Party Of A Lifetime - Tennocon 2024 Interview With Rebb Ford And Megan Everett

Tennocon 2024, Warframe’s annual convention, has come and gone, and after two days of activity, it has left fans cheering with anticipation for the game’s next major story update, Warframe: 1999, which will introduce a new cast of characters called Protoframes and add a romance system.

At the center of this massive event were the game’s creative director Rebecca Ford and its community director Megan Everett. We sat down with them to talk about their journey at Digital Extremes, Warframe, and all things 1999.

After working on the game for more than a decade, Ford and Everett are two of Warframe’s most popular faces. But this wasn’t always the case. “I started as an intern in 2011 when I was in my third year of studies,” Ford says, “and then I stayed on ever since, so I continued my internship, graduated, and then came on full time.”

“In 2013, Warframe was taking off, and Rebecca was the one and only person in community and support. She needed some help, so she reached out to me. I still have the Facebook message that she sent me about applying to DE, which I cherish greatly, and I was like, ‘Yes, absolutely, let's start this party,’’’ Everett says.

After so much hard work to foster the growth of the Warframe community, the result is one of the most passionate, yet friendly and welcoming, player bases in all gaming. But with an ever-growing audience playing a game that doesn’t seem likely to stop anytime soon, what compels them to keep putting in 110% at work?

“I think that, other than Warframe being something that's ours as a team, it is the team itself, and there's so much joyful collaboration with people that understand the pros and cons of working on your own thing,” Ford explains. “It's not always a perfect scenario, there are disagreements and deadlines, but ultimately I don't think any of us take for granted that this is an entirely self-contained IP situation, where we are only beholding to the community. That for me is a very important part of job satisfaction, working in that environment.”

“What's very special about DE is that the team is just really willing to do anything, pivoting with crazy ideas and going the whole nine yards with them; people stick around not only for the love of the game but also the love for the company,” Everett adds. “Whether they’re remote or in the studio, everyone here is extremely well taken care of and it shows with the work that we're able to do. These Tennocon days, the studio fills up even more with people who come to work in the event, and there’s such a palpable energy that shows as a true testament to how DE is run as a company and how much the employees mean.”

This same team has been very transparent about how Warframe’s development has gone in the past; it is known that the conceptual emotions in “The Duviri Paradox” update matched the team's various emotions behind the scenes, and years ago the “Lift Together” motto of the Fortuna chapter echoed their efforts at that time. But were those situations a coincidence, or is every release influenced (at least a bit) by the dev team's state of mind?

“I think it's really hard to separate the people from the themes, at least at a first-pass level, in terms of what the themes are of the story, who the characters are, and what the objectives are; I know for sure Duviri was layered with emotions such as anger, sadness, and happiness. I would say we try to compartmentalize so the game can speak for itself, but I think that there's a very personal layer in 1999,” Ford says. “I think nostalgia is a huge part of 1999. What does the pre-dot com world look like in our memories? I was a nine-year-old girl with unmonitored access to the internet, so for me, it was getting viruses on the computer, and learning as much about The Backstreet Boys as I could. Then for someone like Steve [Sinclair, CEO of Digital Extremes], he got hired at DE that year, and then some folks in the community team weren't even born yet, so we’re sort of a waterfall of what nostalgia means to us and you can see that in a lot of 1999.”

In the upcoming chapter, players will travel back in time to find the Orokin scientist Albrecht Entrati while fighting through the last night of 1999. With a whole new location set millennia in the past, and showcasing fast-paced action sequences, this major update seems to be the most ambitious chapter in Warframe to date.

“It is our biggest, but also it isn't, because it's not a new open-world map update like we did before. We’re being economical while also being ambitious, so it has the most robust Syndicate ever, the most character art we’ve ever put in an update, the new vehicles, the romance system, mission gameplay, bosses, railjack gameplay, it’s all connected,” explains Ford. “We have a very confident amount of things that we think make developing it not so scary because all the pieces are connected, as opposed to separate ideas that make up the update. Early in January this year we put our documentation together to list what exactly we want 1999 to be; we think we are within our capabilities to not make it too hard on the team, but we will adjust as necessary”.

This new update also introduces the Atomicycle, a motorcycle that players will use to move through the streets of Hollvania, the newest location. However, these are purely cosmetic vehicles, which marks the second time a new vehicle has not shown modular mechanics like the Archwings or K-Drives. “I think it is a design philosophy shift, and with no disrespect to anybody at all, this is just a preference,” says Ford. “I like to focus on a unified gameplay for everyone, and then you can express yourself with how they look, as opposed to focusing on its power. But that doesn't mean it's never gonna happen again, because there are some already open threads for what we might want players to customize more deeply in the future.”

A new whole cast of characters is also introduced in 1999; the protagonist is Arthur Nightingale, one of the members of Hex, a group of humans from 1999 that have been infected with a Helminth serum, turning them into proto-warframes. After asking them what their favorite members of Hex were, Everett quickly answers: “I have two at the top, but currently I love Quincy; he's fresh, he's got an attitude, and I love everything about him, from head to toe.” Ford adds: “Eleanor; there’s a couple of secrets with her, you don’t know how deep the infestation goes with her, so you’ll have to wait and see! We do intend to release more Protoframes, so if everything goes according to plan you will see more in the future”.

With such a huge update coming up, and after all these years of both working together in a game they also play, my closing thoughts inevitably went to a question that echoed the first one. After eleven years, what’s the aspect of Warframe they enjoy the most? “Somehow it's 1999 right now for me,” says Ford. “I feel like I can't rest until we ship 1999 because I want to play it so badly, so it's this weird problem where I want to be playing but I also need to finish making it.”

“When I think about Warframe when I first started back in 2013, I don't know why but my mind always goes to when Geoff [Crookes, Soulframe creative director] said there would never be dancing in Warframe, and now our game is just in a completely different direction,” Everett explains laughing. “I think one of the core reasons why eleven years later this free-to-play game is still thriving and existing is because everyone on the team is gung-ho for anything. We're experimenting and willing to go in whatever direction we need to go, and as long as players want more we’ll be here until we're in the dirt making Warframe. If they want it, we'll make it, and I think that's really special”.