Suggestion: Taxi service on the Plains of Eidolon, straight to Fortuna

[Mr_Chrizpy]

https://imgur.com/a/dNa7kdX

Hi!, posted this on reddit and it was suggested that I post it here, Hopefully this is the correct place. This is my mock up for an idea for fast travel directly from The Plains, to Fortuna. The guys are already there, and it would allow for a quicker way to travel between the open worlds, even allowing for some fun different loading screens, such as showing your warframe sitting in the cramped storage section of the cargo hold.

 

Let me know what you think!

[[DE]Rebecca]

This is so clever, haha. How would it work the other way around? 2-way Taxi highway!

[AvPCelticPredator]

Can I be taxi driver pls, that i can earn some platinum for my work 🤗

[Seph-Aldaire]

You could have it work both ways by the Ostrons in Fortuna gathered at the bottom of the ramp opposite of Eudico. They get smuggled back out via the same ship that takes them.

[Nidaria]

I love this!
I can imagine Ordis saying something like "O-Operator... are my services no longer needed??"

[Xaxma]

It's a cute idea, but what is the practical use of it?

Unless we got some cross open world content and missions that require jumping from Venus to Earth and vice versa.

Maybe there's something to be said about bounties that are like caravan/cargo escort missions. Rescue Cetus prisoners from being experimented on in Orb Valis. There's a lot of potential here.

Edited April 12, 2019 by Xaxma

[LordPantaloonsthe3rd]

you already have a taxi his name is ordis

Edited April 12, 2019 by LordPantaloonsthe3rd

[Voltage]

4 minutes ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

This is so clever, haha. How would it work the other way around? 2-way Taxi highway!

Input Konzu lunch.

Output Taxi.

[trunks013]

Hey thats such a funny idea and we could eat early lunch on the way 

[AvPCelticPredator]

6 minutes ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

2-way Taxi highway!

Is that means that u guys cannot make something to work on that way?

I wondering how u are make Transporters in dojo to work!?!? 🤔

[Blackwolfe]

I would just want a way to go back and forth between cetus/fortuna  and the orbiter without queuing the group or leaving the group. Also being able to start normal missions from cetus/fortuna. I mean relays have nav rooms so why couldn't we have that in fortuna/cetus?

Edited April 12, 2019 by Blackwolfe

[Mr_Chrizpy]

37 minutes ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

This is so clever, haha. How would it work the other way around? 2-way Taxi highway!

ahaha thank you, and yessss, we'd have to hide a fishing scrap smuggler on Fortuna somewhere to take you to the plains for sure.

[Regenerating_Degenerate]

This idea makes me think of Jak 2 and jak3, they had a ship that took you to both open world maps.

[Ham_Grenabe]

1 hour ago, Xaxma said:

It's a cute idea, but what is the practical use of it?

Unless we got some cross open world content and missions that require jumping from Venus to Earth and vice versa.

Maybe there's something to be said about bounties that are like caravan/cargo escort missions. Rescue Cetus prisoners from being experimented on in Orb Valis. There's a lot of potential here.

For me, I usually hit either Cetus, then Fortuna (or vice versa) every daily reset to turn in more crap for rep. Instead of the process now, which is (for example):

1. Access menu.

2. Select Leave Cetus.

3. Loading screen.

4. Access navigation.

5. Select Fortuna.

6. Loading screen & animation.

It would cut out the leaving and re-accessing Navigation step. No one step there takes any huge amount of time, but together, it's a time-and-motion saver.

Edited April 12, 2019 by Ham_Grenabe

[Guardian_Legion]

Less loading screens and the ability to make the world feel more interconnected. I'm game

[Librus_107]

Ah, this sounds really clever! I'm down for this being implemented.

[Drasiel]

I love this idea!

[(PSN)xxav1xl6ivax]

10 hours ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

This is so clever, haha. How would it work the other way around? 2-way Taxi highway!

The idea as shown in the (very amusing) example (props to exercising some real wit), may be rather impractical (in the most immediate sense) to aim for, directly, BUT the points which it intersected have been on the minds of a number of players.

The most prominent being LOADING SCREENS.

When “inside” of a relay or a dojo, it just seems plain wrong to look at a loading screen of a landing craft flying, especially when the environment which is loading is supposed to be within the same structure (and the case is not dissimilar, if not even more seemingly disjunctive, when loading into a Captura “Scene.”

