invested in. The updates are consistent, so you can rely on them.”
ON THE ROAD To facilitate their hopes of sticking to a consistent content update plan, Digital Extremes and Airship Interactive have put processes, tools and practices in place to make sure that updating Wayfinder on a regular basis is something that they can reasonably do. “We do a lot of planning. We have a lot of people
content production and pipelines. So from a technology and production standpoint, we’ve learned an awful lot about how you keep an online game updated very rapidly,” says Browne. “We’ve also learned a lot about community. Warframe
probably has the best community online. That’s a lot to do with how open we are and how approachable we make ourselves. We’re not in any way a barrier between development and the community. That’s something we will continue with Wayfinder, and the development team will be talking one-to-one with the audience. “The core basis of how we approach free-to-play is
very different to most. We’ve had some very nice articles written about how Warframe is a free-to-play game that’s not predatory. We brought that forward as well.” The games-as-a-service ecosystem has evolved during
Warframe’s lifetime, thanks to both Digital Extremes’ own efforts and those of other products in the market. Many competitors have come and gone, with GaaS titles that are fun games at their cores seemingly living or dying based on content release cadences and how good studios are at keeping game fans invested. “The most important
thing that’s evolved in the last ten years are the communities.” says an impassioned Browne. “The player base has expectations that things happen on a regular basis, so we make sure that there’s always something new for the player to do. To get a player’s time, we want to involve them in our world. We want to give them something that they fall in love with, to stay
20 | MCV/DEVELOP Febraury 2023
working on the game and we’ve got a roadmap that we stick to, and we keep building it day-by-day,” affirms Browne. “The interesting thing about games-as-a-service is that things can change at any time. So you start doing things and the community goes, ‘hey, we love that.’, so you have to slightly move the path and have the people in place to go down that path. You can do things that have the player base saying, ‘yeah, not so much...’ and then you have to avoid that stuff. It’s a lot of studios working in tandem across the world to make sure that we have the content coming online, and having very good analytics on the back end so that we know what players are engaged with. Wherever they think things are great, we follow that path. Where they think they’re bad, we stay away from that.” When trying to build in that flex in pre-production,
there are elements of game design where you can do that, and there are elements where you can’t. It’s mostly about including procedural elements and repeatable gameplay loops when developing a games-as-a-service title, as Browne tells us: “You just have to have enough teams across enough
areas, so that you’ve got people who can change as and where you go. Obviously in content building, that’s an easier side of it. In terms of features, that becomes a harder issue. Certain things will take a certain amount of
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