Devstream 134 Overview

[BearPerson]

I would also like to know more around the resource mechanics of railjack, specifically

• When crafting consumables on the fly, whose resources are used? The railjack owner, the crafter, or only a "commons pile" of resources picked up in the mission so far?
• Thus, is it possible to "go negative" in missions and consume more resources than you gain, or at least burn off almost all your gain, making no forward progress?
  • This makes me worry about an "elixir syndrome" variant where either players are so scared of needing to use resources that they keep farming low-tier missions so they don't need to spend anything, or fail the other way and keep trying higher tiers than they should, coming out negative, and being frustrated that they constantly have to farm resources rather than doing the gameplay they were planning on (purchasable revives, anyone?).
• Presumably railjack upgrades cost some resources to build, not just to research. Can those costs only be paid by the railjack owner, or can crew contribute upgrades somehow?
• At the end of the mission, who gets resources picked up during the mission? Giving them to everyone in the squad means a dedicated squad has their railjack owner starved while the others are swimming in resources they have no use for, but if you give them only to the owner, you'd discourage using matchmaking because it'd feel like you don't get much unless you own the ship.
• How does mission failure interact with resources gained/spent in missions up to that point?

[FoxyKabam]

my expectations for rail jack were it would be garbage, but I was still a little bit excited about it though, crossing my fingers I'd be wrong and stuff.

after that stream and the seemingly tone deaf lich "discussion", I am not at all excited for rail jack or any upcoming content.

 

if this steam was meant to hype me up for railjack, as a customer/player, it had the opposite effect.

 

 

I hope railjack comes out great and everyone loves it for years after.

 

 

[AdunSaveMe]

I like opening the overview page and having every single video play automatically at the same time.

I have to actually adblock the embedded videos just to read the page properly. oof

[(PSN)OReillysAuto]

Now that I read all of this, I understand the concern and it's honestly one that should be addressed.

DE needs to make sure this update conveys out as smooth as possible, and there needs to be some system reworks, etc. 

The 'Command' skill also NEEDS to ship with Railjack. I personally am not a Solo player, but a lot of my friends are and if I was in their shoes, I'd be quite livid.

However, hopefully Empyrean comes out smooth and easy...

[(PSN)OmegaSlayer]

Liches are Archgun deployment 2.0

Something that doesn't fit the game but it's there because "cool animation"

[kyori]

8 hours ago, [DE]Taylor said:

There is so much to cover in this Devstream

With that said, many people already voiced their concern... why need resources for ammo? who wants to play fireman full time? etc etc

1 main thing above all those... What is the purpose of the Railjack? where we can finish the mission faster with less hassle with our archwing?

What is the purpose of the Railjack?

[MagentTanau]

Been said before, but with the importance of this update we need to get Railjack handled well to reasonable degree at launch, since it's sure to attract a bunch of new sci fi space peeps to the game.

That in-mission crafting system just to use major Railjack abilities/big guns... totally un-FUN. Sure you could almost call that a bit of realism/immersion, but do that BEFORE the mission starts or you launch the Railjack - like you have to stock up on munitions/charges/heals and be able to carry a large number of it, and allow Clans to create a common stockpile that Warlords can control the distribution limits of. That said, you also have to keep in mind solo play, and this is where I'm also of a mind where it would be just better to scrap the whole idea of in-mission, resource cost crafting  -  and just reduce that to a much more simplified 'Fabricator Resource Meter' - which would essentially be a warframe energy meter for Railjacks that can be modded to refill faster/use less, which fuels the Railjack big gun and active abilities. (If it ain't broke, don't fix it, DE!)

Also, during the Railjack mission, that you had to assign two of the party just to keeping the thing intact, playing Wrench Monkey, a decidedly un-FUN task, that is a big problem. A sci-fi geek does not want to be putting out fires, patching hull, or crafting endlessly, while others are using the fruits of his grinding labor to have fun.

[IamLoco]

So after watching this devstream....

 

Can i please return my railjack? I´d like to have my 6 million credits and those resources back.

I don´t even want to imagine having to "play" this. What the heck? Fire fighter simulator 2019?

And this constant resource sink is a terrible idea. If I was hosting a mission on my ship I would be screaming at the crew non-stop so they won´t waste my stuff.

