Warframe is globally renowned for its high-octane action and ability to push hardware to its absolute limit. When Digital Extremes first launched its space ninja simulator back in 2013, its visual fidelity and immensely complex gameplay systems rattled PCs all over the world. But then Warframe came to consoles, and soon established itself as a game that rewarded powerful hardware, but could run perfectly smoothly on less capable machines.

That being said, Warframe has taken complete advantage of the power of the PS5, and has quickly become one of the frontrunners in converting said power into a demonstrably next-gen experience. In order to learn about just how impressive Warframe is on PS5 - as well as how it intends to make use of the console as development on the game continues to progress - I recently sat down with Digital Extremes COO Sheldon Carter for a chat about Warframe's transition to the next generation.

TG: What kind of things does next gen allow you to do that you couldn’t do before?

SC: It’s interesting with Warframe because obviously we’re a title that’s been on PC from our start. When you get to next gen and you start seeing what the experience can feel like... I think the one I was most excited for as a game developer was load times, just watching it be mock speed.

warframe ps5

We want it to be as seamless as possible. If you’re playing in Deimos, being able to quickly go from inner Necralisk out into the landscape right away... Those kinds of feelings are things that players who are playing on PS4 or Xbox - it’s still a great experience, but it’s just not that seamless. You don’t feel like you’re a part of the world. From an immersion standpoint, the load times I love. On top of that you’re able to take more horsepower. We revved our whole rendering engine to get ready for this changeover. Dynamic lighting, how it feels to be in it, the frame rate being smooth. I’ve been around for a couple of changes over, but this one, from frame rate to just game look and load times, has been really exciting.

TG: Is it possible to improve depth of field with this hardware? Can you show more enemies on screen, could you design more complex levels in future? Does it affect environmental design?

SC: This is why you look forward to things that we’re going to be able to take advantage of. The things I talked about are the things that come right out of the package, just on the basis that we get to next gen. But now, as you have more and more players going there… absolutely.

Related: Deimos: Arcana Adds New Augments, New Kitguns, And Warframe’s Second Necramech

The ability to have more AI. It’s something that was in other games previously, but even for us just having crossplay and cross-progression. Even looking at the controller feedback and the feel there, too. That’s another one that’s exciting and I feel a game like Warframe, where we have so many weapons and melees and stances, so many different things that players can do... Being able to tune the haptic - we’ve kind of dipped our toe in it on launch, but we have a lot of stuff we want to do with the adaptive triggers. I think looking forward, as we’ll be able to expand the possibility for space, Warframe on PS5 is going to be amazing.

TG: Have you planned to use the DualSense’s new features?

SC: That’s huge, yeah. It’s funny, I’ve been desperately trying to get my hands on my own PS5, I haven’t been able to land that just yet. But we have the test kits and just seeing - again, we’re playing with it internally, we want it to be just right, and it’s interesting when you have 300 or more weapons in the game to make sure we’re tuning that in the right way to take advantage of it. But man, when you get it right, it feels so good.

warframe ps5

TG: Is there anything in particular you have in mind? Are there any objectives you’ve set yourself in terms of, “This is what I want to do with Warframe with the DualSense?”

SC: To be honest, we have a group of people who work on the weapons. One of our lead designers, Joe Buck, works on the weapons. I think he’d be the best one to talk about it but I know he’s just drooling about it. We just see the check-ins saying, “added this for the DualSense.” It’s pretty exciting.

TG: You mentioned load times - how much has the loading time been cut down by?

SC: We did a little trailer for the PS5 launch that actually had a side-by-side. It’s incredible, it’s probably… I think on one of the loads we were showing it was something like 35 seconds off. We’re talking like five or ten seconds into the level versus 45 on PS4. It’s stunning. It breaks your brain when you’ve been so used to playing one way to see it go that fast and just be in and out of missions. That’s what we really wanted for Warframe. We’ve always wanted it to feel fluid - the movement is fluid, so just being able to transition a little quicker has been a big deal.

TG: Are you able to hit native 4k and 60fps on PS5?

SC: We’ve got it adaptive. There are some places in the game where it’s going insane, you’ve got four players doing clones and firing off like 100 different things, so we’ll play with the frame rate if it’s ever going to dip, but 4k for sure and 60 as often as we can.

TG: First impressions so far, which next-gen console do you think is more capable?

SC: This is like which arm do you like better, right? The thing right now is we’re still working on the Series X version so I can’t really talk too much about the differences between them. As I said, I really love the adaptive triggers on the PlayStation and I’m hoping the things that are feeling so great about the PS5 version, we’re going to be able to bring to [Xbox]. We want everyone who plays the game to love their version or how they’re playing the game. I think there’s gonna be some great stuff with the Series X version as well.

warframe ps5

TG: As you said earlier on, Warframe started out on PC. Traditionally, PC got updates first - do you think next-gen will allow you to roll out simultaneous updates?

SC: Earlier this year we did Heart of Deimos and - kind of even prepping for next gen - we did a simultaneous release just to see how that would feel for us as a team. It’s not so much a thing about the next generation consoles, it’s more just about us being ready to do that on a more regular basis. That is our goal for sure, we know that’s what all the players want. Everybody wants to play the same content at the same time, so that’s a high goal for us for 2021.