It is a small matter, and of no really significant concern. It would not alter how things work. The addition of a couple of alternate loading screens which would seem more contextually appropriate to transitioning between environments within a location, would only change the way things look, and how players are expected to perceive the processes that occur fictionally.

Still, the idea that is presented in the OP, would be first dependent upon an alternate loading screen being employed for moving from one environment to another.

IF alternate loading screens can (eventually) be worked in at all (some day), then there may perhaps be room indeed for very easily doing a Taxi To Venus loading screen (as shown & described) just for fun.

The point being that the loading screen doesn’t have to show all of the particulars of how you get on or off of the Solaris Cargo ride- 

(any more than the present loading screen has to show how you get from a MR test Stall in a Relay, on to your landing craft, back to your orbiter which takes you to MR Test Land, then back to your landing craft, and into the MR Test Datascape ; )

 - it just needs to present a cutaway to being inside of it, while the Fortuna environment loads. MAYBE, if you wanted to get REALLY FANCY it could finish off with an exterior cutaway to the cargo ship flying past the [virtual] ‘space cam’ POV, and disappearing into the distant horizon of a Venus surface landing. And if you wanted to even get a little silly/fun with it, before disappearing into the vanishing point, catch a glimpse of a Warframe popping out like someone who was in an ejector seat going through sun roof, to plummet its own trajectory down ... while the landing IN Fortuna would be no different. 

It would be something added in, just for the fun of it, and it would require FIRST that something new (and to the perception of MANY PLAYERS, something long overdue) be written in to provide for any alternate loading screen to be used at all.

 

I mean it’s not like we’re wanting to actually get to see what it’s actually like to ride in a vehicle that does a whole process of transit across a SOLAR RAIL (secret, underground, rail agent/‘tractor jockey or subway ; ) ROUTE.

 

 

 

 

[DrivaMain]

I would love this! This is basically like Deus Ex Mankind Divided where one of the login screens show adam in a train, makes them more enjoyable and cinematic (I guess)

[Koldraxon-732]

I agree with the notion to add a 'taxi' to the 'town' spaces (Clan Dojo included). Could be put at a floating hologram of Ordis in a corner or at a conveniently placed transport.

Additionally, I would like different loading screens, and a revision of the 'arrival/departure' cinematics, including the Extraction Rooms across (most, if not all) tilesets. This includes a new loading screen for returning and departing from the Orbiter.

[zattez]

I really dig the idea! It would give me not only a shortcut between the two (turning in my fish for Konzu lunch and exchanging rep for the Quills) before i do the same on Fortuna.
also aesthetically it would make the world feel more alive i reckon, Being smuggled back to For tuna in an old cargo hold. I could see my operator bouncing a ball against a wall in the same position as the mirage you have in your picture, waiting for it to land. Surely it couldn't hurt to have it sometime in the future to help connect the open worlds together.

[(PSN)xxav1xl6ivax]

Basically it doesn’t really matter how many player want the one idea to be written in,

because there is no room for it [yet] to be written in.

 

Quite a while back, the PS4@4 Community was getting swamped with every sort of complaint over two things;

The landing craft being parked in some bizarre way (when going to the Relay Dock to leave), and it taking off and departing (leaving the player behind).

Neither of those things EVER happened to me. So I started asking players who posted screen shots of this happening to describe more of what actually occurred. 

I found out that there was something I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW existed, which was an option to depart from a relay by returning to the landing craft. Not that it really made much difference, since the way I had learned to do it, and the way I always had done it, resulted in nothing different that going all the way back to the Dock to do it. Either way, it would just cut to the loading screen.

So I started asking about what players were doing on the relay, and about the whole trip; going there, docking, taking care of business, then going back to the dock (instead of just opening Options and selecting Leave Relay from wherever they were), and found out that in every case, the player had just skipped past the approach and docking cinematic-type shots.

It was something I didn’t even know could be done (but that’s probably just because I’d never want to do it).

To call them Cinematic might not be really quite correct, but they basically use a “sky box” with a single dynamic virtual camera position, and an animation of the players ship (in much the same way as when entering into almost any Mission beginning from the Orbiter or the communications section of a Relay), followed by a Segment which shows insertion or arrival.

