It’s your birthday
GamesBeat: Digital Extremes is celebrating some milestones, right?
Sheldon Carter: Yeah, it’s kind of crazy. When we started this game I don’t think any of us expected it to be like this. We’re at six years now, six years of Warframe. We’re getting to that point where we’re getting closer to 50 million registered users of the game. As our community manager said at the Game Awards, 50 million registered losers. But no, we’re getting really close to that number, and we’re excited. The game just continues to defy our expectations. It keeps growing. That’s what we’re celebrating.
At the same time we always have our heads down, because Warframe is a game where—it’s a hobby for our players. We always have to be giving them new content, new things to do, new ways to experience the game. We’re celebrating, but we’re also heads down. We have three months until TennoCon, which is our big show. Last year we blew it out, and every year we think, okay, we have to step it up just a little more and give more stuff. That’s where we’re at right now.
GamesBeat: It seems like Warframe just keeps getting bigger. Is there a limit to how big it can get?
Sheldon Carter: You don’t want to spend too much time—where’s the peak? We honestly don’t know. We feel like we’re still kind of—we’re much more known than we used to be, but we don’t feel like we’ve necessarily hit that point where everyone knows Warframe just yet. Even when we look at—peak-wise, after TennoCon, for a streak of three or four weeks we had more than a million people playing every day. We still keep hitting those types of numbers when we release something new. We just hit the Switch in December. That’s a growing platform.
From our perspective, there’s a lot of games that keep coming out in the space. The idea of looter shooters, I think a lot of people enjoy that, with some RPG progression. That’s definitely one of those things where there’s competition. We wonder how that’s going to affect us. But like I said, a lot of our players, Warframe is their hobby. This is a game that they’re always going to keep coming back to. Even if they’re gamers and they want to try something else, which is cool, they come back to us after because they know we’re going to give them more stuff, more things to do, more interesting ways to play.
Is 50 million players time for a break?
GamesBeat: With the 50 million-player mark coming up soon, is Digital Extremes planning to take a breath to celebrate?
Sheldon Carter: What’s funny is, we’ve had a couple of parties planned and we’ve had to cancel them, because we do kind of get into that mode where—I think the thing that keeps—when you’re working on a live game, the feedback and interaction from the community is kind of the drug that you get hooked on. That’s the thing that, for a lot of the people on the team, we want to see the stuff that we’re working on out fast and get that reaction. That’s the fuel.
We take a break at Christmas and try to recharge a bit, but this year—honestly, right now, we’re at that stage where we feel like we’re in our sweet spot. We know the game we’re making completely. So we know what we want to do plan-wise. It’s just making sure that interaction with the community is giving us—that we’re all aligned. People keep saying that our players play the game as a hobby, because we really feel like that. We want to make sure that their idea of what they want the game to be and our idea are matched up.
Every time we find a new thing to do for the game—we just did Nightwave, which is almost a seasonal idea for Warframe, where it gave players new story and lore, but it also gave them bigger overarching goals to work on on a week-to-week basis. That was something we just tried. We basically eliminated what we had. We had an alert system, which had random missions that would pop up every day to do to get rewards. So we took that all away and put this in to see how players would react to it. Again, when we have a weekend in February that’s traditionally been very quiet for us, it’s huge, because there are tons of people coming back to play. They want to try this new content.
We don’t really take those deep breaths, other than I can say that we felt a little pressure in January just to come out of the gates swinging for this year. But other than that, that was the only breath we took, was that little bit at Christmas.
Throwing curveballs
GamesBeat: Making games in this genre seems like it’s very hard. Do you think it’s an advantage that you have a game that’s, for lack of a better term, old?
Sheldon Carter: What’s kind of neat is it lets us understand what people like, but then also be able to throw them curveballs. The problem at launch for a lot of games is it’s a curveball to start. Whereas with us, we have the tried and true that you know. You know what the experience is of being a space ninja. You understand how to play.
Now what’s the twist we can surprise you with, but still has all this core stuff that you love, so it’s easier to take that innovation when it comes? I’d say we went through the phase where—we go through phases where we think to ourselves, how many times are we going to basically say this is Warframe 2? When we did Plains of Eidolon and Fortuna, both of those two open worlds, those easily could have been—on any other game we would have worked on, we would have cashed in the chips and just done it again with an upgrade.
We just try to keep upgrading to Warframe 2 or 3 or 4 or whatever you want to call it with every release we do. That’s what we’re doing in a massive way with Railjack, which is coming soon to Warframe. Railjack is going to be a game-changer. That would easily be Warframe 4 or whatever.
Competition and learning to sail
GamesBeat: How do you feel about other games coming into this space?
Sheldon Carter: I guess this is the optimistic view, but it’s competition. Everyone, in any business where you see competition, there’s a part of you thinking, oh, god, what’s going to happen? But really, I think we look at it like—it’s neat, because we almost get to—sometimes you piggyback on the excitement of this type of game. There are lots of people who potentially—maybe they’ve always played games by a certain company, and that company makes a game like ours, and they’ve never really been exposed to it. Maybe when they touch that game for a bit, they say, oh, what else? What’s like that? And they see that Warframe is there. It’s kind of like a rising tide raises all ships, that concept. Or at least when I’m thinking about it in the best way.
