- My name is Steve. - My name is Rebecca and today we are going to uncover some unsolved mysteries of Warframe. - Oh, I hope not. - Yep, sorry, we are. [dramatic music] - Ah, well this is actually-- - Only good things! - Only good things! They have not been destroyed. - They're on an extended holiday and they're like the elves and they got on a boat and they went somewhere peaceful. - [Rebecca] No, if you have sort of pieced together parts of the war within the game itself, you'll know a little bit about the Warframes' final act of rebellion, perhaps? - The Stalker lore. - A bit of Stalker lore. - Low Guardians. - Yeah. The Orokin might not have been the most pure of the regal society. - I'm happy for some of these questions because these are the things that we are putting into our cinematic quest this year. - Correct. - So stay tuned. - Yes. Or read the codex. - But nothing good happened to them. - Nothing good. - I was kidding about the holiday. - The Void is what I call my weekends. And that's where I spend time really just kind of in the darkness of my own entity self but [chuckles]. What is the void? Oh, you mean in regards to Warframe? Ah, right. The Void is a, it's sort of the space between space itself. It's a-- - Oh, is that your answer? - [Rebecca] That's my answer. Perhaps The Man in The Wall knows the answer to what the Void is. - Right, yeah. Chains of Harrow, I think, has a little bit of that and what happens to people when they spend too much time there. It is associated with space travel in Warframe, and it is a subject of future development. - My favorite Warframe backstory is Mirage, because of the quest in which she is debuted and all of the sort of first step into lore paired with the Warframe that we've done. - That was the first one. Harrow is probably mine. I really like Chains of Harrow. I thought that was very dark and interesting and is supposed to advance the kind of meta-narrative Warframe to come. - Favorite Easter egg? Hmm, my mind goes to Flappy Zephyr. - [Rebecca] Oh, yeah, yeah. - My mind goes to the really cool, or Wyrmius, the awesome little mini-games that we put in the game. And I think coming soon we're gonna kinda be immortalizing and enshrining those in the ship quarters with a mini-arcade cabinet. - Well, I mean, it's rendered in 3D but I mean, it's a 2D fighting field. - And it's gonna be coming soon. Every Warframe will be playable. They'll be one of the 3rd-- - Every Warframe? - I believe so. - Wow! - It'll be one of the 3rd Easter egg mini-games in Warframe, in addition to Wyrmius and Flappy Zephyr, which we spoke about. And it's also going to be free. [Steve laughs] - Oh! - Oh! - Well, she actually just puts them back in the levels to keep you guys coming back. She really likes your company, so she goes out on her own to place the Ayatans-- - [Steve] So she's sort of neevy in thay way? - She's neevy, yeah. - I see. - The Ayatans might be sort of like a polaroid of the Orokin era. It might contain within it very specific memories of an individual who lived all that time ago, so-- - You are spoiling The Sacrifice as we speak. - No, I'm not. So the market for Ayatans might be more interesting in the future. [both chuckling] - Well, Rebecca is Space Mom. She voices the character of Lotus for all of these years. - [Rebecca] And I don't love you anymore. No, no, no, no! That's not right! - She abandoned her children. - Yes. - Yes, if you are excited about The Sacrifice quest then that question is definitely relevant. And if you've played the Apostasy Prologue you will see something about a very important character who departs in Warframe and is a bit of a cliffhanger, isn't it? - Yes, it is! And I think that's-- - [Steve] I don't know if you can say that she doesn't love the Tenno anymore, but certainly her relationship has got more complicated with the return of Ballas. - [Rebecca] Indeed. - And you will have to stay tuned. I hope that you stay tuned to find out how that resolves. - Yeah, there's no, when you've made a game like Warframe, having an emotional layer to it in addition to all the other stuff we've talked about is very important. - It's affected the process for sure because every time we deploy something we need to run a audit to see what changed in the drop tables, and if something changed, we have to publish it to our website. We ended up building some tools on our team to make sure that's as streamlined as possible. It used to just be a file transfer upload to our web server. Now we have a bit of a CMS4 to just drag and drop so it's gotten easier so anyone on our team can do it. But it's something that we did in the wake of, what I think every game is used to, the wake of controversy. - Data mining, reverse engineering. We kind of had two forks of data mining, or at least the mindset of data mining in Warframe. One is the, it's okay because it keeps us honest. - Yes. - And we wanted to remove that reason and be transparent as possible with it. At the same time, we wanted to fight against data mining for reasons of spoiling the game. - Yes. - Reasons for cheating. - Yes. - And so we wanted to make sure that when we locked that down, we weren't accused of trying to hide the truth from players. That's why Rebecca pushed for us publishing it. - Yes, and in the scheme of things, I actually did talk about this in my GDC talk because if you are familiar with Warframe's history, we'd actually turned a blind eye to data mining keeps us honest for years, and it wasn't until a hacking event occurred, which we had smoking guns of, and the cusp of the Plains of Eidolon announcement that we actually went the direction of posting our own drop tables. - We