Some challenges in games are:
- In free-to-play games, how do you maintain parity of experience/utility between paying and non-paying players? (the experience shouldn’t be degraded for players who choose not to pay… reference the model of open source software)
- In MMORPGs, how do you enable casual and hardcore players to engage in the same content? (in a family, for instance, you have people of different experience levels intermingling)
- How do you make the experience less linear while having a standard experience for players? (I guess the benefit of having a game not be totally linear is that players can have more freedom to explore, and in a similar vein can also play a subset of the content earlier, and play additional content later)
Warframe is developed by the studio which made Unreal Tournament. Digital Extremes and Epic Games partnered on the original UT and UT2k3, then afterwards Epic Games went on to create the Gears Of War franchise and Digital Extremes worked on several projects, culminating in Warframe.
So, the last MMOs I played were Destiny and World Of Warcraft, both of which operated on traditional models (pay to access content, subscriptions in the case of WoW). It seems that some parts of the industry have been transitioning to free to play models.
One thing I find cool about Warframe’s f2p model is that it is indirect instead of direct:
- Players can exchange real money for an in-game currency called platinum
- Platinum does various things in-game: accelerating crafting, allowing the purchase of functional and cosmetic items. Interestingly, the Warframe team decided against implementing a paid loot box mechanic (I forget the reason they cited, there are loot boxes as a game mechanic, however)
- There is nothing which can be accessed by platinum, which cannot be accessed without paying. There has been widespread opinion among gamers against major publishers’ revenue models (which paywall portions of the player experience), perceived as immoral
- Perhaps crucially, there are items which are valuable and cannot be accessed via platinum. This seems to create an in-game economy between players who pay and players who don’t (and all players can flexibly be on a spectrum between paying and non-paying); all of the advantages of paying can be accessed by obtaining valuable items and trading with paying players for platinum
With regards to the player community, Warframe does some things that seem to prevent castes from forming, and encourage the mixing of players who spend different amounts of time on the game:
- There are an incredible number of things to level up, from warframes (the equivalent of classes in most MMOs) to weapons. It also doesn’t take very long to level one thing to max level, and how powerful a character or item is comes largely from a separate game element, “mods” that can be installed on any item of a given class.
- The mechanisms for improving items and characters involve resetting their level. So players are constantly leveling and re-leveling, creating a mechanism whereby newbie and veteran players continually mix (instead of the latter exclusively playing endgame content / in higher level areas vs. lower level areas).
I think Digital Extremes did some neat things to have Warframe possess an overarching story and flow of experiences, while giving the player freedom to engage in content at their discretion. A lot of these are difficult to explain without referring to concepts specific to the game, so if you’re interested I’d recommend playing!
Warframe’s creative direction: the studio didn’t want to use a mainstream science fiction style (“James Cameron” sci-fi), instead looking to Celtic and Mayan lore for ship and character designs, and Sanskrit for nomenclature. The style also tends to be organic rather than mechanical.