So I also found out that the same players were skipping over that stuff too. They didn’t want to have to wait through seeing what linked from one place to another. They didn’t want to waste time on looking at their ship flying towards a Relay, and docking, and then cutting to the reverse view to see their Warframe emerge from the Landing Craft. They ALL just wanted to get right to being on the Relay immediately.

Yet these are the same players who were complaining about what they saw when they took the totally unnecessary time to go all the way back to the dock from wherever they were in the Relay, just to cut to the loading screen from their ship rather than with the Option.

So, the pattern was obvious. The weird things that players were seeing ONLY occurred when they skipped everything after the loading screen to get there, and then went all the way to the dock (only to cut straight to the loading screen) when they wanted to leave.

So, what were they seeing? 

To them, they were seeing their ship take off and leave the dock without them.

Not one of them even took an interest in seeing their ship from the outside, going through a departure sequence, which otherwise does not exist at all.

That it is something which is already written into the game, and just not active. 

Eventually the complaints piled up enough inside the bug reports (presumably) for DE to figure out (eventually) the whole sequence which triggered weird “parking,” and “Ordis leaving without [them],” and opted to take the most direct action of disabling the option for players to bypass that sequence.

I had been wondering for MONTHS why EVERY RELAY (on the PS4 platform) had become the Strata Relay, inside and out. Why at best only one in every five approach sequences for missions actually matched with the location which the mission was supposed to be. Why the sky boxes were were even mix-and-matching ships to locations where they should not even possibly be, inside and out (Corpus Capital ships in The Void, Grineer Ships in Pluto orbits). NOBODY even noticed. Nobody even cared enough to find it interesting to see.  

Should it be any wonder, or come as any surprise, that devs have de-prioritized  even creating a framework for writing the code that would enable more or different loading screens and transition sequences than what already exists and what will have to exist when new environments are added?

Because in order to get the one cool (but ultimately frivolous) transition sequence/loading screen combination which has been proposed in the OP, the framework which would make ANY alternate loading screen/transition sequences possible at all, will have to be written into the games code first.

[(XBOX)KiryuStark]

On 2019-04-12 at 1:41 PM, [DE]Rebecca said:

This is so clever, haha. How would it work the other way around? 2-way Taxi highway!

There are a few places the load screens could be made less intrusive or eliminated altogether. I am stuck on the rank 8 mastery test and practiced for hours tonight. More time spent in load screens than on the actual practice runs. If this had a quick restart it would make life so much easier. 

As for the smuggling idea, that's awesome. Anything that can keep us engaged during downtime is a plus. I wouldnt mind a landing craft bullet hell game like wyrmius as a load screen option. No prizes or anything, maybe just a stat in our profile for high scores. That way if people dont want to play they dont have to. 

[(PSN)xxav1xl6ivax]

15 hours ago, (XB1)KiryuStark said:

There are a few places the load screens could be made less intrusive or eliminated altogether. I am stuck on the rank 8 mastery test and practiced for hours tonight. More time spent in load screens than on the actual practice runs. If this had a quick restart it would make life so much easier. 

As for the smuggling idea, that's awesome. Anything that can keep us engaged during downtime is a plus. I wouldnt mind a landing craft bullet hell game like wyrmius as a load screen option. No prizes or anything, maybe just a stat in our profile for high scores. That way if people dont want to play they dont have to. 

If by “could,” you mean that it would be something that is desired or would be of benefit overall to the game and players’ experience of it, I couldn’t agree with you more.

One of the most acute instances of not just the existing, but any loading screen, really CAUSING trouble and difficulty by breaking up flow and continuity, is flying back and forth between the MR Test Stall and the Practice Test. 

That is something which has been pointed out (by players) numerous times, for quite a while. 

If by “could,” you mean that it is presently within the scope of the devs capabilities to make such changes, the present state of none having been made yet (despite appeals from the player community to DE/devs, requesting that something be done to that effect), it seems to be the case that they really can not.  Which is not meant as a criticism of DE or the devs in their response to players’ wants or interests. In such instances the case usually is such that what may seem like a simple change, would actually require an enormous amount of rewriting the code which is deeply embedded (at the “root level”) in the way all things within the game work, and the basic structures which they are reliant upon. 

