The popular online game known as Warframe, an experience where you can feed yourself to a giant mouth and drive a motorcycle in the year 1999, has launched a new update. This latest expansion highlights the distinctive charm that has become synonymous with Warframe in recent years.
This expansion, made available this week, brings in a new mushroom-themed warframe that performs a unique animation, along with a brand-new biome to discover. But it’s also going back to basics, with another quest designed to making sure this complex, vast long-running online game is accessible for new players.
Titled “The Teacher,” this is the long-awaited quest that instructs Warframe players on how to use one of the game's most basic — yet most intricate systems: the mod system.
In Warframe, mods are augments that can be added to your character or your weapons to improve their stats. They range from the straightforward (boosting power or shortening reload times) to the incredibly intricate. Dedicated players often craft hour-long videos about optimized loadouts that use powerful mods in combination to create devastating effects.
“I think a lot of people were maybe getting into the early game, encountering mods without grasping their purpose,” explained a lead narrative designer. “I think it was really important, upon completing the mission, for players to think, ‘Hey, modding is cool. I'd like to experiment further.’”
“The Teacher” was created through a partnership between the core team, who handled the story elements, and an external team, who designed the mission, which will appear early in the game.
In the quest, the player is tasked with obtaining a component for their ship, but they’re interrupted by a menacing, powerful warrior called Teshin, who takes away the player’s abilities and close-combat arms, and compels them to use the mod system to effectively show its potential.
Several developers were longtime players, but others had never played before, according to a lead designer. It was this outside perspective that proved critical.
“The first thing we did was basically sit behind them and have them experience the introduction and take prodigious notes on everywhere they fell out,” the designer said. Early-game menu pop-ups presented the mod system. But the team observed these weren't effective for all.
“Certain players missed fundamental guidance where the game highlights it saying equip the modification,” he said.
Warframe’s mods allow players to create incredibly strong combinations that fill the display with damage values. But "The Teacher" isn’t really about that. There will be some long-time players who wish the quest was geared more towards their needs, like optimizing for endgame challenges. But it became clear that the mission addresses a genuine oversight for early players — and that doing so isn’t as simple as it looks.
“Numerous subtle adjustments and background details there to just demonstrate the possibilities rather than tell you,” the designer said. For example, one of the mission's objectives is to show how mods can create elemental damage types; in this case, a magnetic effect that depletes protective barriers.
“We had to change the weapon to be a rapid-fire gun, because it better demonstrates the effect frequency,” the designer said. “However, the goal isn't to explicitly tell players, 'oh yeah, actually on a base level mod, you only got a few percentage chance to trigger a special damage type.' So how do you tutorialize that without changing it?”
Experienced players will naturally recognize these mechanics and grasp their function, but beginners require instruction to pay attention to these things.
“It’s not a kind of game development that we previously focused on just because that hasn't been our focus,” said a story developer. “However, this oversight meant that players weren't properly taught the modding system.”
“There’s so much that goes into just making a seemingly straightforward quest that — honestly — you can complete quickly,” said the designer. “Yet it represents extensive development for many team members.”
The designer was clearly enthusiastic over being able to work on a game that he loves — and to design content featuring a preferred figure.
“I'm a huge fan of Teshin,” he said. “He embodies everything my younger self found awesome.”
In the decade-plus since launch, Warframe has been in a ongoing struggle with its own player onboarding process. There are lots of complex systems that players can ignore initially — and won’t even have access to until hours into the game. And others, like modding, that scale in complexity depending on your level of engagement. An update earlier this year streamlined the early game so that players could reach Warframe’s complex narrative arcs with less time on the grind up front.
With “The Teacher,” it’s clear that the developers are reinforcing their dedication to make sure Warframe’s early game experience doesn’t stay locked in 2013. New players can get their foot in the door — even if they miss the menu prompts.
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