pull off consistently? How strict will the timing be?
Alonso: It’s meant more to be if you can stay on the beat, you should be doing it every ability. Every time you catch an ability, ideally, you land on the beat. It’s not super demanding. I think it’s basically 40% of the time you are on beat. If you’re doing it randomly, you’re going to be landing on the beat sometimes. If you can get on that timing, obviously, you’ll do much better. The buffs are pretty good, but there are ways to mod around them. If you simply cannot land it on the beat, there are ways that you can solve it through modding so that the benefits that you would get from those things don’t impact you. Ideally, we want to encourage players to try it so that when you’re playing Temple, itfeels different from other Warframes. You have this extra cognitive load of matching the beat.
Q: What motivated the Pseudo Exalted rework? What’s the end goal with these changes?
Alonso: We’ve had abilities for a long time that essentially are like attacking with a non-existing melee weapon. When we first released them, they were good, but they were weak, so we implemented this Pseudo Exalted idea. This is literally eight years ago, so a long, long time ago. Basically, what it does is take whatever melee weapon you’re holding on, say if you have a sword, then when Cora uses her whip on her one, you’ll use a mod from that sword in the whip. So that was the whole Pseudo Exalted thing with a statistic. The reason that we never really loved it was because it’s very confusing. Most players don’t even realize that whatever they’re doing to that sword will affect their whip. There’s no connection. There’s no way of knowing unless someone told you; it’s very hidden.By adding modding directly to the whip, now you’ll know, “Okay, whenever I use the whip, it’ll use these mods, because that’s how everything else in the game works.” Our core objective was to solve that, to make it more transparent for players so that they could understand how it works.
Also, when we look at how players optimize those weapons, there’s a gigantic gap where some players squeeze every single ounce of power out of that, but that’s like 2% of players. Most players either don’t know that the statistic works, or they just don’t bother doing the work of configuring that statistic to help their Pseudo result. By making it like this, now you get those two groups closer together. A regular player will be able to put mods directly on the whip and get those power benefits that before, only a few players knew how to get. It is very like tangled because it’s four Pseudo Exalted, but it also affects every Exalted. We have eight or nine, so all of those frames have to get touched, and a lot of interactions between them. It’s been a daunting one. I have notes about changing that four years ago, but we kept putting it off because it was such a challenge.
Q: On a similar note, could you go into some more details about the Ash-specific changes and how those came about?
Alonso:Ash wasone of the lesser-known Warframesthat was affected by the Pseudo Exalted thing. A lot of people don’t even realize that his fourth is affected by it because when you attack with his fourth, you’ll see the damage numbers. This might be a little too much into the weeds, but basically, it’ll hit four times, three times, and it’ll be ability damage, then the fourth time is the Pseudo Exalted version, which is affected by mods. That fourth time didn’t show a damage number, so a lot of players had no idea that this was even affected by Pseudo Exalted. That is such a hidden thing; that was one of the bigger problems. Since we were changing it to be this new version, where you can mod it directly so that those damage numbers do show up, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to touch him up. Ash is not a Frame that’s in dire need of help, so I call this one ‘retouches’ instead of ‘reworks’ because I’m not going to go in and change an entire ability, for example. I’m just touching numbers and a few interactions to make it work.
What we changed is, for one, Throw Shurikens. It used to throw two, now it throws five. We increased the damage by around 50%, and we made them come out into an arc. We made it so when they hit, they give you a melee combo, so it synergizes better. We increased the duration of his smoke screen, which is where he goes invisible. There was an augment for his tree, which was Teleport (when you teleport, it would do an attack at the end—a finisher, essentially). Now, that’s baked into the ability, so you don’t need the augment.
Then the augment has a new functionality, which is that if you kill with that teleport, it extends the duration of your smoke screen. For the fourth, we changed it so now it can be modded, it resolves faster, and the way it does the damage is more straightforward. That whole thing I said earlier where it was like three hits plus one hit but different mods affected the different hit—all of that is gone. Now it’s just a single hit affected by mods, and it all resolves much faster. Part of the problem that Ash had was that you mark a bunch of enemies, and then you release your ability, and then your little clones start killing everyone. That takes a while, so while that’s happening, other players will start killing them, even though you have already marked them, and your attacks go wasted. Now it resolves faster, so you don’t have as much waiting time.
