It’s officially Warframe weekend, what with developer Digital Extreme’s tenth TennoCon live event now here, and it’s brought plenty of news about exciting things to come. Including, it turns out, a native Switch 2 version of the free-to-play sci-fi shooter – just as soon as Digital Extremes can get a developer kit from Nintendo, at least.
Digital Extremes CEO Steve Sinclair (who’s also serving as lead developer on the company’s in-the-works fantasy action game Soulframe) shared the news in a conversation with press ahead of TennoCon, telling Eurogamer and other attendees, “Our tech team is so excited to take advantage of the [Switch 2’s] high-speed cores and the other really cool features of it, [but] there’s just such a backlog for dev kits.”
“I know our programmers are just like, ‘Oh, I can’t wait’,” Sinclair continued, “so we definitely have plans. And when we get a dev kit we’ll be doing a custom build for Warframe, absolutely”.
That doesn’t mean Warframe is currently off the table for Switch 2 owners, of course; Digital Extremes’ original Switch 1 port still functions on Nintendo’s latest console thanks to built-in backward compatibility, but the team says it’s keen to do a Switch 2-specific build in order to “really push it to its limits, see what it can do.”
“Faster load times,” Sinclair added, “there’s a lot of stuff that we can do to take advantage of extra cores, but we can’t until we get a dev kit… So if you know anyone…”
Elswhere in this busy weekend for Warframe (not to mention Soulframe, which just opened up its wait queue), Digital Extremes has offered a first look at things to come, including the game’s next narrative chapter, The Old Piece, which is set to “propel Warframe’s current Void War story arc into full speed” ready for next year’s “monumental” Tau update.