If you thought Octavia mains blasting questionable music wasn’t enough, the upcoming Warframe can blast you with their homebrew png art. Sort of like old Call of Duty Emblems, Follie the paintress-frame will let you deploy your own artistic expression as you materialize various objects into existence. You can’t really import external images, but a legally-distinct-photoshop tool will let you create these in-game.

Digital Extremes are well aware of the kind of gates a system like this can open, too. When they revealed this providence in its world premiere (Devstream 193), Design Director Pablo Alonso urged the community:

“I believe in you as a community to help us make this not have horrible consequences.”

“We have a killswitch”: Warframe Sketchbook art can indeed get you banned

The new opportunity for impromptu art exhibits is tied to the update’s titular gimmick, Shadowgraph. This is Follie’s second ability, which basically lets paint an object of your choosing from your Sketchbook to aid you in various scenarios.

The Sketchbook itself has 14 different objects you can pull from, represented as a Gear wheel that you open by holding the key for the second ability (presumably). These range from traps and weapons to utility stuff like a Conduit Key to use in Disruption.

The interesting tidbit here is that the art of each object here can be customized outside of mission. You can do this on a certainly-not-photoshop-inspired panel that gives you various shapes and sprites you can stack on top of each other through a layering system.

Your custom art can be assigned to any specific element like, lets say, an Arc Trap that zaps enemies. When you cast Shadowgraph to create this next time, it will briefly display the art on a holo panel that everyone can see (whoever is around at the time, at least).

For those wondering whether this gives you the artistic license to spam risque pictures to your unwary teammates, the law of the land will indeed restrict you. As the Creative Director herself confirmed, it can get you banned:

“We do have a killswitch. (…) You agree not to do anything that violates our community guidelines. And if you do, and if people see it, they can report you. It’s no different than if you have an inappropriate pet name. Inappropriate picture is the same thing.”

This is among DE’s more out-there ideas in recent history, even by Warframe standards. Time will tell whether they will have severely restrict this feature in coming days, if not roll it back altogether, but it still stands testament to how open Warframe remains to ambitious leaps of faith.

Check out everything that’s coming in Warframe Shadowgrapher in our full recap of Devstream 193.