 

[ShaperOfForm]

28 minutes ago, MagentTanau said:

That in-mission crafting system just to use major Railjack abilities/big guns... totally un-FUN. Sure you could almost call that a bit of realism/immersion, but do that BEFORE the mission starts or you launch the Railjack - like you have to stock up on munitions/charges/heals and be able to carry a large number of it, and allow Clans to create a common stockpile that Warlords can control the distribution limits of. That said, you also have to keep in mind solo play, and this is where I'm also of a mind where it would be just better to scrap the whole idea of in-mission, resource cost crafting  -  and just reduce that to a much more simplified 'Fabricator Resource Meter' - which would essentially be a warframe energy meter for Railjacks that can be modded to refill faster/use less, which fuels the Railjack big gun and active abilities. (If it ain't broke, don't fix it, DE!)

The Devstream very clearly demonstrated that the intention is for you to stock up before going on a mission. They didn't do it on the demonstration because it was bugged. So they were left with the hectic task of creating as they played. Having the ability to create resources on the fly is meant to be a fallback plan when you run out of ammo or plan poorly. 

31 minutes ago, MagentTanau said:

Also, during the Railjack mission, that you had to assign two of the party just to keeping the thing intact, playing Wrench Monkey, a decidedly un-FUN task, that is a big problem. A sci-fi geek does not want to be putting out fires, patching hull, or crafting endlessly, while others are using the fruits of his grinding labor to have fun.

Where DE messed up in the demonstration is they took an unmodded low level Railjack into a higher level mission. They also very clearly stated that the flow and chaos was still being tweaked. When DE inevitably reviews the play session and debrief, I highly doubt that the two firefighters are going to say they had a great time just putting out fires. It will be balanced.

DE also very clearly stated that Solo play was possible but not optimal. Similar to when other content came out and was not optimal to solo until people figured out the optimal builds for solo play. This idea that DE is forgetting about Solo players for Empyrean launch is beyond ridiculous. If DE balanced content for solo players to comfortably manage the content, what would be the point of playing in COOP? It would be overkill and easy. 

Eidolons can be killed solo with the right setup, but there is also a skill to completing this. Not anyone can just solo an Eidolon. 

 

[Kylo.]

Thank you, friend.

[SnuggleBuckets]

10 hours ago, MirageKnight said:

Don't we have a non-Tenno crew on-board to help with things like that?

Yeah we do, we even see them bumming around in the ship while docked, only to vanish when we fly out.

52 minutes ago, ShaperOfForm said:

The Devstream very clearly demonstrated that the intention is for you to stock up before going on a mission. They didn't do it on the demonstration because it was bugged. So they were left with the hectic task of creating as they played. Having the ability to create resources on the fly is meant to be a fallback plan when you run out of ammo or plan poorly.

I've seen you post this before, and your narrative misses the point. It doesn't matter so much WHEN we have to craft the consumables, though it is an extra added nuisance to slowing down mission time and adding another thing to balance while being busy with other stuff. But what matters is that the Railjack is a slow big singular target floating about with less of a way to regain health and stay competitive with archwings without burning through your stockpiles, they haven't shown other ways apart from fire extinguishing to be important with keeping your ship in one piece.
Fire extinguishing could maybe be a thing to make sure all systems are operating at 100% capacity, and/or make sure ship health regen stays at its 100% (with a hard cap of not falling below 33% capacity, unless health drops to 0 in which case the ship goes into stasis until you fix it up), with more fires slowing things down, but if it turns out to be more vital, then the thing will turn into a sinking ship intentionally designed to be weak, inferior, necessary to access new content at the cost of constantly leeching on farmed resources like a per mission tax to access some area.

1 hour ago, ShaperOfForm said:

DE also very clearly stated that Solo play was possible but not optimal.

The point is that they remained very vague and indeterminate about it, we only heard in passing at some past point about stealth being the main solo method, a bit limiting, but let's stick with it.
That latest stream? Raised some nasty questions when combined with resource use.
Like, say, what if Stealth will be a "power" ability, that you need to feed energy for to maintain, but if you're solo, hundreds of miles away on foot in the middle of some intense section as you're retrieving some artifact or another, but then your stealth ship runs out of energy, how will you feed it more while being away?
We don't know, this is speculation, and the point is that they didn't do anything to answer questions we've had about these issues for months now.
Ideally what I'd hope to see is that stealth would be infinite energy but using any other ability or weaponry of the ship disables it and puts it on a short cooldown (obviously if you will have different manufacturers with different levels, those would influence how long a cooldown before stealth reactivates and maybe your speed while flying camouflaged).

