Grinding, Warframe, and Loving the Endless Loop
James Guthrie
There are two facts important to the context of this article. 1: I, your dearest author, have a generally very limited attention span and 2: I have played a lot of online games, but none of them have stuck until January this year. The reasons for this are myriad: Final Fantasy XIV and Elder Scrolls Online require time investments I cannot commit to for what feels like limited reward in game; EVE Online, World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic, while all very in my niches, came out too long before I had access to them and catch up seems daunting and will likely burn me out; and CS:GO, League Of Legends, Overwatch and Call of Duty are not fun unless you like toxicity. I find much more joy in shooters and hero squad games where people aren't shouting slurs at me because I didn't 360-knife-throw-no-scope some poor other guy who either hates this game as much as I do or also called me a slur.
So why exactly in 2025 did I suddenly and somehow manage to invest 200 hours into Warframe, a game I had never really heard of prior? The simple answer is it's a good game and Shenpai makes good videos. The longer answer involves me being broke, a sudden and bad case or two of career instability, and a gap before Monster Hunter Wilds that needed filled with something before I completely snapped and, I dunno, played Citizen Sleeper again and had a mental breakdown at 3am that led to some of the best writing I've ever produced. Everybody does that, right?
Warframe is a free-to-play MMO co-op shooter produced by Digital Extremes, a Canadian company majority-owned by Tencent now, but previously mostly independent bar initial purchase by the now defunct Leyou in 2016. Important to note: Warframe itself released in 2013, but has existed in development from 2000, and Digital Extremes has focused nearly all of its development and resources on the game from its release until now with few other releases or deviations. Also, the company has in-house streamers and community managers, maintains an active online presence, has its executives involved greatly in community management as recognisable figures, and moderates in-game and Twitch/Discord chat through algorithm but also through employed moderators and teams. Essentially, this studio is very devoted to their product, and are determined to have it continue its success not only by producing more content within it, but by carefully managing and growing a strong community around the product with strong internal moderation that in turn creates and encourages self-moderation in the fandom.
James Guthrie is a visual and emotional lifeform present in nerd culture and critical thinking about video games for approximately two decades and is lovingly known by his 2 followers and family as “into a bit of everything, and also men.” On the surface, Warframe is, in many ways, exactly the game I would want; it is a sci-fi action shooter-rpg with collectible playable characters (the titular Warframes) who function like a group of Mecha Superhero Magical Girls, which you dress up and outfit across the game while collecting weapons and resources by doing quests, which mostly range from shoot some guys to steal from some guys to kill this one really bad guy. Standard fare in all its genres, with an interesting and very large cast of playable frames and weaponry as of 2025.
The truth is, Warframe is a huge grindy RPG. Without too many spoilers, there is a lot of interesting lore in the game about the Warframes and how they came to be, who their creators are and the many bad things they did. Perhaps strangest, there is a major focus on the philosophical concept of Eternalism and alternate realities, as well as time loops, robot uprisings, capitalism in space, functionally Darkseid’s parademons but as kind of possibly people and also The Flood from Halo is here, queer, and also Communist? However, that all takes a backseat to the game's overriding loop: go out to missions, collect resources, use those resources to make more weapons and frames to do more missions to get more resources to empower yourself to do higher level content to get more resources to reach even higher level content. Any and all fun in the game is ultimately, at some point, going to become a grind.
This is like the central conceit of all online gaming, at least in the present era. Hero battler and shooter multiplayers may have their origins in fun asides created for added player enjoyment, but have over time switched towards ranked competitive play and pushed focus onto grinding out the next rank (or battlepass stage) by playing as much as possible, whenever possible. MMORPGs in the modern era rely almost entirely on long levelling grinds, resource grinds and often real-life money grinds to keep you invested that you might get to the next part of their actually interesting stories, locked behind ever-progressing higher level content. Both are infested with devious microtransactions both for cosmetic improvements a la Fortnite emotes and costumes and gameplay progress boosters, from grind-skips to full on story expansions.
