WeAre WARFRAME Developers, AMA!

Any plans to rework snipers before PoE?

Many players are dissatisfied with scope sway, hipfire inaccuracy, and combo decay mechanic.

Imo, i've always liked snipers as an idea but they are wholly outclassed in Warframe gameplay, even moreso by the recent sniper pistols.

Please make them good without strange "realistic" nerfs!

Because the size of the Plains, we are going to take a look at them. Snipers are going to be very interesting in the Plains of Eidolon - we've been having a ton of fun with them in our playthroughs here so we do hope to tweak a bit before launch!

This one is for Steve, or whoever else works on the story. Will old events eventually be added back as quests? A lot of lore and cool dialogue is lost once they are over, Tubemen of Regor comes to mind in this aspect.

We really want to do this... one day, one day.

Is there a Forma Noggle in the works?

And doesn't that champagne still have the cork in?

I wish there was a Forma noggle... maybe one day. And yes... safety first!

When will operators be able to pet cats and dogs?

On the side note you guys are amazing.

One day Geoff will bless us with this.

Can "Warrior Mode" Operators be used outside of PoE?

Yes, once you are Upgraded to Warrior there is no going back!

Hello!

Its been a while since we heard about Shield Gating. Have you made any progress design wise? I understand it will take a lot of time and balancing.

Edit: Also, what are the major challenges with it?

It hasn't made much progress - we do continue to argue about what the best way to implement it is. The challenges are really in the fact that no one really likes the OHKO, but deciding if this feature is the best way to solve that.

If you guys ran an underground boxing ring, who would be champion at DE?

Atlas.

Atlas works at DigitalExtremes?

He holds the company on his shoulders.

When are Lato Vandal and Braton Vandal returning?

We have Braton Vandal slated as a reward for an upcoming event ... a past Devstream may have confirmed the Relay Building aspect. The current plan is to include it there, but no details on the event ETA!

What will zenurik energy regen be replaced with, and will there be new options for passive energy gain during missions?

We answered something like this earlier, but based on the recurring interest we are definitely looking to include aspects of the loved Focus passives possible in the overhauled Arcanes.

With the announcement of the new Focus system, it's clear that we're losing Energy Overflow. This has been a staple of so many builds since Focus initially released, and those builds are now non-functional without a designated EV Trin/Harrow, lots of energy pads, or Arcane Energize. These alternatives are either extremely expensive or require one of the four players to switch to a completely support based frame, both of which are large sacrifices.

My question to you is what are your thoughts on the current 'energy economy'? Is there an intentional plan/design behind it?

With all big changes we try to look at the systems it affects. We will be reviewing the use of this Focus ability and see if we still require it and if we do.. where can that ability live if it no longer fits within the new Focus system. Arcanes come to mind as a great place for something like this to go. One thing we failed to mention is new Arcanes will not be locked behind the Trials game play. So they will be someone easier to collect. (TBD on location) - Scott, Design Director.

A couple questions DE! THANK YOU!

Question about focus schools. If the schools completely change and we prefer a different school with this next update, will we be able to get a lens respec? I have Greater Zenurik lenses installed on a solid amount of my gear, I spent lots of plat on that and I would hate to buy new lenses only to replace the ones I already have. Any thoughts on this?

Will we be able to sell resources at CETUS? For any players with millions of resources with no direction for them?

Will there be a companion representing the "beasts" of the plain such as the birds? To tame an animal, a flying, live companion would be amazing and would allow for lots of creativity to create the dynamic between bird and frame/operator.

With the saving of the progress in the Plains, even though it's a massive area, does that mean there are a finite number of resources? Or will resources respawn randomly?

While CETUS is surrounded by water so traveling outside by land is "impossible" how do you control our flight over the outside borders of CETUS?

Regarding your last question, there is a giant containment field that traps the Eidolon (and you) within the 9km squared landscape.

As for your first one, the Lens respec is a really good point and we should consider it in the respec conversation.

How many beanies does Steve own?

