A hush falls at TennoCon 2023; a rarity given the sold-out occasion boasts hundreds of attendees. Why, you ask? It’s fairly easy: Soulframe. Digital Extremes has given us our first actual deep dive into the upcoming MMORPG, which takes clear inspiration from 2022 Sport of the Yr Elden Ring. It’s a shocking, high-fantasy world that could be a stark reminder of a number of the evils current in our personal world, and PCGamesN had the pleasure of sitting down with Soulframe‘s chief artistic officer, Steve Sinclair, at TennoCon 2023 to speak concerning the new recreation.
Nestled in Digital Extremes’ cozy streaming room amid myriad Warframe goodies and a rocking horse (that Warframe artistic director Rebecca Ford informs me used to speak), I ask Sinclair about Soulframe’s Elden Ring-esque aesthetic.
Fight options quite a lot of dodging and parrying, and whereas the ‘purified’ world seems to be extra akin to one thing out of Fable, the warped, twisted iteration of Midrath that we’ll probably spend most of our time in actually channels the moodiness of Elden Ring’s Lands Between.
After I ask if Soulframe is instantly impressed by the sport, Sinclair tells me “it’s unattainable to keep away from it. Once we have been naming the sport, we have now this premise of the souls of our ancestors, after which we put f**king ‘souls’ within the identify.”
“When Elden Ring got here out, we have been simply beginning on Soulframe and clearly we, like each developer on the planet, checked out one another and went ‘oh shit.’ [Elden Ring] was simply so unimaginable when it comes to how the exploration felt and, for me, the non-linearity made it that, if you hit a wall, you simply go to a distinct place – which was refreshing. So yeah, we’re taking quite a lot of inspiration from it.”
Nevertheless, it’s not the one recreation that has impressed the Soulframe saga. “There are quite a lot of different influences there; nice melee fight video games like Ghost of Tsushima are big ones as effectively. You’ll in all probability discover that the digicam is a little more like Ghost, and fewer like Elden Ring.”
He does inform me, nonetheless, that there’s a “cozy” component to the sport. Soulframe is a step away from the grimdark worlds of collection like Warhammer 40k, and Sinclair says he’s hoping to channel extra “Disney princesses” than blood, guts, and gore.
We see a little bit of that through the menu sequence when your character has fallen asleep within the forest and accrued a slew of lovable animals who’ve dozed off of their lap.
After I ask who got here up with the concept of including mentioned lovable sleeping critters, Sinclair tells me “that was Geoff [Crookes, creative director on Soulframe, formerly Warframe]. He’s the Disney princess – he doesn’t look it; effectively, he does a bit.” Both means, I’m very, very grateful for that selection.
As somebody who liked the world of Elden Ring however struggled with the soulslike parts, Soulframe is precisely what I need and extra. I genuinely felt tears effectively up in my eyes as we watched the Torment Stag boss combat – that second cemented the truth that I need to play this recreation. The music, the aesthetic, and simply the entire that means behind Soulframe has sunk its claws into me, and it’s already skyrocketed in the direction of the highest of my most-wanted video games.
Whereas we don’t know when the Soulframe launch date is simply but, we do have a listing of video games like Darkish Souls for those who fancy some FromSoft-style chaos. We even have a listing of the finest PC video games on the market, and sure, Elden Ring is on there.