Those kinds of things would have made for a good devstream, instead of bumbling around in a messy fight unprepared while not clearly signposting all the incomplete and buggy things and just having that jokey "f it we'll do it live" approach while being dismissive and terse on issues.

[8faiNt]

Tenno, the greatest war machine on the solar system is busy with putting the fire out instead of what he was supposed to do, you know, genociding stuff. 

I can already enjoy the gameplay. thanks

[Captain_Fronk]

Railjack leaving atmosphere - where is it? I expected anything but just a dojo parking room with an enourmous resource/time sink.

Railjack being all about connection - where is it? It has its own completely separate starchart for gods sake! Or look at recources for example. I don't see any Fortuna resources at all, no plains of Eidolon resources needed, not even good old ALLOY PLATES or SALVAGE - it's all new and totally disconnected from the rest of the game.

And squad link, right - "The Thing that will connect it all together". Where is it? It won't be there at launch, nobody knows what it's going to do except for that one mission showed at Tennocon (which again doesn't really make any difference). Any info on that?

Liches are supposed to be in space too but for SOME REASON I think they won't even work properly in space. At least not how they showed it at tennocon.

What is all this??

Is there anything they showed at TWO TENNOCONS that actually works as promised?

 

And that's only Raijack. New War is another huuuuge concern of mine. Good thing they promised absolutely nothing and showed almost zero so they won't disappoint us with false advertising.

The bottom line is I won't spend another $ on Warframe untill I see what I've been waiting 2 years (since Tennocon 2017) for. Because it seems to me that the original concept of "Railjack" and "The Empyrean" have almost nothing in common. It's supposed to be a living breathing universe that is all about connection... Not this... Dojo archwing island.

[KikuVasNormandy]

Its really funny to see in these type of situation how most people quickly jump over any other info once they read something what they don´t like about the content.

These new mechanics are practically a entire new game inside another game, and is going to be just the first iteration of ir, so... learn to have some patiente, this is not Star Citizen levels of disaster, (But i would love to give that ridiculous amount of money to DE). The Liches needed several tiches before being in a more palatable state, currently I don´t have too much complais since its easy to quickly deal with them once you get the system. Is going to be the same for Railjack, even in some point was mentioned "expect a lot of crashes" since these first "flight" is going to be a wat to test out everything before keep interating.

I only have to main worries:

1. How far I´m going to be able to progress solo until proper solo tunning is done and NPC crew is in place since that is my main focus.

2. The low MR gate for being able to join a crew, that is going to be a pain if not lifted to a more proper MR10 or locked behind the Wat Within. I usually dont have problems to help new players, but Railjack missions dont loock like the place to do that.

[ShaperOfForm]

46 minutes ago, SnuggleBuckets said:

Those kinds of things would have made for a good devstream, instead of bumbling around in a messy fight unprepared while not clearly signposting all the incomplete and buggy things and just having that jokey "f it we'll do it live" approach while being dismissive and terse on issues.

I would recommend rewatching the Devstream on Youtube from about 1:36:08 to about 1:45:00. 

Absolutely nothing about their post play review was dismissive and terse and its quite informative. Do they answer every possible question? No.

What is apparent during that ~10 minute recap is the amount of content and layers is massive. The play session didn't get to show POI and boarding parties among other things. Rewatch the section on Avionics at about 56:00 to get an idea of how to improve Railjack survivability. 

They touch on the need for balancing and specifically say that the amount of fire extinguishing is not the gameplay they are after at 1:39:00. They are clearly still fiddling with the numbers. 

At 1:41:22  they comment on solo play. Sheldon says he plays solo every day and mentions that he leaves the ship in Stealth. They mention that keys to doing it solo is good piloting and earning certain tactical mods/avionics. They didn't say that you can only solo using stealth. And they make a point to say you can progress solo, but they encouraged people to try it in COOP because its really fun. They also touch on Solo around 54 minute mark. 

They look genuinely excited about the product they are about to release and really want it to be great. They fully expect adjusting based on constructive feedback. 

 As for the crafting: I think the crafting of artillery is a fantastic idea that will make use of the abundance of resources you will no doubt accumulate through playing. 