Writing The World of Warframe in Encore And 1999
Q: You joined theWarframeteam in 2023, 10 years after the game first launched. What’s it like coming in to work on a game’s story with 10 years worth of plot and lore? How do you keep track of so many events, characters, and factions?
Kingsley: It’s definitely a fascinating challenge.Warframeis a hell of a game to learnas far as the lore and the characters go because it’s an ongoing Jenga game of a story, of the way everything gets introduced and the way the story gets told. I remember the very first quest that I started working on was Jade Shadows, and they were like, “This one can get pregnant,” and I was like, “That’s nice, what’s a Warframe?”. It was a really interesting challenge to be able to dive into it, but the wonderful thing about it is that there’s such a rich community online that cares so very much about Warframe that half the work is already done for you because of the amount of resources that are available to someone who wants to learn what the story is. There are so many wonderful YouTube videos that’ll explain it as well as helper websites—because the community wants to build the community.
Not only did I have the amazing team of writers to assist me, but even before I started, I was playing the game and turning to other community members to help me along, and digest the enormous fire hose that is the lore of the game. About a year in, I feel like I’m starting to wrap my head around it. It definitely helps that, as you start to add to it, you start to be able to master the content that you are adding to. A lot of the Kim system, the romance system, is explaining the lore to other characters, so it was me teaching myself a lot of that lore, and it was able to reduce it to more accessible terms in that way.
Q: The 1999 storyline that’s being continued with Encore contains some time travel elements. How did you approach this from a writing perspective, and was there any difficulty in dealing with the trope?
Kingsley:Luckily, because we were able to sort of use the Drifter’s ability to loop time, we were able to sort of create a pocket dimension of a year and say, “Here’s a bubble of time that you’re able to travel to and fro from”. We were able to leave a lot of those typical issues on the shelf, so a lot of the existential issues of time travel (you go back, you kill your grandfather, and now you don’t exist),Warframehas sort of already solvedwhen they broke a lot of continuity with things with Eternalism and the Drifter. There’s a lot that we can already point at and go, “But we’re high sci-fi fantasy anyway.”
There are a lot of those sorts of things with time travel that we can play with that we already have because of the void and because of Albrecht Entrati, and we’ve already gone back to 1999, and we’ve already done a lot of these things with alternate dimensions that we can play with these concepts and not worry too much about breaking holes in the logistics of the world.
Q: What was the process like for worldbuilding this era ofWarframe? How much of the worldbuilding is handled by the writing team compared to other teams (such as art or design), and how is this coordinated?
It’s a very collaborative process a lot of times. For example, you get the Protoframe art from the concept team; I saw Arthur before I started writing Arthur, and you see the full character. Then I have a lot of details from that artwork that I can then pull from and say, “Well, I have this element of his art, and I have this element from his art. I can pull from these things and start to build around that character.” We do the same kind of thing with the world. When you look at Hollvania, we say, “Okay, so there’s this element that the art team has included; let’s build around that,” and then we’ll include stuff in the narrative that influences the art team. It’s a very circular process.
Digital Extremes is incredibly collaborative in the way that it works. I love the fact that the teams work well together and bounce ideas off of each other a lot, as far as very much in the worldbuilding, like you’re saying. When it comes to worldbuilding for 1999, we always sort of pictured it was like this other Earth—so it’s our Earth, but not. So we reference ‘Libertatia’ instead of America, Ludston instead of London, you know. So we find all of these original names for countries and use those instead of what we would call them now, we make up fake band names for popular bands, and we sort of take all of these and try to make it familiar but strange.
It was a lot of fun to build this world that was unique enough, but just slightly off— familiar and fun, but we’re trying to play it straight in so much as we’re not trying to play it too tongue-in-cheek and make fun of ourselves too much with it. It was a great deal of fun to sort of be able to make this sort of grimy-grungy, but still kind of legitimately trying to feel like it’s in the 90s world, and still very much feellike it’s still withinWarframesomehow. So it was a lot of fun to sort of build that.
Q: What makes Techrot Encore’s new Protoframe characters (Flare, Minerva, Velimir II, and Kaya) stand out? If you had to pick one, which do you think players would be most interested in?
