How this Canadian developer is following up one of the most popular multiplayer games ever

What do you do after releasing one of the most popular multiplayer games of all time?

That’s the situation that London, Ont.’s Digital Extremes (DE) finds itself in with Soulframe, its first original gaming property since 2013’s sci-fi multiplayer action-RPG/shooter Warframe. Over 12 years, Warframe has amassed around 80 million players worldwide and consistently ranks among Steam’s top 20 most-played list. So passionate is the fanbase, in fact, that DE has managed to entice thousands of people from around the world to its hometown for the Warframe-focused TennoCon event for nearly 10 years now.

As a result, there’s a lot of attention being paid to Soulframe, a free-to-play fantasy action-RPG. Set in the magical world of Alca, the game puts you in the shoes of a banished Envoy who must team up with the Omen Beasts to fight back against a corrupted kingdom. That certainly sounds promising and pretty different from the futuristic sci-fi ninjas of Warframe. But after speaking with DE, it turns out that there’s much more to Soulframe than meets the eye.

Taking it slow — with the community

What perhaps stands out the most about Soulframe so far is that DE has taken a decidedly measured approach with respect to its development and marketing cycle. Ever since Soulframe was unveiled at TennoCon in July 2022, DE has repeatedly made clear that the game is in the early stages. But rather than just go dark, as is often common in the gaming space for long-gestating titles, the Canadian developer has been actively involving the community through regular updates and, for the past year and a bit, closed “Preludes” testing among small groups of fans.

“It’d be very easy to start Soulframe and have what we’re doing in Preludes being this really secretive thing where we’re only letting a few people see it, and we’re going to work on it for five, six years, and then release it with a big bang,” says DE president Sheldon Carter. “And we learned from Warframe that building a game and building something like this goes better when you’re working with a community right away […] The idea of getting that feedback early from the community, and building with the community, and being really respectful of the amount of time and investment that they’re giving you, even when they haven’t paid you anything — those are the types of things that we’re taking forward.”

“We knew we had to foster a community. We had to kind of plant the seed of our community with the game and have these two things grow together,” says Soulframe creative director Geoff Crookes of the decision to slowly build out the game alongside Warframe. “DE is bigger now than it was when we launched Warframe, so we knew we couldn’t get away with going, ‘Here’s a janky beta for everyone to play.’ We knew we couldn’t do that, so we really had to think about, ‘What’s a way to make sure the community has a voice and a relationship with us as this game grows and grows along with us?’”

Crookes admits that Preludes testing, which is essentially a “very early alpha,” has involved people “way earlier than anyone would have expected.” But similar to how DE continued to win people over to Warframe after debuting to an initially small audience, the Soulframe team wants to foster transparency and an open dialogue with fans throughout development.

“It’s listening to the community and listening to the things that they’re enjoying and not enjoying about the game,” says Soulframe lead designer Scott McGregor. “It speaks to why we did Preludes early: to build a game we want to build, but also what they want to play. So, taking their feedback into account and making sure it is applied to the game is a really big thing — the retention step for a live service game is big.”

The team notes that it can draw from everything that was successful with Warframe, especially with respect to managing community and content pipelines, while also improving on elements that maybe weren’t as good.

“Making sure that we don’t repeat some of the mistakes that we’ve made in Warframe as well… Warframe is a complicated game, and we’re actively trying to give Soulframe a simpler approach to allow players into that world a little easier on the mechanics side of the game, so that they don’t feel like they’re overwhelmed by the gameplay side,” says McGregor. “Narratively, we are kind of stringing them along as well, and I really love that we’re doing exploration as such a big pillar of the game. It allows the players to get into the game and into the parts that they are enjoying. So as they explore the world, they are making their own path through it.”

Crookes admits that DE actually “overthought” just how much to ease players in. Knowing that Warframe‘s size can be daunting, he says the team initially envisioned a two- to three-hour introductory quest that would really “handhold” players. However, Preludes allowed them to realize that they went “way too far” and that players valued having a “sense of discovery” in the world.  “It’s the idea of this progressive storytelling that we’re making sure that a new player does have a bit more of a path through that stuff that isn’t so gated the way Warframe just moves so fast,” he says. “It’s a challenge, and I think we were insecure about that at the start, but then realized that there’s some potential to still letting people explore and discover.”

Another key differentiator between DE’s two games is that the team has deliberately made Soulframe‘s gameplay loop slower and more methodical than the frenetic action of Warframe. 

“Warframe is one against hundreds. It started out very one versus a dozen, and over the years, it’s grown to you [being able to] easily room clear and kill AI very quickly. So the acting that the AI had to do when the player engaged with them was very light, because their time of life was very, very short,” says McGregor. “But with Soulframe, because it is a slower, more methodical game, that one-on-one combat could end up being a minute or so, so the level of acting and the level of engagement and level of reaction and making sure that everything feels like it’s connected and grounded is really, really high. So that’s been a real focus — combat balancing and feel.”

For the team, this has meant rethinking the approach to character abilities — not just to fit within the fantasy aesthetic, but also to ensure they feel appropriate for smaller groups of enemies.

“When I first started, because I did a lot of the power development for Warframe, a lot of the values in my head are like, ‘Okay, when you do an AoE [area of effect], it’s roughly this big, and when you do this, it’s roughly this big.’ So when I started applying that stuff to Soulframe, it was like, ‘Whoa, these are like nukes!” McGregor says with a laugh. “So it’s bringing it down, but it’s still making them useful and powerful in those smaller moments. It’s been a struggle, and it’s been something we’ve been continually working on. And I think with the Preludes feedback and seeing how players are engaging with the game, we’re going to keep iterating on those things.”

How Mononoke, The NeverEnding Story and Canadiana have inspired Alca

Outside of gameplay, the Preludes approach also provides quite a few narrative opportunities.

