Why Polyamory is a ‘Nightmare’ & All You Need to Know About Warframe’s Romance in an Interview with Kathryn Kingsley

Warframe has gone far in the live-service and looter shooter field ever since its inception in 2013. One of its latest new features is a fully-fledged romance system introduced in the free expansion, Warframe 1999.

In turn, award-winning writer Kathryn Kingsley or Kat Kingsley is one of the newest additions to the dev team in Digital Extremes, and she led the creation of Warframe‘s romance system, or the KIM system. Kat Kingsley has written tons of dark fantasy and horror romance novels, and this attracted the attention of an important fan, Rebecca Ford, Warframe‘s Creative Director (and the community space mom).

Our team at The Nerd Stash and Senior Writer Sid Natividad were fortunate enough to gain an audience with Kat Kingsley for an interview. Here’s how it went.

Note: The interview was slightly edited for better flow and clarity.

How Kathryn Anne Kinglsey Joined Warframe

Sid Natividad (TNS): Were you familiar with Warframe before designing its romance? 

Kat Kingsley (Digital Extremes): So I actually had a lot of my readers who were moderators on my Discord. They were huge Warframe players. And so they were always talking about it and posting screenshots of it. So I was sort of familiar with its existence and it was a wild looking game. 

“[Warframe] was a wild looking game.”

But I’d never actually played it and that changed very quickly once I talked to Rebecca and I came on board. When I got the role, I then turned to my Discord and I was like ‘Hi everybody, I am going to need you all to carry me in this game for the next two weeks.’

So I had a great community of friends to help me play through and discovered very quickly that the Warframe community is wonderful and very helpful and very eager to assist new players to the game. 

Sid Natividad (TNS): You mentioned on your website that Rebecca Ford sought you out, right? She’s a big fan of your novels?

Kat Kingsley (Digital Extremes): I have a history of working in games and I had been working in Volition Games prior to working in Digital Extremes. I had been a UX Designer, then I was a Design Manager, and then I was Chief of Staff prior to the company shutting down. And I was kept on after the company shut down to close everything.

A couple of weeks after I was let go and was in the process of interviewing for new roles, I received a completely random LinkedIn message from Rebecca Ford. At the time, writing had been sort of a side hustle or a hobby. I never thought I could do writing as a day job.

At Digital Extremes, I was able to both leverage my design experience and my writing experience at the same time. It has been an absolute dream come true– it’s been an absolute blast to not only take over the romance system.

I joked that I got Deux Ex Warframe [laughs].

What’s Next for Warframe’s Romance?

Sid Natividad (TNS): Now that The Hex Romance has wrapped up, what are you working on in Warframe?

Kat Kingsley (Digital Extremes): Well, I can’t tell you much about what we’re working on for future releases. Just that, we’ve got plans. But for the Techrot Encore, expanding the relationship system for the new characters that we’re adding in March was an interesting challenge because we’ve adapted the system and we’re telling stories for characters that you can’t date.

We’re adding four Protoframes that aren’t “romance-able” in the same way. But the stories are unique in so much; for example, the Protoframe, Frost (Velimir) and Saryn (Minerva) are an older married couple that are separated and you can try and get them back together.

So it’s like mom and dad and you’re sort of playing the parent trap game. It’s telling a love story from a different angle. Another story is more of a Jekyll and Hyde horror story, another is more like growing up in the digital age and the pitfalls there. 

There’s a really interesting opportunity to tell different stories to the players using the KIM system and the relationship system in a different way. 

Sid Natividad (TNS): I did hear about the four additional Protoframes that are not going to be romance-able and it was quite a bit of sad news for all of us back in the press event. One of them (the Protoframes) looks like David Bowie and you can’t romance him?

Kat Kingsley (Digital Extremes): [Laughs] We’ve gotten that reaction already and we can’t always make everybody happy, but it is feedback that we will process. We’ll see. We’ll see what happens. We didn’t want to do the same thing again. That’s something that Warframe is very proud of.

“We didn’t want to do the same thing again. That’s something that Warframe is very proud of.”

There’s the fact that we generally don’t do the same beat twice in a row. The fact that we have just done six romances, we didn’t want to be like ‘here’s four more of the things we just gave you’. So we kind of wanted to break up the pattern a bit, if that makes sense.

Sid Natividad (TNS): Would it be possible for the future romance systems to be more fleshed out or outside of the AOL messenger system?

Kat Kingsley (Digital Extremes): I’m gonna plead the 5th and say I can’t answer that.

The Intricacies & Challenges of Warframe’s Romance

Sid Natividad (TNS): What were your inspirations for Warframe’s romance system? Apart from Baldur’s Gate 3? Maybe other games or even actual human beings?

Kat Kingsley (Digital Extremes): I think when we were examining the romance system, we had a lot of examples in traditional boxed games or games that start and end, like Baldur’s Gate 3. You start the game and then credits will roll, and then that’s the story.

Then you have Stardew Valley. You start the game, you end the game. There are very few– if any other examples of a live-service game that has a romance system in it. When I went out looking for other examples of a live service game where you can date a character, I had a real problem [laughs].