We have an equation for that...N+1. Where N is the number of beanies currently owned. You always need 1 more. - Dave, Producer!

How was the "umbra" series designed in the first place? what was the inspiration?

With Excalibur Prime on Founders lockdown in the Global build, we were tasked to create a version of Excalibur Prime for the China PC build...but it had to be different. Our Prime Warframes varied in Light and Dark colour schemes, so Mynki thought a dark version of Excalibur Prime would be cool. At the time, we were also working on PBR and newer cloth physics, and Umbra was an early test of that with extra shiny trim and a flowing syandana. The result was Excalibur Umbra. However...the concept for Umbra's design is not nearly as intriguing as our plans for it in the future. - Dave, Producer!

Will the Stalker, G3 etc. be able to attack us on the Plains ?

Only one way to find out... >:)

Once POE is launched and established, what's the ETA (if any) on another open-space area, and is there any chance of a corpus city being a future open-world map?

Hmmmm! Expect information Soon TM!

Oddly enough, all of my questionsrevolve around my absolute favourite frame Volt:

Will the damage cap on discharge be changed for Discharge at any point? Or at the very least, make it keep the enemy stunned until the duration has actually expired.

Why is the drain on picking up and moving electric shield tied to movement? It actively fights against speed which promotes movement, whereas picking up the shieldd discourages you from using an entire power.

Is there anything pertaining to a volt deluxe skin in the works at all? Even super rough sketches? Because right now he's the only frame of the original 8 to not have publicly revealed art for a deluxe skin. Mag and Ember have their arts released bu the other 5 all have skins in the game itself.

Are there still no plans to increase the decoration cap in our ships? While I'd personally love to fill my ship with EVEN MORE VOLT NOGGLES, I don't doubt that even more decorations will be added in future and would be nice to have additional space just in case there are some who are reaching the current cap as of now.

And a very, VERY selfish one that's not even remotely related to volt.. Will we be seeing a return of the kavasa prime fur pattern that came out with trinity prime in the near future? It's the one thing I deeply miss from when I played on ps4 that I had to leave behind when I switched to PC in december 2016. Mostly just so I can finish the recreation of the kubrow I had on PS4. Perhaps some sort of forma-related bet or something, I dunno. I just really want that fur

For you, Foxyboy, some concept art!

Any updates on the team's experiments with Vulkan? I know it's highly unlikely that we'll get a Linux port, but even using Vulkan will give us Linux users an easier time running Warframe within WINE.

Edit: Also, will Sunday Steve make a return at some point?

If I survive PoE I will try and stream again.

Vulkan is something we want to look at, hopefully in 2018 we can drop DX9 which would give us more breathing room to implement something like Vulkan.

• Steve, Creative Director

Are acolytes returning? It's been 7 month and we really wanna see them again

They will be back.. eventually. Plains of Eidolon is a huge brain sink for all of us haha, we haven't forgot about the Acolytes though!

In no specific order:

• How will the new Operator abilities play into the existing Kuva siphons?

• I think the new PoE alerts should be named "flashpoints" or "hotspots"

• Will the update name be changed, since it will easily get confused with the other PoE.

• Thank you so much!

1-Not locked down yet, but should

2-Thank you for this!

3-Probably not :( but agree its confusing

4-Thank you!

-Steve, Creative Director!

Hey guys! I purchased the Founder's Pack on Christmas day, 2012, and seeing you guys change over the years is honestly amazing. My question to you: How frequently do we get endgame rewards in Planes of Eidolon? As it is right now, there are very few things to do at the endgame, besides Sorties and Trials, and while I'm excited to fight Eidolons, I hope it doesn't turn into 'login once a day' activity once we get to the high level.

Holy smokes, thank you! Yes we're hoping Eidolons refresh this end game experience for you. Adding more, making the type-specific rewards interesting (and high end)... this is what we're chasing (on top of greater freedom) - Steve!

