Three years of invite-only playtests end next week. On 6 November, Soulframe opens its doors to everyone — and Digital Extremes intends to mark the occasion by wrecking its own world.
The announcement landed during the studio’s Devstream 18 broadcast on 30 October. The open-world fantasy action RPG from the creators of Warframe enters its Open Preludes phase on PC, with no key and no code required: players simply create an account on the official website and download Digital Extremes’ own launcher. There is no Steam version yet, which leaves Deck and Linux players with extra hoops, and consoles remain out of luck for the time being.
A world that starts corrupted
Open access arrives just before Prelude 17, Verse of the Veilands, an update the studio calls one of the most drastic changes in the game’s short life. Later in November, the landmass of Midrath turns hostile: after the Tormented Stag quest, siphons belonging to the villainous Ode faction spread corruption across the landscape, stealing the energy from Alca and draining the world of its colour.
Cleansing it is the new core loop. Players complete votives — the game’s bespoke term for missions — to build energy, learn each region’s sacred song and restore the land. Enemies, events and loot tables all shift depending on whether a zone is corrupted, and healed regions unlock side activities such as fishing along with fresh resources to gather.
“You’re going to enter a game that is much more unforgiving and harsh at first glance.” — Geoff Crookes, creative director
Wolf mounts and a poacher Pact
The update also answers the community’s longest-running question: mounts, when? Players can finally raise their Omen wolfpup into a rideable adult wolf, a feature teased at TennoCon earlier this year. Alongside it comes a new hunter-style Pact tied to the Ode faction — a poacher class armed with spike traps, throwable bolas and a balloon dart that hoists enemies into the sky.
Key point: Open Preludes starts 6 November on PC via the official launcher. The paid Founders programme stays unchanged, and newcomers can catch up through all 16 existing Prelude chapters.
Worldbuilding gets a push too. Each faction leader gains pages of new writing and will radio in during play to fill players in on the history of the world, part of a deliberate effort to give those characters a more integrated role in the journey. The seasonal Bita’s Eve Halloween event returns for open access with a new mask, talisman and sickle.
Why Digital Extremes is ‘nervous’
Deliberately polluting a game praised for its cosy, fairytale ambience is not an obvious way to court newcomers. Creative director Geoff Crookes admitted as much at a recent roundtable, saying he and lead designer Scott McGregor were “nervous” about the aesthetic shift — but argued the harsher opening pairs well with open alpha, acting as “a much stronger breadcrumb trail” that gives players more ownership of what they do.
The reasoning is practical. Playtest feedback repeatedly boiled down to “what do I do next?”, and plenty of testers drifted away after finishing the opening Fables story quests. The directed onboarding structure is the fix: a tighter hand early on, then freedom once the regions are cleansed. McGregor called it “one of the biggest, most violent changes we’ve made to the structure of the game in a long while” — while stressing that what ships now is only the functional bones of the final systems.
What open access means next
Crookes has been careful to temper expectations: Soulframe remains an alpha, a community-driven project shaped by feedback rather than a finished product. The studio plans to keep running closed preview builds alongside the open test, and is exploring character resets so veterans can replay finished regions with new material.
For the open alpha itself, the team is preparing in-game surveys, progression tracking and continued feedback collection through Discord and the official forums, aiming to pinpoint exactly where new players stall. The more people who join on 6 November, Crookes argued, the better the data informing where the game goes next.
For Digital Extremes, the playbook is familiar. The studio spent years growing Warframe into a free-to-play phenomenon through exactly this kind of iterative, player-shaped development. Whether the same formula works for a slower, stranger fantasy RPG — one that now opens with a poisoned world and a wolf pup at your heels — is the question Open Preludes will spend the coming months answering.
