How do you make an impossibly dense MMO friendly to new players? Warframe dev says you just keep trying: "I don't think we've ever quite got that 100% right"

Any MMO that meets success over a period of time often runs into the same issue – how do you make the prospect of getting into your game less frightening to newer players when there's upwards of ten years of content to catch up on? For Digital Extremes president Sheldon Carter, while Warframe hasn't "quite got that 100% right" even after 12 years, it's best thought of as a theme park.

"So the way I like to think about it is an amusement park," he tells us. "If Warframe is Disney, we're putting in new rides every year or maybe even every quarter, really, that you can go into. But you do have to keep making sure that the path through to get to that is still really good for the new people who have been to that theme park for the first time. My analogy is slowly breaking down as I think this through, but that's the idea.

"I think it's a good model, because it tells you that you need to make sure you onboard people and tell them what they're going to do before you can get them into the big rides. But the team really wants to do the big-ticket stuff, and so it's a challenge to make sure that it's accessible at some level for new players. And I don't think we've ever quite got that 100% right. So it's something we're always working on."

The question comes as Warframe eyes up a new platform – the Nintendo Switch 2. The space ninja-themed MMO is on the OG Switch, though a lack of dev kits is why we've not seen the leap to the Switch 2 just yet. Still, given that Warframe has a reputation for being impossibly big and dense with systems from across genres, we ask how Digital Extremes is keeping all of this contained and playable on multiple platforms, such as the Switch 2.

"Sometimes even I kind of boggle at that," Carter admits. "I mean, we're on iOS too, you know, we're going towards Android. It's the same game. It's not a different game, right? And so across all the platforms, it is wild.

"I think probably one of these core ideas is self-reliance. And that comes from the fact that the Evolution engine is what we built the game on. That's something where our build process kind of gets us there, our tech process gets us there, where it kind of works across everything. And then it takes some pretty good design minds. On Warframe, having a guy like Pablo [Alonso] as our design director, he's able to kind of keep all that in his head.

"I can't – being totally honest, I can't. People ask me point-blank questions about certain systems, and I just go, 'You know, I've played, I have thousands of hours in the game. You know, I've played the development build all the time. I can't keep track of all the stuff, but Pablo can.'"

Carter goes on to say that a big focus for Digital Extremes this year has been breaking down barriers, particularly in terms of time.

"I don't want to spoil The Second Dream, but Second Dream being such a big aspect of the game, I think we chopped something like half of the time to get there," he says. "I think we're hoping to cut it down even a little bit more so people can kind of get to some of those reveals, and we can get rid of some of the places where you might get bogged down in some of the complexity of the game, and get right to the narrative that you're going to love and still give you the progression.

"So it has been a big part of what we're trying to do with the game, and even with the new update, we're hoping to let that be more new-player friendly as well."

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