Warframe, a game almost as complex as it is fun to play! In 2013, Digital Extremes was a Canadian indie game developer looking for some way to stay afloat in a world of insane competition from Activision to Sony. Their self-funded, self-developed and self-published passion project, Warframe, was the unlikely key to their success.
The game was released across multiple platforms in 2013 and was incredibly lucky to receive a playerbase of a few thousand players. Now, in 2026, the player count is in the hundreds of thousands and that’s just on Steam.
One of the biggest keys to the success of Warframe is their truly free-to-play format. Most free-to-play games come with expansions and DLC that you need to pay for, often including pieces of the game’s overarching lore, or just cosmetics, cosmetics always cost money. While this remains true in Warframe, you don’t need to spend a dime of your own money if you’re willing to (as gamers say) grind. All characters (warframes) and weapons in the game can be acquired through some means other than directly spending money on them. While it is true that you need to spend Platinum, the game’s premium currency, on cosmetics, you don’t need to buy Platinum with your own money if you have the time or resources for certain missions. All Warframes can be acquired through RNG (luck) and completing certain missions, and all Prime Warframes (upgraded and gold accented) can be acquired through Relics and that RNG. The game has trading options which allows you to sell parts of these Prime Warframes to other players for Platinum. When asked, fellow Warframe player and Gaucho, Nolan Tucker advised “You can go to Maroo’s Bazaar in game or you can go on your computer to Warframe Marketplace.”
Of course people don’t only play Warframe for the mission grinding and completionism aspects of it. There are many other reasons, one of which being the overarching Lore and characters. Warframe’s developers place a great amount of quality in their character designs, voice acting, and overall just writing the characters in compelling ways. Everyone from The Orbiter’s Cephalon Ordis to the most recent addition of Aspirant Zorba in the Relays. The story as well has grown from what it was, starting on earth and fighting an army of clones somehow leads the player across the solar system and even into the past in Warframe 1999. Along the way you get the stories of Warframes back in the days of their prime, everything from Atlas destroying an asteroid to save a planet, to Limbo, who created a rift between dimensions and accidentally teleported different parts of his body to different locations. (He’s robotic; don’t worry.)
Our next update, Jade Shadows: Constellations, has been teased to reveal more time-travel related things and honestly after seeing the trailers, I am all here for it. Not to mention the new Dual warframe of Sirius and Orion. In the words of Nolan Tucker “Equinox mains are quaking in their boots.”
Of course, a game like this wouldn’t be worth talking about if the actual mechanics weren’t also amazing. For one thing, you can take any Warframe, and give them any weapon you want. There are restrictions such as only having one primary, secondary and melee weapon on hand at a given time, but that’s a minimal problem when there are more than 500 options of weapons and at least 64 unique warframes at the moment to choose from.
The mission type variety is also to be talked about. Of course, there are standard mission types like Defence (protect a point), Extermination (kill enemies) and Survival (last a certain amount of time), but that isn’t the extent of it. There are disruption missions, assassinations, excavations, rescues and several more taking place both on planets and in the void of space. You don’t even need to stick with the action shooter aspect all the time, there’s Shawzin (Guitar Hero), Caliber Chicks (2d flash shooter), even a mario kart-type minigame that I couldn’t find the name of. The newest Warframe “Follie” even has a mechanic where the player can draw their own icons for one of her abilities in order to paint items into existence.
My overall impression of this game is that it is one of the greatest video games to be released in the past two decades and anyone and everyone is welcome to join it. The community is extremely nice and welcoming to new players, or as we in the warframe community call them, “Baby Tenno.” One such new player, our very own Dillon Spease, said “My friends wouldn’t stop bugging me to try this game, but once I got into it, I could understand the obsession.” Of course, it is always more fun to play games like these with friends, so if you have friends, and you feel like trying this game out, I would recommend that you try it out together.
