Soulframe is getting a Wazzard. No, not a wizard, a Wazzard.
What’s a Wazzard, you ask? Same, friend. You best believe that when I got a chance to talk to Geoff Crookes and Sarah Asselin, creative director and senior community manager on Digital Extremes’ still-in-alpha fantasy MMORPG, I asked them. Is there a difference between the Wazzard of Wastes the player fights in the demo of the game shown off at this year’s TennoCon, and your regular neighbourhood wizard?
“You have no idea how much fun we’ve been having for months, saying Wazzard so much,” Crookes responded. “I honestly think in the Digital Extremes way, it’s just a case of ‘how can we make something familiar [more] dorky and fun. Honestly, I can’t remember if it was a typo, it might have even started as a typo.”
While it’s maybe a bit closer to its inspiration than the studio might usually go, the director said Wazzard was “just too fun to deny”. Cue internal jokes that the Waste Bear fable, a new quest the devs are set to add to Soulframe, is a bit of “Wiz versus Waz”. It’ll see you investigate the plight of an ursine tree-hugger called Bromius at the behest of a very French-accented witch who can make rats fly, and Crookes said it predominantly exists for one reason.
“The inspiration honestly started with, ‘Hey, we want a bear in the game’, it’s as simple as that,” he revealed, Then really, we thought [that] if we want a bear omen beast – [that’s] the term that we [use] for our important animal spirit protectors of the world – they usually have very specific roles or jobs they do in the world or things they protect. So when we wanted a bear, full credit to Sydney [Hills] our narrative designer, [she] leaned into calling him the arbearist.
“Once we had that role for him, that he protected the trees, we kind of slowly built the idea that there was a hazard coming to these things he protects. The pollution in the world is, unbeknownst to him, causing him to be unable to grow more trees and because of those schemes he also succumbs to his depression.”
While it fits into the collection of themes that Crookes, Asselin, and co have been building Soulframe around throughout its “Preludes” alpha test so far – nature, romanticism, and redemption – this fresh fable’ll also see Digital Extremes continue to add new wrinkles to their fledgling game.
“The world building, obviously, is just getting expanded, with the role the trees have in the world,” the director said, “It was an opportunity for us to expand on another enemy faction, the Mendicants, and their role in the world.” There are also new enemies, a new procedurally-generated dungeon dubbed the Neath’uns, and a bit of “planting the seed for future problems”. “This is a really great way to kind of foreshadow future quests that the players are going to get, so everything that we do with these story beats is really kind of setting the table for more adventures in the future,” Crookes finished.
In showing off this quest as part of this TennoCon demo, Soulframe’s devs are hoping to offer fans a glimpse of the game that helps alleviate an association Crookes admits is “our own fault”. It’s called Soulframe, but it won’t just appeal to folks who like Souls games. Like Wazzard, the name was “a bit too hard to deny”, because of how well it fit the MMORPG’s story.
“The impression, rightly so, that people get is that the game is pretty hardcore, from that comparison,” the director admitted, “So, that’s why hopefully this TennoCon demo really kind of helps broaden it a bit away from that. We are deliberately using a playstyle that is much more casual in how intense combat can be, being that you can be a ranged fighter in this one. So that’s hopefully what we can kind of keep building, the distinction that we do not want this game to be as punishing, we want to invite a wide array of playstyles that come to this game.
“We want players to be able to build combat builds where, if they want to be a bit more [like] hardcore swordsmen, they can do that. But at the same time we’re putting so much work into the world of Soulframe that we absolutely want to encourage people that want to come in, explore, hang out, and rescue animals to be just as valid as being the world’s best swordsman.”
Digital Extremes aren’t quite ready to commit to a date when they’ll bring the MMORPG they announced all the way back at 2022’s edition of TennoCon yet. However, 2025’s annual Warframe get-together is seeing them let anyone who signs up for an account over the convention weekend into Soulframe’s Preludes. The fact an eventual full release, while assumedly nearer than it was last year, doesn’t look to be on the immediate horizon, mirrors how Digital Extremes are approaching Soulframe’s debut differently than they did with its established sci-fi sibling, which started slow before growing into the juggernaut it is today.
