Soulframe - Digital Extreme's new MMO

[ADL]

Steve Sinclair's new project. Rebecca is the new creative director on Warframe.

Digital Extremes has announced Soulframe, a new MMO inspired by the works of Studio Ghibli that is currently in early development status. The newly announced MMO game draws influence from different fantasy genres and art, but is not solely influenced by western artistry. The works of Hayao Miyazaki alongside other Studio Ghibli projects are key inspirations for Soulframe’s fantastical elements. “Our team has a fond love for Miyazaki and Princess Mononoke where there is this idea of nature and humanity colliding and we’ll be exploring a lot of themes around nature, restoration, and exploration in this new title,”

“Where ‘Warframe’ is focused on shooting, this one’s focused on melee,” Sinclair said. “Where ‘Warframe’ is super fast and crazy high-speed, this one’s going to be a lot more slow and heavy. But it still has a lot of similarities to the genre that we have experience in.”

“Soulframe’s” world, as proposed, might be its most interesting character. The game will focus on themes of nature, restoration and adventure as inspired by works like “Princess Mononoke” and “The NeverEnding Story” — specifically, the collision between industry and nature. In service of that, the world will show its displeasure toward players who occupy it. The hub world, meanwhile, will be open, more akin to “Warframe’s” recently added open-world planets than its early foundation of corridors and space stations. Crookes wants “Soulframe” to have a focus on exploration that “Warframe” never had — for it to feel more alive to players on a moment-to-moment basis. “I’m chasing that 'short session but high immersion’ thing where you sign in and you come out of your yurt and you are where you last signed off,” he said, “but the world feels like it’s been going on without you.”

“Our work has been extremely community driven,” Sinclair said. “It feels disingenuous not to tell [players] about changes and who’s leading ‘Warframe.’ It’s way too early to announce ‘Soulframe,’ actually! But in terms of transparency and making sure they understand how we think, we tend to be a lot more open … than most studios.” But Sinclair and Crookes don’t plan to announce “Soulframe” and then recede into a hush-hush development lab that’s all metal bars and tinted windows. After finding success with regular “Warframe” behind-the-scenes Twitch streams, they plan to give fans a look behind the curtain of “Soulframe” as early as possible. Ideally, that process will begin ASAP, and Digital Extremes die-hards will get to play a version of “Soulframe” within a year.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/vide...ulframe-warframe-digital-extremes-elden-ring/
https://www.pcgamesn.com/warframe/soulframe-reveal

 

[Mary Sue Leigh]

Have to admit, I completely fail to see Hayao Miyazaki's influence here.
Maybe they meant Hidetaka Miyazaki?

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i wish you foreign people could understand the value of the following video as answer to these news.

 

[Pink Eye]

It's going to be shit, there, I saved you from getting addicted to their next game. Been playing Warframe since closed beta, how DE handled that game's development is nothing short of retarded.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Warframe was good during the first couple of years (2013-2015), back when it wasn't a mindless horde shooter but was Left 4 Dead with a unique space opera aesthetic. Rather than mowing done tens of thousands of mobs or being one shotted out of nowhere, you instead faced off against a few but very dangerous mobs. Being knocked down by a charger and then having chunks of your HP taken out of you while you were trying to get back up was scary. You didn't have to AFK in a defense mission for an hour to wait for the scaling to finally make the enemies threatening (and then be forced to leave 5 minutes later because the scaling is ridiculous); the mobs were challenging right out of the gate, and surviving 15 minutes into a survival or defense mission was pushing it. Rushing to extracting at the 25 minute mark when everybody else was dead felt incredible. This was also way back before the hundreds of grinds (bypassed by paying, ofcourse) were added to the game. Another thing too, is that at some point Digital Extremes started acting like dicks to towards their customers. So I'm going to pass on this.

 

[Pink Eye]

I think the worst thing about Warframe is how they turned it into a press a button and watch millions of enemies implode. It just go so boring over the years of how everything has an ability that can do that. It's extraordinary how they turned Warframe into what it is. Then again. When you have a retarded sycophantic community you can get away with making your game shit.