“As Soulframe‘s identity is being built, the pieces fall into place, lore-wise — it’s more of an additive thing,” says narrative designer Sydney Hills. “Now that the Envoy can Soul Steal [a powerful finisher introduced last year], what does that mean about the world, and what does that mean about the magic system that we’re going to build off of that?” In other instances, she says the team can start teeing up threads to pay off down the line. “When I’m writing location lore or weapon descriptions, sometimes I’ll just throw in, ‘Okay, now the land of Orel exists, and it’s where Verminia [a friendly French witch NPC] is from, and there’s a lot of witches there,’ and just kind of planting seeds, and hopefully — eventually — we will be able to remember and build on them.”

Crookes says that sort of world-building is a great asset at this stage of development as it helps inform design. “There’s times of artifact collecting, or even just looking at a design spec for an enemy, and as you build on that and write it, you’ll throw out a new behaviour or a new location idea to find the stuff in,” he says. “So it’s totally a plus — that collaborative interaction between the design process of how we just go, we make, and we let everyone have a voice.”

Something that’s immediately apparent about the world of Soulframe is that it strikes a fine balance between natural beauty and whimsy (Verminia, for instance, is endearingly playful) and darker elements surrounding environmental corruption and decay. According to Hills, this was a conscious choice because of how it feeds into the central theme of “redemption.”

“You have to have both the image of what once was or what could be, or this fantastical version of this really beautiful, pastoral, medieval style world that you know is right there waiting for you, but it is actively getting interrupted and getting colonized by these polluting aliens,” she says. “And that’s where the darkness has to come in. There has to be this big threat, and this pit that so many loved characters are gonna fall into.”

A great example of this came during a 30-minute Soulframe demo shown at TennoCon. In it, we see the Envoy learning about what happened to a kindly bear spirit named Bromius who became corrupted, culminating in a tense boss fight against a three-headed, beastly version of him. Once you deal enough damage, you control your Poppet — a flying rat gifted to you by Verminia — to ostensibly perform a makeshift colonoscopy on Bromius and shoot out of his rear with the seed that was infecting him. It’s a bunch of tones, to be sure, but it culminates in a surprisingly touching scene of Bromius returning to his senses and rejoicing in the restoration of the surrounding nature, with a soulful vocal piece playing in the background.

“Bromius is a good guy — objectively, he’s a nice, big old bear!” says Hills. “But people are gonna stumble, and people are being corrupted. So you have to have those two extremes in order to make that redemption feel really powerful and meaningful.” Adds Crookes: “When we go dark, we have to make sure that we pay that off with the contrasting light.”

DE has also been turning to some seminal environmentalist works for inspiration, specifically citing Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke film and developer Team Ico’s games, which include Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. “I think those are probably still some of the pinnacle of immersive storytelling,” says Crookes of Team Ico’s works.

Hills, meanwhile, says the narrative has been inspired by many mythology-heavy works, with Crookes quipping that he’s had her watching “a lot of old man stuff” for reference. “I’ve watched Legend, I’ve watched Willow. I’ve already seen The NeverEnding Story — that’s a banger. The Last Unicorn…” says Hills. “They’re really good! They’re such a specific brand of fantasy that has built-in nostalgia.”

 

Crookes confesses that this is all likely due to him and DE CEO Steve Sinclair “unintentionally mining” from their childhood. “We’re kind of making it reality and forcing all these kids to retread what inspired us,” he says with a laugh. But Hills also sees that as an asset.

“It’s nice, because I think a lot of more modern media, more modern fantasy, is more self-reflexive. There’s more irony built-in, because you know that you’re building off of so much history of fantasy,” she says. “Those earlier ones are more fairy tale-like. There’s no ‘nudge, nudge, wink, wink.’ It’s just, ‘Enjoy it — just be a part of it!’”

Another key influence actually comes from the real world: the Southwestern Ontario wilderness surrounding DE itself. After all, London is known as the “Forest City” due to the abundance of trees and other greenery surrounding it. “We originally went for a ‘romantic, European, British Isles kind of setting as the initial launching point. Then, as it came out, I think our Canadian genes just ‘infected’ it. Honestly, the beaver came in quick, and we’re like, ‘Okay, there it is.’ I do love it,” says Crookes with a laugh.

“Then we have our level art team — you kind of use your own backyard, right? They’ll go on hikes, they’ll go to our national parks, and then they upload, ‘Check out all these photos I just took!’ And the next thing you know, you’re seeing that stuff in-game. So it’s pretty great.” Notably, the Soulframe team even shared a video from London’s Kains Woods to commemorate the kick-off of development.

During the demo, the Envoy can also be seen tracking Bromius through tree sap. As I watched this, I wondered if this was a nod to maple syrup, and sure enough, Hills confirmed as much. “I was out on a hike with my family, and my little brother was pulling a tree branch off and licking the sap — because I dared him to, obviously,” she says, laughing. “I was like, ‘Hang on, that could be something!’”

For Crookes, all of that also speaks to DE’s ever-growing role in the massive Canadian gaming space, especially in a city like London that’s outside of more widely known development hubs.

“A lot of creative people, talented people, in Canada feel like they have to leave. And DE has given a lot of people the opportunity to come back. So I think it’s pretty rad that we have very experienced people who got to cut their teeth in the world and then come back home and collaborate with us and then build the project,” he says. “I think it’s nice when you see people from the local area, or even just Ontario, Southern Ontario, and beyond — it’s cool that there’s an opportunity now that they can come back and settle down and build Canadian talent.”

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Soulframe is currently in development for PC. You can register to join Preludes on the game’s official website, with DE inviting select people every week. For more on DE and Warframe, check out our big TennoCon 10th anniversary feature.

Header image credit: Digital Extremes