While Warframe still has microtransactions, the game has been widely praised for keeping things in balance: the online environment certainly isn't 'pay to win', and purchases within the game don't come remotely as close to gambling as the infamous slot machine lever incident mentioned above. Now some 5 years after its initial release, Warframe is still getting updates from the developers as the community continues to dedicate plenty of hours into the space-based shoo

When Carter and the rest of the development staff looked at the ~$137 purchase history of a man who really, really wanted to find the perfect fur pattern for his in-game pet, they realized they had essentially created a slot machine that impulsive players would gamble away significant amounts of money on. While many studios would consider this a big win, Digital Extremes made the decision that this kind of activity wasn't healthy for the playerbase in the long run. As Carter explained, it wasn't long before the 'gambling fur randomizer' was removed from the game entir

Cephalon are essentially powerful artificial intelligences created during the Orokin-era. Some, such as Cephalon Ordis, control a ship’s systems and essentially make it so the occupants needn’t perform any action to maintain the ship. Others, such as Cephalon Suda and Simaris, are just powerful beings that try to acquire as much knowledge as possible, albeit through somewhat different meth

In game terms, each Cephalon Fragment contains a piece of a larger picture. Depending on the specific planet you are on in the solar system, you might need 3, 5, or even 7 fragments to unlock a piece of hidden lore. Once completed, each Fragment is displayed in the Universe Tab of your Codex, and each contains a larger picture and a brief description of what the image displ

As someone who came back to Warframe around six months ago after a couple of years off, I felt overwhelmed with all the new mechanics and content. It was mentioned some quests like Chains of Harrow are like 100 hours in. How do you balance and remedy new and returning players so they're not lost?

So, we started early this year, probably between three and six months from idea to pen on paper. We essentially started the year off with the biggest problem of all: what are we going to do to keep our veterans happy? We can write a quest to keep them happy for a week, or can think what's the next push. We've pushed in all sorts of directions and they all have given us different results, mostly positive, but you can see when something doesn't have that staying power straight from the source someone who loves our game for it's core, that fluid gameplay and stuff, but in this case, this caters to that too a degree you can't get any idea. We're about to put their skills to the test.

Well, that didn't take long. Hot on the heels of DC Universe Online Executive Producer Larry Liberty calling the PS4 "a great platform for MMOs," Sony has announced several MMOs are headed to their next-gen sys

I think it will affect it dramatically. So much of the game is built around the core that we have, and it boils down to a player going out and getting resources and finding stuff. We're still going to have that there, but it's executed in a more… A way where the player has more agency to go visit and go back where there's no jarring transition. You're going out into the plains and you can find resources and interact with the environment in, well you saw the fishing. All of these are going to amplify the current gameplay. You'll be able to kill things in cooler ways which is usually what they're looking for.

Yes. Right now the player is faced with a faction called the Grineer, who's largely the first fraction you encounter in the game. So, a new player is familiar with them. In the daytime, new players will be very comfortable, learning things about the world. But at nighttime, the Eidolon comes out and that is an enemy that can only be encountered by someone that has the gear and the progression in the game to do so. We're talking hours into the game to unlock different quests to give them access to the Tenno, your operator, so that's a progression lock, more or less. This "kaiju" we call it, can't be countered by someone who hasn't progressed far enough. So it's an end game version of nighttime.

In an interview belonging to the Noclip documentary series by Daniel O'Dwyer, Digital Extremes Studio Manager Sheldon Carter detailed an unexpected result that occurred when the developer introduced a small microtransaction for Kubrows, an in-game virtual pet. The studio had implemented what Carter defines as a "slot machine lever" that allowed gamers - for the price of about $0.67 - to randomize the fur pattern and fur color of their pet Kubrow. While it was only a cosmetic feature, the idea of putting something so random behind a paygate drew the ire of many of the game's fans. Still, Digital Extremes went forward with the idea - until one fan spent well over $100 on it almost immediat