GamesBeat: Or how about, every time someone new gets into sailing, next time they may want to try your sailboat?
Sheldon Carter: Exactly. That’s a better metaphor, totally. [Laughs] I think there’s lots of room. There’s lots of room for people–there aren’t necessarily that many people playing this type of game just yet. It’s growing. Any way that you get exposed to playing this type of game, and you love it, we want you to try us as well.
Bigger and better
GamesBeat: Does it put a lot of pressure on the team that every content update is bigger and better than the last?
Sheldon Carter: It does. We get to the point, I think, where each new release feels like we’re just doing it new for the first time again. I don’t think the kind of fear or anxiety of doing something new goes away. The pressure—I guess the pressure we have is, are we going to engage them in the right way? It is a really—especially, again, on top of the fact that we’re this looter shooter game, we’re also a free-to-play game that people have invested a lot of money in. We want to make sure that they feel like their investments in this game are paying off.
As soon as we release content, we’re watching every stream. We’re all over social media. We’re everywhere trying to get as much feedback as we possibly can on it, because we want to have those experiences where people know we’re going to exceed their expectations. Or if we didn’t get it quite right out of the gate, we’re going to make that—we’re the company that responds to that. If we didn’t hit the mark, we’re going to do whatever we can to fix it as quickly as possible for you.
Fire starters and fire fighters
GamesBeat: What’s been the recent feedback?
Sheldon Carter: It’s neverending. Right now we’re working on—every time we release something there’s something new. We just released Buried Debts, which is this really cool event we had where the players had to unlock a hidden part of Fortuna. They got to fight a huge spider boss and get some cool stuff, new parts for Warframes.
We did have issues where there was a matchmaking bug. The whole weekend where we had this thing going, a lot of people participating in this event weren’t able to matchmake with their friends. They could still play it, but it wasn’t exactly the way they wanted to, or they got kicked out. That’s the current fire.
As of an hour ago I saw a fix to go into that, and I can’t wait for that hotfix to go up so more people can try that. We’re going to extend the event a little longer so people can play it for a longer time. That’s part and parcel. That’s how it works.
GamesBeat: Is that the primary job when you’re running a game like this? Putting out fires?
Sheldon Carter: We have kind of three different tiers of teams that are working. We definitely have—we use Slack as our communication tool, and the main, most exciting Slack channel is called Fireboard. That’s where—what’s on fire right now that we have to fix? A lot of people—we try to rotate people into the front lines. It’s almost like we’re fighting a war sometimes. You have some people who are at the front lines, and they’re taking whatever’s happening and trying to fix that.
Then you have the people working on some of our mid-term content, what’s going to come next. We have an awesome remaster of Plains of Eidolon coming out. The game just looks stunning with all the changes they’ve made to the graphics. There’s a team working on that. Then on top of that we have this massive Railjack team that’s slowly going in. We try to insulate them from all the excitement of the firehose, so that they can get their work done. When we hit TennoCon or whenever, we’ll have new stuff to show as far as all different types of content.
Remasters within remasters
GamesBeat: You’re in a place where you can start remastering older content. How’s that going?
Sheldon Carter: For sure. It’s cool, because what we realized after doing them a little bit is that there are two things you have to do. One, it’s that fresh coat of paint, that’s also bringing the game up to—we’re all proud developers. We want our stuff to stand shoulder to shoulder with everything else that’s out there. One is, from our side, making sure our game looks the best it can.
Then, as long as we add something for players with that, as long as we give them—okay, now you can go back to this place you’ve been and there will be new things for you to do. As long as you combine those two, it’s a win-win. We get what we want, which is, some of us are—we want graphics. We want it to look and run as best it can. And the players want that too, but also we’re giving them new reasons to go back and engage in the content. It’s not like going and doing the same thing you’ve always done there.
That’s the secret sauce to remastering. It’s great that it’s a visual upgrade and a performance upgrade, but you have to have new content for players to try as well.
Douglass Perry, Digital Extremes PR director: You’re aware of the Plains of Eidolon update that happened in 2017. That was our first open world content update. That was the one where we could have called it Warframe 2.0. When we brought out Fortuna last November, that was the second open world, which advanced the open world concept for us tremendously. We learned all these things from Plains of Eidolon. I’m not sure how the team did it technically, but there were so many graphical advancements and gameplay advancements in that one, what they decided to do is take all those learnings and all that technology and reapply it to Plains of Eidolon.
If you look at Plains of Eidolon now—look at it now, and then in a week or two wait until our update comes and look at it again. You’ll see a vast difference in graphics, but we’re also going back and adding gameplay. For instance, how you can hoverboard in Fortuna, we’re adding that back into Plains of Eidolon, and we’re not just adding it.
We’re making it so there are places you can jump, places you can rail, places that all of a sudden work with the K-Drive. We’re adding new bosses as well. And we’re adding this thumper boss, which is—
Sheldon Carter: It’s the most hilarious enemy we’ve ever made on this thing.
Perry: It looks like the Apollo lunar lander, with this kind of stomping press on the bottom. It jumps around and smashes things and sends out this seismic wave. In addition to the graphics there’s also all this gameplay we’re adding. We never just add a graphical touch. We add something that’s valuable to play on.