At its TennoCon 2024 fan event earlier today, Digital Extremes brought us a new look at Soulframe, its upcoming medieval fantasy “sister game” to Warframe. Like Warframe, it’s an “action-RPG, MMO-lite” free-to-play game, albeit with a slower, more deliberate pace to its melee-heavy combat compared to Warframe’s space ninja acrobatics. Oh, and you can make your mom in it.
In an advanced press preview of this year’s TennoCon demo, DE showed off the introductory section of the game’s opening story quest, during which you’ll create your character. A cutscene follows a bird flying in a rainstorm over a sprawling fantasy battle at night, where an army is besieging a castle with catapults and battle magic. A narrator recites the tale of the battle in skaldic verse, and as the bird flits in through the castle window to show a woman cradling a baby in her arms, the game enters the first phase of character customization: momcrafting.
It seems that, in Soulframe, you’ll determine your character’s appearance by first choosing what your parents looked like. In today’s TennoCon demo, we only see the mom portion: as you choose her features, the narrator’s poetry reacts to reflect your choices, choosing appropriate metaphors for her hair and eye color. Theoretically, those decisions will inform how your character ends up looking, but we don’t see the full process. Once your mom’s locked in, she passes the baby—you, presumably—to a handmaid to be carried away from the battle.
Beyond the customizable moms, this TennoCon’s look at Soulframe does more expanding on what we’ve seen in earlier previews than providing new details. After the mom creation, the demo jumps ahead past the rest of the intro quest and character creation to give us a taste of questing and combat, but it’s a shorter sampling than the 30-minute gameplay overview from TennoCon 2023.
Soulframe will feature a large, open overworld, which you’ll move through to access procedurally-generated dungeons, similar to how Warframe’s mission layouts are randomly stitched together from tilesets. Whenever you’re away from enemies, you can warp at will into a pocket dimension called the Nightfold, a personal hub area equivalent to Warframe’s Orbiter.
As you play Soulframe, you’ll gather spirits of your ancestors, who’ll hang out in the Nightfold to handle your progression, equipment, and—most importantly—fashion options. During the preview demo, revealed a new ancestor: Verminia, the Rat Witch, an alchemist who’ll help craft elixir consumables while offering her own set of cosmetic unlocks. Also in the Nightfold? A giant, friendly wolf who’ll serve as your mount.
In addition to weighty sword-swinging, combat in Soulframe will make use of your Pact—your cursed arm, and Soulframe’s version of a character class. Instead of swapping between Warframes, you’ll swap out your horrible nightmare limb, which will provide you with different sets of core magical abilities. In the demo, the character could fling their halberd and recall it at will, Thor-style, providing some ranged versatility to Soulframe’s meaty melee battles.
Soulframe Preludes, which DE calls its “pre-pre-pre-alpha,” started invite-only testing in December 2023. During the press preview session, DE said it hopes to “get Soulframe in more public hands” this fall.
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