Warframe writing team on story growth and evolution – an interview with Kat Kingsley and Adrian Bott

If you go onto YouTube and search for videos about Warframe’s story, lore, and themes, you will find an array of videos under a variety of topics. There are nine hour-long breakdowns of the overall story, or a Jungian analysis of a specific quest. There are dissections of the interpersonal relationships of specific characters, and how they will affect the game over time, or valiant efforts to map how all seven of the supposed main story archetypes weave throughout the game.

Over nearly twelve years, Warframe has offered players a lot. It has never been afraid to get deep, or esoteric, or, recently, romantic. It has never been afraid to challenge us, thematically, with things that might not usually fall into the narrative arcs of your typical free-to-play fare.

But Warframe, it has to be said, has never been typical free-to-play fare.

For the last few updates, Warframe has explored the recently introduced Hex: Protoframes that allow the developers and community to reimagine the long-established Warframes as more than just walking war crimes. These are people, plucked from the lives they were living and inflicted with horrors because an egotist from the future needed a plan B. They have fears, hopes, and dreams. You can get to know them via the incredible KIM conversation system that contains hundreds of thousands of words worth of writing. You can, if you are lucky, find a little happiness for the Drifter, our Voidspun offshoot. The us that never was, and ever will be. 

Warframe has done a lot in the years it has been around, but there is so much more for it to explore. I sat down with Warframe’s Principal Writer, Kat Kingsley, and Lead Writer, Adrian Bott, to find out what it’s like to write for Warframe, a game that is constantly changing and always imagining its own future.

The first, and perhaps most interesting aspect, is just how much writing there really is, and how it all needs to be approached differently. “It depends, I think, on what exactly we are writing,” says Kingsley, when I asked what a day of writing Warframe actually looks like. “If you’re talking about quests, if you’re talking about vendor scripts, if you’re talking about the relationship system…the KIM conversations is a very different beast than literally everything else, if you are just starting to sort of flesh out a character and you’re doing the casting scripts. The sort of flavor text stuff, all of that has a very distinct and unique process.”

Kingsley’s story feels like it was written by an author who was especially interested in giving you a protagonist who is easy to root for. Former Chief of Staff at Volition, Kingleys has always written, specialising in romance novels. She loved the gaming industry, but really wanted writing to be her professional focus, and woke up one day to a message from Reb Ford, Creative Director of Warframe. The rest is history. Kingley came on to write and ended up masterminding the KIM system, one of the most interesting expansions of how stories are told in any live service game in years.

KIM is an incredibly high-quality addition to the game. The Kinemantik Instant Messenger allows you to engage in a slowly unfolding conversation with the Hex members, potentially leading to romance, but adding incredible depth to every character involved, even if it doesn’t even with a New Year’s Eve kiss. The risk of such a romance system is that, if you know the option is there with a character, it can feel cheap and contrived due to its inevitability. A few ticked boxes and suddenly you’re in a relationship. With KIM, the team managed to avoid falling into that trap.

“What’s really interesting is that Warframe’s Syndicate system already set us up for that,” says Kingsley. “When you’re writing a romance, I sort of use a metaphor of like you’re unwrapping an onion and everything is done in layers. So when you are interacting with a human being, they sort of construct a series of walls around getting to know them. There’s like the first person you meet, and then they trust you a little bit, and they let down a wall, and you see the next thing, and then they trust you a little bit more, and they let down a wall, and the Syndicate system naturally mirrors that. And so, as we were building out the sort of branching narrative system that became the relationship system. It was about sort of building a smooth gradient from the first series of conversations, if it feels choppy, that’s where it starts to feel jarring.”

Bott agrees, pointing to previous Syndicate systems as being solid foundations for the KIM system, but pointing out that ultimately, KIM was Kingsley’s creation. “I think that the ancestor to it was Fortuna. I think that was the first step, where we initially showed a process of increased trust and intimacy, ultimately building into the big revelation at Rank 5. Then with the Entrati family and Heart of Deimos, we expanded upon that, and we had the successive kind of resolution of the family conflict culminating with the player character being welcomed to the table. So with the KIM system, she’s very, very much Kat’s baby.” 

“Her task of creating KIM that really sort of took the the idea of journeying through an arc of discovery and increased intimacy, increased trust by, you know, also showing what the different characters were bonding over, their their common grievances, their common struggles, and putting that as the background to the personal agenda that you have with each of them, they’ve got plenty to talk about because of the situations they find themselves in and that I think really helped.” 

