“Warframe” is a game that’s held a special place in my heart for quite some time. It’s an infrequent passion, something I come back to once every couple of months, just to play for a few weeks – but nonetheless, it’s one of those games that’s managed to stick with me. Years after first starting, I still come back once in a blue moon, and I’ve accumulated quite a few hours in its digital world.

But my own enjoyment of the game isn’t the only reason I wanted to talk about it here. Warframe also represents something of an oddity in the gaming world, in many respects. It’s an eleven-year-old game, yet still has failed to either blow up or die off, maintaining a position on the edge of popularity, never truly becoming mainstream. It’s a live service game, something which has grown increasingly unpopular among consumers and popular among developers and executives in recent years, yet has remained completely untouched by those modern controversies. It has one of the strangest and most abstract art styles I’ve ever seen from a game, borrowing ideas and motifs seemingly at random from cultures across the world and blending them in what seems to be entirely unique ways. So what is Warframe? How has it managed all these strange things? And what lessons, if any, can the rest of the gaming industry take from its steady success?

Categorizing “Warframe” is not as easy a task as you might first assume. At a glance, it’s a “looter-shooter”, reminiscent of Destiny (despite the fact that “Warframe” actually predates Destiny), set in a sci-fi world – yet it seems to delight in turning it’s own gameplay on its head, introducing new modes with completely different mechanics. In one moment, you’ll be running through a semi-random level, killing enemies and collecting loot. In another, you might find yourself fighting a boss in an open world, or flying a spaceship, or tinkering with your gun to find the best build. Regardless, the main gameplay loop stays … semi-kind-sorta consistent, and it goes something like this:

You start off by playing the game, going through a level or boss or something, and collecting materials and blueprints along the way. Once you’ve found enough, you head back to base – your “orbiter”, a personal spaceship where you can choose new missions and change your build – before using those materials you’ve collected to either build a new weapon or upgrade one you currently have. Upgrades work through a mod system – the important thing to know about it here is that it means upgrades are completely modular, not only allowing a great diversity of builds, but also meaning that upgrading a single piece of your weapon – a single mod – will upgrade that mod across every weapon and warframe you own. From there, you choose your loadout – you are allowed three weapons and a warframe, with the warframe being a sort of class or character choice, giving different abilities and a different appearance based on what you select – before you go to the mission screen and start it all again. This cycle varies across the game – different blueprints and materials often require different approaches to collect them, and some things use completely separate, but parallel systems, like the upgrades to your spaceship.

So what is there to enjoy about “Warframe”? Quite a bit. The first thing that has to be touched upon is the movement system – “Warframe” likes to advertise itself with the tagline “Ninjas play free”, and that’s quite evident in the unique freedom of movement the game grants you, allowing you to dash across walls, jump dozens of feet in the air, and latch to vertical surfaces at will. The movement system has no cooldowns or costs attached to it, and doesn’t even interrupt the regular gameplay, encouraging you to jump around like a deranged chimpanzee on a trampoline all while shooting your guns and casting your abilities uninterrupted. Unfortunately, this also gives the game a somewhat steep initial learning curve, as the player is forced to adjust to the fast-paced system. The game compensates for this by making the early levels so pathetically easy that it would be legitimately difficult to fail even if you tried, which is … a mixed blessing. Another thing I really like about “Warframe” is the modding system. I somewhat touched on this before, but weapons and warframes can be upgraded through slotting in mods. You have a limited number of mod slots and a limited number of points which with to equip mods, meaning every choice must be balanced against the opportunity cost of using a different mod. The system is simple at its heart but the complexity quickly becomes apparent as you start acquiring more mods. It allows you to tinker with your weapons to produce all sorts of different effects, to the extent that I would personally say the modding system is more engaging than the actual combat system. I would not at all be surprised to learn most players spend more time modding their weapons and testing new mod combinations than actually playing the game. That being said, I do feel the modding system is somewhat restricted by the game itself at the highest levels. In the late-game, enemies have so much health and armor that it becomes a DPS check, functionally forcing you to put all your mods towards pure damage output, instead of investing in the interesting but not quite as immediately useful abilities like healing on heavy attacks or regaining energy with headshots. Still, that is a minor blemish on an otherwise excellent system that helps to make “Warframe” the game it is today. Finally, I wish to touch on the in-game monetization. Not as a negative, mind you – “Warframe” actually has, in my opinion, one of the best monetization systems I’ve ever seen. The game itself is entirely free to play, all you need is a computer capable of running it. However, there are in-game microtransactions, mostly to purchase platinum – the game’s premium currency. Platinum is used in everything from speeding up crafting to buying cosmetics to buying weapons. Now you might think – this just sounds like a cheap, scammy mobile game. But there are a few aspects that I think really make the monetization of “Warframe” shine. First of all, everything gameplay-relevant can be earned through regular gameplay. And not “earned” earned, where you’d need to play for dozens and dozens of hours, but earned regularly, through a not insignificant but not overwhelming amount of work. Certain cosmetics cannot be acquired this way, but there are still lots of cosmetics that are available for free, so I feel it balances itself out. Secondly, while platinum cannot be earned in game, it can be traded between players – and the platinum market in “Warframe” is a very real, and very active, thing. If you do want a cosmetic that can only be obtained through platinum, all you have to do is trade with other players until you have enough. As an added bonus, the main thing players trade for platinum – relic drops – is not a high level activity and becomes available in the first few hours of gameplay. This means platinum trading isn’t just there, it’s very accessible even for new players. And on top of that, there’s also Tennogen. These are special in-game cosmetics that can only be bought for real money – and why is that, you might ask? Because a portion of that money is going to their creators. Any fan of the game with a talent for 3D modeling can create a cosmetic and submit it to the developers. If it’s accepted, it’s added into the game, and whenever someone buys it, a portion of that money goes to the person who created it. This is not only really cool and leads to there being an absolute avalanche of unique and interesting cosmetics, it’s also very consumer friendly – fans of the game can essentially make money off of their fan-art.