Do you expect Plains of Eidolon to increase the rig requirements to run the game smoothly? Will players be able to see the same framerate/quality of resolution in Eidolon as they do in normal grid missions? Thanks guys

We have been using the same tools and hardware to monitor performance in PoE as we have across the rest of the game, and we've actually had it running on our minspec machines for quite some time. At the moment there is no reason for us to believe that players should be required to upgrade their systems for this update. This is largely due to the new tech that has been added to the engine to reduce the amount of stress that PoE's content has on lower end hardware. With that said, we are still working on optimizing this update for a wide range of PC specs (as well as consoles) and will continue to do so even after it has shipped.

• Dmitri, Performance QA

Hi there. Thanks for the game and the AMA.

I am a founder, I love the game and I have been collecting complains/suggestions over the last year and posting weekly at the reddit weekly rant thread.

I don´t want to be disrespectful but here is a wall of questions/suggestions based on my experiences since starting the game - sorry for mspellings!:

• At today´s devstream, it was said focus will be centered around operator mod. Will Warframes still benefit somehow from focus like passives, bonus, or it is an operator only system now? Many people don´t like using operators at all and that will make focus not attractive anymore for them.

• Why there is no -% recoil mod for pve shotguns? Drakgoon and Boar Prime shake a lot, and give motion sickness to some people.

• Will we get Tennogen armor sets?

• What do you think about no more keys on derelicts?

• Would it be possible to toggle on/off prime skins on weapons like we do now with the frames?

• Shield gating state?

• Syndicates: armor sets, 2nd wave of weapons, operator suits, noggles?

• Can you review Stalker drops? Currently it has heated charge and heavy impact and those don´t seem a valuable drop from him.

• 1000 credits and 80 endo: t3 rewards, any plan to enhance it or make maybe it scale with player level?

• Any news of the teased new 4 legged corpus?

• What do you think about a toggle on/off grass/leaves/extra details? Earth post rework is still lower than 30fps on slow machines with all settings on low.

• Any news about the discussion of eidolon night events vs day-night cycle: sentient fights and some plant scans are only at night and waiting 1 hour or more to go to day or night?

• What do you think about a auto-recast for most timed skills? Nekros shadows, octavia 1-2-3-4, trinity energy drain, etc. click shift+skill to auto cast it, shift+skill to stop it. shift, ctrl, alt or other key. object-related abilities as volt shield and vauban bastille can be limited to 4 as frost domes

• What do you think about a riven stats table page? Stats like %chance of stat spawn per weapon, min/max stat values?

• What do you think about improvements on Kuva farming? Kuva siphons are identical to pre-fissure void tears, that were improved because of flawed unfun mechanics with added invencibility from enemies

• What do you think about a syndicate choice per account not per frame? select operator outfit´s sigil/mark supported syndicate from syndicate panel

• What do you think about focus choice per frame not per account? different frames have different focus needs

• Will there more pvp mods come to PVE?

• What do you think about a 4 missions on sorties and let us skip 1? Players don´t like some kind of missions and would make it more fun

• What do you think about Warframe summons with life/shield/armor as specters? no life decay/timers for shadows, rumblers, equinox augment, etc

• What do you think about weapon type reroll for rivens costing kuva?

• What do you think about a review on invencibility mechanics? Like kuva guardians, grinner turrets and most bosses. Maybe give them 90% damage reduction, we won´t depend only on operator mechanics to fight them, or wait time locked stages

• What do you think about no more keys on derelicts?

---

Frames

• Can Titania get to keep vaccum active while in pixie form? Would be a great QoL change to her.

• Can Inaros' sarcophagus mode get a review? It is very weak against any enemy after level 50, maybe make it get more damage, or finisher damage, or bigger heal?

• Can Equinox get her augment timer of 1st ability summon stay around 1 minute or 2 instead of 10 seconds?

• Can Ash get a review? Bladestorm is still cinematic mode, fixing that was the entire point of the rework. Everything is dead in the room before you can aim and cast bladestorm. Maybe make it an area, or make it as Excalibur´s 3rd

• Can Harrow get 10%/x% energy to his team on allied weapon kills for team synergy and teamwork?

