Warframe Interview: Megan Everett and Pablo Alonso talk ten years of TennoCon and how design drives Warframe

It was a very special TennoCon this year, being the tenth iteration. Over the years, it has blossomed from a small gathering to perhaps the biggest event London, Ontario hosts. I sat down with Community Director Megan Everett and Design Director Pablo Alonso to discuss the journey of TennoCon and the style that makes Warframe endure after a decade.

Pablo: I'm Pablo Alonso. I'm the design director on Warframe.

Megan: I'm Megan Everett. I'm the community director on Warframe.

Pablo: I remember when we were making the initial beta of Warframe, and I was chatting with one of the UI designers. We had no idea if this was going to be a hit or not. We were still sorting it out. I remember telling him, we'll be lucky if in five years we are still working on this. And here we are, 12 years later. I don't think anyone could have predicted this. I don't think there's any way to predict these things, as you can see from many, many, many other live service games.

Megan: I had a very similar conversation when I first started., I would look around me and I'd see the veterans here for 10 years, 20 years. I'm like, wow, what's Warframe going to be like in five years? Now we're 12 years in and I think game-wise, never predicted we would have gotten to where we are, done what we've done. It's a crazy kind of route we've taken.

And then for TennoCon specifically, I still remember having those conversations with Reb (Rebecca Ford), who was the Community Director at the time, now Creative Director, and we were thinking about doing the biggest community event we've ever done. We're like, what if we had a Warframe one just for us, just for our players. What would that look like?

I remember in the RBC Center, where it's always been, we just had the ballroom. It was just this one room. We crammed everything in there and hoped it worked out. It was probably one of the most terrifying things to do, having all these players come down, and all this pressure to entertain them is something I've never done before. I was very scared.

For it to have gone well enough for us to be doing this now with our 10th one, and we're doing a concert. It's definitely skyrocketed in terms of any event I thought we could ever put on. It’s a testament to where the team has taken the game, where the community has supported us, and where we can try to hopefully entertain them yet again with a new experience in the same town, in the same space.

Pablo:  Yeah, I remember on the first one. The fear went very quickly from, "Is anyone going to come to London?" To, "Oh, everyone's coming to London." 

Megan: I'm getting a flashback.  We said we'll do a cosplay contest if anyone shows up in cosplay. We had no idea if anyone was going to care enough to dress up as a Warframe character to come to this. So, I was on standby to do a cosplay contest.

I got the call on my walkie, and it said, “Megan, come to the side stage, we're doing the cosplay." I rock up and there are 20 people in cosplay. I still worry even now that no one is going to show up in cosplay, even though we have a giant production. Deep down, there is still that scared Megan from 10 years ago, thinking no one is going to show up.

Megan: Now that my role has progressed into doing the demo live, as scary and daunting as that is, it is truly the most rewarding moment of my entire career every single year. The dev team trust me enough to drive that bus. Pablo knows. He sends me DMs every day, telling me like, go here, do this, look here. I would do whatever you tell me to do. Because this is their work. I'm just driving the bus.

I love cosplay. It's very near and dear to my heart, because that's what I started with, organising that. Still to this day, it is mind-blowing to me, even though we are into this for 12 years, that anyone would take the time out of their day to draw art of our game, to make a costume of our game.

Mega: With the streams, even though I can't see anyone. I know you guys are there and you're watching, you're tuning in. My hands are shaking. I'm sweaty. I'm cold. But I can't describe the feeling of doing the demo live in that environment, knowing there's 500,000 people watching. This is what they're here for. The more nerve-racking thing for me is making sure I do justice to the work that has gone into it.

There are moments in it that I know I have to look here, I've got to look here for the little moments that are going to impact the demo. I want to make sure that I hit the mark. So I practice, I practice, I practice. I'm nervous as hell. I don't think even on dev streams, I get super nervous.

Reb actually asked me this year,  because we're so busy. She's said, “Do you want to do it this year? I know you have a lot on your plate”. And I was like, "Reb, it's the greatest joy of my life. Please let me do it." I will do it every year, all year.

Megan: I do. And I still watch it if I need that like rush of excitement. I'll watch back the 2017 Plains of Eidolon reveal when the door is open and the crowd just...

Pablo: It was the same one for me. I was in the audience. I was crying when the thing opened. It was crazy.

Megan: I know exactly how I felt in that moment, because it was Reb and I doing that demo together. Having those doors open and having that reaction, I get goosebumps thinking about it. It was a moment of okay, we did it. We delivered. Last year was also a peak for us, I think, like 1999. Even the Whispers in the Walls, which led into 1999 with the Nine Inch Nails moment. Hearing that song, like, it triggers something in my brain where I start to get sweaty. I get all excited. Those moments of shock and awe.

Pablo:  Hearing all of the fans around me and just the roars. It's the sort of high you chase for 10 years. Last year, I had my cringeiest moment, which I didn't even realise I did. I saw it later when Rebecca's mom sent me a video. When I came out to the audience, Sheldon introduced me. And then I come out and start waving, and then I blow a kiss to the audience. 

