Warframe has fishing, creature capturing, kaiju hunting, mining, hacking, piloting mechs, and much more. If there is something you want to lose yourself in while playing Warframe, you can “find your own fun,” as Creative Director Rebecca Ford told the Epic Games Store. That now includes romance. 

Chaperoned by a best-selling romance author, Principal Writer Kathryn Kingsley, the latest updates to the expansive space ninja odyssey have added relationships to nurture. But before delving deep into Warframe’s new branching romance system, the story of how Kingsley joined the team is notable, especially in the game industry’s landscape.

Ford is an avid reader, loving romance and storytelling in books, manga, anime, webtoons, music, and games. After reading Kingsley’s books in a book club, Ford wanted to reach out to the author and pinged her via LinkedIn.

“My feelings were a whirlwind of excitement, anxiety, and just full-on delight. Hesitancy was not among them,” Ford said. “I just knew she would be perfect for what we wanted to explore with [Warframe’s] 1999 [DLC], I just had to cross my fingers that she said yes. You never know how someone is going to respond when you randomly message them on LinkedIn! The all-seeing algorithm put Kat’s books in front of me, possessing me to read her author bio to see her game dev experience, and ensuring she was available to be hired.”

On the other side, Kingsley was facing tough decisions, since she had been mulling over selling her home.

“I was applying for jobs, and then received a random LinkedIn message from someone named Rebecca Ford,” Kingsley said. “It said, you know, ‘Are you the author Kathryn Ann Kingsley? If so, I'd love to have an opportunity to talk to you about writing for Warframe.’ And I literally sat on my carpet back here and just broke down in tears. Because I had no idea if we were going to need to sell the house. I was having a full existential crisis about what I was going to do with myself. What proceeded 45 minutes later was the funniest Google Meet phone call ever, because we were both trying to play it cool. A week later, I had a job offer, and I was hired to create the first live service relationship system in existence.”

When developing a branching romance system for a live service game, Kingsley first spent time at Warframe developer Digital Extremes researching romance systems in other titles. However, she quickly realized it was untrodden territory.

“The first thing I did was go research other live service branching narrative romance systems and conversation systems that were specifically in live service games and how they handled it,” Kingsley said. “With a lot of relationship systems, people will resort to saves, where if you screw up an interaction with a character, you go, ‘Oh no,’ and you reload a save. You can't really do that in Warframe. From the very first moment I went out and looked at what other games have done this, I realized there really weren't any. There were some other games that had kind of similar-ish mechanics, but nothing that really matched what we were trying to achieve with this sort of fully branching narrative system.” 

Kingsley was able to find a way to thoughtfully tackle this choice selection reset while still integrating impactful decisions that players can make in Warframe’s new Y2K setting. For those not in the know, 1999 introduced us to instant messaging, infected boy bands to fight, and Protoframes, which are a human version of Warframes. Digital Extremes wanted to ensure these characters were written as people and not as caricatures.

According to Ford: “Since this was the first time that we gave our Warframes faces and personalities, it was imperative to us that they felt like ‘real’ people, not just video game characters who gave you rewards when you ticked all their boxes. You can accidentally make them mad. You can apologize to them. You can hear their deepest fears or set boundaries to keep them at arm's length. You can break up and make up with some, but not all of them, depending on their personalities." 

1999 is set on New Year’s Eve with a looping mechanic that builds on the playable character Drifter’s time manipulation ability. Even through this looping mechanic, it does not mitigate the conversations or choices you can delve into with the Hex Syndicate. 

“I could make sure the players never became trapped,” Kingsley said. “Or if they made a mistake, it was safe insomuch as they could reset. I wanted to make sure that the conversation still felt like they had a sense of real danger. If you clicked the wrong choice, it had a sense of meaning to it. I didn't want the conversations to ever feel fluffy in that way because you were talking to a person, and those conversations had weight and value to them. I never wanted to really penalize the player permanently for screwing up or misreading something.”

At the heart of many well-known stories, romantic subplots are almost inseparable from tales of grand crusades and world-ending plots. Video games have been rife with love stories for decades, and that has not diminished the hunger people have for romance in narratives.

“Strip out all of the steamy scenes and all of the hoopla that goes along with it, [and] they are, at their core, love stories, and humans have been telling each other love stories since the dawn of time,” Kingsley said. “Every good story, down to King Arthur, down to everything else, is a good guy saves the world [and] gets the girl. That is the story we always wanna tell each other. Romance novels are explorations of that in perpetuity ad nauseam. They are just a way for us to explore parts of our psyche in safety that allows us to express ourselves in a way that we can't do in our daily lives.”

When crafting an ending for a romance novel, there is really only one way it can end, but when a player’s decision-making factors in, there can be dozens of ways to reach a romantic or platonic ending among characters. Kingsley found this element of player involvement both compelling and challenging, opening up new possibilities of what games can do that romance novels cannot.

“When I write a romance novel, it's fully linear,” Kingsley said. “When you introduce player choice into that, I have to think in multiple branching realities. I have to say, ‘What if the player wants to interact with this character in this way? What if the player wants to interact with the character in that way?’ And I have to make both of those choices fully valid. It's a challenge both for me as a writer, and it's also just a wonderful experience to sort of be able to explore a personality in that new, fun, and interesting way. I think it's a completely different kind of challenge because they're not plot-driven stories. They are fully personality-driven interactions. It's more of an organic exploration of a personality and letting people discover how they want to interact with that person, things that they want to discover about them, and what rocks they wanna turn over.”

After the release of 1999, the Warframe community has asked for more exploration and choices with the game’s romance options, which rallied the team to add additional branching romantic options and conversations in Isleweaver, Warframe’s latest major update. Digital Extremes has been extremely receptive to the feedback from players and their insistence on more of these branching romantic choices.

“We are elated. Everyone’s reception has been above and beyond what we could’ve expected,” Ford said. “Players keep asking us for more, more, more, so it feels like we’re on the right track and plan to do everything we can to give ‘more.’”

Ready to become a space ninja parkouring, shooting, and now smooching other space ninjas? Warframe is available to download through the Epic Games Store.