Warframe's next big, WWI-inspired story update happened because a developer wrote the words 'Trench Warframe' on a whiteboard

Warframe's next major update, The Old Peace, is a doozy. When it releases on Wednesday, December 10, it'll be the first time Warframe players get a firsthand look at the Tau system that's been mythologized by more than a decade of in-game storytelling, witnessed as their characters relive induced war flashbacks from a forgotten, failed ceasefire in the interstellar conflict that defined Warframe's past, present, and future.

It all started with one phrase: "Trench Warframe." Digital Extremes had been "really struggling" to find a direction that would unify its next years of updates, Warframe creative director Rebecca Ford told PC Gamer in a recent interview, but once those words were uttered, the possibilities were impossible to ignore: If Warframe did its own spin on World War I, what stories could it tell?

The Old Peace story quests will explore the tragedy of two children doomed to find themselves on opposing sides of treaty negotiations that, from the outset, we know will fail disastrously. While players have slain uncountable millions of enemies as their Tenno Operators, the update is the most that Warframe has centered the player character's past as a child soldier. According to Ford, that tragedy—echoing "some of the greatest war stories" and "a surprising amount" of child soldier-based science fiction—is the "missing piece" for the player character's story.

"They're kids, but there's a very adult underlying conflict. There's just so much there, thematically," Ford told PC Gamer. "The innocence of the child soldiers, thinking they're doing the right thing, thinking they can be friends forever, and then having it all taken away, because—well, you'll see."

Ford and the Warframe team, she said, had spent years being reluctant to tell stories with those kinds of heavy emotional stakes, because they felt players "couldn't relate" to the Operator's aging visual design and facial expression tech. But in The Old Peace, player characters are getting a long-awaited art remaster, allowing the Warframe devs to add the necessary emotional depth to the player's interactions with their long-forgotten Sentient friend, Adis.

"The remastered Operator was really the push to commit all in," Ford said. "I'm very glad we waited, because the emotional support of this remaster is huge."

Despite its sci-fi setting, The Old Peace's Perita Rebellion—an ill-timed military revolt aiming to topple an attempted peace accord in the war between the Orokin empire and their Sentient creations, relived through the Operator's suppressed memories—is inspired by World War I. It's a grisly conflict, sending the Warframe-wielding Tenno into the charnel house of trench warfare where Dax and Grineer soldiers pile casualties to trade inches of ground.

As an update pitting child soldiers against each other in space battles recalling some of the grimmest moments in military history, it's appropriate that The Old Peace also happens to add a playable, demonic personification of the evils of warfare: Uriel, the game's 63rd Warframe, is a devilish, fork-tailed commandant backed by a trio of conscripted fiends and armed with the Vinquibus—a signature rifle-and-bayonet that's the first of a new weapon type occupying both the primary and melee weapon slots.

The timing of Uriel's arrival, Ford said, is no coincidence. There's a sort of "war is hell" thing happening here, you see. In fact, in earlier drafts of The Old Peace's TennoCon reveal, Uriel was intended as the central screen presence, until he was eventually replaced by Excalibur Prime—a Founder-exclusive Warframe only available at launch—to draw in fan curiosity.

"You were going to see what looks like pure evil—and then a kid comes out of it and picks a flower for his friend, Adis. That's not to say you won't see Uriel in the quest," Ford said. "You absolutely will. There was one scene that was so important to this whole story that we kind of built the rest of the quest around it, and it involves Uriel. So it's essential. Uriel has his moment, I will say."

Alongside the main story quest, the operator remaster, and the demonframe, The Old Peace update is also adding a massive rework and expansion to its Focus school system, a Uriel-centric side story involving a pair of future-French space Catholics, and more. According to Ford, all those pieces fell into place thanks to a single galaxy-brained moment from former Warframe creative director and current Digital Extremes CEO Steve Sinclair, which she likened to the story of James Cameron pitching an Alien sequel in a meeting by simply writing "ALIEN$" on a piece of paper.

"We were really struggling. We were really not sure what order to release the next two years of updates. And Steve basically just said 'Trench Warframe,' and we were like, of course!" Ford said. "World War I, trench warfare, flowers in Flanders fields—it was that one word whiteboard thing, where all of the pieces come together. There's just so much to draw from."

A particular inspiration, Ford said, was the Angels of Mons—a phenomenon reported during World War I in which soldiers alleged their units were miraculously aided by phantom bowmen or angelic warriors.

"A Warframe entering a field of battle would feel like the Angel of Mons for a given battalion," she said. "I'm not saying that this is a textbook World War I homage, but it's very much the feel. And the battlefield being alive is something that we really wanted to do right."

Warframe: The Old Peace launches on December 10.