Warframe – the ever-lasting sci-fi action MMORPG – is at a turning point. Nearing the release of The Old Peace update, players will be able to look back through memory at an integral part of Warframe’s history. There will be narrative twists, new weapons to collect and people to romance, and perhaps most intriguing of all a suite of ultimate abilities called Tauron Strikes.
These ultimates stem from Tetkolyst artifacts, a new tier of armament which offer cinematic attacks for each of the game’s six focus schools. Fans of the game will already be familiar with one, a giant sword introduced at Tennocon earlier this year. The rest are equally enticing: one is even a Kamehameha.
Why and how were these made? How big of a game-changer are they for Warframe, and just what inspired the over-the-top animations that go alongside them? To find out, Eurogamer sat down with Warframe game director Rebecca Ford for an interview which you can read below.
Eurogamer: How did the idea of these big new ultimate attacks come about?
Ford: “Whenever you ask the big broad question I always like to look back to find out when the first time it was brought up. My recollection is that I really wanted to do focus ultimates that were very anime-inspired, ways for each school to have this potent culmination of their respective traits. I can see that all the way back in February they were brought up as a concept! Pablo (game design director) was asking what we wanted them to be and, this is such an obvious answer from my brain, but I was like: ‘Giant sword. How do we get a giant sword?’
“It’s like a balsamic glaze reduction, you just boil something down until it’s this sickly sweet or sour version of itself. That’s what the focus school ultimates feel like, they’re each a teaspoon of concentrated combat prowess.”
Eurogamer: Anime-inspired! In the Tennocon show earlier this year Final Fantasy came up as an inspiration for these, and some of the poses made seem vaguely Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure esq… What were the specific inspirations here?
Ford: “We needed to go into the direction of – we have five focus schools and each of them need a signature weapon. Naramon was very easy because it’s a melee school and a giant sword would do the trick. We were looking into moments where the protagonists of an anime would bring out a giant sword for this big attack, as a kind of animation and presentation base for that.
“Things started to get a bit more sensible as we started to look at our favourite inspirations – I don’t want to say tropes – for flavour. The bow and arrow came from us, that was our own Warframe slice. We know we wanted Vazarin – our healing school – to have a staff. This mage moment came a lot from Frieren. For the hammer: everyone loves a giant rockin’ hammer.
“Zenurik was the hardest one. We wanted it to be a Kamehameha. It had to be an energy beam attack, but it needed a conduit. We actually have an anime channel at work, and one of our designers said: ‘oh my god we could just do a book, a tome’. So we got the page doing the beam attack, it came through for us. It’s a little bit of a Nier: Replicant throwback with Grimoire Weiss.”
Eurogamer: How do you make these play into the fantasy of each school, aside from just the aesthetics?
Ford: “Sometimes it’s the wanting, it’s the cooldown. You can only do it so many times every five minutes. But it’s all in figuring out what the best in to cycle it into your gameplay. You’ll use it when you want a lot of damage, and the secondary buffs that come with it. It’s truly like casting an ‘ultimate’ – it’s something we’ve never done this aggressively in Warframe.
“We used to have ultimates that animation-locked you, but Warframe got too fast for watching these drawn out attacks. We got rid of it for Ash when you use to do his Bladestorm. But we’re going back to try it out, there was this tug of war around how long these would be. At Tennocon, we showed off this 16-second-cast. That will never ship, we just needed to show off what we were making. Three seconds is way too short, so we’re right in the middle at around six seconds. Each represents an attribute of the focus school and as you upgrade these via the skill tree you hone in on these attributes.”
Eurogamer: How do you anticipate these ultimates will impact the way general action will work in Warframe going forward, now that players have a new tool to use?
Ford: “They’re really meant to work well in the 12-minute war. That’s been proven at this point with the grappling points and other new things present there. As far as people bringing it back to the regular world, I feel it’s just a user expression thing. If you want to do something lethal, you’d be able to do it on a cooldown we assign. There’s nothing really anything in the game with cooldowns, aside from your Necramech. So if anything, it’ll make things more accessible depending on where you are in the game.”
Eurogamer: How is it balanced for Conclave?
Ford: “You f- You know the answer to that, it’s not! I don’t even know if you can do… I don’t even know if you can use Operators in Conclave, can you?”
Eurogamer: I don’t know!
Ford: “I don’t think you can. That’s embarrassing for me. I literally don’t even know if you can. Lol.”
Eurogamer: Do you now have to design encounters in the future with these ultimates in mind? Are there considerations that have to be made?
Ford: “It will impact it in the same way all these vertical levels of power growth do, in that we’re aware of it and we account for it. The way we handle this case is by attaching a more significant cooldown than with anything we’ve ever done.
“We know what we’re doing next year and it’s all figured out. So this is like a dance move you can bust out, a big animation with a big number at the end of it. You can measure it, and address it systemically.”
Eurogamer: One final question on this: why is it valuable to have the big narrative lead-up to obtaining one of these weapons? What do you gain from taking this approach?
Ford: “Honestly, it’s completely a creative choice derived from the myth of excalibur. We don’t really have a lot of named legendary weapons in Warframe. We have the Paracesis, we have Broken War / War. There are all the primes and some quest weapons that are important, but it felt as though we hadn’t delved into the world of ‘relic weapons’.
“The experience of designing these felt as though we had hit a tier of legendary weapons that we hadn’t hit before. It was a full commitment to flavour. It adds a level of attachment to these new weapons, and also provides an opportunity for us to make new ones. There could be another ancient book. It’s a new school of things we can keep expanding.”
Eurogamer: What makes a weapon legendary?
Ford: “It’s the ceremony. I just came back from England. There’s something to be said about ritual and celebration. Like, the crown jewels. What makes that legendary? You know what they represent, there’s such a potency there. Some games do it so well, like Final Fantasy 7! You know what Sephiroth or Cloud’s swords are. I love how unique this feels for Warframe – it’s like an untouched diamond mine for us.”
Warframe’s next update – The Old Peace – in which Tauron Strikes and a variety of other new features will be making their dubut is set to launch on the 10th December. You can play Warframe on PC, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, and Mobile. The game is also coming to the Switch 2 some time next year, after Digital Extremes struggled to get dev kits for the hardware earlier this year.