Digital Extremes lays out Soulframe’s next pre-alpha update with a shipwreck quest, Mirifuir Castle siege activity, and a rideable wolf mount tease, while clarifying how the fantasy MMO is diverging from Warframe in tone, pacing, and world design.
Digital Extremes used its PAX East showcase to put Soulframe back in the spotlight, outlining what comes next for the fantasy MMO’s pre-alpha testing and giving fans a clearer picture of how it will stand apart from Warframe. The next major test build, currently referred to as Preludes 14, is targeting an April rollout and layers in new quest content, a large scale siege, and the game’s first real taste of mounted traversal through a teased wolf companion.
A denser pre-alpha: shipwreck quest and duel with a fencer
The headline addition in the next pre-alpha build is a new quest that centers on a long-lost shipwreck. Digital Extremes is using this storyline as a showcase for Soulframe’s slower, more deliberate quest pacing compared to Warframe’s mission structure. Instead of blasting through short objective chains, players track the remnants of a wreck, follow clues, and eventually confront a famed fencer who anchors the climax of the quest.
That fencer encounter is not just a cutscene cameo. The duel is built to emphasize Soulframe’s more tactile, melee-heavy combat, where reading animations and committing to swings matters more than spraying bullets. Winning the duel unlocks a new pact and a new rapier weapon, which reinforces how narrative beats are directly tied to progression in this build.
Alongside the main storyline, the update adds five new side quests that branch around these events. These are less about loot pinatas and more about deepening your ties to the world, ancestor spirits, and the factions circling the shipwreck site. For a pre-alpha environment, it is a surprisingly content-rich loop that should give returning testers more to do than simply repeat the same encounters for gear.
Mirifuir Castle siege and the push toward large scale encounters
Preludes 14 also brings a siege encounter focused on Mirifuir Castle. Where earlier Soulframe tests leaned on smaller pockets of combat, this castle activity is built as a proving ground for the game’s larger battles and more reactive environments.
Players will work their way across the outer approaches, breach into the castle’s defenses, and contend with waves of enemies that escalate in composition and tactics. The siege is meant to stress the cooperative side of Soulframe’s design, with space for tankier frontliners, support-oriented characters, and finesse melee fighters to all matter. The Mirifuir setting itself continues Digital Extremes’ push toward handcrafted, layered spaces instead of reusable tile sets.
Tying this siege into the overall pre-alpha progression is the ongoing expansion of ancestor Orlick’s systems. With Preludes 14, players earn more Orlick progression hooks as they clear castle objectives and side routes, reinforcing the idea that ancestral bonds are the backbone of long term growth rather than a bolt-on system.
Fallen Ode Skytower and journal UI upgrades
Beyond the headline quest and siege, the next build introduces the Fallen Ode Skytower, a new location that leans into verticality and traversal puzzles. The tower appears in the current test shard as another anchor space, giving Digital Extremes room to test how players move through multi-level interior environments while still keeping combat at the center.
To help players track all of this, the studio is iterating on Soulframe’s journal interface. The upcoming UI pass is focused on making quests, pacts, Orlick progression, and lore entries easier to follow without drowning players in menus. That refinement matters here, because Soulframe’s slower pacing and heavier narrative emphasis rely on players keeping up with who they have met and what they have promised to do.
The wolf mount tease and what it means for traversal
Digital Extremes closed the pre-alpha segment with one of Soulframe’s most attention grabbing reveals so far: a rideable wolf mount. The team clarified that the mount is being teased ahead of its full implementation and is not guaranteed to ship in the same April build, but its inclusion in the presentation signals how central animal companions and natural traversal will be to the final game.
The wolf mount is concepted less as a disposable vehicle and more as a bonded ally that fits the game’s themes of restoration and kinship with nature. Where Warframe’s movement is about hyper-kinetic parkour and speed, Soulframe’s mount design focuses on weight, presence, and the feeling of sharing momentum with a living creature across rugged landscapes. Expect the mount to interact with world elements like undergrowth, shallow water, and uneven stone rather than just hovering over the terrain.
Even as a tease, the wolf immediately reshapes mental images of what exploring Soulframe’s open zones will feel like, hinting at longer treks between points of interest and more organic terrain that rewards mounted traversal and dismounted exploration in equal measure.
How Soulframe is pulling away from Warframe’s shadow
With each new pre-alpha update, Digital Extremes is under pressure to show that Soulframe is not just a fantasy reskin of Warframe. The studio used this latest reveal to underline three core areas where the new MMO is intentionally diverging.
In tone, Soulframe trades Warframe’s slick sci-fi surrealism for a mood that is more somber, earthy, and reflective. Battles are still brutal, but the framing centers on restoration, broken oaths, and the scars left on the land. The shipwreck quest and Mirifuir siege are both steeped in loss and reclamation rather than power fantasy alone. That tonal shift shows up in art direction too, with heavy use of natural materials, overgrown ruins, and companion creatures that feel like characters, not tools.
In pacing, the team is steering hard away from Warframe’s constant forward sprint. Combat is heavier and more deliberate, quests stretch over longer arcs, and traversal is built around savoring the journey rather than chain sliding from one objective room to the next. The upcoming duel with the famed fencer is a perfect example. Instead of being a short boss that melts under gunfire, it is positioned as a duel where spacing, timing, and a few well placed strikes decide the outcome.
In world design, Soulframe emphasizes contiguous, handcrafted spaces that evolve over time. Where Warframe’s tile based missions shine in repeatable, fast content, Soulframe leans into a more traditional MMO-style world. The Mirifuir Castle siege, the Fallen Ode Skytower, and the shipwreck zone are all fixed locales players can come to recognize, with questlines, side stories, and ancestor progression looping through them. That sense of place is critical to how the game wants to build long term attachment.
The teased wolf mount reinforces those differences. A mount that has its own personality and connection to the world does not make sense in Warframe’s rapid fire mission loops, but it slots neatly into Soulframe’s slower, more tactile exploration model.
Pre-release interest and what the next build signals
As pre-release interest in Soulframe builds, Preludes 14 feels like a pivot point for the project. The update is not just more content; it is a small vertical slice of what the final game wants to be. There is a narrative spine in the shipwreck quest, systemic depth in ancestor Orlick’s growth, large scale cooperation in the Mirifuir siege, and early steps toward a traversal identity with the wolf mount.
For curious Warframe veterans, all of this makes Soulframe easier to imagine as a complementary experience rather than a direct replacement. Where Warframe remains the go to game for high speed, modular missions and constant gear churn, Soulframe is positioning itself as the slower, more grounded counterpart that you sink into for evenings of exploration and story driven combat.
The next pre-alpha build will not answer every open question about monetization, endgame, or long term content pacing, but it will give testers a clearer, more cohesive sample of what Digital Extremes is building. If the shipwreck quest lands emotionally, the Mirifuir siege holds up to repeated runs, and the eventual wolf mount feels as good to ride as it looks in teases, Soulframe’s path from intriguing experiment to must watch MMO will start to look much more concrete.