Warframe Digital Extremes developers launched founders program for their faded dark fantasy actionRPG Soulframe. This means you can now pay to access an unfinished game rather than signing up for a chance to get a free code. Moreover, now you can add it to your wishlist on Steam before a possible final release, as a constantly updated game world like this will ever reach completion. There are always more layers to the setting and more cool shoulder pads to unearth from the depths.
The purchase includes one or all three “Wild” characters, each with different weapons, skills and gear, or as Digital Extremes calls it, “unique pacts, armor, weapons, sidearms, figurines, Sparrow Spirit Guide skins, talismans and wild animal motifs.” Soulframe has a lot of this slightly confusing text. Some of them exist for the love of fairy tales; Some of these are designed to increase the appeal of various items, currencies (including Arcs purchased with real money), and other microtransactions. I'm not sure I would call Founders packages “micro”. They cost £25 or $40 CAD each, or £85 or $130 CAD if you buy all three as part of the Paragon bumper pack.
I'm still passionate about Soulframe, which is based on those few hours I played about a year ago. It features a tense and mournful world full of exquisite metals, fabrics and stonework, as well as Moria-inspired procedural dungeons that are worthy of praise. It features characters who spend hours and days between logins napping among the animals of the forest.
The game features a robust and balletic third-person combat system with some florid special moves that reflect the decade Digital Extremes has spent creating increasingly interesting playstyles for Warframe. It features a parallel dimension of the Nightfold tent city, which you can fall into backwards, as if snuggling up to a big, fluffy dog at the end of a busy day spent *checks notes* collecting threads of moonsteel to stitch together your equipment. (There is actually a big fluffy dog in the Night Pen.)
I really enjoy some aspects of the backstory writing, which has the same gnomic intensity and byzantine cast relationships you'll find in the Souls series… then it's all compressed to the point where my eyes get tired and my brain fills with the squeaks of a million hamsters chained to wheels. The main problem is that it's a free-to-play, update-driven simulator, and like Destiny, that entails a cutthroat world-building shootout. They call it “Soulslite”, but there's nothing light about the lore. Most of this lives on the official website and social networks. Check in while looking away and you may be surprised by the silence of the game world below.
Soulframe's Founder's Packs accompany the twelfth major “prelude” or pre-alpha update. Given the complaints above, the most important thing it introduces is probably expanded and retuned gameplay for new players, allowing you to try out starting characters before committing. It also adds the ability to fast travel between world trees using Wevetseeds, new boss spawn patterns, a mushroom you can eat to trigger a painful “Koga” world shift for special rewards, a new “Great Sword” weapon, and a camel trader for the Nightfold tent dimension. A camel has an eyeball attached to its beard. There will be an explanation for this, and it will be annoying. Read more at official website.
