Warframe and Why I Keep Coming Back

The game doesn't have its hooks in me, it's got its Hooks Prime in me and I'm currently grinding in order to build my own Hooks Prime.

It doesn't take a lot to get me to play a game to completion. In fact, I'm likely to do it just in order to feel as though I got my money's worth out of the experience, to know that I actually did the thing I bought the ticket for. But it does take a fair bit to make me come back to a game after I've beaten it. There's a lot of reasons for this, not the least of which is that there's a lot of games out there that need playing. These days, chances are good that one of your favorite games growing up was also a developer's favorite game growing up, so you've got a lot of stuff out that's been inspired by and that improves upon what you know and love. Recently, I felt like playing Baldur's Gate, and I wound up playing Pillars of Eternity instead, because the same itch was scratched all the same.

What I'm saying here, is that, as someone who plays videogames, I am not at a loss for choice. Even actively screening entire publishing companies, whose practices I am protesting with my non-consumption of their products, the flood is endless.

Meanwhile, I'm at 1100 hours on Warframe.

Greetings. FROM SPACE.

I have spent 45 days of my life playing this game. Not in the sense that for 45 days, I had a play session of Warframe, but in the sense that more than a month straight of my time has been spent playing Antifascist Space Ninjas. I have played entire genres of games for less time than I have played Warframe. I can't say that I've played Real Time Strategy, as a genre, as much as I've played the game where I maintain an extensive collection of capes.

I've asked myself the question why, over and over. My brain has a quick answer for me: "Warframe is cool and good," it says, with the confidence of an 8 year old. My response to this is "well, yeah, of course, but elaborate, please?" Then my brain sorta makes a little trailing off noise, with a question mark at the end, and afterward I want to play more Warframe.

It's a little deep, this game.

It finally came to me, after watching the live preview of the forthcoming Empyrean update at Tennocon 2019, Warframe's own yearly convention, that is growing just like the playerbase is. As I watched the team on stage cooperatively pilot a starship around a debris-riddled region of space, carrying out raids on floating orbital ruins and performing boarding actions against the ships of the game's assorted enemy factions, the most prominent three being "fascists, capitalists and a literal disease," I realized something: I was watching them demonstrate their sequel, called Warframe, which was available inside their previous game, which is also called Warframe.

I realized what I was watching was a team of people who totally believed in what they were doing. It wasn't just because they were sure they had a moneymaker on their hands, because they've had that moneymaker for years now, for their purposes. No, it's because the people on stage were game developers being enthusiastic about the thing that they do, that pays their bills. The Empyrean presentation wasn't some highly rehearsed and flashy corporate presentation, made to upstage the competition and assure investors that their taste of the profits is about to get tastier, but something made to face the playerbase. It was a group of people saying "hey, people who like what we make, look at all this new stuff we made for you to play, ostensibly for free, because that's what our game costs to play."

I loved every second of it. Especially though, I loved the parts where the team was laughing and joking with each other as they played. They felt enough themselves, up in front of a big life crowd and many, many more watching online via livestream, to casually swear and make inside jokes, because what they were demonstrating was the work of their creative life, at that very moment. Rather than seeming exhausted, they seemed charged with life and vitality. These are not people wrung out by the constantly changing and updating nature of their game, a game that they've built and rebuilt more times at this point than I'm willing to take a run at guessing.

You can't inject this sense of life into a project with new technology or more money. There is no stimulus driving Warframe to the places it's going that is greater than the satisfaction of the team that makes it. This is a game that is free to play, yet has secured them a future as the people developing it, through sheer confidence. That confidence is felt by the players in playing the game, which is big, bold, deep and a uniquely deadly-wiry sort of agile, navigating a game loop and narrative that is quite unlike any other. The confidence reflects in the people that make it, even if they are the self deprecating sort that make elaborate jokes about blowing up cop cars, because if they weren't confident in what they were doing, they'd have gone bankrupt long ago. Instead, they took a chance on a game that the greater Industry said would fail, building upon its foundation, and evolving it over years. The result is a game that is still called Warframe, six years after its launch, yet contains the amount of a trilogy at least, that is still changing and growing to this day, with excited people driving the growth.

That's why I keep coming back to Warframe.