Warframe creative director dishes on the romanceable nun Marie Leroux

'I think that it is our mission to always wear a PhD in gooner'

Warframe fans are facing their biggest challenge yet: a beautiful nun with a bangin’ bod. Her name is Marie Leroux, and she’s one of the latest romanceable characters added to Warframe’s end-of-year expansion, The Old Peace.

When Marie was revealed at TennoCon this past summer, the Warframe subreddit was cast into chaos. You see, Marie’s design is based on the popular Warframe Wisp, who is truly the full package: she’s powerful and useful in any game mode, fun to play, and she’s majorly caked-up. But according to a 2024 Reddit community survey, 47% of Warframe players are already dating the beautiful, tormented goth Eleanor. Could Marie Leroux change all that?

Warframe’s dateable characters are called Protoframes, and they’re (to majorly simplify something you’re not allowed to know about until late in the game) people whose designs are based on the titular Warframes. Developer Digital Extremes introduced Protoframes with a cast of loveable fuck-ups trying their best in the 1999 expansion, which came out in late 2024. Marie Leroux and fellow Protoframes Roath and Father Lyon Allard are the latest crop of characters to be introduced to the narrative.

But to say Warframe only got sexy with the introduction of Protoframes is a big mistake. Warframe has always been sexy, and that’s by design.

“I think that it is our mission to always wear a PhD in gooner,” creative director Rebecca Ford told me in an interview ahead of the release of The Old Peace. Years before Warframe was even a game, she recalls seeing a sketch of the character that would become Excalibur, one of the first Warframes.

“We understood that in that specimen there is such an appreciation of anatomy, form, and science fiction,” Ford said. “Every animation we have was based on Excalibur. So every movement, every fluid animation choice has come from the perspective of that cyber-unit. And he’s fine as hell.”

Following in Excalibur’s footsteps, Warframe’s designs are hot as hell, both despite and because they’re all kind of fucked up. As a woman player, it’s hard to describe the difference between a sexy design that makes me roll my eyes (what I described to Ford as “cringe horny”) and one that doesn’t. In speaking with Ford, it occurred to me that maybe it is that wrongness that all Warframe characters have that complicates and enhances their hotness. After all, Warframes are bio-mechanical weapons — not people, but not not people. They have histories, attitudes, and a heavy dose of medical horror. Also, one of them is a wolf girl.

There’s something very appealing about that: the toned, raw body grafted with armor that can give the illusion of bare skin, but just the illusion.

“It has a perspective that isn’t inherently sexual, but it is sexy,” Ford said of that original Excalibur design. “I truly believe that understanding this line is genre-defining for a lot of teams in games.”

As for Marie Leroux, it remains to be seen how many players will jump ship to romance her now that the Old Peace update is out. There’s plenty of comments about players leaving Eleanor to romance the caked-up nun, but the players that I spoke to admitted they were joking — and that Marie would need to be more than a pretty face to convince them to make the switch.

“I do think that if [Digital Extremes] keeps up their quality writing and character development with these new Protoframes, Marie might convince more people to switch over to her purely for character-driven purposes,” said SilverSage616, one of the players that I messaged over Reddit. Probably not for SilverSage616, though.

“There’s a lot of sentimental attachment [to Eleanor] already that will be very hard for other frames to compete with,” SilverSage616 said. “I was enamored by the way her character was written and developed as I continued to interact with the Hex storyline.”

Another player, Lemme, plans to romance Marie, but also for sentimental reasons: Wisp was the first Prime Warframe that they obtained as a new player, and they completed most of the game playing as her.

“Even though I currently no longer use her as much, I will always hold her dearly in my thoughts,” Lemme said over Reddit DMs. “Only time will tell, but usually DE makes a good job with the Protoframes [...] so I have good faith in DE to deliver a good character when the update comes around.”

Ford says that Digital Extremes isn’t done pushing the boundaries of what a sexy character can look like.

“I do think you will see us take some different directions next year, just in the framework of pushing beauty in themes that we haven't done yet,” Ford said. She points to the large Warframe Grendel, who is functionally Kirby in that he sucks enemies into his gut and can then consume them for power or spit them out like bombs of bile. “People always look at Grendel and they’re like, ’That’s a different body type.’ What I hope to do is to take the appreciation of all the forms, and the Warframe art style, and make some new marriages next year. So you’ll see some new things next year.”