• Can Nidus get 10%/x% infection points to him on team or allied weapon kills, if enemies are under his powers for team synergy and teamwork?

• Can Mag get a review? Everything is dead in the room before you can aim and cast magnetize. take out target requirement for magnetize, make it an area ability. make pull attract enemies to magnetize when casted over it and so the enemies are not able to leave the bubble easily

• Can Volt get a review? Take out damage cap on his 4, huge energy cost for him or others when picking his shield - why both timer and energy drain?

• Can Limbo get a review? Stasis+cataclisym invalidate primary and secondary weapons until it ends. doesn´t work with beam weapons. rework damage formula allow low duration cataclysms be viable

• Can Ivara get a review? still reports of players doing 40+ times the same spy mission and not getting any ivara parts.

• Can Octavia get a review? All skills are time based. make emp an aura like her 3rd, not an area cast. Maybe double duration of all skills? Also her 1 is anti-synergic with her 2

• Can Vauban tesla get a review? On higher levels is very weak, make each 20% power strenght cast an extra ball each time: 20% 1 ball, 200% 10 balls

• Can Vauban and Ivara get one more button to choose sub-skills? 1 button for both causes miscasting during combat

• Can Trinity get an augment like energy drain as a passive as Nekros dessecrate? Balanced to not make it op, stop her being a "spam 2 bot"

• Since their release, the back of deafult helmet of Nyx and Excalibur are uncolorable, even on immortal skins always black. Light colored fashion frames are prejudiced

---

General

• Game mail between players? The current only way is to gift something bought with plat to send a message with it

• Why we have to bet our own money in Index quest? Personally I lost 1 million credits doing it, and had to "cheese" the low margin quest with Iron Skin Rhino

• What you think of a frame mod that swap timers for energy consumption and casting turns on/off, so we don´t need to recast so much? As on Octavia that all skills are time based, or Nekros Shadows?

• Any plans for charge attacks in quick melee?

• What about joining all +damage auras into one single +damage aura? at least join the primary ones (rifle+sniper+shotgun)

• What about give all auras same gain as steel charge?

• Can magnum force for pistols get a review? It is weak when compared to +90% elemental mods or equivalent spoiled strike/heavy caliber

• Can Hulta armor get a review? It needs 2 color channels to color leg and arms "plate" parts same color, colors are very "washed out" when comparing to the pallet

• What you guys think of increased beam weapons range? Specially Embolist that has less range than Orthos literally

• Any news about the teased sortie token system teased by Sheldon some Devstreams ago?

• Why we have to press 2 buttons to do operator jump?

• Can operator energy be easier to see? Giving it numbers?

• More special effects to kuva clouds be seen from distance?

• Can liset deployables get a review? The turrets recast timers are too long to be fun and really useful

• What you guys think of archwing item pickup/revive/xp ranges? Are they too short? Maybe double or triple them?

• What you guys think of a mod to change trigger/semi-auto guns become full auto? Maybe -% damage +% ammo.

• What you guys think of a mod to change full-auto guns become semi-auto/trigger? +% damage -% ammo.

• What do you think about a review on kubrows and kavats? Why they still have decay, credit maintance and de-frost timers? Isn´t that making people go more for sentinels than kubrows?

• Would be possible to get glyps/icons for founders with founder level? And for players with MR level?

• Any news about Arcane slots or view sydana on/off?

• What do you think of proto shield, or "armor for shields" for Warframes and companions like some enemies have?

---

Art

• Would be possible to toggle on/off prime skins on weapons like we do now with the frames?

• What do you guys think of add tenno specters as enemies at void/corrupted void? More variety and they were working well during the Dark Sector missions

• Any news about a Neural sentry boss fight? Maybe with ravagers to control at battle?

• Any news about more tenno companions as teased some time ago the osprey and moa?

• We will get a non-prime targis armor set? Or non-prime version of the prime armors?