“We’re using everything, absolutely everything we learned from the Warframe launch, except this time knowing that the industry is different 13 years later,” Crookes told me, “So, we don’t have the same kind of leash that was given to us then, to just put something out as early as we did with Warframe and build on it. That’s why we decided to do our Preludes closed alpha, where we’ve had limited access to a core group of [our] community that we could build and start to get the snowball getting bigger as it went down the hill.
“It’s going to be when we find where that snowball is ready to keep its momentum going, [that’s] when we’re going to open it up really wide. So, we’re approaching it very much the same way we’re just being a bit more decisive about when we have the good content loop and the good progression loops that are there, because we know we’ll probably get a bit more attention on the game now than we did when we launched Warframe.”
The good thing is that while that snowball’s still in need of some extra rolling, it sounds like the devs working on it have nailed down a strong vision for what they want it to look like, at least from a narrative and theming perspective. One of the new additions Soulframe’ll be getting to its skill systems is medieval-style martial arts manuals which allow you to learn skills like parrying and perfect dodging. I got a glimpse of the art for a couple of them, and it looks really cool, but given that what I’d played of Soulframe in Preludes felt like it leant a lot more into whimsical fantasy elements than down-to-earth medieval inspirations, I asked the pair how they’re managing that dichotomy.
“It’s a balance, we’re definitely conscious of it,” Crookes replied, “We want everything to feel like, even just in how it’s presented, we want to make sure it doesn’t distract from the core themes of the game. So, even when we come to the whimsical magic stuff, we want to make sure we justify and have good reason for it, not be hand wavey with it, if that makes sense.”
That’s far from the only balancing act Soulframe’s devs are trying to pull off, though it seems that when the team’s encountering these with the game’s non-writing aspects, they’re being a bit more open and malleable. I mentioned the fact that at current, Soulframe lets players run and roam free the moment the game’s short intro cinematic concludes. It’s wonderfully liberating, but comes with a lack of overtly clear objectives which can also lead to you just wandering around for a while until you happen upon a quest or dungeon.
“Yeah, there’s not a lot of early game hand-holding right now and finding that sweet spot between exploration and people missing important aspects of the game is something we are continuously working on and is really important to a new player experience that feels good. It’s one of the things we want to get right before we open it wider for sure,” Asselin said.
“It’s funny, we actually had plans and we put them in place, we were working on it to be very handholdy at the start,” Crookes continued, “Almost probably like a two hour starting quest that really wouldn’t let you escape and put you on a distinct path. Then we were getting just enough feedback that people loved being [free to roam]. Obviously, it wasn’t perfect, but there was an aspect to discovery that people liked, so we said, ‘You know what, let’s go really hardcore the other way, let’s take advantage of preludes, let’s stop this [plan], keep putting stuff in, and then, okay, now we’ve gone too far’.”
Soulframe’s procedurally-generated dungeons are another area which’ve seen the team have to adjust established plans or preconceptions, with Crookes acknowledging that it’s been difficult not having the level of control over structure and flow handcrafting dungeons allows. “Even with Warframe, there’s something about the language of spaceships, you can kind of play with the layouts a bit and make it make sense, but when you’re kind of digging trenches into nature you find you have to justify it a little bit. So, it is a challenge, but it’s a fun one,” he said.
Those go along with equations the team will have to think about further down the line, such as how players recruiting more and more of Soulframe’s ancestor allies to their spirit dimension home base (called The Nightfold) as they progress affects the challenge the world offers. Plus, the conundrum of whether to add-in a bird racing minigame centred around the sparrow that Soulframe employs to help guide you to objectives, and back to your corpse when you need to respawn. Okay, so that last one might just be an idea I floated to Crookes and Asselin.
As it stands, Souframe’s devs are hopeful that they’ve created an MMO that, while sharing some familiar DNA, is distinct enough from Warframe that the two can forge “their own pathways, their own niches”. Crookes says he’s “moderately” concerned about the potential for Soulframe to cannibalise Warframe’s established audience, while Asselin is a bit more glass half full.
“As someone that has played a lot of both games, it almost feels as if there’s a similar spirit, but a different pace and tempo,” she said, “Soulframe is more grounded and more exploratory, and they both itch a different part of my brain. So, I think there’s a world where they coexist for people, who’re interested in both and also them individually.”
We’ll just have to see if, whenever Soulframe does reach the point of emerging from its Preludes cocoon, there is a bit of a War versus Waz boss battle. Warframe’s got firepower on its side, but I’d not want to bet against a Wazzard.