Warframe Interview: Drew Pennycook and Corey Van Den Hoogenband discuss Warframe Mobile and Digital Extreme’s charity partnerships

| Jul 22

TennoCon has been and gone, and, of course, one of our most burning questions was, "Where is the Android version?" The answer: a closed beta later this year. I sat down with Digital Extreme’s Associate Producer in charge of Warframe Mobile, Drew Pennycock, and Associate Community Manager, Corey Van Den Hoogenband, to discuss the upcoming port.

Thanks, everyone, for joining. Let’s start with introducing yourselves.

Drew: I'm Drew. I'm the mobile producer for Warframe at Digital Extremes.

Corey: I'm Corey. I'm the associate community manager at Digital Extremes. I work on a few different things like TennoGen and some of our charity initiatives. I'm also the mobile lead on the community side.

How has working with Nitro Games on the development of the mobile version been?

Drew: It's been a real eye-opening experience for us because we historically have had zero experience with mobile games at Digital Extremes. So this is a whole new territory for us.

When we brought them on, it was to give us a sense of what it's like in the mobile space and to leverage their expertise. And so the whole process over the past few years has been just a very quick lesson in what it's like in mobile gaming. The do's, the don'ts and all the ways we can improve.

Corey: I think we had this vision of Warframe on mobile being the exact Warframe you experience on PC and console, just on phones. And through working with Nitro, they definitely have a whole bevvy of suggestions and context about how the game can thrive on mobile. It's been cool hearing from them.

What has been the biggest hurdle in getting something as action-packed as Warframe onto mobile?

Drew: RAM. That's the technical answer. It's very difficult going from very game-specific platforms to something that's not necessarily designed for games.

Getting Warframe to work on older phones with lower memory has been a massive challenge. In terms of the actual gameplay, it's been trying to preserve Warframe. Warframe has a very complex movement system and gunplay, trying to preserve that while also making it playable with touch controls.

In terms of cross-play, how do you run a game like Warframe on both mobile and computers that have 30 GB of RAM at the same time?

Drew: We have checks and balances on the phone’s backend that try to mitigate any negative experience you might have. We try not to have games hosted by an iPhone player if we can avoid it. We try to let the 32 GB RAM PC guy be the person to host the game as opposed to someone who's playing on their phone.

Same with AI limits and stuff like that to try to make it so that you still have a really good experience. Something that still plays like you'd expect when you're playing on PC, but that can be handled by the phone.

Are there any phone-specific features that you are developing right now, or are we at a point where it's like-for-like between all versions?

Corey: There have been a few systems that are mobile-exclusive that are already out in the wild, like the Aim Assist. We've announced this summer plan to ship a few more features shortly after TennoCon, like HUD navigation improvements.

Drew expressed earlier that one of the goals and ambitions is making sure that movement and parkour feels really good on mobile and that we can transfer that seamless controller and keyboard experience onto touch controls

Drew: When we started, we thought we were just going to have a pure one-to-one experience. And then as we went along, we realised we needed to refine it specifically for touch controls for mobile players. Like Aim Assist, and making sure the UI scaling looks as good on a phone as on a big monitor

I think it's safe for us to say that we're also trying to simplify the controls in a similar vein, where the game will intuitively know, naturally, you'd want to do this next move. And so we're going to have what would normally just be a jump button or a bullet jump button also lead into a double jump and a roll. That's still in development right now.

Warframe Mobile has been iOS-exclusive for a while. Why start with Apple and not Android?

Drew: It was the number of devices. Apple's quite limited, Android is not. As we're learning, there are literally thousands and thousands of Android devices that we have to take into consideration. The number one reason was just because it's a lot easier. We're a smaller studio comparatively, and the mobile team is a fraction of that.

The primary benefit of mobile gaming is being about to quickly dive in whenever you have a minute. Has this influenced the development of the game itself in any way?

Drew: That is a question that is happening more internally nowadays. In the past, we would develop new features, and then we would make this work on the iOS version. Now we're taking a more holistic approach where we think maybe we can restructure some of these levels.

Maybe we can make them a little bit shorter, make them a little bit more mobile-friendly, especially early game. So that's sort of a conversation that's happening internally right now, how we can adjust for the mobile space.

Corey: When we were doing the iOS closed beta, we had those early game defence missions that historically were 10 waves of defence. And we thought this might be a little rough on mobile, but it's a mission that lasts 20 minutes. We've recently made some changes to older missions like that where we trimmed down the amount of waves we're doing on defence.

Obviously, Warframe has a massive community. How have you found adding new mobile players to that?

Corey: There are two camps, in my opinion, of people playing on mobile. There are brand new mobile players who have discovered us on the App Store, and then there are the people who have been long-time Warframe players on PC or console who are joining us via cross-platform save.

Communicating with those two different groups is very different. The existing cross-save people know to go to our Discord. They know to go to our mobile forums, and they know that they'll get some responses there. They are great about providing bug reports and crash logs. And that's been awesome.

The challenge definitely is the newer players. They don't know quite where to share their feedback. A lot of the time, we will get App Store reviews. That's our best way of hearing from new players. But unfortunately, you get one reply on the App Store, so we can only have a very short conversation. And I can say, join us on the forums, or let's pick up this conversation on the Warframe mobile bugs. And I just hope that they'll join us there.

I think the good thing we have going with Warframe is that the game itself fosters community in a really nice way. Just the fact that it is PvE rather than PvP for the majority of your Warframe experience. You're finding yourselves in squads, you're finding yourselves in chat, in regional chat in-game.

It's been challenging compared to other platforms, but we definitely see people transitioning to our community spaces.

Let’s talk about Charity for a bit. DE have been very active in helping charities, especially with TennoCon. How do you decide who will be the recipients each year?

Corey: At the start of the year, we look at what's going on in Canada, what's going on in London, and we identify themes first. For instance, 2021 was the first year that I was involved with TennoCon in this way. We knew that homelessness was really growing after the first year of the pandemic. So we said we want to address or find a way to help. Then we narrowed that down and found this charity unity project and worked with them. That's generally how it goes. We pick a theme and then the charity. This year, we're with Make-A-Wish Canada and CMHA, which is Canadian Mental Health Association.

With Make-A-Wish, it's kind of a cooler, different story. They were part of TennoCon last year, with James Conlin and his wish to be a voice actor. They actually did come into the picture after we had identified our two charities that year. Although they're a big part of TennoCon, they weren't the charity that year. We’ve had these amazing moments with Ollie and James. So that's why this year we decided on them to be one of our charities.

The Make-A-Wish is perhaps the most visible impact DE has had charitably. How did it feel to be able to grant that?

Corey: It rules. I remember I had just come back from a vacation in March of 2024, and then Reb (Rebecca Ford) and Megan (Everett) messaged and said, “Hey, we had this person from Make-A-Wish reach out. There's this great kid who wants to be a voice actor”. From there, we wrote this character.

We connected with James to learn about who he is and what kind of character he wanted to play. Then we custom-made that devilish prankster, kind of skater character for the 1999 arcade. And we've still been in touch. He's coming to TennoCon. We've got more autograph prints for him if he wants to sign autographs. It's definitely one of the highlights of my career, if not the highlight.

Drew: Before I was in production, I was in community, and I had the privilege of doing our first Make-A-Wish years ago with Eli, actually. This goes back to 2018. So both Corey and I have had the privilege, which has been great.