Ford:The four characters that are being releasedin the new Techrot Encoreand are getting Kim expansions are not romances in the same way that they were in the original Kim conversations for the hex, the original six members, but they are still stories in their own right. They’re a little bit more of a novella, so they’re a little bit shorter in content than the original ones because they aren’t full romances, but they each still tell their own particular story. One might be a horror story, one might be a little bit more of an aspirational tale, one might be trying to reconcile a personal strife or a personal argument with someone. It was more about “How can we use the system to now tell different types of stories that the players can engage with” than more traditional, “Here’s a person, get to know them, maybe you get to romance them or just get to be their friends.”
We really wanted to see what happens if we take the system that we’ve now built, that players really engaged with and seem to enjoy, and gave it a little bit of a spin and said, “Okay, now what if we use it in a slightly more unexpected way?” What we didn’t want to do was give people the same thing four more times, so we wanted to tell some more surprising stories this time. Now, as for which ones I think people will enjoy the most? I think people will be very surprised by Flare’s, but I think people will really enjoy Minerva and Bellamy. I think that one will be their favorite.
Digital Extremes’ Echoes Updates Explained
Q: Techrot Encore has been called the game’s ‘biggest Echoes Update yet’. Given that 1999 was already fairly ambitious, what is it about this chapter ofWarframethat’s led the team to flesh things out so much?
Ford: The truth is that because we had to delay the Technocyte Coda, we kept growing the package for the follow-up. One of the original potential plans was to drop 1999 in December, quickly drop the infested liches in January, and then do the Echoes update in March. But just with the way holidays work and the quality bar we wanted to hit, we ended up just putting everything into the Echoes update. It’s a weird fact that I’m proud that it’s so big, but at the same time, it’s like, “Oh, well it’s actually that big because we turned two follow-up updates into one.” The reason all that happened, obviously, is that we had to delay one of the features.
Having said all that, what we end up making and what we end up delivering ends up being a pretty well-timed, well-oiled follow-up to that already ambitious update because we knew we wanted to go in different directions with new characters. We wantedWarframestuff to play—like a classic mission type and a classic endgame thing that we’re iterating on, and then, of course, our adversary expansion with the infested Liches. On the one hand, it was good planning, but it was also coincidental. Let’s just pretend it was a completely tactical choice.
Everett:I think we had to make that choice to take out Technocyte Coda so that we were able to ship 1999 as we could. I’m very happy that we did because I feel like Technocyte Coda has turned into something way bigger and better than it could have ever been if we had shipped it at the end of last year. It lends itself to being why this Echoes update is so big—because we’ve made this system better than we ever thought it could have been when we were developing it last year. So really happy that we’ve had this extra little bit of time to really finesse it.
Q: What’s the community response been like to Echoes updates generally? How has their development changed over time?
Everett: I think we’ve gotten ourselves into an almost accidental rhythm of how we do updates. With Tennocon being the pinnacle of the whole year, and knowing we’re going to have these kinds of interim updates, and then we’ve built community excitement around the fact that we’ve been consistent with these Echoes updates.We had Whispers in the Walls, and then we had the Echoes of that with Dante and those cool systems. Our community has almost gotten themselves to expect that from us, and we’re along for that ride, too. It works out nicely that way, and the community can have their version of a roadmap without us putting a roadmap physically out there. They know there’s going to be a Tennocon, that it’s going to be hype, that they’re going to get this really juicy lore expansion and then an Echoes, and then something in between that to keep them fed and healthy. It’s an accidental formula that we’ve made, but I think it’s really worked itself out to spread out the love of what we have cooking here.
Ford:To be a complete nerd, I’ll tell you how it all began. 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 developWarframeremotely, as well as how to do a Tennocon remotely.
The historical archive of this Echoes concept started with that as a firm-up of the idea, and we realized what that allowed us to do for our planning. Then, I think by the time 2021 rolled around and The New War launched, 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 overWarframeto the new leadership team. Right away, we would have already started planning for the Echoes of War update, and then it just became something that made sense with how we wanted to develop Warframe. I was like a dog that bit on to it and never let go. Serious lockjaw.
Q: How has community feedback on 1999 influenced Techrot Encore?
Ford: In every way, because we committed to it.Techrot Encore wouldn’t be as bigif the reception to 1999 wasn’t as positive; it would have only been the infested liches and the new Warframe if not for the reaction.