There are no other examples that I could point out. How do you save-scum in a game where you can’t restart a new save? So one of the biggest mechanism problems we had to face from the very beginning was how do we give players the ability to start from the beginning when you inevitably screw up a conversation and can’t date Eleanor.

One of the things that were very important to me was to make sure that the conversations felt real and felt like there was risk and that they didn’t feel too easy. The characters didn’t feel like they were too easily romance-able. That there was a sense of danger in talking to them. The choices mattered. Because of that, failure had to be a real option. So if failure’s a real option that means that you have to not allow people to be permanently locked out.

“The characters didn’t feel like they were too easily romance-able. That there was a sense of danger in talking to them. The choices mattered.”

You have to give players a reset mechanism. How do you do that in a live-service where people can’t just restart a new account because they have 9,000 hours in it. We had to come up with this reset mechanism and luckily, Warframe 1999 had already been designed to have this looping mechanism that was pre-existing to the romance system.

We were able to just tie it to that because the year loops and reasons [laughs].

Sid Natividad (TNS): Yeah, that’s where the monthly reset comes in.

Kat Kingsley (Digital Extremes): One of the things that we were very interested in with the feedback that we received was that people wanted to read all of the conversations. There are a lot more that are available that you get in a single playthrough, and people wanted to see all of the content in a single playthrough.

Sid Natividad (TNS): The branching paths, right?

Kat Kingsley (Digital Extremes): Not even just branching paths, there are 35 conversations (give or take) that each character has. You only get about 13 to 18 per “play” between the start and the moving in with you or getting to be best friends. That was to encourage people to reset and to play again.

However, people don’t like doing that. They want to see all 35 in one run and just set it and forget it. They don’t just like having to break up and erase people’s memories. So in March, we’re adding a feature that will allow you to play all of the conversations instead of pulling a certain number before you move on, if that makes sense. 

Instead of playing from rank one and then two from rank two, and then whatever, you will play all of them in rank one and then play all of them in rank two. That way you get to see all of the conversations. You won’t see all of the branches, but you will at least see all of the conversations. We’re adding that feature for people to be able to see all the content.

Sid Natividad (TNS): Sounds very convenient. You don’t have to wait for another month to see a different outcome?

Kat Kingsley (Digital Extremes): If you want a different outcome to a conversation, you would still have to reset, but [it will be more convenient] if you want to see all of the potential conversations that you missed. I’ll start from how the conversation system works.

Previously, in each rank in the Chemistry system, say you’re in the Neutral rank, there are four conversations that you could possibly have but you only need to have two of them. So we draw randomly two from the hat, so you will miss out on two of those four conversations before you move on to the next bucket of rank two.

Instead, we’re playing all four for you before you move on to the next one. This way you get to have every conversation whether or not you screw them up or how you get the ending. You will at least get all of the conversations.

Sid Natividad (TNS): I can see many players liking that, especially the ones who want all of the content and those who have limited play times.

A Lot of Writing for Warframe

Sid Natividad (TNS): So one thing I was curious about, when you were designing the romance system and character personalities, did Digital Extremes give you these characters all ready-made or did you have a hand at designing their appearances or their archetypes? Like what came first, the chicken or the egg?

Kat Kingsley (Digital Extremes): The concept art when I arrived was done. So when I arrived, I had the concept art for all six of the original Hex along with most of the character background work. For example, Amir Becket is the hacker character and this is his basic personality. He had a skeleton framework of a personality built out but a lot of the detail was missing.

The specifics of his backstory were missing and a lot of the fill-in-the-blanks were not there. So when I got into writing his romance, for example, I had to go back in and really figure out who this guy really was? What are his hobbies? What is his backstory?

“So a standard novel is about 80,000 words. The original KIM system clocked in at around 166,000 words, so it is two full-length novels worth of words.”

I had to go in and start taking all of that and really filling out all of the details, building out his timeline, figuring out what his hobbies are. What is his personality? Because we only had those high-level things, and that’s the difference between taking somebody from an archetype of a personality into a full-fledged character.

So that’s where we started and taking that into where we ended. For example, you have Arthur. Arthur has a story arc in his KIM conversations where you can talk to him about the bandana tied to his sword. That sword was done and shipped in Whispers of the Walls a year before I started [laughs]. That shipped the day I started.

I worked that into his personality. Here’s a bandana that was part of his art and I was like ‘alright, I’m gonna make a backstory because here’s the thing that he’s tied to his weapon and it’s important to him; I’m going to tell why’. I invented the backstory, but you take those pieces of concept art and you wrap the story into it.

The concept artists and the character artists at Digital Extremes are so talented, and they put so much detail into the Protoframes. [For example] The rings that these characters are wearing or the little dongle that this one character has or the scar on the cheek, I can tell a whole story about that.

All of these little details, I can go and write a whole arc about how this happened and why this is important to this character, and they gave me a whole lot of detail to work with.

Sid Natividad (TNS): That sounds like a lot of writing.

