Warframe's dev team talks about pushing beyond the game's original limits, and not getting caught in dev crunch

Warframe has been going for 7 years now, and the team at Digital Extremes has not only been adding new content, but expanding the idea of what Warframe is. In an interview with Eurogamer, Digital Extremes chief operating officer Sheldon Carter talks about the growing pains of pushing Warframe beyond its original plan.

The hardest thing about this is we have a team who - for seven years - has made a third-person, over-the-shoulder action game, and now we're making a space game. It's very very different, and it's hard to wrap your head around how that game is going to work like Warframe. For our staff who work so hard on this stuff, it's really a challenge to get everyone on board with the same creative vision for it - so Steve [Sinclair, director] has done an amazing job of communicating that, and that's why things like TennoCon are so good, because they're a forcing function for us to be like 'no we need to solve this', we need to make sure everybody understands what they're doing towards this goal. I'd say that was the biggest challenge, just shifting. So much of the gameplay inside Empyrean is still about four players using Warframe powers and using your Warframe, because you're going into these ships that are populated before you steal them, or you're down on the surface doing the core Warframe loop. But making sure that the space combat loop feels good, that is the hardest part.

How does the team take on this Herculean effort without crunching the team beyond the belief? Slow and steady wins the race, says Carter.

Our perspective is we're very blessed to have a situation where we only have one immovable date every year, and that's TennoCon, so we just want to make sure we have something that we can deliver for our fans so we know where we're going with the game. Every other day other than that is fluid. Warframe is a game that's been around for seven years and the reason why we've been around for so long is that our development team - generally speaking - take the idea that it's a marathon, not a sprint. If we sprint, it's not going to work, it's not even a comment on crunch or the industry, it's literally for our business model to work, we have to treat it like a marathon. If we did treat it like a sprint, we'd be dead. If we start losing our key developers because it's too hard to work on this game, we wouldn't.