Everett:If they didn’t like Protoframes, if they didn’t like the Kim system, then we wouldn’t have put so much energy into making new Protoframes and new narrative pushes for the Kim system. I think it gave us the confidence to keep experimenting with those aspects. Echoes updates are very much our way of keeping that content fresh and exciting and bringing you back to it, but in a new and fresh, exciting way. That’s our main goal with Echoes: to keep that world alive.
Q: The team has talked a lot about how nostalgia and personal experiences in the late 90s shaped this 1999 epoch. With the world of Warframe: 1999 having both similarities and key differences to our own timeline, how did you handle integrating this nostalgia? How heavily did you want to lean into the iconography of the period?
Ford: It started with every sense: the sound, the visuals, the tone, etc. We knew we wanted it, in the cognitive world of the player, to feel like grunge-versus-pop in an online space as much as possible. It’s a heavily fictionalized version of the 90s, but there’s an entertainment story being told between the internet and the music and the role that the mall plays as a hub for all that.
We leaned hard into architecture, interior design choices, and entertainment choices. Everything had to be a CRT screen. Everything needed a disk drive. Boy bands had to be there, but we needed an answer to all of itthat was firmlyWarframe. Iimagine having the biggest Alice in Chains fans in the world being asked to make a character that opposes everything about the Y2K aesthetic, from the boy bands to the Y2K pop. Arthur came from that—this gritty, earring-scarred guy. You throw him in this environment, and you’re able to see the epoch at war with itself.
Everett:I think it was like top three in the most exciting updates to watch develop from the actual development team with everyone putting out random ideas, very 90s themed ideas, and us being like, “Let’s do it!” Very accepting of 90s themes and turning what is a very human, normal-looking motorcycle, and thinking, “How can we make thatWarframe? And how can we make that cool?” That was always what it came back to: it’s got to feelWarframe, but we want it to be weird. The development team and the creative team and everyone just cooked on everything we could to make this update feel the way it felt. I think it did resonate with players, even players that maybe weren’t adults in the 90s. I think that’s where there’s success in that: we’re not teaching people the 90s, but we’re like, “This was a thing. It’s got aWarframespin on it but this was real”.
Ford:We have this very lucky team composition. Steve Sinclair, our CEO, started at Digital Extremes in 1999. My version of 1999 is what led a lot of the North Stars for the update when I was nine years old. One of our artists on the team (who is just incredible) wasn’t even born yet. We have this generational inspiration perspective that made it not lean too heavily in one truth of 1999. You get someone like Steve, who knows 1999 in a Digital Extremes lens. I know it from a naive consumer perspective, and then you have people on the team that weren’t even born yet. We luckily get to have all these perspectives, which makes it not a very skewed experience, in my opinion.
Q: With all the moving parts that go intoWarframe, and with 1999 and Encore adding to a whole new frontier, have you ever felt the need to drop some element of the game or to go back and simplify some system of mechanics or narrative branch?
Everett:I don’t think ‘dropping’ is the right word in this scenario. We definitely go back—and we’re always looking at the new player experience. I think the crux of the game that is hoping to have longevity of 12 years is the more you add content, the farther you push that accessibility for a new player to jump in and play. That’s something that we’ve battled for years now. Every time we put in a quest or a new story arc, it’s like, “Okay, how do we get peoplewho have never playedWarframebeforeor at the very beginning? How do we get them to experience that?” because it comes down to, when we put something out, we want them to experience this day one or day two. We’re always looking back at older systems. We know where our highs and lows are for the new player and what we can perhaps work on to explain things better and simplify things. 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.
I think when it comes to dropping stuff, which, again, I think is the wrong word, I think it’s more just prioritizing things. We’re already looking ahead at the next year or so, and we know the thematic arcs. We’re already looking at if something fits quality of life-wise or if we change something up rework-wise, does it fit properly in those updates? Those are the things that we look at. We don’t normally completely ax things. Temple, for example, was, as we know, a concept from Kaz years ago of a rock star, guitar-themed Warframe, and we’re finally able to do it because it feels right, like this is the time to do it. We always have really awesome, fun ideas or mechanics that could use improvement, but when the time is right, the time is right.
Q: Do you see more Echoes updates reaching the scale of Encore in the future?
Ford:I can say with my current view, with the team and the discussions, this will probably be the biggest one for a while, but that’s because we’re doing some different stuff this year, so maybe it doesn’t lend itself as well to this level of entertainment. There’s more to come in very surprising directions, so I can’t say much more than that.
