Co-op shooter Warframe coming from Digital Extremes

The Darkness II developer Digital Extremes has found steady work on the side as a multiplayer hired gun, brought in to jazz up the online offerings of other developers' games. Now it's putting that expertise to work on a game of its own, a free-to-play co-op shooter named Warframe for PC.

Warframe's set deep in space, where an enslaved race are fighting back against their oppressors with handy ancient 'warframe' exo-skeletons they've found. Missions are for squads of four players, and levels are procedurally generated so they're different each time.

"Warframe is a new name for an old game," chief creative director said in the announcement (via Blue's News). "It was a shelved concept we kept coming back to. High-tech machine-gun Ninjas set in a far-future, over-hyphenated, Manga-Dune mash-up."

CEO James Schmalz added, "In many ways, we're going back to our PC action-based roots. Free-to-play is like shareware 2.0! Once again, we're connected directly to our end-user. They decide whether or not to pay for their experience and we listen to their feedback and continually improve the experience to make it worth paying for. Game development as it should be."

Warframe is due to launch this winter, preceded this fall by a closed beta. You can sign up at the official Warframe site now to reserve your nickname, score a bonus weapon, and maybe get into the beta. Don't confuse it with Crytek's free-to-play co-op PC FPS Warface, though. War!