Starting with the original six Hex members, the one that many players seemed to latch onto the most was the hardest to talk to, be friends with, and ultimately romance, Eleanor. Eleanor’s mutations, a whip-like tongue, set her apart from the rest, both for the player and in the interpersonal relationships of the Hex. She was different, not as close to the human side of the line as they were, and perhaps a stark reminder of where they all might be headed if the Helminth strain used to infect them continued to alter their bodies.

Eleanor was at times a tough conversation, and when you were talking to her, the safest choices were sometimes the wrong ones, just like in real life. By avoiding the temptation to just make a gamey system, and instead developing something players would struggle with at points, the team embraced risk, and it paid off in a big way. 

“Adrian was actually the writer for Eleanor,” says Kingsley, “because I was like, ‘I’m not British enough to write Eleanor, I’m just not,’ and Adrian was like, ‘can I please, can I please, can I please?’ and so I was like, ‘yes, yes you can.’’ With six new characters being added to the game, all with substantial conversation options in the KIM system, the team would end up writing 166,000 words of dialogue. That’s a substantial volume of work, close to two hefty, full-length fantasy novels, according to Kingsley.

“I was like ‘I cannot write all six, so please take one.’ And so he was the sort of voice behind Eleanor, and I remember when we were writing them, I was like, we need to make sure that these conversations don’t feel safe, they need to feel real. I don’t want these to feel like we’re just moving you through them. They need to feel risky, and so every now and then Adrian would be like, ‘but, but,’ but I’d be like, ‘Nope! Let them fail. Let them fail. That’s what the reset system is for.” 

“Yeah, I mean, I did write Eleanor, but I had Kat and I had Rebecca constantly to refer to,” says Bott. “I wanted to make sure that the stuff that I wrote that spoke to Eleanor’s experience as, you know, a female Protoframe, actually rang true and felt emotionally authentic, but I found it immensely helpful to have Amelia Tyler’s voice in my head. I was actually hanging out with Amelia yesterday on Brighton Beach because she came down for the development conference and we got to meet up in person for the first time, which was bloody lovely, but I was saying to her that once I knew who Eleanor was, what she sounded like, that really, really helped to bring it to life in my head and then put her down on the page.”

“I wanted her to feel authentic, honest, real, and part of that involved her being increasingly, I think, upfront about her own warts and all presentation, because part of her sees herself as monstrous because of the Infestation, because of the tongue, because of the fangs, because of the dilemma, you know. She’s got that sort of self-conscious monstrosity to her, and she tackles that in a way that involves simultaneously kind of owning it with humor and grace and kind of almost wanting celebration of that side of herself, but at the same time, she feels very deeply that sense of potential ostracism. She is the scapegoat; she does feel like she’s carrying the blame for a lot of the Hex. There’s the whole sort of side story.” 

Bott brings his own serious pedigree to the writing in Warframe. With a career that spans back to the 80s, he has written just about every kind of project you could imagine, and is currently balancing Warframe duties with a position as Writer In Residence at the University of Exeter in England. He has written a multitude of books and has done significant work in the tabletop roleplaying space. 

With the KIM system a roaring success, the writing team’s eyes turned to the future, and the chance to shape the next several years of Warframe’s story, The Old Peace. After dancing around it for years, knowing only that Tau exists and the Sentients wish us harm, we finally get to learn more about both.

This puts Warframe in an interesting place. By exploring the events that precede the conflicts and acrimony we have encountered in Warframe so far, we, as players, are being pushed backward from tragedy into the calm before the storm. The time when there was a promise of something more, an Origin system that was not torn apart by war. However, whatever we experience in The Old Peace, whatever gentle calm, or subtle kindness, it’s destined to be destroyed. This brings its own challenge for the team.

“Blimey. It’s obviously not all out there yet, and there’s a lot that I cannot speak to, but you’re absolutely right. I mean, just speaking for my part in the writing, I think an image that I would mentally come back to is the game of football in the trenches in the First World War. That moment of, sort of, which is being referred to and, you know, feted very, very often, but yeah, that sort of hush, that moment, that sort of humanity coming through,” says Bott.

