Warframe’s PAX East showing of The Shadowgrapher was everywhere.
At PAX East 2026, con-goers were greeted by the normal big red X sitting in the middle of the main lobby of the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center and assorted fanfare that comes standard for the event. Standing tall just off to the side of it was a glowing, spinning statue of Heirloom Ember Prime, a fan favorite Warframe popular because, well, she’s hot (pun intended).
The lanyards that were issued by the convention staff featured Warframe branding. The biggest, brightest sign that runs the width of the lobby and shines over the entrance to the convention floor itself ran Warframe ads. This kind of real estate is usually preserved for the biggest games on the planet (traditionally, that’s Final Fantasy 14). This year, it was another stop on the reintroduction tour for Warframe.
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“Shout out to the events team,” Megan Everett, Community Director and style icon of Warframe, said as the realization dawned that this full-court press at PAX East might be the biggest presence the game has had outside of TennoCon, the game’s annual fan-focused convention that goes down in developer Digital Extremes’ hometown of London, Ontario. “As we are now 13 years old, you kinda have to do that, right? Like ‘Hey, we’re still here.’”
The need for an old game to stay relevant is real, and Warframe’s instinct to make a big show of doing so is valid, but by most obvious measures, Warframe is in its prime. Warframe 1999, its big expansion in 2024, reinvigorated interest not just because of its 90’s core, millennial-bait setting and style, but with an investment in presentation, namely with a relatively large roster of star voice actors lending a bit of celebrity clout to the game that it hadn’t really seen before.
Fast forward to last year’s The Old Peace expansion, which has record-setting amounts of engagement on the back of a hard sci-fi, no frills Warframe story without the strength of a Ben Starr traveling the globe being an advocate for it. It seems like everyone is quite aware of Warframe in 2026. “I don’t think we ever thought we’d be able to do that,” Everett added, who attributes Warframe’s continued success to how community-focused the game is.
At the PAX East TennoVIP mixer, a party thrown every year by Digital Extremes for their most loyal fans, I met a few community members who would agree, including Emernyx, who greeted me with a smile and a fist full of LGBTQ-themed Warframe trinkets. A community organizer and owner of the blog Warframe.gay, they attributed their own continued investment in Warframe directly to the constant efforts of Megan and her team to create fun and safe spaces.
“It’s especially rewarding for us [marginalized people] to be able to know that the support comes from the top.” Emernyx gathers dozens of people for an annual meet and greet during TennoCon and sees the well-maintained friendships and camaraderie nurtured through Warframe firsthand.
Even with the increased footprint and all-time high player counts, Megan sees success as subjective. “There’s the numbers and the data… but for me, being plugged into the community: do they like it?” To her, getting them to come to The Old Peace in record numbers is one thing, but are they still talking about it in their streams or in their forums? Are they still making fan art of those characters? Those are telltale signs that the people really like a thing, and The Old Peace meets those metrics of success as well.
The Shadowgrapher
Warframe stays successful by its own metrics by staying engaged and continuing to tinker with and expound upon the game in ways that are both bog standard for live service games and sometimes unexpected ways as well. Warframe specifically drops bigger narrative expansions once a year that slowly move the Tenno’s tale further down the timeline. In between, they spot the calendar with smaller events, like The Shadowgrapher that dropped on March 25th, 2026 (inconveniently, a day before PAX East started).
Adding new story content and a new Warframe, the paint-themed Follie, to the mix as a snack-sized addition to the long list of stuff to grind through is par for the course, and players love an opportunity to add weapons and warframes to their collection. They also serve as great opportunities to reward long-time players by exploring old lore and locations again, giving context and character to parts of the game that have been dormant but suffered from “what even is this thing’s deal, anyway?” syndrome.
The Shadowgrapher takes place in the Vesper Relay, a location that’s been closed to players for some time because it was destroyed at some point during Warframe’s long and winding story (but left on the map to remember the fallen, of course.) It revolves around the Arbiters of Hexis, one of the six syndicates that all have their own stories and beefs, but are largely secondary to the fact that they can sell you cool stuff if you work for it.
But Megan and the team find stuff like this to be great opportunities to reintroduce people to parts of the game they might take for granted, or move on from so fast that they never stopped to smell the roses. She used the example of last year’s Vallis Undermind update, where “we haven’t touched Fortuna in nine years, and we gave them a mushroom basement, and people would go back and realize ‘oh I never finished my kitgun!’”
But these add-ons often also provide good opportunities to address community concerns by making quality-of-life updates to old content or completely revamping staple systems. In this case, the changes are as small as being able to copy cosmetic options across multiple loadouts, to more system-affecting things like streamlining the complex Adversary system (where procedurally generated bad guys can spawn to be your own personal bespoke opp), and everything in between.
Megan sees all of this work as consistent with the greater goals of making Warframe the best version of itself and a game that can regularly surprise players,, new and old. “A lot of feedback that we get from players who have left and come back is ‘Warframe is so different, for the better.’”
The Shadowgrapher dropped in tandem with Warframe’s long-awaited Switch 2 debut, and I got to kick the tires on the new mission and the new platform. I did dabble with the game briefly on the original Nintendo handheld, but the performance didn’t blow me away, especially in comparison to the Steam Deck. Running in docked mode, the performance was a night and day difference over the original Switch with much higher res textures, a smoother frame rate, better lighting, etc. You could probably identify it next to PS5 or Series X gameplay, but it’s a far more serviceable alternative.
The mission itself, Follie’s Hunt, as is tradition with Warframe over the past decade plus, attempts a riff on popular game types in the trappings of its own world and mechanics. This time around: a PVE, Dead by Daylight-style asymmetric survival mode where players have to locate and complete unfinished, likely evil paintings by delivering globs of haunted paint to the canvases without being killed by the titular Follie.
There’s a lot to learn upfront, but it quickly settles into the kind of simple and repeatable rhythm that all of the best Warframe quests have. Will players be dipping and dodging Follie and her inky minions in three months? Hard to say, but one thing is certain: Megan and Digital Extremes will be watching very closely.
Warframe is available now on PlayStation 5 | 4, Nintendo Switch | Switch 2, Xbox Series X|S, PC (via Steam), Xbox One, and iOS.
