The Duviri Paradox, Warframe’s latest expansion, is weird, quite unlike anything the free-to-play shooter has attempted before. It ditches the game’s usually overt sci-fi trappings in favour of something closer to a fantasy western: it’s in black and white (accept when it isn’t); it’s a rogue-like; it’s simultaneously both a sequel and a prequel (paradoxes, eh?), and the whole thing takes place inside the mind of its new Big Bad. Oh, and despite being radically different, it’s also the new opening to the game. Like I said, The Duviri Paradox is weird.
So what, you might well ask, is going on here? “It’s sort of the reality when… you’ve been making the same game for 10 years,” Warframe’s creative director Rebecca Ford tells me during a recent chat, “that if you keep piling things on at the end of the experience, you leave a lot of people behind… And we also realise the people who’ve been with us for 10 years, if we keep giving them exactly what they expect, eventually they’ll lose interest.
“So we tried to converge the immense weight of veteran expectations with the grim reality of running a game as a service and people feeling it’s too impenetrable. And we tried to force gravity to bend to our will and create this new beginning. Will it work? You tell us!”