TG: What are the barriers and obstacles there - what causes development cycles to be on different paths?

SC: What it really comes down to is that at Digital Extremes we have an internal philosophy that we want to ship things as quickly as we have them. We have a really hard time holding onto content if we don’t have to. The console cycles require you to cert the content before it goes live, and so a lot of the time what we end up doing is we ship that PC version because we can ship it whenever we want. We send it off to cert at the same time and if there’s little tweaks or fixes we wanna make before it gets out to the consoles, we do it through the testing of that first big batch of PC players.

Again, as the title has matured and we know a little bit - you know we try some crazy stuff sometimes - we’re getting better at saying we understand what the problems are gonna be before it comes out. And so it becomes easier to tighten up that window and not have to say, “Hey we have to look and find out what’s wrong with the update before we get it through the cert process.” It’s really just philosophically, from us who are a high speed team, saying OK, we can slow down a little bit and make sure that everybody gets it at the same time.

TG: Is it fair to say that the upgrades we’re seeing for next-gen Warframe are going to be transposed onto PC as well?

SC: Right now for PC players, the rendering was experimental, you could turn it on or off in the options to see it. Obviously there’s a whole range of PC players. There’s one way of looking at PC as the audience has hardware that’s beyond the consoles, but I think it’s equally relevant to say there are a lot of people playing on early PCs because that’s the way they can game, which I think is totally viable as well. We have to make sure with Warframe being a game that is people’s hobby that just because everybody else has stepped up, you’re not gonna get left behind. So we wanna make sure that those toggles are there. However, it’s cool - if you have a high power PC, now you’re able to turn on a lot of the bells and whistles that came along with the console cycle to make it sing even more on your PC.

warframe ps5

TG: What kind of bells and whistles are we talking?

SC: This is when we’re talking about the change to our rendering engine. I’m probably not the best person to talk about all the features, but you can just do it on PC. You can turn it on and off and look at how the dynamic lighting looks in something like Plains of Eidolon. Any of the places where you’re gonna see the shadows, the lighting on the character, it’s gorgeous. We built that from the ground up looking forward to the generational change.

PR director Douglass C. Perry: We found that open world parts of Warframe were the ones that showed the lighting off the best. And Plains of Eidolon of those open worlds had more trees and foliage, so you could see those god rays coming through.

SC: Exactly, Doug makes a good point. You can really see it environmentally. Of course, even like muzzle flashes, weapon trails, all those things get touched when you change the way lighting is done in the game. There’s a lot of places to look.

TG: What attracted you to the idea of building an internal renderer? A lot of devs have opted for pursuing ray tracing on next gen.

SC: It’s funny, the engine we work on, we call it the Evolution Engine. It’s been with us for a while. Steve Sinclair, who’s the creative director of the game, is one of the architects of the engine. So the amount of love and craftsmanship that goes into our technology is something we pride ourselves on. We didn’t want to have to look externally for how to make the jump, we wanted to look at it and invest internally. All the crazy stuff we do for Warframe - it allows us to do those things and we don’t have to rely on someone else’s engine or someone else’s rendering technology. For us it wasn’t even much of a discussion, it was just, “Hey we’re going to do this, we need to jump forward.” We were looking at all the great games that came out towards the end of the cycle and seeing the things that they were doing. Obviously it’s awesome that developers all around the world are happy to share experiences and ideas, so we took some of those ideas and ran with it.

warframe ps5

TG: I haven’t seen many other games that are trying to reduce the file size while improving visuals. That sounds difficult to juggle - how do you go about doing something like that?

SC: You need some crazy slash genius engine programmers who are gamers themselves and want that. It’s one thing to want to be at the top end of the technology, but it’s another thing to be an end user who wants that - I wanna have it download to my system as fast as possible, I want to have space. I’d love it if Warframe is the only game you’re playing but that’s not reality, right? We all want to have space to play our other games. This is all of our hobby, so we want our game to be respectful of your hard drive capacity.

TG: I had no idea the bullet jump was inspired by a bug until today - something called coptering?

SC: If you go back and look at some of the early Warframe videos it was all about how to copter through a level. You look at those things and you’re like, if all the players are doing it and it’s an exploitative behaviour in terms of speed travelling, but it’s something that they all love, how is it something that we can incorporate into the game in a way that made it a cool feature, but also gave them the mobility. It’s funny, those players helped us to understand that mobility was such a huge aspect of Warframe. It was a bug that got exploited, and we changed that into the key defining features of Warframe, which is cool.

TG: What’s that process like for saying, this part of the game is a glitch that players are aware of and exploiting - how do we implement that as a core mechanic?

SC: It’s about a relationship with the community and the players. The relationship we’ve built with them, we think of it like we’re co-developing the game with the players, so the things that they see and find, we take them really seriously. Bullet jumping is a great example because it isn’t coptering exactly, but it’s an expression of that feeling for them. We try our best to give players what they want but in a surprising and different way, so it still feels fresh.

