Warframe‘s next update – The Shadowgrapher – is fast approaching. A shot in a new direction for the sci-fi MMO, players will have to navigate through cramped corridors and inky pathways in the game’s first explicitly horror-inspired game mode. But how exactly do you make a game with bullet jumping and space ninjas scary?
The answer, as you may imagine, wasn’t an easy one to come across. In fact, as design director Pablo Alonso and community manager and live ops lead Megan Everett tells Eurogamer, it morphed quite drastically from a Gary’s Mod-esque Prop Hunt-inspired experience to the tense mode it exists as today.
This mode, titled Folie’s Hunt, started as many Warframe updates do: with the warframe itself. Designed by artist Michael Skyers years ago, Folie acted as the roots from which the entire update would grow.
“The art was always black and white, with the balloon and the spooky clown look,” Alonso said. “So we knew we wanted to go into the scary vibes, which got us into the horror mindset.” This warframe, a monochromatic artist who steps through paintings flourishing viscous black paint, needed a home. While the Solar system itself is a touch crowded these days, there was some not-so-prime real estate going that fit her themes quite nicely.
“One of the very early ideas was it would take place on the haunted relay, so based on that we knew it would have tighter corridors with a larger area in the middle,” Alonso explained. The destruction of the relays, which occurred back between 2014 and 2015, had left these ruined player hubs scattered around the in-game galactic map. But, for those not playing back then, they stood as strange testaments to events long-passed. Folie’s need for a home offered an “opportunity to connect them to these past events”. It also, according to Alonso, “really served the themes of the update, lots of people died there. So there’s weight behind it.”
So you’ve got the warframe, and you’ve got the location. Now, a game mode must be built. Here’s where Prop Hunt enters the equation; it was the initial idea for The Shadowgrapher update. As Alonso revealed to Eurogamer: “one player would play as Folie, while the others would hide around the place. You’d turn into a barrel, or what have you. We liked it, because it was a fun, totally different thing. But once the art started coming in, it was clear to us we needed to get spookier than something like Prop Hunt would allow.”
One key component to the Warframe loop is repetition, the ability to run an event over and over to unlock warframes and weapons without tiring. This proved another crucial problem for the original Prop Hunt mode, as the development team found it lost its lustre relatively quickly. As such, the player-controlled Folie was abandoned in place of regular computer-controlled enemies chasing players down. That way, they wouldn’t have to “neuter” player power as initially planned. Players working together must gather paint and take it to a canvas, all while being pursued by an invincible killer clown.
But therein lies another problem. Warframe isn’t scary. Part of the reason why is because you, as a space ninja with all manner of powers and an arsenal of weapons at your disposal, are too strong to feel vulnerable (except in very few narrative-driven moments). It is hard to feel scared when you’re busting out red crits and running at one million miles per hour.
As such, attempts to curb this player power and bring on the spookiness were tried. The first, a failure: “our first swing didn’t work at all,” Alonso said. “When you picked up the paint your warframe held it, but if you jumped or sprinted you started dropping paint. We were trying to tell players not to go too fast, but muscle memory would take over. They’d get to the painting and think ‘where’d all my paint go?’
“Then we started blocking players from jumping and spriting, and it felt awful. So what achieved the same thing was forcing players to pick up paint as the operator; they already move at a slower speed and have these inherent limitations to abilities they have. We found it was a way to make you a little more fragile, while giving you control over the situation.
“Even then we still had problems, where players would see Folie and run straight at her. That still happens – new players who are used to rushing straight at enemies will do that and die. But after a few times, they figure out what’s going on and adapt.”
Finally, after much trail and error, they landed at a solution that gets the intimidating point across. As Everett points out: “It’s the first time we’ve done something where an enemy chasing you is fully invincible. The point of it is to not run into her (laugh). But, she gets faster and stronger as time goes on, so it gets scarier as time goes on. It goes against the typical pace of Warframe missions – you can kill enemies and there are boons for doing so – but there’s this underlying vulnerability throughout. It puts a nice spin on things.
“We know what our players love to do: bullet jumping power fantasy. After 15 years we know what our players hate, and we obviously need to tease a little bit towards that before we hit ‘we don’t play that game mode’. But we have to spice things up as we go on. Realistically, something like Folie’s game mode may not be people’s cup of tea, but it’s there for players who want to experience something new.”
So, with all this in mind, why is it important to try out weird stuff like Folie’s Hunt in a long-running game like Warframe? I’m sure that if she was packaged alongside an aesthetically different version of a typical game mode – like defence of extermination – many players would not mind. Pablo, however, believes that variety isn’t just the spice of life, it is the spice that keeps long-running live service games like Warframe exciting for players and developers alike.
“As game developers, it’s hard to keep making the same thing for all these years. So we need to keep things fresh to keep us excited about it. And we know if we’re excited to make it, players will be excited to play it. That’s how we believe things work, and generally when we’re doing any project, I try to get someone involved who’s really invested in whatever that one thing might be.”
