Warframe, the space ninja game where you can feed yourself to a giant mouth and drive a motorcycle in the year 1999, has a new update. The Vallis Undermind exemplifies the whimsy that has come to define Warframe in recent years.
The expansion, released on Wednesday, introduces a new mushroom-themed warframe that does a little dance, along with a whole new explorable fungal area. But it’s also going back to basics, with another quest geared at making sure this complicated, expansive 12-year-old MMO makes sense to new players.
Called “The Teacher,” this is the long-awaited quest that teaches Warframe players how to use one of the game’s most basic — yet most intricate — systems: modding.
In Warframe, mods are augments that can be added to your character or your weapons to enhance their abilities. They range from the straightforward (increase damage or speed up reload rate) to the devastatingly complex. Warframe YouTubers will craft hour-long videos about idealized builds that use powerful mods in combination with each other to create devastating effects.
Not me though! I am comically bad at modding. Every time I level up a new warframe or weapon, my try-hard boyfriend appears behind me and says, “show me your mods,” and I look at him like a dog that has gotten into the garbage as I open the menu to reveal that I’ve added the most basic damage modifier to my gun, then forgot to ever touch the mechanic again.
After speaking with the developers who worked on “The Teacher,” I know I’m not the only one.
“The Teacher” was developed in a collaboration between Warframe developer Digital Extremes, who provided the narrative sauce, and Sumo Digital, who designed the mission, which will appear early in Warframe for new players.
In the quest, the player is asked to retrieve a new segment for their spaceship, but they’re interrupted by a menacing, powerful warrior called Teshin, who takes away the player’s abilities and melee weapons, and forces them to engage with the mod system to handily demonstrate its power.
Many of the Sumo Digital team were already fans of Warframe, but others had never played before, according to principal games designer Sam Baker. It was this outside perspective that proved critical.
“The first thing we did was basically sit behind them and go right play through the tutorial and take prodigious notes on everywhere they fell out,” Baker said. Early-game menu pop-ups introduced players to modding. But Baker and the Sumo Digital team noted that they didn’t work on everyone.
“Some people didn’t see basic instructions where it’s flashing on the screen saying put the mod in the slot,” he said.
“I think a lot of people were maybe getting into the early game, seeing mods, not really understanding it,” said lead narrative designer Ryan Mole from Digital Extremes. “I think it was really important, at the end of the quest, for players to think, ‘Hey, modding is cool. I want to try more of this.’”
Warframe’s mods allow players to create stupidly powerful synergies that turn the screen into a blitz of numbers. But “The Teacher” isn’t really about that. There will be some long-time players who wish the quest was geared more towards their needs, like creating powerful and specific builds catered towards running Warframe’s ultra-difficult Steel Path mode. But in talking to Baker and Mole, it became clear that “The Teacher” is filling a real and significant gap in the game for early players — and that doing so isn’t as simple as it looks.
“There’s lots of little tweaks and little subtle things in the background there to just sort of show you what it can do rather than tell you,” Baker said. For example, one of the goals of “The Teacher” is to show how mods can create powerful elemental status effects; in this case, Magnetic damage that eats chunks out of enemy shields.
“[…] We had to change the weapon to be a burst-fire weapon, because it shows off the proc rate more,” Baker said. “But you don’t want to […] say to people, ‘oh yeah, actually on a base level mod, you only got a few percentage chance to proc an elemental effect.’ So how do you tutorialize that without changing it?”
Experienced Warframe players will instinctively look for that kind of weapon effect and understand how it works, but new players have to be taught to pay attention to these things.
“It’s not a kind of game development that we’ve had to worry about as much on Warframe just because that hasn’t been our focus,” said Mole. “But part of it not being our focus is that we never really told people how to use mods.”
“There’s so much that goes into just making a really simple mission that — honestly — you can blast through in about 15 minutes,” said Baker. “But it’s months and months of work for loads of people.”
Baker was visibly glowing with excitement over being able to work on a game that he loves — and to craft a mission for one of his favorite characters.
“I love Teshin,” he said. “He’s my 8-year-old internal self’s idea of what’s cool.”
In the 12 years since its release, Warframe has been in a consistent battle with its own player onboarding process. There are lots of complex systems that players don’t need to worry about — and won’t even have access to — until hours into the game. And others, like modding, that scale in complexity depending on how much time you want to invest. An update earlier this year streamlined the early game so that players could reach Warframe’s mind-bending plot developments with less time on the grind up front.
With “The Teacher,” it’s clear that the developers are doubling down on a commitment to make sure Warframe’s early game experience doesn’t stay locked in 2013. New players can get their foot in the door — even if they miss the menu prompts.
