Digital Extremes Unveils a Second Solar System, Dark Powers, and Star-Studded Casts at Annual Fan Showcase

Digital Extremes capped off TennoCon 2026 with a packed live showcase covering the future of two of its biggest online action-RPGs: the long-running Warframe and the alpha-stage Soulframe. The event delivered sweeping announcements across both titles, signaling a major creative push from the Canadian studio as it looks to sustain player engagement well into the future. Developers framed the reveals not just as content drops, but as deliberate steps toward ensuring both games remain alive and evolving for years to come.

For Warframe, the flagship announcement was the long-teased Tau expansion — described by creative director Rebecca Ford as the single biggest shift in the game's 13-year history. The expansion adds a full second solar system to the game's universe, complete with new stories, locations, and threats tied to the Sentinels and the Orokin-terraformed colonies that have loomed in Warframe's lore for years. Central to the expansion is Forax, a cyberpunk-styled Hub city that blends open exploration with procedurally generated combat zones. A brand-new Chimera Warframe named Brysko, voiced by Critical Role's Matt Mercer, will anchor much of the expansion's character-driven narrative, playing as a gunslinger with a fast, character-action-game feel. Before the Tau launch later this year, players can also look forward to the Iceblade of Narin story quest, new Nightwave missions, deluxe Warframe skins, and a poker-inspired in-game card game called Portau.

Soulframe, meanwhile, remains in its Preludes alpha phase, but TennoCon gave the game its most substantial public showcase yet. The centerpiece reveal was Warsongs, a new narrative fable questline arriving this fall that dives deeper into the Envoy protagonist's backstory and the motivations of recurring antagonist Tempest Bayor. Actors Ben Starr — known for Final Fantasy XVI and Expedition 33 — and Jennifer English, recognizable from Baldur's Gate 3, have joined the cast as Tempest Bayor and the Empress of Eldveil respectively, lending significant voice acting pedigree to the title's expanding lore.

The Warsongs questline also introduces Soulframe's darkest narrative territory so far, offering players the Vadagar pact — a corruption-driven system that lets Envoys wield dark powers for the first time. The new Coiled Dawn snake sword, which uses wide sweeping strikes to engage multiple enemies, was showcased during the demo's climactic battle sequence. Alongside this story content, Digital Extremes also revealed several quality-of-life improvements, including player-rideable wolf mounts — one of the community's most requested features — and a new relaxed-gameplay system called Vegan Fishing, allowing players to catch creatures across the world of Alca for wildlife intel.

On the access front, Digital Extremes announced that players who sign up on the official Soulframe site before July 12 at 11:59 PM ET will receive entry to Soulframe Preludes, representing the broadest public access wave the alpha has seen to date. Senior community leadership openly acknowledged that the game was announced earlier than ideal, but framed that transparency as a strength, noting that building the game alongside its community has allowed the studio to take meaningful creative swings based on real player feedback. Both games appear to be entering pivotal phases of their respective development cycles.