 

[Mary Sue Leigh]

Whenever I wanted to get back into it, I quickly begun hating it because groups were pointless, everyone speedrun the levels as fast as possible while I liked to take my time, lookin for fights and trash loots. Why do people play games if they want to skip over the actual fun content so badly?
Yeah I could play it alone but it isn't meant for that and thus no fun either. Exceptions : Stealth missions, they seemed much better solo.
But you're absolutely right, the game was good at launch when people weren't tryharding and pay-to-grindskipping yet. Whatever new game they make will probably start out with all that cancer built in already.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I think the worst thing about Warframe is how they turned it into a press a button and watch millions of enemies implode.

I pointed this out ages ago and made codexers angry that I was right.

prediction:
unless they do something about the absurdity of nuke frames the popularity of this game will drop like a rock

Excluding brief periods after major patches, average userbase is now half of what it was when I made that post.

There's 2-3 frames that are objectively the best for 99% of activities.
I could tell it was going to ruin the game because I mostly played as Volt and people got angry that I could just nuke entire maps and kill everything before they got a chance to do a single attack. And Volt wasn't even the best at it, Saryn was significantly better and an obvious dev favorite.

 

[gurugeorge]

I love how they're distinguishing a slower, more deliberate form of gameplay re. Soulframe from the helter-skelter style of Warframe. But that's what Warframe initially was, it's just that they retardedly let "coptering" (a speed hack discovered by players that should have been instantly nixed) stay in the game for a couple of years, to the point that people got used to the speed. But the game's small environments hadn't been designed for fast movement, just the occasional bit of parkour in marked spots. So they made a rod for their own backs - they had to incorporate the speed into normal movement, then they had to make wide-open spaces to accommodate the speed.

Their whole initial vision was fucked because of that stupid mistake.

That said, the speed of Warframe as it is now is delightful and very well implemented in terms of UI and playability. If they'd designed Warframe as that sort of game from the beginning, with bigger maps, etc., it would have been fine. But Warframe as initially designed was a much slower, more deliberate affair, and actually it was better for it in the early days IMHO.

I've harped on this several times in posts, but it's a factor that I think is quite important, and was especially relevant to superhero games and MMOs: as soon as you have any form of fast "normal" travel (as opposed to "fast travel" in the sense of point to point teleportation), it psychologically shrinks the game world, so you have to make more game world to retain any sense of scale.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

early warframe UI is SOVL

 

[Pink Eye]

There's 2-3 frames that are objectively the best for 99% of activities.

Equinox is the worst offender in my opinion. Afk based gameplay is unhealthy as fuck.

 

[thesheeep]

Whenever I wanted to get back into it, I quickly begun hating it because groups were pointless, everyone speedrun the levels as fast as possible while I liked to take my time, lookin for fights and trash loots. Why do people play games if they want to skip over the actual fun content so badly?
Yeah I could play it alone but it isn't meant for that and thus no fun either. Exceptions : Stealth missions, they seemed much better solo.

That was also my impression when I played the game.
It was fun for a while, played a surprising 40 hours or so, but eventually I just started to do the same crap of skipping most of the content, and that was when motivation to continue disappeared quickly.

 

[gurugeorge]

Whenever I wanted to get back into it, I quickly begun hating it because groups were pointless, everyone speedrun the levels as fast as possible while I liked to take my time, lookin for fights and trash loots. Why do people play games if they want to skip over the actual fun content so badly?
Yeah I could play it alone but it isn't meant for that and thus no fun either. Exceptions : Stealth missions, they seemed much better solo.

That was also my impression when I played the game.
It was fun for a while, played a surprising 40 hours or so, but eventually I just started to do the same crap of skipping most of the content, and that was when motivation to continue disappeared quickly.

