Warframe's Next Big, Wwi-inspired Story Update Happened Because A...
The Old Peace's military tragedy of child soldiers and bayonet-wielding demon Warframes had humble beginnings.
Warframe's next major update, The Old Peace, is a doozy. When it releases on Wednesday, December 10, it'll be the first time Warframe players get a firsthand look at the Tau system that's been mythologized by more than a decade of in-game storytelling, witnessed as their characters relive induced war flashbacks from a forgotten, failed ceasefire in the interstellar conflict that defined Warframe's past, present, and future.
It all started with one phrase: "Trench Warframe." Digital Extremes had been "really struggling" to find a direction that would unify its next years of updates, Warframe creative director Rebecca Ford told PC Gamer in a recent interview, but once those words were uttered, the possibilities were impossible to ignore: If Warframe did its own spin on World War I, what stories could it tell?
The Old Peace story quests will explore the tragedy of two children doomed to find themselves on opposing sides of treaty negotiations that, from the outset, we know will fail disastrously. While players have slain uncountable millions of enemies as their Tenno Operators, the update is the most that Warframe has centered the player character's past as a child soldier. According to Ford, that tragedy—echoing "some of the greatest war stories" and "a surprising amount" of child soldier-based science fiction—is the "missing piece" for the player character's story.
"They're kids, but there's a very adult underlying conflict. There's just so much there, thematically," Ford told PC Gamer. "The innocence of the child soldiers, thinking they're doing the right thing, thinking they can be friends forever, and then having it all taken away, because—well, you'll see."
Ford and the Warframe team, she said, had spent years being reluctant to tell stories with those kinds of heavy emotional stakes, because they felt players "couldn't relate" to the Operator's aging visual design and facial expression tech. But in The Old Peace, player characters are getting a long-awaited art remaster, allowing the Warframe devs to add the necessary emotional depth to the player's interactions with their long-forgotten Sentient friend, Adis.
"The remastered Operator was really the push to commit all in," Ford said. "I'm very glad we waited, because the emotional support of this remaster is huge."
Despite its sci-fi setting, The Old Peace's Perita Rebellion—an ill-time
Source: PC Gamer
