Warframe: Digital Extremes on Designing Frames Fans Actually Want to See
Thirteen years into Warframe’s life, Digital Extremes is still wrestling with the same question every time it sketches a new suit of alien armour: how much can a design change before it stops feeling like Warframe? Community Director Megan Everett tackled that exact tension in a recent interview with Shacknews, walking through the studio’s internal rules for balancing classic silhouettes against increasingly extreme cosmetic experimentation, just as TennoCon 2026 wraps its 13th-anniversary celebration in London, Ontario this weekend.
“I think maintaining some sort of classic Warframe integrity is extremely important when we do any type of design,” Everett said, adding that “there are some Prime and Deluxe skins that really push those lines and go extreme.” Her go-to example is one of the game’s most divisive cosmetic overhauls: “I always think about Nidus Deluxe with his crazy arms and his eyeballs, and that one we took to a whole other level, but you still know it’s Nidus.”
Classic Silhouettes vs. Extreme Deluxe Redesigns
Warframe now carries base designs alongside Immortal, Deluxe, Heirloom, Protoframe, Prime and community-made TennoGen skin lines for the same characters, and every new pass has to answer to the ones that came before it. Everett pointed to Garuda’s Deluxe skin as another case where the team deliberately strayed from the character’s usual reading, describing it in the interview as pushing past the expected silhouette while still needing “some sort of callback to whatever the base Warframe is that you’re trying to do,” even when a Deluxe skin turns Garuda into what Everett called “a little twig, bug thing… sometimes that’s a little strange and not what you think Garuda would be, but at the same time, you kind of do have to experiment a little bit.”
That willingness to get weird traces back to the earliest days of the studio. In a separate Pocket Gamer interview conducted alongside Design Director Pablo Alonso, Everett credited original art director Michael “Mynki” Brennan with setting the tone still followed today, saying “it was from a foundation that Mynki (Michael Brennan) set. Mynki was our art director back in the day. He always had a really out there vision for the designs. He always made weird things that it just looked very interesting. And they always work great.” Alonso, in the same conversation, said seeing those early designs pushed him to chase the same instinct as a designer himself.
From Mynki’s Napkin Sketches to Styanax Prime
Everett told Shacknews the team still returns to that founding artwork whenever it plans a new Frame or skin, explaining “we go back a lot to the napkin drawings of Mynki from the very original days of Warframe, and he and Jeff created Excalibur, created the first Warframes, and even now, when I read the conversations between the designers and the artists and Rebecca, and they’re talking and going through the design of a new Warframe or a new skin, there’s always a mention of making sure that you have so” that callback to the original character intact.
She used the recently released Styanax Prime, the game’s 50th Prime Warframe, as the clearest recent example of that principle in action. According to Everett, artist Liger Inuzuka built the redesign directly from one of Mynki’s original concepts, deliberately imagining how the Orokin’s own artisans would have depicted the hero rather than how the game’s antagonist Ballas might have styled him. As she put it, “they wanted to kind of show what the Orokin artists would have made Styanax look like as opposed to Ballas doing it, so it really pulls from that Orokin inspiration… they really wanted to focus on what they would have pictured the hero being as opposed to what Ballas would have pictured.”
Heirloom Skins Rebuild 13-Year-Old Frames With New Tech
The interview also covered how engine upgrades have let Digital Extremes revisit its oldest Warframes without junking their original look. The Heirloom line, which currently spans Frames including Ember, Frost, Mag, Rhino, Valkyr and Vauban, was built specifically to give early Prime designs a modern glow-up. Everett described the tech behind the line’s signature glass-like effects, saying “I think they still maintain what we originally sought out to do, which was this like uber celebratory look. It had all new technology with the… effects under the skin of all the molten lava, constellation-looking stuff. We kind of like reinvented our tech a little bit to even make this happen, and we always knew we wanted them to feel special.”
With 50 Prime Warframes now in rotation, Everett acknowledged the growing challenge of keeping older designs accessible as newer ones push frames into temporary vaulting, noting that “the introduction of Prime Resurgence was kind of our way of trying to offer different routes, especially cause we’re actually having the conversations about the Prime Vault as new Primes come out.”
Design Talk Lands as TennoCon 2026 Closes Out in Ontario
The design conversation arrives at a fitting moment. Digital Extremes is currently running TennoCon 2026 over two days in London, Ontario, marking Warframe’s 13th anniversary with a Cosplay Contest, a full orchestral TennoConcert and the finale TennoLive presentation, all streamed free worldwide on Twitch and YouTube for fans who can’t make the in-person show, including Australian and New Zealand players tuning in outside North American time zones. Everett flagged the scale of this year’s event ahead of the show, saying “our biggest TennoCon yet may be around the corner, but we have so much more in store for players this year. Both Warframe and Soulframe have bustling and passionate communities we want to celebrate and honor.”
Digital Extremes has also been leaning further into ambitious character design this year, most recently with Jade Shadows: Constellations, which introduced the game’s 65th Warframe as two playable characters sharing one kit. Announcing the update, Everett said “our character design team really pushed themselves to the limit with creating two playable Warframes in one. It’s been so inspiring to see the gameplay and the narrative of this update seamlessly blend together.”
For a decade-plus-old live-service game still adding Frames, skins and entire cosmetic tech lines, the throughline Everett describes is less a strict rulebook than a constant negotiation: honour the silhouette players already recognise, but never be afraid to let a designer go, in her words, “extreme” when the character calls for it.
Read also: Warframe Kuva Weapon Tier List: Nukor, Bramma Lead New S-Tier Ranking
Join the Conversation