Rebb Ford Takes Over Warframe as New Creative Director

Rebb Ford Takes Over Warframe as New Creative Director

Rebb Ford, the longtime Live Operations & Community Director at Canadian developer Digital Extremes, is changing roles to Creative Director of Warframe — the studio’s biggest game.

In fact, she’s been fulfilling this new role “in secret” since at least February of 2022. Ford explained as much during a preview for TennoCon 2022 (the company’s annual fan convention) as well as an interview with Fanbyte. She’s already helped oversee many of the game’s in-development projects. Including later stages of development on its long-awaited The Duviri Paradox expansion, which was first shown in 2019.

Players got to see a much deeper glimpse of this update at TennoCon 2022. Though the first major addition totally overseen by Ford in her new role, Veilbreaker, will actually launch sooner. More information on that is due just a few weeks from now. Sometime in August, to be specific.

It’s an exciting time for #Warframe as Rebecca Ford transitions to Creative Director while Steve Sinclair and others focus their efforts on a brand new game, #Soulframe.

We’d like to share a letter from each about the future of #Warframe and more. pic.twitter.com/0F5c5nlt8J

— WARFRAME (@PlayWarframe) July 16, 2022

For now, though, we already know it’s a direct sequel to major The New War expansion from last year. As such, it once features Grineer character Kahl-175 in a playable role. Warframe fans will also be able to hunt powered-up versions of story bosses, called Archons, and generally just get a lot more plot.

All this news comes as Digital Extremes also announced Soulframe: a new fantasy game with an obviously similar name to Warframe. We have far fewer details about Soulframe than the aforementioned updates. Yet Digital Extremes says it’s being overseen by former Warframe director Steve Sinclair. With him shifting over to the new game, that leaves an obvious gap on the existing cooperative shooter, which Ford will now fill.

Soulframe Announcement

Soulframe is also the first truly new Digital Extremes game in several years. The developer launched Warframe all the way back in 2013. It was followed shortly thereafter by a Star Trek tie-in (based on the J.J. Abrams films) which received extremely mixed reviews. Digital Extremes later worked on another licensed game, Sword Coast Legends, set in the “Forgotten Realms” setting of Dungeons & Dragons. Yet this was actually co-developed with U.S. studio n-Space. Sword Coast Legends also suffered middling reception in 2015 and n-Space shut down shortly afterwards, in 2016.

Obviously bolstered by Warframe, Digital Extremes kept on going until 2017. That’s when it announced The Amazing Eternals: a very silly-seeming multiplayer first-person shooter. That game was actually quickly canceled due to a lack of interest in both its closed beta and other shooters of the era.

Warframe itself has changed a lot during that time. It’s gone from a fairly basic “corridor shooter” to a massive, unique, and extremely intimidating loot game. One that includes capital spaceship battles, multiple open-world zones, mech combat, and more. Though this has all largely been overseen by the same creative voices. With Ford, who has been a part of the game both behind-the-scenes and as the voice of a major character since its inception, we’ll certainly see some new choices going forward.

Disclaimer: Digital Extremes is owned by Tencent, which is also the parent company of Fanbyte Media. Though editorial has no direct contact with anyone from Tencent. Seriously, they don’t tell us anything. Ford didn’t even know our companies are technically owned by the same company until we told her, which was extremely funny.

Author: Deann Hawkins