‘You’re showing how things could have gone differently, I think, I think what we need to do, and what we are trying to do, is give players the feeling that this is how it could have been, and so maybe this is a reason to have hope. You have to, I think, without being sort of heavy-handed about it, you have to tell how close we came, you know? I think that encouraging people and giving them the desire to speculate, to build narratives, and then ultimately what you have to deliver, it has to be what they knew was coming, but as you say, it can’t be what they expected, so, a lot of it is going to be preloading the emotional canons and giving them an awful lot to care about, to wish that things could have gone differently.” 

Kingsley advises that a lot of the true north for Warframe’s writing is still what Steve Sinclair, former Creative Director of the game and now CEO of Digital Extremes, spent years establishing with the team. “The sort of approach, and this always this guidance has come down from Steve, and it’s sort of the guiding light from the very beginning of Warframe, is like when you’re telling these big space epics, it’s so easy to just get lost in the explosion. ‘There goes Corpus ship number 74 filled with 1000 people!’ and in order to make sure that you’re maintaining the emotional weight to make sure that you’re personalizing it and making sure that you’re telling it from a really front and center emotional story.”

“That’s a lot of what we try to do with all of the quests that we write is, like, how do we connect this to a personal human story, even if we’re talking about these ridiculous Sentient characters and they’re off in the far flung lands, and this is some ‘question mark’ millennia in the future. How do we connect these two feelings? How do we make the players feel real feelings? And even if we know how the story is inevitably going to end, how do we make that matter to the player? And that’s the trick of writing these things. It’s like, yeah, we know where this is going. How do we make that count? How do we still kick you in the teeth?”

With The Old Peace, we’ll finally be learning more about the Sentients. Not just as a threat, but as a society, and as a culture. The Sentients, while not alien in the strictest sense (it’s complicated, trust me), are very much alien when it comes to the human experience. With them, the team had a new challenge. How do you write something so tremendously foreign to human understanding and still have it be comprehensible for players, and something that they can connect with?

Sometimes, according to Kingsley, the answer is just to give them a face.

“The decision to give Adis a face and the decision around that geometry is very poignant and on purpose. It is to make those characters approachable and more human, and to give them more feeling and more emotive capability. But then again, you have to look at Star Wars and BB-8. You can emote through a ball with a little antenna on top if you can just make the little beeps and whoops and whatever, cute enough!”

Where it gets fun is the questions that you can get players to ask with something as simple as how you have characters refer to themselves, something that the team was eager to explore with the Sentients.

“We’re also fortunate in that Steve has trodden where we are now going to some extent,” says Bott. “Certainly, where the Sentients are concerned, we’ve never really sort of unpacked it or elaborated upon it, but the Sentients are discovering, well, we’ve kind of portrayed them as discovering who they are and modeling their ideas of themselves in their society. It’s fascinating to me that in Ropalolyst, Natah says, ‘my father was a farmer, my mother a carpenter,’ and it doesn’t mean that literally, you know? Hunhow wasn’t out there with a pitchfork and Praghasa wasn’t out there with a lathe.”

“This is a human conceptualization, so the Sentients, for whatever reason, seem to have this tendency to sort of structure how they see themselves in human terms. Whether they want to or not, they have this sort of reflex to humanize themselves.”

“I’d love to find out more about that in a story exploration sense as to whether they are adopting labels that this sort of overlord authority that initially created them, sort of the foisted upon them, or whether it was an aspirational thing, or whether they’re sort of clinging to this idea of, you know, ‘my sister’, ‘my brother’, ‘my womb’. And these bizarrely humanocentric terms of Sentients use, are they clinging to that because they have no other frame of reference through which to understand them?”

“Do they maybe need to, or would it be good for them to come to some kind of more autonomous sense of who they are as a people or as a set of people? I think there’s a lot of very, very interesting meat on that bone personally.” 

So, with the obvious need to keep full details of the TennoCon reveal under wraps until I get to see them (and I will have seen them, just like you, but by the time this article is live), we are left with more questions than answers, and likely always will be when it comes to Warframe, a game that has spent twelves years slowly opening the mystery box to reveal the enigmas left inside.

In his letters, Tolkien spoke of the magic of the unknown, shimmering and enticing in the distance. If you plan to explain it, he felt, you need to reveal some new vista, some new mountain or glorious city that inspires the next step of the journey and makes the heart throb with the desire to explore. As we prepare to explore Tau and the Sentients, you have to wonder what the Warframe team will leave unsaid and unexplored, shining in the distance, luring us onward.