• Are new graphic enhancements such as volumetric lights tested with min steam configuration? It is windows xp sp 3 or higher, intel core 2 duo e6400 or amd athlon x64 4000+, 2 gb ram, nvidia geforce 8600 gt or ati radeon hd 3600, directx®:9.0c, hard drive:10 gb hd space

• Would be possible to do sound and mesh transmogrifation of items: ex: soma prime looking as opticor and sounding as boltor prime?

• Why no female corpus technicians? Also, Grineer have more variety of female units.

• Would it be possible more options to get visible on/off on frame parts? all Trinity´s skirts, Chroma´s pelt, Nekros prime shoulder cape, Titania waist decoration, Saryn skirt, Volt, Atlas and Oberon tabards, Equinox day corset circles and night form skirt, Nehza shakran

• Would be possible to Toggle always on/off on weapon lanterns on dark ambients?

---

Prime Time

• Can you help the toaster owners on Prime time? Since you play in 2 people, one of them play with a pc with all graphic options set to lowest and minium settings from steam while the other to max to compare both: it will help find mistakes on "toaster" pcs when something new is deployed

---

Enemies

• Why do we still need amino for Ambulas, rathuun points for Kela, nav points for mutalist Alad V?

• Yellow mine osprey are killable, but don´t have life bar neither show damage numbers

Haha well we can't answer ALL of these and still ship PoE this year BUT... for one common question about the Derelicts, we are hoping to remove the key system and have them be more 'floating through Solar System'.

Are we ever gonna get Ordis Prime / voice packs for Ordis?

I would love to do voice packs for Ordis at some point. I think for starters we will be giving him some new Landing Craft lines at the very least. - George, Sound Design

Is it stressful that people compare most free to plays to you? Most free to plays are no where near the quality of warframe, and being a founder from the near beginning I have seen you guys grow so much.

Nope not at all. We think the business model is the future and if we can change some players minds as we grow and develop to give other devs the chance we think that is great. -Scott, Design Director

What part of Plains are the staff most excited about?

With the changes to focus schools will there be any way to increase energy regen on casters so that you don't have to spam energy pizzas.

Excited!!!!!!

Boss battles - Sarah, QA

Writing my name in the mining tool - Dmitri, Performance QA

Long range sniper weps making sense finally. :P (or not, depending if our AI and culled stuff messes with this ) - /u/DE_Killerkarpfen, Level Design

Regarding exploring the Plains themselves, will it adopt a traditional MMO style of open world where players are able to roam freely? Will it be like Destiny's where other players drop in and out of each others' local instances? Is it possible for a player to have an instance of the plains all to themselves or with their personal squad without worrying about other players?

Great Q! For 1.0 we are focusing on traditional squads / solo that you know from Warframe but in a huge, beautiful landscape. If you want to just fish and drink greedy milk, you can go solo, kill the Grineer by the lake and get relax and throw out bait. If you're jumping in with randoms you can join and roam with them doing dynamic missions. If you want to really focus, squad up in Cetus and do intense dynamic Jobs for Konzu to help the Ostrons.

When are we getting Nightmare Jordas Verdict? It was talked about in Devstream 50 and I've been dying for it!

Currently not on the schedule at all, sorry!

Hi DE; I loved the Plains of Eidolon gameplay you showed off today! I just had a couple of questions for you:

1. Is there any sign of a Volt Deluxe Skin in the future?

2. Will Hydroid get any more major changes at this point in time? I know you've said that this was the case in the last Devstream, but I and many others really do feel like he still needs some important changes (mainly to his passive and how Undertow works when using Tidal Surge, to name a few examples).

Either way, thank you for making such an amazing game!

There are indeed some Volt deluxe concepts that have progressed a fair bit - maybe next Devstream!

As for Hydroid, nothing major is coming but we can look at the little things still!

What has been your favorite memory from the past (almost) 5 years?

War Within & Harrow Quests - Sarah, QA

Tennocon's got to be on there - Dmitri, Performance QA

Watching the fans during the PoE reveal. And working on Hydroid powers, that was a huge shift in what was normal for us. - Jeremy, FX

Helping to bring Clem to life from a fan-made comic was a lot of fun - Whirrr, Design

Seeing that people care :) - Rebecca, Community

Will the Operator warriors have melee weapons?

