If you’ve been circling Digital Extremes’ fantasy action-RPG waiting for a way in, your moment has arrived. During TennoCon, the studio behind Warframe welcomed a fresh wave of players into Soulframe: Preludes, the ongoing pre-alpha build of what’s shaping up to be Warframe’s spiritual successor set in a world of magic, forests and forgotten gods rather than orbital gunplay.
For the uninitiated, Soulframe is a free-to-play co-op action-RPG that Digital Extremes first teased with a cinematic trailer back at TennoCon in July 2022. Since then it has been trickling out to the public in an unusually candid way: rather than sealing everything behind an NDA and a distant launch date, the studio has been shipping numbered “Preludes” updates that let players poke at systems as they’re built. The most recent major drop, Preludes 15: Gods & Ghosts, landed on June 10, 2026, expanding the game’s melancholic fantasy sandbox.
The headline here is access. Getting into Preludes has historically meant either grabbing a Founders pack or waiting for one of these periodic openings, so a TennoCon-timed intake is exactly the kind of window curious newcomers should watch for. If you make it in, you can start playing right now, no purchase required to sample the pre-alpha in this batch.
What’s it actually like? Soulframe leans hard into atmosphere. Expect:
- Fantasy melee-focused combat rather than the gun-heavy loops of Warframe
- Co-op play baked into the design, so you can wander its world alongside friends
- An evolving world that shifts with each Preludes update as new zones, systems and story beats arrive
It’s worth being clear about what “pre-alpha” means here. This is not a finished game, and Digital Extremes hasn’t committed to a launch date — the official line is that Preludes simply continues until Soulframe is ready. That makes the current build less a demo you’re meant to judge harshly and more an open workshop, warts and all. Bugs, placeholder content and rough edges come with the territory, but so does a rare chance to watch a live-service RPG take shape in public.
The approach fits Digital Extremes’ reputation. Warframe famously turned a shaky launch into one of the most durable free-to-play games around by iterating relentlessly with its community, and the transparent, Preludes-by-Preludes rollout of Soulframe reads like the studio applying those hard-won lessons from the ground up.
Pricing for the full release hasn’t been announced, and the studio hasn’t published official system requirements yet, so plan accordingly before diving in. But if the pitch — a moodier, sword-swinging cousin to Warframe you can help sculpt — sounds like your thing, this TennoCon opening is the low-commitment way to see whether Soulframe’s world grabs you.