I have stockpiles of resources sitting around doing nothing. Finally a system that actually feeds itself.   

Now the response from Steve about Kuva Lich changes wasn't great or handled well. But that's a different topic. What was shown about Empyrean looks great and DE looks really excited to get this in our hands and make it as great as it can be.  

 

 

[Jaffawer]

So is there a chance that the first phase of Empyrean will come before the end of the year?

[(XBOX)C11H22O11]

Man people are whining a lot, just wait for it to be released

[Bountyboy312]

Okay why are you guys getting mad because we of the ammo and the resoruces that you need to make your ammo for railjack I dont understand that but i love a challange but, This is my oppertunity to show what i m made of as tenno 

[V0LK]

Quote

Any plans to change your consequence of dying when stabbing your Lich with the wrong combo of Parazon mods? No.

Great! There literally nothing as fun as being killed because you didn't roll a right combination. You were oneshot not because you were slow, unobservant or ill-prepared. No. You just guessed wrong and BAM! you're RNGed to death.

That's game DEsign for you.

[Ikusias]

Apart from the obvious roughness of the developer build they did show, they did us a disservice by improvising it all with inexperienced players and god-mode /dev-mode active.

DE railjack got annihilated dozens of times with its lifebar resetting before zeroing...

it's quite clear they messed up doing a mission far above their equipment level, still i feel on foot enemies and relative ships should have different level scaling, it makes no sense that troops on a level 12 ship in earth orbit are tougher than level 30 crew on regular missions.

Flight mode also is atrocious and too arcadey, a big step back from what was before all in name of brain dead ease of control... FFS it's a big honking ship in space and it's more maneuverable than archwing?

I dislike that current archwing model slaves movement and aiming together, forbidding you from flying in a direction while looking underneath your archwing without planting yourself in the ground.

Ship felt underarmed compared to enemy crafts and having the main engine being the cowling up top open all the time looked like crap, what was shown at Tennocon was far better 8sans the micromanagement of power)

So far Railjack feels more of a "raid" activity, needing more than a single squad to handle missions properly.

At the same time I'd find far more enjoyable the option of crafting someting more akin to an heavy fighter instead of a full-on corvette and have more allied player-crewed ships in the same mission.

I won't comment about De Steve  way of addressing the lich debacle.

I suggest DE PR department to gag him for the foreseeable future, he'd do less damages.

currently cancelled all planned expenses on the game, if yo treat your players like trash, expect the same in return.

[OniDax]

12 minutes ago, Ikusias said:

So far Railjack feels more of a "raid" activity, needing more than a single squad to handle missions properly.

At the same time I'd find far more enjoyable the option of crafting someting more akin to an heavy fighter instead of a full-on corvette and have more allied player-crewed ships in the same mission.

I'd like to see something like a heavy fighter/Slave 1 (Boba/Jango Fett ship) and allied player-crewed ships supporting the Railjack as opposed to two-to-three players having to micro-manage the Railjack. I also felt that Empyrean is a raid-like activity.

[Fl_3]

I can't really comment on Railjack because I haven't played it yet.

But, I am disappointed that that major concerns that players brought up about Old Blood and Kuva Liches have pretty much been ignored.

I thought that with the extra time between this and the last dev stream that more progress would have been made on fixing the problems, but I guess DE has been busy concentrating on the next piece of unfinished content they're going to throw at us.

I don't mind the unfinished content, I understand the need to give us new things to play and do. I just wish you would fix the last one before releasing the next, because it feels like when something new is released, you no longer pay any attention to the problems that still exist in the old.

[(PSN)yikesitsthatguy]

@[DE]Taylor Do you guys plan also releasing Empyrean for console this year also? I know its an Early question when we haven't gotten Rising Tide Yet.

[DeMonkey]

53 minutes ago, (PS4)yikesitsthatguy said:

@[DE]Taylor Do you guys plan also releasing Empyrean for console this year also? I know its an Early question when we haven't gotten Rising Tide Yet.

I rate your chances at about... 0%.

[Ikusias]

2 hours ago, (PS4)yikesitsthatguy said:

@[DE]Taylor Do you guys plan also releasing Empyrean for console this year also? I know its an Early question when we haven't gotten Rising Tide Yet.

Not their say when content arrives on console, DE depends on Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo certification to publish content on the respective platforms