still haven't put the Arcata in the game for the PvE crowd. So that's the old Lunaro Scoop. - That's right. - So that's something we still haven't been able to make work for Warframe, which is the idea that you're throwing a sport ball around with a weapon. - [Steve] Little speed ball reference in there. - [Rebecca] There's still work going into it-- - Speedball Two, brutal deluxe. - There you go. - I think it would, titanium's probably the thing that we shouldn't have done. Oh, but we did that, didn't we? - Yeah! - We put a Warframe in that shrinks down into the size of a fairy and attacks tiny enemies. - This is ideal. - Yeah, so I think that really as we've grown the game, we don't really rule out a lot of crazy ideas. It's mostly a fantastic challenge to try to see them through. - Yeah, we should probably not put a mod in the game that let's you get ridiculous crits on spin attacks, 'cause then everything will just turn into a melee spin to win. - Yeah. - Too late! - Inside joke. [both chuckling] - What's the coolest user build? Hmm. - Hmm! - I love it when you see people using a fashion frame to cosplay. - Yes, yes! - Atlas as One Punch Man or they'll try to do Kill La Kill color scheme with their Warframes. - Those people must be really cool. - Yep, so those are very cool people. - Yeah, I'm one of them. - Are you gonna say Primed Chamber? - No, I'm not gonna say that! That's not my favorite mod, why would I lie? Why would I lie to you? What's your favorite mod? - Well, this year we're adding the new Peculiar Mods, right? The ones that grow flowers inexplicably. - So the man with the pizza hat is interested in Peculiar Mods? You don't say? - The man is, yep. - Okay. - This is maybe a coming Peculiar Mod. We're just testing it out in real life. - [Rebecca] It's true. We'll take our inspiration from discount hat stores. But, yeah, so Peculiars are your fave? - Yeah, I'm like a pack rat, attracted to shiny new things. How bout you? What's your good power build? - Right now my favorite mod is the-- - [Steve] You going for the reach or what's the? - It's actually an Augment Mod. So Warframe's have their base powers and we started adding Augments which allow you to tweak a given power. And I've always loved Nyx's Assimilate Augment. This is the one where Nyx goes into her sort of absorb power and but can actually walk around with Assimilate but you move at the speed of a really slow T-1000 that's just tshh-tshh but nothing can hurt you and you just look so cool doing it. - Primes, of course! Primes! - [Steve] Yes. - [Rebecca] But, oh that was a hesitant yes. That was a-- - I think the answer to that question is yes, there were originals. - Agree. - Agree with that answer. - Good question. - Two affirmative answers. - Actually, all these are good questions. - They are very good. - A big problem we've had in Warframe since launch was the inability for us to make large groups of NPCs-- - Yes. - -so that you knew kind of what you were fighting for. And that was a big part of my excitement for Plains of Eidolon update we did last year, was to finally show non-combatant members of the society in Warframe. So this year when we bring out our expansion on Venus, we intend to show more of the cultures in Warframe. We have a lot of diverse cultures planned, and we'll be finally implementing a second one. So in my mind they are scattered, kind of like a Titan AE, scattered in junkyards and small little forgotten colonies and hidden recesses. [Rebecca exhales sharply] - That's a very good question, and I think the answer has to do with the subatomic particulate suspended in that air. - Yes. - Right? If you think about the way infestation affects all biologically-orientated organisms, air is probably simplifying too much. - Exactly. You clearly don't understand survival missions to ask such a question. [both chuckling] - Well, we [laughs]. Is this an M-rated [laughs]? No, I can't make it, I can't make a D joke. But anyway, we find that, actually I don't-- - [Steve] We gotta bring back the D into Primes? - I think we're gonna have to bring the D back to primes. Typically, the forma process is one that players should get familiar with if they want that polarity. - That's right. - They can add it. Whether it's there by default or not is in no way an inhibiting factor to receiving a D polarity, 'cause you can add them. - [whistles] Ouch. - When it comes to Corrosive Projection, we regularly run stats on it between players and platforms themselves. And it's actually not-- - The most used. - It's not the most used, foremostly. Relative to platforms, I don't know offhand but it certainly is the linchpin in a lot of conversations about auras is Corrosive Projection, so we study it rather closely. - Hmm, peer-to-peer versus hosted. - It's a good technical question this one, isn't it? That was a decision that was important for Warframe early on because if you know the history of Warframe the company was in jeopardy and we needed to make a game quickly. And of course that also implies cheaply, and so it was much more feasible for us in terms of networking to host centrally database and matchmaking and chat but not to host the high internet traffic, high bandwidth aspects which would be central servers. Since then, we've been sort of picking away at potentially letting Tenno themselves host their own PVP servers. - Yes. It's totally functional. - So we've been kinda working on that code somewhat. We've also radically improved our peer-to-peer traversal stuff. - Yes. - So, for example, in a lot of peer-to-peer games if you can't firewall punch to talk to each other, then you're outta luck. And for us what we do is we