Ever since the reveal of the PlayStation 4, Sony has placed a lot of emphasis on bringing as many games over as they can for their next generation console. One such game is Warframe, a free to play game that is being developed by Digital Extremes, the studio behind 2008’s Dark Sector.
We recently got in touch with Steve Sinclair, the Creative Director of Warframe and asked him a few questions, such as the decision to go with a co-op, free to play game in the first place. As expected it was all related to creative freedom in development.
“Independence! When we pitched the original idea it was too risky for the people we talked to. When we had freed up a few people (almost a decade later!) to work on what was next, we found ourselves coming back to those ideas we had to shelve. Free-to-play was a way we could start small and build something without taking a publishing contract and without losing creative control,” he said.
We then asked him what it was about the PS4, over the PS3, that motivated them to develop Warframe for it, to which he replied:
“PS4 is a powerful console with great connectivity and online features. It lets us bring over our high-end visuals without compromise, with the promise of pushing it even further in the future. The PS3 was a great machine and the SPUs were insanely fast if you customized your code for them – with the PS4 the power increases yet at the same time being more generalized. We got our Warframe engine up and running in just three months on PS4 – it was such a pleasant experience… with Warframe being a ‘new’ franchise, I guess it just made more sense from an intuitive level to look to future platforms,” he added.
Warframe is currently in open beta for the PC and is expected to be released on the PS4 when it’s ready. Stay tuned for our full Warframe interview sometime next week. In the meantime, share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.