Not to continue the exhumation of Warframe too much (it has its own thread), but this relates to my post above about "coptering." As I say, to begin with, Warframe was very much a co-operative game, people did communicate, old hands showed new hands the ropes, etc. It was proper PUG multiplayer, and I came in just at the cusp of when coptering was becoming popular, so I experienced the game like that - presumably as it had been intended - for pretty much the whole levelling of my first frame (Volt). And the addiction to speed that the playerbase developed as they got used to coptering pretty much killed all that - even more so as the speed became incorporated into the game orthodoxly.

OK so that was a disaster - they shot themselves in the foot by keeping coptering in when they should have nixed it immediately (some dumb bs about "emergent gameplay"). So everyone got used to the speed, and the game took the shape you guys have experienced.

OK fair enough, it became what it was. BUT THEN, to cap it all, DE went a further step to destroying community in the game. You see, even though there was no PUG camaraderie through the early game and you more or less had to fend for yourself, once you got to a high enough level, there was what passed for the endgame for quite some time - you'd hang around with PUGs in the Orokin areas, going through increasingly difficult "phases" hoping for a chance to get some sweet bit of loot. And that actually worked quite well to build a sense of camaraderie in PUGs and a sense of community. Warframe basically was that endgame for most players for a long time. You'd hang with the random team you'd been landed with, and you'd start to develop a sense of camaraderie and relying on each other, learning how each other played as you went, fitting in with each other, so you could work together as a team as the phases got more difficult, and you'd see how long you could last. Usually it was capped pretty much by your capabilities in terms of your mods in your frame and weapons. But more experienced players were usually ok if you could at least not be too much of a liability up to the point when a renewed chance to get the phat loot thing came round again, and even as a relatively weak player you could chip away at the weaker adds.

AND THEN, they got rid of that whole endgame, the very thing that Warframe had built itself around as a community (in default of a proper endgame), and they substituted for it another mode of collecting the phat lewts that didn't require any sort of team play at all, that you could do virtually solo anyway.

So effectively, DE kept in a stupid bit of "emergent gameplay" that they should have stopped ASAP, that cheapened the game, and they dismantled the real, genuine "emergent gameplay" faux endgame that players had built up for themselves, that had made Warframe popular and addictive.

Way to go DE

There was a slight return of team camaraderie with the open world stuff in its early days when people were still learning it, but it all eventually became stuff-you-can-do-solo too.

I think maybe DE were so focused on the treadmill of producing new content to keep people coming back, that they didn't quite notice or service the things that had really kept people playing the game.

 

[Mary Sue Leigh]

Guess you mean when they release that new game, people will probably stick together again for a while when everything is still new and stuff needs figuring out. That's fair enough.

I do remember orokin towers I think it was called where you fought waves as high as you'd dare and then try to extract? I played it with people I knew, we wiped a lot due to overestimating our capabilities but it was fun. Figures they'd take this out eventually.

I just don't understand why in PUGs people would never wait on others who were obviously new, or hadn't seemingly played in a while and learning again, or plain out didn't have the kind of high level OP frame as them.
Sure nobody wants to waste time deliberately in a game (unless trolling), but if they don't want to bother helping the team they should play solo to begin with.

 

[gurugeorge]

Guess you mean when they release that new game, people will probably stick together again for a while when everything is still new and stuff needs figuring out. That's fair enough.

I do remember orokin towers I think it was called where you fought waves as high as you'd dare and then try to extract? I played it with people I knew, we wiped a lot due to overestimating our capabilities but it was fun. Figures they'd take this out eventually.

I just don't understand why in PUGs people would never wait on others who were obviously new, or hadn't seemingly played in a while and learning again, or plain out didn't have the kind of high level OP frame as them.
Sure nobody wants to waste time deliberately in a game (unless trolling), but if they don't want to bother helping the team they should play solo to begin with.

That's what I'm saying you see, coptering and zipping through the level became the elite, showoff thing to do, and that destroyed any sense of you being a team of 4 ninja superheroes working methodically through the level.

Of course there was power creep on top of that too (things were quite dangerous at first and you kind of needed a team to get through the level, whereas later on the mobs were like nothing, like chaff), but the main thing that set up that barrier to PUG camaraderie for the new player was that division in the playerbase between newbie plodders and elite copterers. Really stupid.