have a turn server which will echo the packets and kind of solve that problem for you. The vast majority of console games used to work that way for their matchmaking and their networking. Is it something we might change in the future? Perhaps. - Yeah, that's-- - Knock on wood. - Yeah. - Warframe is still alive, and so sometimes we dip our toe into that. - Even though five years ago Warframe choices were rooted in a desperation that we don't have as much today, when we do explore server costs, it's not something that you can just do, A, quickly, and B, you have to be very strategic in how you would set that up, especially for the volume of traffic we get in our game. - Right, right, right. But it's a very good question and it is something that continues to be on our minds here. - Yes. - We didn't come up with Clem. - The fans came up with Clem. - The fans came up with Clem, and our favorite fan theory about Clem is that Clem exists at all. Because he was theorized by the fans. - Right. - I believe it was data-- - [Steve] Didn't we give him a fort? - [Rebecca] We did! He has a fort in Iron Wake. - He has a fort in Iron Wake, if you wanna go and take selfies with him. - Yeah. - He's there. - [Rebecca] And you can also use a spectre of Clem to harken back to the spectre question. - That's right. - So there you go. - That's right. Clem is, every now and then, we will take something from our generous community that is a bit of an inside joke and we will enshrine it within the game. - Correct. - We don't do it a lot. - Nope. Tasteful. - Every now and then we have to do it for the fans. - Indeed. - The first TennoCon? Second TennoCon? The upcoming TennoCon? - [Steve] Are they talking about in-game events? - [Rebecca] Let's answer both. You take the in-game and I'll take the-- - [Steve] Well, the TennoCon last year was mind blowing when we revealed our kind of open world expansion, Plains of Eidolon, to the world. That was a feel good moment, despite the fact our test-demo before it crashed a lot. - The same day it crashed. That's why you guys yelled, "Don't die, Rebecca!" 'Cause if I die, it would have caused a crash. It is all a blur but one of them that led me to learn the most about not only the game and the community was one that actually was hacked. It was The Gradivus Dilemma and a player had found out how to inject score changes to their performance. 'Cause you picked Grineer or Corpus, essentially. - [Steve] Yep. - [Rebecca] And we told players the reason it's this is 'cause players hacked it, we have to stop it, and the players thought we were lying 'cause we wanted to control the event outcome. And I think to this day a lot of people that we still weren't being serious that a player manipulated the results. And obviously that was four years ago, I think? So we've come a long way. - It's almost like you're inviting people to hack future events with this. Eyes of Blight was one? - Oh, that was a good one. - Yep, yep. - Yep. But yeah, The Gradivus Dilemma actually had a lot of drama. It was probably the most, it was a long time ago so not all the players have played it but it was-- - We gotta bring those back! - I agree. We always say that, though. - We always say that. - Well-- - I think we've kind of taken a bit of a language smorgasbord. - [Steve] We have and I think when we're looking for naming, we're trying to distance ourself from other games or other Sci-Fi cliches so rather than trying to borrow heavily from James Cameron or George Lucas-- - [Rebecca] Or Arthur C. Clarke. - Or Arthur C. Clarke, we tried to look for other cultures, other languages, other mythologies than the ones that we're familiar with. So even Fomorian is from Gaelic, which I wasn't very familiar with. Some of the sentient terminology and inspiration comes from Mayan mythology. So mostly it's just an effort at least, from my perspective, to differentiate Warframe's Sci-Fi. Give it a unique flavor. It's not because Avatar: The Last Airbender is my favorite thing in the whole world. - [chuckles] It's not. Yes, it is. - Five years, six years into this rhythm now because-- - Is that an employee question? - Yes! [Steve laughs] - It is, it is a challenge. - It is very hard. - It certainly, I think, would be in my top 10 kind of ongoing issues with Warframe, which is how to keep those that make it creatively engaged and invested in it's outcome. - We have been doing it for six years now. - The one way that we do it, which players can, long-term players will know, is we take lots of risks with the game and do crazy, wacky things and sometimes they don't pan out. Lunaro was very exciting to work on, but wasn't as successful with the audience as we had hoped. But as a counterpoint, Plains of Eidolon was really successful with the audience and really helped get a lot of attention for Warframe, and it was a very different kind of challenge for the people that created it. So that's kind of how we do it, is if you're challenging your people and getting them creatively excited then you're accomplishing your goal, which is to surprise and delight the people on the other end. - I think every question we received has come from a person who really clearly knows Warframe. - And is deeply invested and has probably been playing it for a long, long time. - And we love that and we love you guys and-- - We appreciate that. - Warframe is sort of the best [chuckles]! So best part of, I don't know, it'll make sense. - Warframe is the best. That's the-- - Warframe is the best! - Warframe is the best. - That's not what I meant to say. I meant to say you make Warframe the best. You do. - Oh, that's touching. - Not you. You. Tsss. [dramatic music]