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The space ninja adventure known as Warframe, a title where you can feed yourself to a giant mouth and drive a motorcycle in the year 1999, has launched a new update. The Vallis Undermind highlights the creative flair that has come to define Warframe in the past few seasons.

This expansion, made available this week, brings in a new mushroom-themed warframe that performs a unique animation, along with a brand-new biome to discover. However, it also revisits core concepts, with a new mission designed to making sure this complex, vast long-running online game is understandable by new players.

The Arrival of "The Teacher"

Titled “The Teacher,” this is the highly anticipated mission that trains Warframe players on how to use one of the game's most basic — yet most intricate systems: the mod system.

In Warframe, mods are augments that can be added to your character or your weapons to boost their performance. They range from the straightforward (boosting power or shortening reload times) to the incredibly intricate. Content creators often produce extensive guides about idealized builds that use synergistic enhancements to create devastating effects.

“Many players likely started their journey, seeing mods, not really understanding it,” noted a lead narrative designer. “We believed it was crucial, upon completing the mission, for players to think, ‘Hey, modding is cool. I'd like to experiment further.’”

Teamwork in Action

“The Teacher” was created through a partnership between the core team, who provided the narrative sauce, and a supporting studio, who crafted the gameplay, which will be introduced to new players.

In the quest, the player is tasked with obtaining a new segment for their spaceship, but they’re interrupted by a menacing, powerful warrior called Teshin, who takes away the player’s abilities and close-combat arms, and forces them to engage with the mod system to effectively show its potential.

Several developers were already fans of the game, but others had never played before, according to a lead designer. It was this outside perspective that proved critical.

“Our initial step involved observing new players and go right play through the tutorial and take prodigious notes on all points of confusion,” the designer said. Early-game menu pop-ups introduced players to modding. But the team noted that they didn’t work on everyone.

“Certain players missed fundamental guidance where the game highlights it saying equip the modification,” he said.

Filling a Significant Gap

Warframe’s mods allow players to create incredibly strong combinations that turn the screen into a blitz of numbers. But "The Teacher" focuses on different aspects. There will be some long-time players who wish the quest was geared more towards their needs, like creating powerful and specific builds. But it became clear that the mission addresses a genuine oversight for early players — and that doing so isn’t as simple as it looks.

“There’s lots of little tweaks and little subtle things in the background there to just sort of show you what it can do rather than tell you,” the designer said. For example, one of the goals of “The Teacher” is to show how mods can create elemental damage types; in this case, a magnetic effect that depletes protective barriers.

“We had to change the weapon to be a burst-fire weapon, because it shows off the proc rate more,” the designer said. “But you don’t want to say to people, 'oh yeah, actually on a base level mod, you only got a few percentage chance to proc an elemental effect.' So how do you tutorialize that without changing it?”

Veterans will naturally recognize these mechanics and understand how it works, but beginners require instruction to pay attention to these things.

“This type of design work that we've had to worry about as much just because that hasn't been our focus,” said a story developer. “However, this oversight meant that players weren't properly taught the modding system.”

Months of Effort

“A tremendous amount of work is required for just making a seemingly straightforward quest that — frankly — you can blast through in about 15 minutes,” said the designer. “But it's months and months of work for loads of people.”

The designer was visibly glowing with excitement over being able to work on a game that he loves — and to design content featuring a preferred figure.

“I love Teshin,” he said. “He's my 8-year-old internal self's idea of what's cool.”

Streamlining the Beginning

In the 12 years since its release, Warframe has been in a ongoing struggle with its own new user introduction. There are many intricate mechanics that players can ignore initially — and won't encounter until much later. And others, like modding, that scale in complexity depending on how much time you want to invest. An update earlier this year improved the introductory experience so that players could reach Warframe’s mind-bending plot developments with less time on the grind up front.

With “The Teacher,” it’s clear that the developers are doubling down on a commitment to make sure Warframe’s initial hours doesn’t stay locked in 2013. New players can get their foot in the door — regardless of overlooking tutorials.