Digital Extremes has been on the battle path to address some of the oldest quality of life requests made by players in Warframe. In a rare visit to the forums, Warframe‘s Design Director Scott McGregor posted a Developer Workshop highlighting the upcoming changes to weapon holstering. Specifically, these changes will be improving the speed at which weapons are holstered for a better gameplay experience. Digital Extremes has carved out time on the path to The War Within for the sole purpose of addressing these long-standing feature improvements and requests.

Following suit with the recent changes to Vacuum, the intent of the upcoming changes to weapon holstering are intended to address player requests, but maintain balance within the game. “Instant weapon swapping is not something we want to do.” said McGregor as he pulled up a preview video to showcase the before and after speeds. “Choosing when to swap weapons was always meant to be a fun and meaningful part of gameplay. Some weapons make sense to be able to holster that quickly, but some of the bigger ones just wouldn’t make sense.”

Weapon holstering speeds are being adjusted to address concerns with immersion. Now a smaller weapon such as the Kunai will have a nearly instantaneous 0.4 seconds speed to holster or equip whereas the Opticor has been increased to 3.0 seconds to account for its larger size and technological requirements. “Previously these weapons were instantly available after swapping and we realized that would be dangerously unsafe in practice. Explosive and beam weapons will have a longer ‘warm up’ and ‘shut down’ period before and after use to ensure safety.”

With over 300 weapons to account for, McGregor is confident these changes will be improve the gameplay experience for everyone and confirmed the changes will apply to Conclave as well. He later added: