Warframe's Upcoming Expansion Adds Romances After Getting the Final Push From Baldur's Gate 3

Warframe's next major expansion – Warframe: 1999 – had its moment in the spotlight at TennoCon recently with a new trailer and gameplay demo, announcing that 1999 would launch on all platforms winter of 2024. It's taken eleven years for it to happen, but Warframe is finally introducing a romance system to the game with the 1999, in which players can potentially end the new storyline with a New Year's kiss from any of the Hex, a new syndicate introduced, through a minigame – with one of the options including Arthur, who is voiced by Ben Starr. 

Per a recent interview with GamesRadar, Warframe creative director Rebecca Ford has wanted to implement the romance system for a while, but "there was never an appropriate scenario to do it." After a long wait for a romance system to be added to the game, what ultimately gave the developers at Digital Extremes the final push to go for it was the success of Baldur's Gate 3, and more specifically the popularity and reception toward the romance systems in Larian Studios' 2023 critical darling:

"I think two things really gave us the courage to proceed. Of course, the success of Baldur's Gate and their romance system was like, 'okay, like, people do want this fantasy,'" Ford notes in the interview. "It does help, there's no doubt, but we did have, I should say, ambitions of it, that fit the Warframe architecture, on and off ... Baldur's Gate was the push over the cliff for sure, and I'm grateful for that, that was one of the best gaming experiences for me, ever."

Baldur's Gate 3 will undoubtedly influence many games' romance systems in the future – upon the Dungeons & Dragons RPGs' release in 2023 the internet was in a frenzy for its characters – both those who are romanceable and those who are not. There was a time when not a single social media app was unfamiliar with two characters in particular – Astarion and Shadowheart. Not only did the characters take gamers into a chokehold, the unraveling of Astarion's storyline including the evolution of it while being romanced by the player character was consistently recognized for its writing and beautiful, gripping performance as the vampire Spawn. 

Outside of that...let's be honest, we've all seen or heard about the bear scene. To say Baldur's Gate 3 has some memorable romance scenes would be an understatement – it makes sense to already see the impact of Larian's struck gold spreading throughout the industry.