Soulframe Starting Island Is 2x Bigger Than Warframe’s Plains of Eidolon; Features Similar Mastery Rank System

Although Digital Extremes isn’t quite ready to call Soulframe an open -world, there’s still a lot of area to explore in, as the studio has confirmed that the game’s first island will be two times bigger than Warframe’s Plains of Eidolon.

Speaking during a press-invite Q&A session at a preview of the TennoCon 2024 event, Digital Extremes’ CEO Steve Sinclair talked a bit about the size of the map in Soulframe. He referred to the location featured in all the demos as the starting island (suggesting there may be more, or more eventually added), with its size roughly twice that of Warframe’s Plains of Eidolon. Despite that the size is probably the biggest of any open zone the team has created, Steve did make a mention of avoiding using the term open world, as a focus is more put on the density of the world rather than the size.

“The starting island is twice as big as Plains of Eidolon.  There you go. Twice as big. Soulframe is two times bigger than Warframe.  The reason we’re kind of avoiding the open world word is that we’re spending a lot more time on density. If you’re in Preludes, Preludes 5 just dropped a whole bunch of activities and that sort of thing, which is a new system that we just put in.

You’d be wandering around, and then there’ll be almost like a mini-quest; there’s a Banneret there! Or there are some cute little beavers that need to be rescued, and so on. That’s how that works.”

During our hands-off preview demo, Digital Extremes showed a bit of this open area with plenty of combat in-between against small and even possibly mini-boss types of enemies. They later went on to wander around the map, only to tease what appeared to be a random encounter of sorts rewarded from just exploring. The demo cut short from the player interacting with said encounter, but it was clear from what we saw that the world of Soulframe was rich in offerings in the small amount of play area that was shown off.

As for how the game keeps track of progress and such, Steve later on answered a question relating to if Soulframe featured a similar mastery system like in Warframe.

“It actually does have a very similar mastery rank system. You have your envoy, which is your character, and then you have your pact, which is your cursed armor.

Your pact is a class that you can level up. And then, for every pact you level up, your envoy gains a level. And then they have three RPG stats, that are what we call the virtues.

And that feeds back into the system as well. So it’s a kind of almost like the focus school of the operator meets mastery rank.”

Soulframe currently has no release date, though it is running some closed tests that will eventually open up later this year for all players. You should check out this 17-minute gameplay demo of it at TennoCon where we see combat, gameplay mechanics and more featured.

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