But enough of me singing “Warframe’s” praises – what do I not like about the game? Well, several things. First of all, the game can get very grindy at times. This is partly because certain things just take a long time to earn, and the grind is built into the game. That’s not ideal, but the real problem comes in how the game fails to make the grind interesting. “Warframe” has a plethora of game modes – but as you play through them, you may begin to notice that, for all the different names, there are really only a couple of “true” game modes. There is extermination, the game mode that you will spend almost all of your time playing, in one form or another, where you have to kill as many enemies as possible with a time limit. Sure, the name and the nature of that time limit might sometimes change, but the core gameplay is the same. They can call it “survival,” where you are killing enemies to collect life support packs, or “defense,” where you are killing enemies before they can damage an objective, or “interception,” where you are killing enemies before they can capture four objectives, or any number of other names or variations, but the core idea and core gameplay always stays the same. Then, there’s “spy,” where the game tests your stealth and movement capabilities with a series of vaults you have to break into without tripping the alarms. And… that’s about it. At the core of things, those are really the only two game modes in the game right now. Now, to be clear, the combat is really fun and I don’t mind terribly how much the game is centered on it, but it can still be annoying how little variety it actually has when you drill down into it. Thankfully, the developers do seem to be aware of the problem. The recently added “ascension” game mode puts an actually meaningful twist on exterminate by forcing you to keep up with a moving platform, and the newest update is set to add a PvPvE mode where two teams compete against each-other to complete objectives. Still, for all the different activities the game offers, it suffers from many of those activities feeling like they aren’t actually any different from one another. Another problem with the game is just how buggy it is. I’ve heard many long-time fans call it “Bugframe”, and that is not an inaccurate name by any means. To be fair, the developers are fairly good at fixing the larger, game-breaking bugs, and will generally release multiple hot-fixes within days of an update going live. But still, it is simply inexcusable just how buggy the game remains. It gets especially bad in how certain parts of the game are effectively abandoned now due to being too broken on launch. Remember the spaceship combat I talked about earlier? Yeah, that’s in the game, but no one actually plays it – not because it’s bad, but because on launch, it was so broken that its reputation in the community was forever tarnished. Which is a shame, because it’s actually been fixed now, and is really fun. Honestly, that entire update feels emblematic of the entire game to me – a great core idea, made by talented people, but filled with flaws that are slowly being patched over time. Finally, I feel it necessary to touch on “Warframe”’s infamously bad new player experience. Personally, I feel its terribleness is often overstated, but it is still undeniable that it’s not very good. This is mostly a problem of too little direction – past the tutorial, the game just kind of lets you do anything. Sure, there’s still plenty of stuff to unlock, but it can feel overwhelming to be given so many choices and no clear idea of what the correct path is. I honestly think this wouldn’t be too hard to fix, even – just give the player a little more direction. Maybe sort the main quests away from the side quests, so it’s clearer where you should be going first.

Overall, “Warframe” is an amazing game – don’t let my negative comments cloud that fact. It’s also an enormous game, and I’ve barely even scratched the surface of all the stuff there really is in it. There is room within it for a ton of fun and a ton of flaws, and any player should expect to find both in ample amounts. And so, if you have the time, I would highly recommend you download the game (it is free, after all) and give it a spin. Just temper your expectations and remain patient when the game shows its cracks, and I think anyone will be able to have a great time.