A major Soulframe combat upgrade kicks off a year of "big swings" as the RPG aims to be more than 'fantasy Warframe'

Digital Extremes promises a year of “big swings” for Soulframe as it aims to flesh out the new RPG into a fully fledged fantasy counterpart to Warframe. Soulframe Preludes 13: Virtues is almost upon us, and the developer is making some dramatic core changes to the fundamentals of character building and combat in an attempt to set the foundation for the future. In its latest dev chat, the team also details its overhauled customization system, tools for clearer progression, and a new game mode.

Joining us on the couch for Soulframe Devstream 12 are Digital Extremes CEO Steve Sinclair, Soulframe creative director Geoff Crookes, lead designer Scott McGregor, audio director George Spanos, and senior community manager Sarah Asselin. As the name of the next update suggests, a big part of the focus is a total redesign of the way that the Virtues attribute system works. “Big swings are coming for the meta and the game systems underneath,” Sinclair remarks, “This is going to be the one that affects all your builds.”

Rather than manually assigning points into Courage, Spirit, and Grace, you’ll now select a Virtue Prism that determines your stat distribution. As you grow more powerful, your selected Prism will automatically assign points to the three categories, and the purpose of each is more specialized than it was previously. Courage makes you a melee warrior, capable of using stronger weapons and armor. Spirit enhances your spellcasting ability, and Grace leans into trickery such as stealth, backstabs, and sneak attacks.

“It’s going to affect what kind of armor you can equip, or at least equip effectively,” Sinclair explains. “It’s going to affect your weapons, it’s going to affect which abilities are scaling, it’s going to affect a lot of things.” Rather than having to micromanage your stat points, you’ll now be able to swap out to a particular Prism that fits what you want to do. In similar fashion, your Pact abilities are now each specifically scaled by a certain attribute.

The separation of Pacts and Virtues allows you to mix and match to suit your current loadout, and the team says there’s potential to experiment with various combinations. “I see some people are scared about this, a lot of hesitation,” Sinclair comments in response to the live chat. “If you play the game right now, Courage is mostly the only thing to invest in. So that’s the reason for this change; obviously you should give it a try when it comes out.”

Sinclair reassures players that there are Virtue Prisms designed to play with a blend of two or more attributes, and says Digital Extremes wants to continue finding new ways to support that variety. He also addresses concerns about whether abilities will feel useless if you don’t opt for a hyper-specialized build: “That’s not the case. Just think about it as more of an encouragement or a bonus on top of a healthy baseline.”

Combat has also been given a big overhaul. While Soulframe still moves faster than your average RPG, it’s not quite as high-octane as its sci-fi older sibling, and that means the movement and action can feel a little too loose. “These last few weeks have been a significant push on combat feel, in particular melee combat feel,” Sinclair explains. “Target switching, reduced skating, keeping ideal distance, the camera being too tight on the action [and] pulling out when there’s multiple attackers.”

Overhauls to player movement, the lock-on system, and camera behavior all combine with a hefty sound design upgrade that takes both your equipment and that of your opponent into account. “Hopefully after you get over the shock of the Virtue Prisms, you’re going to see a much tighter game,” Sinclair says. “The player physics are way less slippery and icy, and the camera’s not so tightly on a metal pole locked on the back of the character.”

Another big change from the current build is a reduction in unblockable attack spam. “This is probably an exaggeration, but [it] kind of feels like 30% or maybe even 50% of the attacks that enemies are kicking out right now on live are unblockable, which means you’re constantly in this kind of dodge-spam situation because you can’t really trust the blocking system,” Sinclair remarks. In Preludes 13, even large foes are “on kind of a throttle for how many times they can do that, so you can make a tanky Courage-based build and just block and duel with them.”

We get to see three new weapons in action. Seathorn is a caster staff, Basker’s Wrest is a fiery casting sidearm, and the Clivers are a pair of dual-wielded swords for your sidearm slot. I’m already dreaming up my equivalent to Final Fantasy 14’s Viper. We also get a look at the first proper version of character customization. Your initial appearance will be based on the decisions you made during the tutorial, but you’ll have access to all five basic face types along with a range of hairstyles and various color settings. Face makeup will be temporarily disabled as a result, but it’ll return with more options in the future.

During the remainder of the stream, the developer shows off a battle against a Vadagar Bear boss, along with a new game mode, Operation: The Organ. This involves a massive machine built upon a Dendrit tower that is polluting the land, and it’s up to you to fend off enemy forces while you attempt to halt the tower’s corrupting influence. There’s also a peek at new mission boards that you’ll find at World Trees, offering “a clear, more deliberate way to take on tasks.” Finally for today, Crookes teases that mounts are “penciled in for this year.”

“This first half of the year is going to be significant changes like this coming pretty rapidly to how the RPG systems [work], how the questing system works,” Sinclair concludes. “We have very, very big ambitions for the game. So I hope you will be patient with us. We will always be listening, but the road map is very aggressive, because we want to make this game significantly better than it is today. I hope that you’ll be willing to come with us on that journey.”