- [Man] Sorry, I was trying to kill your cat.

- We prefer not to kill our cats. We're not gonna say whether cats or dogs are better, we're not gonna answer that, we're not going there. [laughter]

- Hi, I'm Mark Ollivierre, I'm an Assistant Producer at Digital Extremes, and I am Adam Creighton, I'm the Studio General Manager and Director of Development for Panic Button.

- We're really excited to talk to Ars Technica about Warframe on the Nintendo Switch, coming November 20th.

- So excited, so excited.

- So Warframe's been released on PC first, PS4, Xbox, Warframe has a pretty streamlined new player experience, at least for the first couple hours, once you're in the tutorial, you get to choose between three different frames, three starter frames, so Excalibur, Mag, and Volt, and that's your kind of initial jumping off point, there's 37 frames to collect after that, I think Excalibur is usually the one people kind of gravitate towards the most, he's kind of the poster boy of Warframe, I prefer Excalibur myself, so. And then once you do that, you're kind of released out into the wild of Warframe, where you get to experience the five years of content that we've had, on the Switch, at your own kind of pace.

- I think the shooter and the action landscape on Nintendo Switch is growing quite a bit, it's really exciting, when you look at titles like Warframe, which are its own kind of experience, yeah, you can play it as a shooter, you can play it as stealth, it's really an action, triple-A, RPG kind of experience.

- Not confined to one specific genre, so we all love all the other shooters on the other platforms, but we're pretty unique in and of ourselves, so it'll really depend on what players are looking for from the game itself. If you're kind of into customization, and fashion, you'll be able to jump in and customize your syandana, your art style, your color pickers, you can do all that kind of stuff, if you're more into just hack and slash, you can definitely play the game like that as well.

- And I think there's been a lot of stuff that Nintendo has done on the hardware for their catalog that are broadening the audience for that platform quite a bit.

- [Mark] Let's do this, so we're gonna jump into a Corpus gas city match right now, we're the Tenno here, those four ships flying in, and we're about to conduct a raid on this facility, our mission is to go in there and exterminate a specific amount of Corpus agents, and then get out of there as quickly as possible.

- [Adam] Mark likes to run ahead and kill everyone, so just follow the trail of dead bodies. Bringing Warframe over to the Nintendo Switch platform has been a very good experience. This is five years of content, so there's a lot of challenge in taking all of that content, it's going to be the first time that those players get to experience it on this new hardware. We've been able to leverage all of the work that they've done, whether it's the infrastructure, the five years of content, or what they've built in for latency tolerance and those co-op mechanics, and being able to jump in and out of gameplay, we wanted to make sure that we had great battery life, that we had great performance, so those kind of things, I think people sometimes don't think about as far as bringing a title over to a hybrid device that is made for displaying things on television and in handheld mode.

- [Mark] So how are you liking the controls on the Switch version?

- [Man] Oh, it feels really smooth. Like, someone firing this up that's been playing on the PC for years, not making an adjustment at all.

- [Mark] It's the entire five years of content on the Switch, so there's nothing different other than the adjustments to make it run on the actual hardware, so nothing's been adulterated or altered in any capacity. Panic Button was able to actually make all of the inputs make sense, so the right bumper is your ability button, and then those, your actual powers are then the face buttons in conjunction with that, so it all makes sense, and plays really fluidly. In Digital Extremes, we develop and iterate on things pretty quickly, so we don't always have the luxury of going back and looking at, kind of reviewing things that we've done and how we can do it better, so having Panic Button kind of step through the code as a whole, and his team is incredible, the guys over there are absolute wizards, and so they were able to actually implement a couple of improvements to a number of different systems, and we've been able to back-integrate that into PC, PS4, and Xbox for the original game. So an example of some of the backend improvements that we've kind of taken back into the full game was, I think it was texture compression.

- [Adam] Yeah, I believe so, yeah.

- [Mark] So at least one of the programmers on the port, she found something that we were doing on our backend that could be improved upon, and so she implemented that on the Switch side, Steve, our creative director, saw it, and was incredibly impressed by it, and so he went to Twitter and blasted about how, I think it improved rates by almost one millisecond, so it was pretty significant, yeah.

- [Adam] We're not about Warframe just on Nintendo Switch, we are about, how do we make the game better for our partners, and so when we see opportunities, we raise it our teams, sometimes you just have fresh eyes, looking at the code or at assets, and we have suggestions, and sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, sometimes they benefit one platform, sometimes they benefit all platforms, it's a very healthy, fun collaborative development process for this game, which has been fantastic.

- So if you're a PC player, you'll actually have the opportunity to migrate your PC account to the Switch on day one, so you can kind of have all the same content that you had on your PC moved over, so you don't have to start again fresh, so we talk about cross-play all the time at the studio, and we love the fact that other titles are kind of paving the way to making that more of an accepted thing, we're always adding features and content, so it's not to say it's completely off the table, it's just, at launch we won't have it.

- For us at Panic Button, and with Digital Extremes, we started this, we want it to be a good gameplay experience. So resolution and framerate factor into that, we've got the game right now, it's a very solid 30 frames, and we do a lot of clever things with dynamic resolution, and the gameplay mechanics, and input, and all of that kind of thing, I don't know that 60 makes the game necessarily better on the hardware, quite honestly, for us it's a, what makes the gameplay better? We're putting a game on hardware that you get to take anywhere and play anywhere, we want to make sure that people get to play, and they get to play for a good long play session, so we test battery life throughout development. And for this title, we're in that probably, I guess, unofficially, around that three hour timeframe for playtime, and that's a healthy playtime on this platform, we're excited about that.

- In terms of connectivity, so the Switch is gonna benefit from a lot of the backend infrastructure that the PC has, because we're a globally released game, we do have players in regions where they don't necessarily have the strongest network connections, so all of that kind of, allowances that we built in for the PC are being carried over right to the Switch to allow for that kind of same situations where you might drop out, and lose connection, but you can jump right back in as soon as you're restored.

- [Adam] In general, it's like the one game where not knowing what you're doing doesn't get you a lot of grief from other players.

- [Mark] Yeah, community's really, like, really understanding of the learning curve and onboarding process for new players, so a lot of the times, if you're new, and you say you're new, they'll actually go out of their way to help you out with, you know, showing you the ropes, kind of explain the more obscure systems to you, gifting you some items that you may need to help. Warframe etiquette, you gotta wait for the elevator. Thankfully, our community is incredibly supportive of new players, so that's the first place they should go, they can open up the chat message, say "Hey, I'm a new player, I'm looking for help "with x, y, or z," and they're bound to have a bunch of people come to say, "Hey, well, I can help you through this mission, "I can provide you with this resource, "I can kind of describe this, "maybe somewhat more obscure system,"

- People will say, "Hey, I'm so and so, I'm jumping in "to help new players, where do you need help?" So people don't have to leave the game to get that kind of help, it's a very positive community, compared to a lot of online communities, and I really appreciate and enjoy that about the title, another unique thing about the title. [quick techno music]