I've been trying to work out if I'm keen on Soulframe only because I feel guilty about missing the boat with Warframe. I reviewed Digital Extremes' hit free-to-play shooter in 2013, back when people were still calling it a spiritual successor to the developer's boomerang-throwing action game Dark Sector. I didn't like Warframe much at the time. Think I gave it a 6/10. Warp forward a decade, and that 6/10 game has become a thriving live service phenomenon - fifteenth on the Steam Most Played charts at the time of writing, and profitable enough to spawn its own annual TennoCon expo. It's also become an intoxicating, confusing morass of dynastic sci-fantasy politicking and genre-shifting expansions, ranging from capital ship mechanics to questions of time travel, wrapped in layers of cosmetics that make Destiny look about as colourful as Gears Of War.
I definitely didn't see all that coming. I doubt Digital Extremes saw it coming either. Warframe today feels like a lab experiment run amok. I love its appetite for novelty, but there's a lot for a returning player to catch up on and, frankly, it feels like homework. As such, I had a couple of broad motivations for playing Soulframe's pre-alpha "prelude": I'm keen to see what Digital Extremes can do when they aren't encumbered by 10 years of world-building, and I want to get in on the ground floor before they absolutely swamp this thing in updates.
