Railjack's Potential and Raids

[Zeful]

I was going to write a big post about the things DE needs to do to avoid making Railjack just a repeat of the issues with Archwing, but that's not useful criticism. The team likely already knows anything I'd post and it's not worth the effort to post the obvious just to pat myself on the back.

Instead I want to point out something that I feel the team probably already knows but that I haven't seen the community really talk about: Railjack has the potential to reintroduce 8-man raids to the game without the puzzle gimmicks like The Law of Retribution's "take a number" room.

The reason I make this argument is pretty simple, the demo showcased a way for DE to provide things to do for a full team that isn't just "be another gun". 

For those that need a refresher, the Railjack Demo saw Rebecca, Megan, and Danielle perform a highly scripted approximation of a Sabotage mission. The team needed to close distance to the ship deal with fighters, repel boarders and eventually send one member to board the enemy ship to locate the shield generator that a ship bound member needed to shoot with the Railjack's big gun. The way this demo played out required a small bit of coordination between different squad members, Rebecca needed to stay aboard to hack the energy door, Megan needed to fight through the bowels of the ship to scan the "shield coil", and Rebecca, still on the Railjack, needed to shoot it with the ship's Super Opticors. This creates a mission framework that has at least two major partitions; you have the Railjack section, where Rebecca as the ship's pilot performed necessary actions in hacking an energy field and performing the mission ending shot, and you have the boarding section where Megan boards the enemy vessel, and marked the "shield coil".

While this example is pretty barebones (Danielle doesn't have much to do), the framework's logic still provides DE the tools to potentially add more sections to a mission, or more tasks that require more people. A good example for how this could work would be a potential "Railjack Capture" mission, which has a Railjack section in the vein of the Archwing pursuit mission (disable the ship's engine), and two boarding sections, where there are one or two decoy capture targets (in addition to the real capture target) and a spy vault that reveals the correct one. To complete this in the shortest time you need someone flying the Railjack, so the enemy ship can remain crippled, someone to break into the spy vault to locate the capture target, and someone to go and capture them, now we're at a 3 man team. To give the fourth squaddie something to do that isn't just be another gun for one of the other players, throw in an atenna on the enemy vessel that's been deactivated to prevent the Railjack from just hacking forcefield doors like we saw in the demo that need to be manuevered to and then hacked and then defended, and now a full squad are needed to just capture one target.

How this works for Raids is pretty simple, the framework's logic allows DE to just add more mission sections until you have something for 8 people to do either in the form of more objectives and higher interactivity, or in the form of parallel missions that converge near the end for a boss fight. And with tecnology advances in the form of Sanctuary Onslaught allowing DE to better optimize multiple tilesets in a single mission and the Plains and Vallis for larger maps with smoother transitions, it should even be possible for DE to have raids that play like the Battle of Endor from Return of the Jedi.

The only potential downside is that these hypothetical raids aren't like raids from other games, and thus might become uninteresting, but that's mostly because the combat math doesn't really support building expansive combat encounters when there are powers that can scale up enough to oneshot anything.

What do you think, what are your hopes for Railjack or Raids?

Edited April 4, 2019 by Zeful

[fr4gb4ll]

the biggest problems i see with a mission type like the raids, are first of all, the problems with having 8 ppl connection to a host that is very likely to much of a potato to handle it - with all the annoyance we've seen in the raids... so, either this new try on it is server-bond or DE need to seriously improve on their netcode and the way a host for such mission is determind. else, the whole thing will nigh unbearable to most player who not doing it with only known people right of their physical neighbourhood.

next 'problem' is the predictability of highly scriped missions - at least if there is little in the way variations in it... even if the rewards are tempting, people are likely to moan about it soon, like they did with both orb-fights just recently. ofc, this can never be prevented totally, but enough variations and rare suprises during the mission (good and bad ones) are a way to spice things up and keep it interesting far longer - something they sure should already have thought of for the bounties in both open areas, but that's just my own opinion...

one thing that also goes in the way the prevention or the "same old, same old" problem is actually one thing i always loved warframe for: the randomeness of the titleset in the missions. since DE could 'recycle' many parts of titles for such a assault-type raid with only a few changes and improvement (they might even finally rework some of those age-old titleset for the normal missions while at it), they really should consider using such in those raids too.

as for rewards, they should really, really think about a system, that has a long time motivation factor. only thing that is halfway like this, is the eidolon-hunt and only because of the many arcanes one need from them... and what a supries, those rewards came from the 'old' raids too... so hopefully this time, they think of more than a new frame or weapon or FX/cosmetic-stuff as rewards and then STILL cycle the tables for it occasionally. what it could be, i'm not really creative enough to think of, maybe something entirely new like weapon augmentations for a new weapon-aug-slot, or something like this - there sure are many ideas that came from the players over the years that they could use.

oh, last but not least: for sanity's sake, let them REALLY test the whole thing in a way that will represent an actual situation of gameplay (meaning not just test drive this within their own network, but on a global scale - maybe involving some trusted players, like still playing founders in the test run). i understand that we (especially the PC-players) are the 'beta-tester' of the game, but it sure hamper the overall fun if such a new contend would end up a bug-fest for the first 4 weeks...