Embedding speed in everyone's playstyle did alleviate that a bit, but then the game bumped into the other aspect of speed - the levels, which when the game had started, had seemed ominous and quite big enough for a moderate-length session, became psychologically tiny for everyone, and just a minor chore to get over with as quickly as possible.

 

[Gerrard]

AND THEN, they got rid of that whole endgame, the very thing that Warframe had built itself around as a community (in default of a proper endgame), and they substituted for it another mode of collecting the phat lewts that didn't require any sort of team play at all, that you could do virtually solo anyway.

Yes, for 1/4th of the chance of getting something good. Not to mention that relics have standardized drop rates regardless of loot instead of arbitrary bullshit, and effectively cut the amount of time you need to spend getting something in 4, and you can't get fucking scammed.
If you think that the old void key shit was better than relics you're either a retard or a trade chat jew.

 

[Sykar]

There's 2-3 frames that are objectively the best for 99% of activities.

Equinox is the worst offender in my opinion. Afk based gameplay is unhealthy as fuck.

Nah that is Octavia. The most effort is setting up your Somachord for easy Invis. After this, press crouch, win.

 

[Pink Eye]

I forgot Octavia. That's the music one right. Her quest was pretty fun to do.

 

[Gerrard]

Remember when Nova was released? Old Mesa with 360 degree aimbot?
People hated that shit, and that was in 2013-2014. DE is not a learning animal.

 

[Pink Eye]

Speed nova, heh, I remember farming all her parts just so I join the farming groups in old void. There was no short supply of groups looking for nova players.

 

[gurugeorge]

AND THEN, they got rid of that whole endgame, the very thing that Warframe had built itself around as a community (in default of a proper endgame), and they substituted for it another mode of collecting the phat lewts that didn't require any sort of team play at all, that you could do virtually solo anyway.

Yes, for 1/4th of the chance of getting something good. Not to mention that relics have standardized drop rates regardless of loot instead of arbitrary bullshit, and effectively cut the amount of time you need to spend getting something in 4, and you can't get fucking scammed.
If you think that the old void key shit was better than relics you're either a retard or a trade chat jew.

Depends on what you mean by "better." Better in terms of getting the loot at the cost of worse in terms of sense of community. The Orokin towers were the endgame, they were where strangers actually started talking to each other in the game, and they are what created the basic sense of community that Warframe had. And DE fucked it.

 

[Sykar]

Remember when Nova was released? Old Mesa with 360 degree aimbot?
People hated that shit, and that was in 2013-2014. DE is not a learning animal.

Nova was not released like she is now?

 

[Gerrard]

Remember when Nova was released? Old Mesa with 360 degree aimbot?
People hated that shit, and that was in 2013-2014. DE is not a learning animal.

Nova was not released like she is now?

I don't even remember if there were many changes, but I'm referring to the "kill entire room in one click" gameplay.

 

[Sykar]

With which ability does Nova do that? MP builds focusing on duration do not have enough range for the explosions from MP on top of them doing meager blasting damage even at 145% power strength. Range builds usually have low power strength so the explosions are laughable even at low levels. On it's own MP is just a slow+damage amplifier and does basically nothing if you do not deal damage to the enemies.
AMD needs to be charged up and back then there was no OP weapon+mods+arcanes that could do that easily in one shot. Nullstar and Teleport are purely utility so are not even up for discussion.

 

[Alphard]

If the paymant model involves the same level of grind as WF hard pass. since the game was so good mechanically, i got caught farming 24/24 ( not literally) for stupid platinum, and then doing some speculation to buy some new frames. when you get new frames you are very excited, but even if they are good and fun the enthusiasm lasts only until you are bored again pressing the same skill over and over again , and then you start farming for a new frame again . it s the same for weapons. it's a viculious cycle you can only break if you realize the gameplay remains the same regardless if you played 10 hours or 1200 ( many with that playtime)