“But from the sounds of it, that was the first big reluctance we had, which was, ‘Well does that mean we’re going to be treating the game like DLC?’ and ‘is the PS4 version going to fracture off from the main game because it’s only going to be updated every three months? When I talked to Sony at E3 they said, ‘No go for it, write down what you want.’”
Sinclair told Sony at the show that he wanted Warframe to be updated every week or two weeks, and that players would be able to team up with PC users using cross-platform. They agreed no questions asked. It surprised Sinclair as he initially feared there would be many political hurdles blocking his team’s ambition, particularly when cross-play was concerned. It was a non-issue for Sony.
While the age-old complaint of mouse and keyboard players being much faster than their joypad-wielding counterparts is reasonable whenever cross-play is mentioned, Sinclair advised me that PS4 does support both devices, but couldn’t say if Warframe would follow suit. However, he stressed that Warframe’s co-op focus should leave all players on an even keel regardless of input.
He also told me that the Digital Extremes team has been thoroughly impressed with the technical capabilities of PlayStation 4, and he was keen to stress just how the closely its architecture matched that of a PC. Without this common ground, Warframe might not have been playable on PS4 in time for E3.
“Warframe supported 64-bit and DirectX 11 for a long time,” Sinclair added, “and there’s a lot of commonality in that sort of architecture with what they’re doing on PS4. They’ve got a lot of cores on there, so, I was every surprised how fast we got up and running – I think Sony was as well. When we went to [E3] people said, ‘Holy smokes this is on PlayStation 4? It looks amazing.’
“Maybe they were Warframe fans so they were just trying to appease us, but they said it was one of the best-looking games they saw at the show. In three months time; that’s a testament to how developer-friendly this version of PlayStation is. It’s absolutely awesome. What surprised me most is how kick-ass the GPU is – the graphics are super, super high-end.”