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The space ninja adventure known as Warframe, an experience where you can feed yourself to a giant mouth and pilot futuristic vehicles, has launched a major update. This latest expansion highlights the creative flair that has come to define Warframe in recent years.

The new content, made available this week, introduces a fungus-inspired character that performs a unique animation, along with a brand-new biome to discover. However, it also revisits core concepts, with another quest geared at making sure this complex, vast 12-year-old MMO makes sense to new players.

The Arrival of "The Teacher"

Titled “The Teacher,” this is the highly anticipated mission that instructs Warframe players on how to use one of the game's most basic — yet most intricate systems: the mod system.

In Warframe, mods are augments that can be added to your character or your weapons to boost their performance. They range from the straightforward (boosting power or shortening reload times) to the incredibly intricate. Dedicated players often craft hour-long videos about idealized builds that use synergistic enhancements to create overwhelming power.

“Many players likely started their journey, encountering mods without grasping their purpose,” noted a lead narrative designer. “I think it was really important, at the end of the quest, for players to think, ‘Wow, modding is interesting. I'd like to experiment further.’”

A Collaborative Effort

“The Teacher” was created through a partnership between the original developers, who provided the narrative sauce, and an external team, who designed the mission, which will appear early in the game.

In the quest, the player is tasked with obtaining a new segment for their spaceship, but they’re interrupted by a menacing, powerful warrior called Teshin, who removes the player's powers and close-combat arms, and compels them to use the mod system to handily demonstrate its power.

Several developers were longtime players, but others had never played before, according to a principal games designer. It was this outside perspective that was essential.

“The first thing we did was basically sit behind them and go right play through the tutorial and take prodigious notes on everywhere they fell out,” the designer said. Early-game menu pop-ups introduced players to modding. But the team observed these weren't effective for all.

“Certain players missed fundamental guidance where the game highlights it saying put the mod in the slot,” he said.

Closing an Important Loop

Warframe’s mods allow players to create stupidly powerful synergies that turn the screen into a blitz of numbers. But "The Teacher" isn’t really about that. Veteran users who wish the quest was geared more towards their needs, like optimizing for endgame challenges. But it became clear that “The Teacher” is filling a real and significant gap for early players — and that doing so isn’t as simple as it looks.

“There’s lots of little tweaks and background details there to just sort of show you what it can do rather than tell you,” the designer said. For example, one of the goals of “The Teacher” is to show how mods can create powerful elemental status effects; in this case, Magnetic damage that eats chunks out of enemy shields.

“We had to change the weapon to be a rapid-fire gun, because it shows off the proc rate more,” the designer said. “However, the goal isn't to say to people, 'oh yeah, actually on a base level mod, you only got a few percentage chance to proc an elemental effect.' How can you teach this mechanic effectively?”

Veterans will instinctively look for that kind of weapon effect and understand how it works, but beginners require instruction to pay attention to these things.

“This type of design work that we've had to worry about as much just because our priorities lay elsewhere,” said a narrative lead. “But part of it not being our focus that players weren't properly taught the modding system.”

Significant Investment

“There’s so much that goes into just making a seemingly straightforward quest that — frankly — you can complete quickly,” said the designer. “Yet it represents extensive development for many team members.”

The designer was visibly glowing with excitement over contributing to a beloved title — and to design content featuring a preferred figure.

“I love Teshin,” he said. “He's my 8-year-old internal self's idea of what's cool.”

Improving the New Player Experience

In the 12 years since its release, Warframe has been in a ongoing struggle with its own player onboarding process. There are many intricate mechanics that players don’t need to worry about — and won’t even have access to until much later. And others, like modding, that scale in complexity depending on your level of engagement. An update earlier this year streamlined the early game so that players could reach Warframe’s mind-bending plot developments with less time on the grind up front.

With “The Teacher,” it’s clear that the developers are reinforcing their dedication to make sure Warframe’s initial hours doesn’t stay locked in 2013. New players can get their foot in the door — even if they miss the menu prompts.