An award-winning romance novelist and AOL Instant Messenger are at the core of Warframe 1999's best new feature

Love - or platonic friendship - is in the air with Warframe 1999. While the next major update for Warframe has plenty of big features to get excited about, be it a motorbike, an infested boyband, or a whole new enemy faction to take on, it's the cast of new characters vibing around the run-down mall that has won the hearts of many. But how did this actually come about, and how did an award-winning romance writer end up working on the game?

It's quite the story. According to game director Rebecca Ford, the Warframe team wanted to implement a relationship system, given the playable character The Drifter's older age and introduction to a found-family collection of proto-frame characters. However, no one on the team knew how to approach such a thing. Enter Kat Kingsley, author of many a romance novel, who just so happened to be looking for a job.

Ford: "Players have loved our characters for years, they've had huge positive responses to our characters and we felt that with The Drifter being more mature and the proto-frames feeling like a found-family, what if there was a way to leverage the 1999 worldbuilding to create a text message relationship system, be it platonic or romantic."

Kingsley worked at Volition Games as one of its studio managers and chief of staff. However, with her work as a romance novelist remaining a side gig.

Kingsley: "It's always been my side hustle, right? It was what I did for fun. Unfortunately, Volition Games was shut down. As chief of staff I was part of the crew responsible for closing down the operations. But it was only a couple of weeks after I was laid off, while I was sitting there figuring out what I would do next, when I got a message on LinkedIn from Rebecca."

"Well here I am a year later! It's been an absolute joy to be able to not only get to work on the system design for it, but also to be able to write and sculpt what it could be. Not only am I able to write all the words, but working with the designers, the UI artists, the programmers - I've been able to really sculpt the experience for people. It's been such a pleasure."

Ford: "I actually didn't know about Kat's experience in the industry, I only knew Kat as a romance author! So finding out the industry experience was there was great, but it would have worked anyway with the book experience. Over COVID, I must have read 25 of Kat's books [...] Kat has been a great part of the experience."

But there's a chasm of difference between writing a novel and writing for a live service video game. The way in which players interact with characters is different, as are the consequences of making mistakes, and the ability to make mistakes in the first place! Creating a romance system for Warframe came with its own slew of challenges according to Ford and Kingsley.

Ford: "I think the biggest challenge for fans of the game who know Warframe: we're a live service title where you can't save scum and go back. So if you're like me and someone dumped you in another game, you can reload a save. So the objectively difficult task of having meaningful choices in a game that players can't reset... It was a huge design problem for this system. We're not gonna spoil how we solved it, but rest assured for readers and players that we tried to make it as impactful and real as possible, but we also know you might want to change your mind and we have solved for that."

Kingsley: "You won't have to make a new account and play 1,000 hours to change your mind! The other challenge was the way that it's structured, the branching narrative, gets exponentially more challenging as you go. That is a thing you learn the hard way where you start doing it. I was watching an interview with the folks at Larian, and they were asked how they did it for Baldur's Gate 3, and they said it was a lot of hard work! I saw that and was like, oh no [laughs]. It's like a bowl of spaghetti! One noodle is easy, but add more and you've got an airplane hanger of noodles, and that's what it's like to write a system like this. But, it is incredibly rewarding and a lot of fun."

There are also pacing concerns. While the new characters introduced in Warframe 1999 have been lurking around the conscious of players for a little bit, we'll be getting to actually interact with them for the first time when the update drops. So how do you build a fluid relationship system that doesn't feel rushed, and that fits inside the wider Warframe system?

Ford: "We have two elements that worked in our favour for templating in major expansions. One of them is the existing syndicate grind, which naturally takes place over real-time days. So we're able to say, okay, we can bootstrap some of the romance gates to the existing syndicate backbone. That overall is hopefully what players will see as a familiar, but you can't either burn yourself out or go too fast. It's there for a reason and the romance system takes advantage of it in terms of pacing."

"The other part is a happy accident. As with all things in Warframe are very much a team effort, some of the Soulframe team members hopped over to poke around. They poked very hard in the quest direction for us [laugh]. So as the quest has come together, it informed the romance system. And friendship! I think it's important that it's not just about romance, but platonic relationships. It's about being part of a new group for The Drifter. The Drifter - maybe or maybe not - has found a peer group they can be a part of as part of their story. That has informed the importance of connecting with these characters as a story element, not just a side system."

"This is a very vague way of saying we've established systems that are time gated, and we have a quest that serves to give the player an experience unlike other quests, and it's all connected. It started with the team looking at it as an optional system, and it still kinda is, but it also can be so much more if the player wills it."

Kingsley: The other thing that was already in the structure of Warframe that lends itself to this system is the tier element of the syndicate system, where you go from neutral to loved. When you are approaching romance or friendship, and you're writing an arc where you get to know a character, it already follows that process where you start at a neutral place. I like to think of it like peeling an onion, where you dig deeper to the core of a character. So as players explore the system, they'll notice similarities in that way."

So that's how the romance came to be, and we know how it'll fit within the structure of Warframe. But how do you make a relationship system feel Warframe-y. You know what I mean. The game has a distinct feel, a look, a style. How do you add such a thing to the game so that it doesn't come across as a brief shagger escapade, but a meaningful addition to the game as a whole. The answer, according to Ford and Kingsley, lies in the text messaging system the relationships are built upon.

Ford: "We wanted the primary interaction point to be the instant messager system. We have a diverse team of ages already. Some of us were AOL, ISQ, bulletin board systems, so we have all this tapestry to pull from to make a meaningful text relationship system. Then we have six characters, so one of the first things we put up on the board is how these characters feel in the 1999 setting. So one of the characters is heavy on the asqi emoji usage. Each of them needed that flavour."

Kingsley: "The one I will give away because it'll be a surprise to literally no one, and one that brought me back to the 90's, was Amir. He's the nerd character. I was like, I'm just gonna bash my head across the keyboard and remember what it was like to play World of Warcraft in the 90s and 2000s with leet speak. It literally broke me for a solid... I was talking to the writing team in Slack and they were like 'you've been writing too much Amir this week Kat, you need to slow down [laughs]. It changes the way you as the writer communicate when you get stuck in the character's head for too long."

I'll be the first to admit that relationship systems in video games aren't a massive draw for me. But, given the option to see friendships flourish in a way that fits within the Warframe settings adds another layer to an already exciting update. Only one question remains: which of the Warframe 1999 cast are you keen to start talking to?

Warframe 1999 is set to release some time this December, so keep an eye out for the release soon!