Kat Kingsley (Digital Extremes): Oh yeah. So a standard novel is about 80,000 words. The original KIM system clocked in at around 166,000 words, so it is two full-length novels worth of words. That’s for the original one. The new one [for the Warframe 1999 expansion] is a novella, that one clocked in at 50,000 words. 

Sid Natividad (TNS): You spent a lot of time with these characters and I read that you spent the most time on Amir, so just out of curiosity again, who’s your favorite among the Hex members?

Kat Kingsley (Digital Extremes): Oh see, it’s like trying to pick between your children. They’re all my favorite in a different way. I think the one that was the easiest to write was Amir because he’s the part of my brain that is the chaos goblin that played Diablo 2 in 1999 and I had to bash my head against the keyboard and remember all of my “leet” speak and it broke my brain for like a month. 

I wouldn’t stop saying woot in the [work] chat and everyone was like, ‘Kat you’ve been writing too much Amir’. And so he is the part of my brain if I turn off my filter and go. It was very easy for me to write Amir.

“It’s like trying to pick between your children. [Hex members] They’re all my favorite in a different way.”

But Quincy… I had so much fun writing him once I got the hang of it. He was hard to find at first. There’s always the moment where a character shows up for the first time and you meet your character and you go, ‘Ah there you are, I found you’. Then they show up for the first time.

Once that happened with Quincy, he really popped out of the cage and all of Quincy was written in about nine days. It was an absolute joy. Each character has their own unique challenge, and that was very much on purpose. None of the characters are supposed to play the same as any of the others.

If you approach any of the KIM conversations the same way, you will screw up those conversations. You have to adapt to each personality in a unique way because they’re all written uniquely.

Polyamory in Warframe is a Huge Math Problem

Sid Natividad (TNS): In line with adapting to each personality for romance, have you considered polyamorous romance for The Hex? Or Why hasn’t Digital Extremes considered polyamorous romance for Warframe?

Kat Kingsley (Digital Extremes): I will give the technical answer, which is from a technical standpoint: it will be incredibly difficult to track and handle that just mathematically. The issue is that branching narrative is a math problem that grows exponentially difficult the more variables you add to it.

For example, when you ask someone to date in Warframe, I have to do a check that says: ‘is dating true or false?’ and then if it says ‘false,’ great. You can then go date that person. But if it says ‘true,’ then I have to go do a check for every single character that’s in the game and ask them ‘which person are you dating’ and that person has to react to that.

Say you’re dating Arthur and Eleanor, these two are siblings. So if we’re going to support polyamorous relationships, that can’t happen for the two. So I have to know this and track that and now you’re getting into this weird exponential math problem. 

“It’s not a limitation so much as it is a nightmare and we’re not sure if it’s worth the return on investment at this point. But we’ll see.”

Flash forward a year and a half when we’ve now potentially added ‘maybe’ or ‘don’t know’ because who knows how this is going to go in future conversation– maybe we expand the system, maybe we don’t, there’s this insane curve of when you’re tracking variables like this, some of the spaghetti math ends up happening.

I’m trying to figure out how to describe this in a way that is going to make sense without spoiling how the system actually functions in the back-end… I think I will just have to summarize it as branching narrative is an exponential math problem, and therefore polyamorous relationships would require expanding the narrative team to the point that I don’t know if it would become feasible.

Sid Natividad (TNS): Right, and also numerous cutscenes for several possibilities. 

Kat Kingsley (Digital Extremes): Yeah. Now you’re having to track multiple combinations and what happens if you break up one half of the polycule? How does that affect the other half of the polycule? You’re going to have to track all sorts of weird combinations and varieties of breaking up and angering one half and the other half. 

Sid Natividad (TNS): Would you say it’s more of a technological limitation?

Kat Kingsley (Digital Extremes): It’s not a limitation so much as it is a nightmare and we’re not sure if it’s worth the return on investment at this point. But we’ll see. I think many players do want to see chaos on screen. One thing that impressed me the most about the romance system and the Warframe community is the fact that this would not have been nearly as successful as it was in any other game and any other community.

Because I think any other game community made up its mind about what the system was going to be before they went into it. Warframe’s community, I think, uniquely has the ability to go into it with an open mind. They let themselves enjoy it for what it was and they let themselves be surprised by the content. 

Before it was released, I also lurked Reddit and I saw the jokes about ‘dating sim’ but as it was being released, I saw a lot of people [saying] this is such a cool lore mechanic and it’s so much more than just a dating sim. People seem to really enjoy it. I don’t think any other game community would’ve embraced it nearly as well. So I give so much credit to the players for having such an open mind with it.

I’m exceedingly grateful to the community for meeting me on an open playing field with this [laughs].

Sid Natividad (TNS): Do you have any message for your Warframe fans now that you have some?

Kat Kingsley (Digital Extremes): Just that we are on the narrative team– I speak for myself and the rest of the writers, could not be more grateful for how openly the players received it. We hope that they continue to enjoy it and that we lurk Reddit and Tumblr [laughs] so we see all of the posts. 

We just want to thank you for playing it and hope that you continue enjoying it.