Soulframe

Soulframe is an upcoming free-to-play online action game from Digital Extremes, the Canadian studio best known for Warframe. It was publicly revealed during TennoCon 2022, where the company presented it as a separate project rather than a sequel. Its development is led by people who previously worked extensively on Warframe.

The project’s creative direction is associated with Steve Sinclair, who directed Warframe for years before moving toward Soulframe. Digital Extremes describes the game as a free-to-play cooperative, player-versus-environment experience, but it is not simply Warframe with swords. Its setting, movement, combat rhythm, and mythology are designed around a fantasy world.

Soulframe takes place in Midrath, a world damaged by industrial exploitation and environmental decline. The player is an Envoy, a wandering figure tied to conflict. Revealed gameplay has shown the Envoy exploring forests, ruins, caves, and settlements while confronting hostile creatures and enemies. Ecological recovery and resistance are recurring themes.

Its combat system emphasizes close-range weapons, including swords, polearms, and bows, with parrying, dodging, and timed attacks visible in demonstrations. The Envoy can use magical abilities and interact with a companion called a Fey. Unlike Warframe’s mobile gunplay, Soulframe’s combat has slower animations and impacts, although Digital Extremes develops it.

Exploration is structured around a hub known as the Nightfold, which functions as the Envoy’s home and base. Demonstrations have shown equipment, social spaces, and routes into the world. The game features procedurally generated or variable activities, but its developers have stressed handcrafted locations and storytelling alongside replayable missions and cooperative encounters.

Soulframe’s title reflects a vocabulary. Digital Extremes has referred to figures called the Ancestors and connects the Envoy’s journey with memory, lineage, and the recovery of a world. The enemies and landscapes draw on folklore-inspired imagery rather than the science-fiction technology that defines Warframe’s Origin System, giving the project a distinct identity.

Before release, Soulframe has been available through Soulframe: Preludes, an testing program for PC players. Preludes gives Digital Extremes feedback on performance, balance, quests, and progression while the studio expands the experience. Its limited availability means footage does not represent a product, and timing, platforms, and monetization details may change during development.

Soulframe remains a work in progress, but its material distinguishes it from Digital Extremes’ franchise. It combines a fantasy setting, melee-focused combat, cooperative exploration, and environmental storytelling with the studio’s experience operating a game. Until launch, the clearest evidence is Preludes and demonstrations, not assumptions that it will duplicate Warframe.