Warframe turned BG3's "unf**kable" narrator into a badass, romancable heroine

I met Amelia Tyler in the restroom at Tennocon, Warframe's annual community event. The stars aligned an hour before my allocated interview slot with her (the interview did not take place in said restroom, to clarify) and it felt like, as a result, we'd formed a bond forged in fire and bad-smelling soap. In many ways, our newfound friendship felt akin to the ones I'd formed in Baldur's Gate 3 with Astarion, Lae'zel, and my beloved Shadowheart: a chance meeting that changed, in BG3's case, the course of history, and in our case, the general vibe of our interview (and potentially history, too). It's a relationship that you never quite have with the narrator of Faerûn's greatest tale to date; she's a faceless whisper, tempting and dissuading in her own way. She isn't a visible entity like Karlach, Wyll, and company, but she is still a character in her own right.

Tyler describes the narrator as "unfuckable;" you can't romance her like you can with other members of the Baldur's Gate 3 cast, nor can you push her aside if her vision doesn't align with yours. In a sense, your relationship with her is even more intimate than with the rest of the roster - she's omnipresent, always there, always watching, always judging.

I ask Tyler what it was like playing a GM-like entity instead of a traditional character, especially given the popularity of the RPG's more visible, interactable NPCs. "I didn't really think about it at the time," she tells me. "There are so many different versions of the narrator and I didn't feel like I was faceless. We did something unusual with the narration of this; it feels like she's a character behind your ear just whispering throughout. When I was doing the Dark Urge narration I certainly felt like a classic character [because it] was much more meaty - literally - but it was very much that you were playing the inner monologue of a character.

"It's made conventions weird," she says with a laugh. "Some people are very into [Baldur's Gate 3] and know all of us, and probably know more about me than me at this point. But there are some people who have just played the game and haven't been involved in the social media side of things, so they'll go to a convention and be like 'oh, there's Shadowheart, there's Lae'zel, there's Karlach; who the hell is that?!' And it's only when they're queuing for someone else and they hear me talking that they're like 'OH! It's you!

"I think that people have a very different relationship with my character than they do with the other companion characters," she muses. "I call myself 'unfuckable' - probably not the technical term but that's what we're going with. With the characters that can have relationships, players very much hone in on that relationship as the thing that draws them to that actor, whereas for me, because that isn't there, they tend to want to talk to me about being a Dungeon Master or playing tabletop games, which I absolutely love." She notes that players also discuss more personal themes, like gender and sexuality, as well as neurodiversity. "I've really enjoyed that because it takes that relationship beyond 'what did you do in this romance? What did our characters do?' It's more like you and I talking; you can have very nice, open conversations about some stuff that I think the world should talk about."

But all of that changed with Warframe 1999, the space MMO's colossal update that dropped at the tail end of 2024. In many ways inspired by Larian's DnD epic, 1999 added a cast of romancable characters, a dating sim-style messaging system reminiscent of chatrooms like MSN, and the new protoframes that reimagined various Warframes in human form. Tyler plays Eleanor Nightingale, the Infested twin sister of Ben Starr's Arthur, who, unlike BG3's narrator is, to borrow Tyler's phrasing, 'fuckable.'

"[Playing Eleanor] was really fun for me. I come from a psychology background: I was studying to work with serial killers, it was a very dark route that I was going to go down," she tells me. "Getting to play a character like Eleanor [the protoframe for psychic Warframe, Nyx], where there are two sides of her that are constantly doing battle, where she really doesn't want the bad side to win, but there's something alluring about it and it gives her power [was amazing]. There's the constant fight between the different sides of herself, the wanting to be a badass, but also wanting someone to be vulnerable with; there are layers of complexity in that character that we don't get to see in women very often - certainly not in 'ass-kicking' women.

"You get to meet [1999's] characters in all of these different stages of reaction," she continues. "If you're in a relationship with Eleanor and you dump her, you get this moment of 'I can't react right now, but are you sure?'" Of course, this is simply the in-game flag to the player that their choice will have consequences, giving them that moment to back out and switch course.

For Tyler, however, it gave her the flexibility to really feel Eleanor's emotions. "[Eleanor] can go 'okay cool, bye, I guess' or [the player says] 'no I didn't mean to do that haha,' and [Eleanor replies] 'oh, well, I'm glad that we're still together, but please, please don't do that again.' We don't get to see characters in games setting boundaries like that, or having that vulnerability and tension."

It's an interesting transition, but there's an intimacy in both characters - an intimacy that Tyler has come to embody. The question remains then: will we see Eleanor return in the future? While Tyler states that "she knows as much as [I] do" about that, she'd love to see a plotline exploring the intersection of Eleanor and 1999's primary antagonist, Major Rusalka, played by Elsie Lovelock (Genshin Impact, Metaphor Refantazio). "There would be a connection there," she says. "I want to see them not as a romance, but as genuinely supportive friends - we so rarely see female relationships where it's not fetishized."

The future, however, includes a few new roles, where Tyler is "excited to show off [her] acting chops." Of course we'll see her as Hecate in Hades 2 when it launches in full, but I, for one, can't wait to see what happens after that - perhaps our next meeting will be in the restroom following her latest reveal. Until then, however, you'll find me haunting the halls of the Höllvania Central Mall, wondering whether or not Eleanor's going to answer my risky K.I.M message - fingers crossed.