Warframe creators Digital Extremes have announced that their free-to-play fantasy RPG Soulframe will be available for everyone to download on 6th November, after two years in closed alpha. Finally, you serfs without “prelude” keys will be able to fire up Soulframe.com and make sense of my ranting about the sleeping animals on the lobby screen.
The new “open prelude” will land shortly before the game’s 17th major update, Verse of the Veilands, which lets you grow your Omen wolfpup allies into rideable adult wolves by finding the ingredients for a special biscuit. More importantly, prelude 17 violently rearranges the game’s wistful world, adding an Ubisoft-esque region purging system that is designed to guide new players a bit more emphatically towards the game’s “votives”. Aka, missions. Yes, Digital Extremes sort of have a bespoke term for every game feature in Soulframe. I find this can be either charming or maddening, depending on how much sleep I’ve had.
Here’s how the region purging will work: after completing the game’s Tormented Stag quest, you’ll find that the landscape is being corrupted by siphons deployed by the villainous star-faring Ode faction. You have to complete votives to build energy and learn the sacred song of each region, allowing you to cleanse it and restore the environment.
In a roundtable preview session last week, creative director Geoff Crookes and lead designer Scott McGregor expressed a certain amount of anxiety about deliberately polluting Soulframe’s fairytale ambience. “Scott and I were just talking yesterday about, aesthetically, how nervous we are about this change,” Crookes commented, “because the game has gotten a lot of really great feedback on how cosy it is, how beautiful the world is, and you’re going to enter a game that is much more unforgiving and harsh at first glance.”
That said, he thinks the shift “pairs really well with going into open alpha, because it is a much stronger breadcrumb [trail] for the player, to pull them into the world and give them a bit more ownership of what they’re doing.” Once rinsed of Ode siphons, regions will appear more like how they are in previous versions of Soulframe, with activities such as fishing and new resources to snaffle.
McGregor added that hitherto, a lot of Soulframe players have gotten lost and put the game down after completing the opening “Fables”, or story quests. “It’s a really big change to the structural flow of the game, you know,” he told the assembled journorabble. “We’re very open and discoverable, and we had a lot of player feedback that was basically ‘what do I do next? What do I do next? I don’t know what to do next’.
“So [it’s] taking that and mashing it with the votive system, which is our mission system for the game, and making that more of a directed experience,” he went on, “and then once they get through that directed experience, they can go back to that open world.” Prelude 17 will also let you accept votives more straightforwardly from the world map, after finding the local representative or mission giver.
Digital Extremes have a new Soulframe “pact” or character loadout on the boil, the Ode Shrike. It’s a dastardly poacher class who specialises in spike traps and throwable bolas. The Shrike’s standout ability is a balloon dart that lets you hoist enemies into the sky, as in Metal Gear Solid V.
You can read more about Soulframe’s on-going reinventions on the official site. While you won’t need a key to get access as of Nov 6th, the game’s paid Founders program will remain the same. Digital Extremes will likely still run closed preview builds alongside the “open prelude”, testing out features with a smaller group of players. They’re also looking into giving you the ability to reset your character, so you can check out any new material added to parts of the game you’ve finished.
I’m not sure I’ve ever been exhilarated by Soulframe, but I like the poise, flamboyance and gentle complexity of its combat. I also really enjoy its faded tapestry aesthetics, though I think it’s yanking on the goo-goo glands too avidly with all these fluffy forest animals. Enough photogenic wolfpups, Digital Extremes – let’s see you make, I don’t know, a blobfish look adorable.
It’s also very interesting as a new live service project from a company defined by the success of Warframe. I spoke to the Soulframe developers earlier in the year about the challenge of borrowing Warframe’s thunder without getting lost in its shadow.