Digital Extremes has officially shelved its long-in-development wall-running rework for Warframe, confirming that the feature is no longer planned for the foreseeable future.
During recent developer commentary, Creative Director Rebecca Ford acknowledged that the team ultimately decided to walk away from the system after extended internal testing. “It didn’t matter how much time we spent on it or how much we felt like it would be cooler, it was removed for a reason,” Ford said, underscoring that the feature simply wasn’t landing in a way that justified its continued development.
Former Creative Director Steve Sinclair added a familiar Warframe caveat, noting that players should “never say never” when it comes to wall running returning someday. Still, he emphasized the scale of the challenge, calling it “a big, big, big game to change wall running,” and signaling that a full reintroduction would require far more than a simple movement tweak.
Lead Designer Pablo Alonso went deeper into the design struggle behind the scenes. “Wherever we went there were always new compromises to make,” he explained. “Do we make new compromises or keep the compromises we already have?” Alonso said the team repeatedly found that the rework didn’t meaningfully improve the experience. “Every time we tried it, it just didn’t really feel like it was elevating the game. It felt a lot like change for change sake,” he concluded. Wall running was officially announced as a major focus during Tennocon 2025, marking how quickly things have turned on the exceedingly complex animation.
Rather than pursuing wall running further, Digital Extremes is shifting focus toward refining existing traversal systems. The team is now prioritizing improvements to ledge pull-ups, with smoother animations and better detection for grabbing and climbing from edges. “It’s all about the flow sync and keeping you moving forward,” Ford said, framing the change as an effort to preserve Warframe’s fast, fluid movement identity.
Sinclair also touched on broader animation tech still in active development, noting that he had recently received a message about bringing motion matching into Warframe. Motion matching is an animation system that dynamically blends between captured movement clips based on player input and in-game context, allowing characters to transition more naturally between actions instead of snapping between rigid animation states. The technology is already in use on Soulframe and is designed to improve overall fluidity, responsiveness, and visual coherence.
While motion matching isn’t tied directly to wall running, Sinclair used it as an example of the kind of long-term animation work still happening behind the scenes. Even with wall running set aside, the team is continuing to invest heavily in movement feel, visual polish, and animation quality. The goal, as the developers framed it, is to make Warframe’s traversal look and feel better without forcing a massive mechanical overhaul that never fully found its footing.
For now, wall running appears to be off the table, with the studio opting to iterate on what already works instead of pushing a system that never quite clicked. While a future return isn’t impossible, the message from the dev team is clear: if wall running comes back, it will need to earn its place in Warframe’s movement ecosystem.