In case you missed it, Warframe will be releasing its 60th playable warframe later this month, on March 19. It’s a frame like no other, packing a horrific infested guitar, various spikes and other sharp pointy bits, plus a protoframe user that bares a striking resemblance to David Bowie. It’s the MMO’s first rock star, unapologetically loud and brash.
But how did this character come to be? Well, it may surprise you to know that this musical warframe, releasing alongside the upcoming musical update – Warframe 1999 Techrot Encore – has been bubbling away in sketches and design docs for a while. To fill me in on how this new frame – dubbed Temple – came together design-wise, I chatted with Warframe’s weapon art lead Kaz Adams, who was responsible for bringing the idea of Temple to digital life.
VG247:How did the Temple design come about?
Adams: “This was like an off-hours sketch kind of thing. A lot of people at DE are inspired by the game we’re working on, so in the back of their mind they’re like ‘if I could make a Warframe, what would it look like?’. I have a folder with loads of ideas in there. This one in particular was one of the most self-indulgent, coolest sets of things I could put into a Warframe. I was like, it has to be rock ‘n roll, and I also had a whole bunch of extra ideas we ended up pulling out.
“Originally it had ball joints and a puppeteering sub-theme, and demon-summoning. So that was too much (laughs), so we scaled it back from there. Back then, the sketch wasn’t really in a place where I could use it that well. So I kept reworking it and reworking it, and as my skill level increased and my tastes got better, it just became closer and closer to something that I could see actually existing in the game. I’m glad it took that long! I’m so much more competent nowadays.
“Once we started ideating for Warframe 1999, and we knew there would be a boy band, I was like well there’s a boy band, can there be a rock ‘n roll character too! Of course, Rebecca had the same thought. She was like, ‘We’re putting this on the schedule!'”
VG247:When did you first pitch the Temple design to the rest of the Warframe team?
Adams: “It was in 2018, I was going to Japan for the first time ever and I was full of all kinds of ideas. I pitched it to Jeff Hartling and Steve Sinclair, and the original version was based on a bunch of 80s Rock bands I suppose. The helmet had a top hat kind of thing, I was basing that off Slash. But at that time, we had just put out a tall hat – I think it was Revenant. Steve’s advice was that the guitar wasn’t weird enough. So I made it infested instead.
“Then Steve said, what if it turned into a gun? (laughs) That was all early advice, and Temple kinda evolved from there. Rebecca told me it looked too deluxe in the very early [designs], as I had a lot of stuff sticking out of it. But that’s what you do when you have a blank canvas, you go ‘I’ll add this thing! I’ll add this thing!’ But the better direction is to start taking away stuff and seeing what you miss.”
VG247:Which specific bands inspired the design?
Adams: “For me, I was listening to a lot of 70s stuff, so Ziggy Stardust is the biggest visual inspiration there because of the pinstripes and the colour pallete too. But I used some inspiration from non-rock stuff too. One of the biggest breakthrough moments for me when I was coming up with the visual elements was a suggestion from Nikita Leshakov to [emphasize] a spike that was on the thigh a little more. I did and it started to remind me of a dragonfruit, so I started adding those in other places and arrived at the look. For the last element, I really like guitars.”
[Kaz proceeded to show me one red guitar she describes as Iceman-ish, as well as a white Fernandes]
VG247: We’ve got to talk about the guitar! How did you arrive at this wild, infested guitar Temple has?
Adams: “Well, you do a lot of really gross messy sketches for a while and figure it out. It’s one of those things that’s really nuanced for answering. It seems like a thing that’s a fine line to walk, but there’s a lot of ways to do that. I started out thinking I could put it on the character, like on both arms. But it didn’t look like a guitar anymore, it was too wide. So, what other arrangements could work if it were bisected like that? Well, then I thought of like a Michael Angelo Batio double guitar – that’s cool right? But I see a lot of guitars in other games, and they all look like regular guitars. I was thinking, what if I could base it on one of these crazy guitars instead.”