I was so embarrassed. I was like, what did I do? I don't remember doing that. Honestly, you come out on stage and there are 3000 people chanting your name. It's hard to know what to even do. 

Pablo: Generally, the demos we do maps pretty directly to the quests that we make. The quest people are not barreling around at 100 miles per hour. It's generally on that one is much easier because they're solo. It's not as much about the action, but more about the story. 

When you need those kinds of calmer moments where you do need the players to look at something or figure out something, generally those are in quests, and it's much easier to control the pacing there. Once you're out in an actual mission, just fighting, they're not going to see anything you want to see.

It's like two different modes where we have to kind of split our brains and go, okay, well, during quests, we do need this more traditional level design cues. We need more guided experience. And then, for just normal gameplay, it is freedom. Just make space for them to bounce all over the place. Just give them choices of where to go, where are the enemies, that sort of thing.

Pablo: The key to Warframe is that it doesn't look like anything else, it doesn't play like anything else. It's not even made like anything else. The way we develop it is different. And that's kind of the key to its longevity, I think, is just how unique it is. If you love Warframe, there's really no alternative for you. 

And for us to achieve that, 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. That combined with another one of the people who makes a lot of the art, Kit Thompson, just leads to weird designs that just inspire you.

As a designer, seeing those designs makes me go, "That's so weird. I want to be weird with it." Titania is a good example. I remember that at the time we released Titania, we also released a fairy character at the exact same time. And you can see how weird Titania looked.

Their character was very much what you'd expect to see straight out of a storybook. That is what works in Warframe: we make it weird.  A scarf is a syandana. It's not a scarf. It has to be Warframized and weirded out.

Pablo: It'd be like choosing between my children. One that I always say, just because I didn't make it. I did rework it at some point, but I didn't make it myself. I really like Nesha. I feel more comfortable saying one that I didn't make myself. It feels less narcissistic.

Megan: I designed zero of them. My biased answer is Valkyr, for obvious reasons. But my hyper-fixation is Dante. I think he is so interesting and different with his book and his wizardry. To me, very easy to use. Dante just scratches that itch for me.

Pablo: Not really. There's plenty where I write a doc, and then I'm like, this is never gonna work. I have many of those. Part of what is necessitated by live games is that you basically have to have really good aim in knowing that anything you make it past just a written document, it has to work. You don't have time to change your mind. 

Fortunately, I'm pretty good at figuring out if this is gonna work. If there's anything that I have question marks, I always make it clear, and we will prototype those things and not invest a lot in them.

Megan: Yeah, I definitely don't think we're scrap people. We're more save for later. Example being, Kaz (Kaz Adams) came up with the idea and the concept for the Temple Warframe. It was an idea that Kaz had a while ago, and we loved it, but it just doesn't fit right now with what we're doing.

And then we started doing 1999, and it's all music, guitar, rock and roll, that, and so we went all right, bring that back out. That makes sense for what we're doing. Let's do it. So, it's not a scrap. It's just a keep that in the folder, and then when the time is right, out it comes, and then the work happens.

Megan: Warframe is my life. I've only been here for 12 years, and I know there are people who've been here for longer and worked on the games before Warframe, or been here from day one of Warframe. I never expected this community to support us in the way that they do. 

When I got brought on 12 years ago with Reb, the game's was doing great, they just need some more help, and for the community to have stuck with us for as long as they have, to continue to support us, to watch our dev streams, to come to London, Ontario, which is not very exciting, just to hang out with us and see us, that's awesome.

We have had our ups and downs, and even through the trials and tribulations, they give us the feedback that we want from them, and we've always had that very honest relationship with them. It's always been a very community-minded game and development process, and I think what's most impressive is that the weird things that we've done, especially recently, they're down to clown with us.

I had a conversation the other day about how someone was scared that the boy band addition to 1999 was going to turn people away, because if we're going to serve them rock and roll, and then give them a boy band, maybe they don't like the two worlds. Our ability to experiment, but be accepted by our community, and bounce feedback and ideas off each other has really shocked me.  I'm very impressed by the community. Warframe is my life, this community is my life, and I will be working on this game until it has zero players. Even if there's one player, I'll be right here.

Pablo: I don't know if I can say better than that. As a game developer, you can't really have a bigger dream than people caring this much about the game you're making. You see that just disappear into the void, and it's a tragedy to see all that art and all that effort just lost to nothing.

It's a privilege as a developer to have people who are as passionate as our players are about Warframe. In the last TennoCon, I met this grown guy with a beard, and he said, “Oh, I've been playing since I was 12”, and I was like, wow! It is very cool to see that people that passionate and that into it where they inspired back with things like what they do for TennoGen. I love seeing fan art. I'm always on Twitter, liking fan art. It just shows a passion and an ownership that's shared between us and the community of Warframe in a way that really kind of elevates it. 

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