It’s not like, “Hey they just made coptering a thing” - they changed coptering into bullet jumping which is even cooler because now I can go up and I can reach places I couldn’t before. And then our level design team starts coming up with ways that they could use that in the levels. It’s this really dynamic collaborative process with the players. I think when we’re at our best - when Warframe’s at its best - it’s because we have that relationship with our players. Again, the new consoles are exciting because this whole new set of players are gonna come in with new ideas and new things that maybe we haven’t thought of, and that we’re able to evolve Warframe into over the next year.

warframe ps5

TG: The most recent Warframe was co-developed with the community - is there anything currently in the works that you’re collaborating with the community on?

SC: There almost always is. Our community management team is integrated with the dev team, so they’re embedded with us. We’re always getting ideas from them.

DP: We have Deimos Arcana in the works for consoles. Xaku wasn’t just an average collaboration, Xaku was a really big collaboration.

SC: To be fair, that was a huge success. It’s cool to see a design you came up with as a group come to life inside the game, and it’s something that was super successful with Xaku, so it’s something we’re going to continue doing. Honestly there always is something.

TG: In a more general sense, have you got any big content planned for the future?

SC: That’s always the fun, right? What’s the big reveal, what’s coming next. We’ve shown hints at some of the TennoCons of the content to come, and I think Doug will probably somehow disconnect the call if I talk about what the next thing is. But we have some really cool stuff coming with the Lich system. We have a Corpus version of that that’s coming down the pipe that I think is gonna be really exciting, because it’s gonna be another way for players to understand new lore, and actually understand more about how the Corpus work. There’s things down that path. Getting through the last end of 2020 with the console changeover… 2021 we’re really wrapping up to be a big content year. And the stuff we have planned is not just stuff that’s gonna come at TennoCon, we’re looking at some big stuff even before then.

TG: Is there anything really cool about Warframe that you’ve never really got to talk about?

SC: What came out in Deimos and Deimos Arcana was the mechs. I’m kind of a huge fan of mechs in general. The way that we’re pushing that, the things we wanna do with the Necramech system… It’s already there, so you can try the new one that came out, the Bone Widow, and we shipped with one as well, the Necramech. But what we wanna do with that system, how we wanna integrate that, how that actually plays into the future of the game - without getting too spoilery - it’s something that if you haven’t really had a chance to invest in that system and learn how they play and use them a bit, we’re gonna have lots of places for you to try that more as we proceed, and it’s really exciting and actually really deep.

warframe ps5

TG: When you’re developing a game that has a continuous story like this, especially one that’s been going on for several years, what kind of challenges are presented when you’re trying to release new content that is consistent with everything that’s come before but also pivots in a different direction?

SC: It’s actually a real struggle. I won’t spoil anything for new players, but there are some pretty exciting reveals in the storyline that happen along the journey when you start the game and when you get into it. Some of those reveals come with gameplay implications. When those reveals have gameplay implications, then certain content is gated by whether you have that gameplay or not, so that makes you do some interesting design backflips to be able to let a new player or a player who hasn’t maybe run through all of the story content yet to be able to try that content.

To be honest, right before this call that’s what I was doing. I was in a conversation with lead designer Scott McGregor, and then Steve Sinclair our creative director, Jeff, our whole senior leadership. The discussion was one of those design backflips we have to do in order to make sure that we keep our big story reveals interesting and relevant, but still let a new player try those things without having to go through all of that. It’s a massive challenge, it’s one of the bigger ones and it's one of those things that even as we go into 2021 and we have some big story beats coming, we’re trying to think about ways we can get players that story information if you just started. You just got your PS5 and you wanna make your way through Warframe’s story, well how can we make it really clear to you what the core story beats you have to hit are so that when new content comes you’re ready to go, and you don’t think you have to play 40 or 50 hours before you understand it all.

TG: I like that phrase design backflips - are there any examples of that?

SC: It’s funny because to give you a specific example without spoiling things that I’m trying to backflip around is tough. But in most of the open worlds - Plains of Eidolon has a good example of a faction that is a secret faction, that you can only access if you happen to have done that content. Part of that is interesting, it’s really cool to have a secret faction, but part of it is that we had to have a secret faction so that those people who hadn’t completed certain aspects of it would still be able to participate in that open world without revealing that to them. So by making it secret and gating and building a whole lore around the fact that it was secret, we were able to have this mid-game content around without spoiling it all for the new players and still letting them be able to go to that area and look at it. That’s a pretty good design backflip.

warframe ps5

DP: On Plains of Eidolon there were also Archwings, that were introduced for the first time in open worlds. But you actually had to go and finish the missions elsewhere in order to use those Archwings. There are other flying machines that were introduced in so that people who didn’t have Archwings or hadn’t completed those missions were then able to fly around with single-pilot machines.

TG: In some ways it seems as if the struggle is able to beget something really cool.

SC: That’s a really good point. It’s kind of just making sure we have that right balance. Design is best when it has some constraints to it. That’s a constraint - it’s a story constraint we put on ourselves that we have to design around and has created some really interesting side effects. At the same time, we’d love for as many people to be able to participate in the new stuff we do as possible. It’s an interesting balance.

Read next: Warframe Builder: The Best Warframe Builds 2020