They won't to start, they have what we're calling 'Amps' internally. These are component based weapons that focus your innate Tenno energy in ways you can customize.

So with the new Arcanes, what is going to happen to old Arcanes, will they be changed in any way? and if so, will we see significant changes?

We are currently leaving old Arcanes intact but stay tuned!

Will we be able to use archwing weapons on the Plains?

Not for now, they are designed for space combat and will severely disrupt the atmosphere of the Plains if the players was to unleash them.

How about Archwing abilities?

They sure work!

We have seen the arm-canons in a past devstream. Any more news about them?

They are still in the works!

With all these new deluxe skin concepts/release... When can we expect to see an update for the Zephyr Deluxe??

It's been states time and time again that it's a passion project for a specific member of the team, who is also working away on PoE content.

When they get a chance to chip away at it I'm sure you'll see some progress.

Haha yep, pretty much this exactly!

Is Warframe going to get directx 12 in the future?

Right now we have legacy support for DX9 that we want to phase out before we add new APIs. We have lots of good new rendering tech coming with Plains of Eidolon though :)

Favorite warframes among the devs?

Ivara or get out! (Nidus is pretty cool to tho) - DE_Killerkarpfen, Design

Vauban - Ben, Design

Me and Clint default to Nezha for testing purposes - good for entering/exiting missions quickly - Connor, Community QA

Nekros (is metal and helps me with perf) - Dmitri, Performance QA

This one goes to Steve and Scott Specifically: Do you guys feel that working on this game and dealing with the community through Rebecca has been an enlightening experience? How do you guys not burn out when rage-threads happen?

The community team does a good job of translating vitriol into actionable feedback which we are always open to (but also Scotch) - Steve

Is a bird companion planned at all in the future? Also, will there be more enemy vehicles besides the dropships we saw in preview?

Bird companions.. maybe one day. We want it.

For enemy vehicles right now they are all aircraft... you haven't seen them all yet!

Will the Twitch Drops program during Plains of Eidolon be available to streamers not partnered with Digital Extremes?

Some aspects of it will be, yes!

I just wanted to clarify, did you say that we would be able to apply arcanes to our current Kiddo clothing? Also, so hyped, been playing for a few years but wow, this is amazing. Keep up the good work!

Yes (Steve & Scott at the SAME TIME...).

When exactly is PoE coming? Will it be this month?

We aren't gonna give an exact date I'm afraid but us being in lock down mode (i.e no more deploys) means we are closing in! Hopefully soon!

Besides warframe of course, what other games do the warframe team enjoy?

Borderlands, Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Sim, Child of Light, Overwatch - Sarah, QA

Yakuza 0, Mario + Rabbids - Dmitri, Perf QA

Lots of QA playing PUBG lately (when they're not playing The Amazing Eternals, of course ;) - Connor, Community QA

I will play and enjoy almost anything... but most recently on PC: PUBG, Quake Champions, Path of Exile - Ben, Design

they never specified video games, but there are a lot of Magic the Gathering players here ;) Personally I've been playing RimWorld, Pit People, Don't Starve Together, Factorio and Quadrilateral Cowboy...and of course PUBG (edited) - Sam, Design

Is there any news on a new Ember Deluxe skin?

We will show a new look next Devstream!

Will the cetus daily standing limit be shared with the syndicates standing? And will there be other ways to earn them besides the jobs? If no, the jobs will be refreshed daily?

Currently no we don't have a Syndicate Standing limit for the Cetus Syndicates, this could change with testing. The Jobs refreshes daily giving you new job types to try out. All activities inside Cetus and the plains have a chance to add or reduce the amount of standing you have. - Scott, Design Director.

Hey, thanks for everything you've done so far!

If you can say without revealing too much, what was the most challenging aspect of developing the Plains of Eidolon update?

For all departments the scope landscape/huge terrain and view distance has impacted them - we've never attempted this and it slammed all departments with unique challenges (performance! open area with nothing to do! massive monsters!) - Steve!