Love it or hate it, the word “soul” is quite synonymous with From Software, whether that’s Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, its other challenging action games like Bloodborne or Elden Ring, or the Soulslike genre the studio inspired. So it’s no surprise that some players expected “Soulframe” to feature gameplay reminiscent of a Soulslike.
After playing the game for several hours myself – and if you’re a Game Informer subscriber, you will be receiving a Soulframe Preludes code to check it out for yourself, too – I can confidently say that while there is a slight tinge of that Soulslike feel, I wouldn’t place it in the Soulslike subgenre of action games. Digital Extremes doesn’t admonish anybody who sees its slower, more deliberate fantasy RPG action game with “Soul” in the title and assumes it’s in the ilk of From Software games, though.
“We made the idiot decision to put ‘Soul’ in the title, right?” Digital Extremes CEO Steve Sinclair tells me in the studio’s DevStream recording space during my visit for the Soulframe cover story in the May issue of Game Informer. “Yeah, it’s stupid. We invited that criticism, absolutely, but the ‘Soul’ is supposed to be more about the literal soul [of these characters and the world].”
That criticism Sinclair is referencing is the initial response to Soulframe’s combat when players first jumped into Preludes. He says the team used too much of the Warframe system for Soulframe’s combat, a smart and iterative idea in theory, but one that doesn’t work as well because the latter is a much slower system than the former. “[So] when an enemy is lasting 15 to 20 seconds on screen, instead of one [like in Warframe], you see everything,” Sinclair says. “‘That foot slid there, the character doesn’t have a good hit reaction, when he falls, his head clips through the geometry,’ and all this stuff.”
The team responded by reworking combat and believes the community would agree it’s in a much better place today. “People definitely love the vibes […] and the stories we were telling, but yes, mechanically, we just missed the mark, and I think it was a lesson learned and a failure in our messaging because we probably didn’t elaborate enough on the title of the game,” Soulframe creative director and former Warframe art and animation director Geoff Crookes says.
Today, Soulframe is more responsive to your real-time inputs, in stark contrast to the typical animation frame-based combat of Soulslikes. “All this stuff, which From Software has been working on for two decades, we were trying to do in two years […] and it didn’t work,” Sinclair adds.
Speaking to Soulframe lead designer Scott McGregor in a different interview, he tells me the first iteration of early access combat for the game “wasn’t good enough,” but notes the Preludes and Founders programs are about finding out what works and what doesn’t, and addressing it alongside the community actually playing the game. “Warframe’s combat, from where it started to where it is today, is radically different, and I think Soulframe will be a continuing evolution of that core loop,” McGregor says. “We’ll be continually refining it and making it tighter, and I think you can already see that almost on the daily.”
Soulframe level designer Penny Shannon, seated beside McGregor, says, “I think it’s really down to being okay with the fact that you’re going to have to change something that you’ve done and are really proud of and be okay with that.”
With Soulframe Preludes continuing today, the game will continue to evolve based on the intersection of Digital Extremes’ vision and the desires of its active playerbase. And, if you’re a subscriber to Game Informer before April 22, you can be a part of that because you will receive a Soulframe Preludes code to check out the game. More information about codes can be found here.
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