Digital Extremes Warframe: The Old Peace Art Blast

By ArtStation Team - March 30, 2026

The Old Peace defines the Digital Extremes update process perfectly – behold something beautiful and lovingly crafted that we had only 5 months to get ready to show the world, and then 6 additional months to ship.

In January of 2025 we decided it would be better to show Warframe’s new solar system TAU, an ambitious place players have been expecting for 10 years, from the perspective of a tragic war backstory on a moon: PERITA.

This meant we had to quickly define and build out a location that would define the next many years of our life – it needed to feel alien, yet World War 1. It needed to leverage all the tech we’ve put in our own tools, but still feel Warframe.

The team had to start from scratch to build the tentpole update of 2025, and in doing so, set the scene for the future of Warframe. The community response to this said it all: masterful work by all departments.

Rebecca Ford

The Old Peace was a multi-faceted project. We needed to establish a foothold in Tau’s story with the war-torn moon of Perita, explore the mind of a troubled character through Descendia, and remaster the player’s own Operators.

Working with a new setting and new cast members is exciting, and challenging. The story needed Sentient characters who could carry emotional roles and have layered alien strangeness, which was a difficult visual design and craft problem. Perita’s location needed to capture the feeling of a grinding conflict, hint at what the Sentients could have been, have moments of Orokin grandeur, and come together very quickly. If you had asked us a year earlier whether we expected to rethink how we make rocks, we likely would have said no, but the rocks and cliffs of Perita were key to its war-torn feel. It took a diverse team (tech art, materials, asset art, and level art) to improve our proficiency there, with benefits well beyond this project. The team implied many stories, from the trenches a Grineer marine might have fought through to what a sacred location would mean for machines freshly made sentient.

Descendia was home to key characters for the update. Most people would not have guessed Warframe needed a nun, a priest, and a demon, but they are a natural fit for our fluid relationship with time. A location inside memory can be very open-ended, but the team moved decisively and made it memorable. A huge part of the update, and a strong testament to the beautiful craft work both the worldbuilding and characters teams do.

Touching the player’s own character is intimidating. Our character art and rendering pipeline has changed radically since Operators first appeared, but these are still the player’s characters, shaped by their choices. Making them feel like a clear upgrade while still feeling like the player’s own demanded careful research, along with key contributions from art, animation, and code to bring everything together. When the project was rolling, it was amazing to see how decisively everything came together, and the reception from players has been great.

It was a diverse update for the art department. We had a great deal to make from scratch, and fast. The team did an excellent job bringing it all together under serious time pressure, with a lot of care, thought, and range in the final work.

Kary Black