Read our in-depth interview with Warframe: TAU’s audio team here.
Warframe is taking on a noir spin with the upcoming update, Warframe: Tau. The new update will take players to the Sentient ring city of Fornax. During the TennoLive Demo, players got a taste of what TAU has to store. And the answer is all noir, with the right kind of trip hop edge.
Known for going all in on the genre, Warframe: TAU pits players against The Hunra (Jonathan Bullock), a ruthless crime boss who rules the city by producing an addictive substance called the Bloom. Accented by the character you’ll be embodying: Brysko. Voiced by Matt Mercer, the speech pattern feels more 1930s than anything else as you move through the city, as you hear an inner monologue, play a few rounds of Portau (Warframe’s poker equivalent), and even see a cosmic jazz singer.
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Taking a note from the private detective classics, the score throughout much of the demo captures just what you’d expect from a seedy underbelly where criminal factions and in-fighting fuel everything, all while a black rain falls on Fornax. Still, it’s the black rain that stands out.
Warframe: TAU is detective noir by way of trip-hop.
If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably wondering why the title of this article is “I Went To TennoCon And Found Blade’s Blood Rave In Warframe: TAU.” Well, all of that has to do with the boss fight sequence featured at the end of the demo.
In a release to the press, Digital Extremes said that the all-new original music would be a “somber trance with a new original noir trip-hop track,” which is titled “View From the Top” sung by Canadian vocalist Jill Harris. And while that song is great, the boss fight score is what stole the show.
When we think of the noir detective genre, we think of breathy jazz that melts the audience as much as the PI hot on a trail. The sensual and alluring nature of those expectations is met in “View From the Top” as Brysko walks through the club you enter. But as he moves into the boss fight, another thing happens. A more beat-heavy trip-hop emerges, with a vibe perfect for playing in The Bronze or, well, the Blood Rave scene in Blade.
But is it the blood rave scene? The devs said so.
During TennoCon, I had the chance to talk to Matt Chamblers (Composer) and Erich Preston (Audio Director), the duo responsible for the epic scores and soundscapes players experience in Warframe. The aesthetics of Fornax in Warframe: TAU match anything you would see in Canto Bight or Coruscant for Star Wars fans, while also embodying just enough of The Fifth Element and Dick Tracy.
But with all of those influences on their sleeves, I had to ask the audio duo how Warframe chose to tackle the noir detective genre and the seedy underbellies filled with scum and villainy without falling victim to the memories that shape pop culture from such large properties.
Their answer? Well, they’re exploring everything there is in Fornax in Warframe: Tau. And that starts with acid. “For the warehouse scene specifically, I think it’s funny what will inspire you sometimes. And the reason why I thought acid would be cool for that scene was that they were in a warehouse, and for whatever reason, the warehouse image just conjured up the Blood Rave scene from [Wesley Snipes’] Blade,” Erich Preston said.
Warframe continues to showcase genre mastery.
Continuing, “So, I was like: We gotta do the Blood Rave thing here. And it turned out great. And Matt was able to take it and do a cool spin on it and make something like that that was super unique, and I think it’s better than that track in the [Blood Rave]. So don’t tell Blade!”
Masters of genre, the Digital Extremes team has already proven their ability to adapt their free-to-play multiplayer game to just about any setting. Not only have they done boy bands and Y2K nu-metal, but they’ve also embraced the space opera in terms of their orchestral tracks just as much. So it wasn’t surprising to find that in the reveal for Warframe: Tau’s boss battles, they looked to Blade.
Preston added, “We’ve all consumed so much media through our lives, especially if you’re in the industry. I think the nice part about consuming all that media is that when we sit down to create something, we just don’t even look at what other stuff is out there. I think not paying attention too closely to what other people are doing just allows you to have your own unique synthesis [of ideas].”
Creatively, we’re everything we’ve everything experienced.
“It’s like everything you’ve consumed coming through you creates a unique piece. I think you’ll see that in different art forms too, like Picasso and Rembrandt. It’s like they’re looking at the same subject matter that we all look at, but because it’s coming through their influences, that kind of shapes something unique. We try to do that too,” Preseton concluded.
Matt Chamblers added in, “Or we look at multiple things, and we just look at a bunch of stuff to find one thing. So that it’s not like we’re accidentally drawing influence from one very obvious source. It’s like this big picture of options that we pull together to create one vision.”
Ultimately, creatives are the sum of their parts. And all of those parts are all of the things we have experienced throughout our lives. It’s what we hear, what we see, and the kinds of moments in pop culture that a setting or single chord can trigger, taking you back to that exact moment. When you watch the TennoLive Demo, do it and tell me the first bit of trip-hop doesn’t send you right back to Moscow, 1998, in a little place called Club Blood.