Warframe is no stranger to this, but deviates in that its premium currency is farmable through in-game trading of items and mods from farms that are more draining or take great time or rare resources. The game is truly free to play; I have spent no money, but have rarely felt actually roadblocked, and have managed multiple times to accrue enough in game currency to splurge on more inaccessible frames, very rare resources and even some minor cosmetics. The game is constantly reminding you to take breaks, and other than a daily login bonus, there is little to push you to endlessly come back to the game bar the genuine enjoyment of the grind. It is a comfortable rhythm that feels rewarding; getting what you needed, that rare resource or successful trade, is always satisfying, and allows you new gameplay, always in bits and pieces but at times adding up to totally new playstyles or opening new ways through missions.
You get better. You get faster. You get more into it. You grind and you grind but the content is basically endless, and there is no pressure to reach the highest ranks or grab the newest thing, only to do what you want to do in a huge game that is basically an always growing list of things to do. Every grind opens up another grind with new prizes, every mission gives a tidbit of lore that pushes you down the chain to yet another grind. There's even romance! Guess what! Its a grind! The grind can even literally love you back!
There's something to be said about Warframe’s mastery of those little dopamine rushes we get when we succeed. It knows just how to keep on delivering them, but how to do so without the pressure to keep returning, so instead you become addicted. It doesn't feel so much insidious as it does escapist; you get to lose yourself over and over in that cycle of grind and reward, grind and reward, for no gain bar a little pleasure rush. If you spend money, you get that little rush faster, but there's no huge pressure because you know its all inevitable. Cyclical but soothing.
I finally get what this style of game has to offer in all its enormity: comfort. When real life gets too hard, too unrewarding, too painful and tough, there's a new thing to farm waiting just behind the screen. You don't need to think when you can just have a bit of fun turning your brain off and mowing down some guys with your friends or randoms while hoping you get that extra rare drop so you can build that really cool cape you want, and you can choose your level of emotional investment, with no clear force pushing you deeper or into scam-game territory. It's just an experience with a morsel of joy at the end, over and over again. There is a pleasantness in that. If you get burnt out, you stop; if you want to do something different, you can. If you're not having fun, you make other ways to have fun. It's all the things real life, and having a real job, often refuses to allow.
Also, as a fun extra twist, nearly everything said in this feature about the loop of Warframe can and does apply to the gameplay loop of Monster Hunter Wilds, just on a more micro and focused scale. While Capcom is a larger studio with many projects, Monster Hunter innovates only slightly with each new generation, maintaining its core grindy loop over and over but with new bells and whistles, and it works because at its core, it offers a fun time with fun rewards and opportunities to play with other real people while also choosing your own level of gradually escalating challenge.
Playing Warframe followed immediately by Wilds, I started to see this style of gameplay loop in a new light, where its real merit isn't in how the game's escalating challenge or style or cultivated community adds to the loop. Its how the loop being as satisfying as it is allows these games to focus on these factors as added extras. They are built to be engaging and replayable at their centre in ways few games manage, especially in the same space of Online Gaming. They are confident enough in their loop that they trust you'll come back, but don't have to enforce it or lock parts of it away behind money spent or hours played. Instead, they use gradual scaling and additional content to keep you engaged, always thinking about how you could get that next item on your mental list.
I value a simple loop like that. I value the confidence of these games and their developers more. To be so engaged as to actually trust their game conceit and hold player engagement, sustaining large, ever-growing playerbases, feels rare in today's climate of executive mismanagement and interference in the games industry, where a slight decline in player numbers or SELLING BELOW EXPECTATIONS can immediately kill a studio and all its creativity in less than a day. At least, for now, there is always going to be some relief in there being a new Monster in Monster Hunter or a new Frame in Warframe: those grinds never cease, nor does the fun.