In general theory, altering the level of coding which is responsible for WHAT is SHOWN during loading screens and transition sequences may be difficult to the point of impracticality in the immediate, but is something that would be far easier (by comparison) than changing the fundamental coding which uses loading screens to link from one environment to another. 

 

 

 

 

 

[(PSN)xxav1xl6ivax]

On 2019-04-12 at 10:41 AM, [DE]Rebecca said:

This is so clever, haha. How would it work the other way around? 2-way Taxi highway!

Back to trying to address the simple question in the most direct way,

it would not have to work both ways.

There are numerous commonalities between Relays, Dojos, Cetus (not PoE), Fortuna (not Orb Vallis), Iron Wake, Maroo’s, etc. which are fundamentally common between them all.

The shared common ground of what they do and how they work has been frequently revealed right within the game itself. At some point in their use after being introduced, MOST have shown “Leave Relay” instead of “Leave [name of place],” or otherwise referenced the environment as a Relay in the Options Screen or when accessing a terminal or function (usually in an early version, or when a new function which is common to Relays is first added, or activated).

I don’t know whether it is still the case that a section does not yet exist (“live”) in Cetus or Fortuna, which has the same function as the Communications Room in a Relay. 

Such a device in both locations would tend to put a damper on the idea of using the shuttle to taxi (or directly “shuttle”) from Cetus to Fortuna, since it would become a redundancy, and ultimately override the major purpose underlying the utility of the shuttles function (namely direct, point-to-point access from Cetus to Fortuna).

IF I am just behind the times with some development aspects, and an analog to the Communications Room on a Relay is being developed for or already exists in Fortuna, Cetus, or Both, (whether it is yet “live” or not), the likelihood that the cargo shuttle pad will be considered for a use which is already available or planned seems rather poor.

Also even if there are no such plans for adding a Communication Room type area to Fortuna, Cetus or Both, the progression of development of contextual activity to the Shuttle landing and taking off, suggests that plans, and even already existing code which is not yet “live,” for further development may likely be already in the works.

Initially it was a sort of Mystery Shuttle, which only took off and landed, with nothing and no one going on or off.

While it was presumably a Corpus Shuttle, it was nonetheless without any markings or identifiers which would necessarily make it so.

A presumption which had been put in place by DE was that certain smaller types of spacecraft are not exclusive to either Corpus or Grineer, and can possibly be, or are also used by other Colonists, Minor & Neutral Factions and/or Syndicates.

Another was that many existing spacecraft designs have carried over from the Orokin era, and were originally designed under the purview of The Empire.

(Hence there was a notion that the shuttle could even possibly be a ghost ship, just running the same automated routine that had been established to transport cargo to & from the Cetus Tower [“Space Elevator”]).

https://www.deviantart.com/sbigham/art/Warframe-Cetus-Orokin-Tower-710414455

The retrieval, assembly, decryption and playback of the complete encrypted Sigor Savah journals pointed toward a new, even stronger possibility; that the Shuttle was being used by Solaris. If that speculation were to show to indeed be the case, then it could easily imply that the shuttle could be, and probably has been used for for things which the Corpus would consider misuse (at best), and taken advantage of by Solaris/Solaris U Rail Agents, Smugglers, etc.

That speculation was strengthened further by the “reliable sources” which informed that after being discovered (fused but intact ... except for one hand of course ... which somehow ended up somewhere quite a ways away from the rest of her) Khora was smuggled off of Venus and eventually made its way out onto The Plains ; )

As it turned out, the speculation that the Shuttle was/is in fact being run by Solaris was dead on.

So those considerations might make it seem rather likely that DE already has ideas (at least) for further development associated with the Shuttle, and that they may have ideas (at least) for adding Relay Communication Room-type facilities to Fortuna & Cetus.

It would be unFORTUAte (on one HAND), if either/both of those are indeed the case, because I really like the idea presented in to OP, and love that it puts some emphasis on altering the languishing status quo of a single-loading-screen-for-everything, while making clear that there really is an interest in seeing and improved sense continuity through the use of linkages, and encouraging creative, fun new ideas for transitions.

It would be FORTUNAte (on the other HAND, which would be attached to the larger schema for further development), because whatever DE may have in mind will probably be really really cool (if they do have a trajectory for further development which incorporates the shuttle).