Connecting Railjack to the rest of the game

[DrakeWurrum]

So... at Tennocon, DE touched on the idea of connecting all the game's parts together. And I know I've seen others talking about wanting it. Well, ya know what, I want it too...

And I think the best way to do that is to be able to use my Railjack to go to normal missions. But see, I want it done right, too. At first, I thought... okay, setting that up can take a LOT of work beyond what we already have, so I can be patient.

I now think that's not true. The more I think on it, the more I realize the groundwork is already laid-out. It's just a matter of putting in the effort to get all the pieces together. I know coding-wise it's a lot of work, but DE is already in a place where they have the foundation to get this done.

Firstly, we'd need a console for regular Navigation. Considering we have a "Navigation" console already in the Railjack, that may get redundant/confusing, so... we could come up with something a bit more obvious. Maybe the console would be named "Solar Rail Navigation" since the idea with the Railjack missions is we're NOT using the rails... but the rest of the star chart does. Maybe y'all have something better, but that's what I'm going with.

Secondly, we need to be sure we can gear up. We have an Arsenal, but on the Railjack, there is no means to mess with mods, the Foundry, the Companion section, relics, the market... none of it! All we can do is change Loadout. For that matter, I actually feel like the Arsenal is placed... weirdly. As far as ship design goes, why would be it be smack dab in the middle of the ship? It seems like something that would be closer to the cargo bay.

To meet those first two needs, I realized the area below is currently not used for anything, and is just... there:

Spoiler

So I propose we move the Arsenal back there (I think against the far wall, in place of that random tech decoration), clean up the area of random clutter, and set up some of our usual Orbiter stuff too: Foundry, Mod table, Void Relic refinement, a Market console, the Companion module, etc. We'd also need to place in the middle of that area a Solar Rail Navigation console - where the Host can select a mission from the regular star chart. Let us access Fissures, Syndicate missions, Sorties, Invasions... give us all the options here. (admittedly, quests would have to be left out)
The idea would be to make that area look like a sort of "mission prep" area in the ship, where Tenno gather for a mission briefing and to gear up before a mission.
Otherwise this area just goes to waste as empty space in a ship that's way larger than we need.

I don't know if something else should replace the current location of the Arsenal... maybe a third gun placement option, equipped separate from the side turrets? Maybe nothing at all but just another Archwing exit.

But we need more than just the ability to do that... we need incentive! We can't just suddenly drop into the mission from there. This would only make the Railjack an Orbiter "replacement" which... we don't need. Especially since we can decorate our Orbiter. The Railjack can't just be a glorified taxi (that's the Liset's job). or else what's the point?
So, that brings me to...

Thirdly, the Railjack needs to actually be involved. So starting up a regular mission from the ship should still drop us into a small Railjack mission as a sort of... precursor to the actual node we selected. We're flying the Railjack there, after all, not dropping in stealth with the Landing Craft. I think here is where the real work would come in for the devs... these missions should be different from current Railjack missions. The goal is to get to the mission area, not just tear apart Grineer, after all. So the Railjack objectives would be tuned to clearing a safe path to the surface (or enemy ship, we do that sometimes) so we can enter the ground mission area, and also ensure the Railjack itself isn't detected by the larger enemy forces in orbit.
So things like... disabling orbital security stations. So as to disable their radar, or orbital bombardment, or communications network. That sort of thing. Cripple their defense network so as to clear a route to where we want to go.
Failing this wouldn't mean we don't get to go to the node though. Instead, the result is the mission suddenly turns into a slaughterfest. Enemy forces show up looking to fight, so we gotta take them out before we can continue with the mission proper.

And naturally, for certain missions, the exact nature of the objectives would change. Imagine what a Railjack-linked Invasion mission might be like heading in - having to navigate a WAR ZONE with our ship, and actually taking part! That might have to wait until they start adding Corpus and Infested Railjack content, though. I'd be happy with just the basics first.

Fourthly, and probably most importantly, we need a reason to go to all this trouble. Why bother with the extra work?
So let's lead with this: doing it from the Railjack raises the mission level. I personally think level 90-120 level range is fine. (I know, plenty of players don't see that as challenging, but it's better than dropping into a level 10). This would, naturally, have to call for increased rewards from the mission too - more resources, credits, traces from fissure missions, etc etc. I would rather leave the tuning for that to the devs than dare to suggest numbers.
But we need more than that. That's a boring incentive, right? So let's have these missions also reward a "Railjack cache" with a unique drop table. The actual drop table for this cache could depend on which planetary node we go to - sometimes relics, sometimes major credits, or maybe kuva. This could be a good place to toss in some new weapons or future frames, if DE wants another thing for us to grind for farming drops. No matter what, I think these caches should also provide stuff for the Railjack - resources, weapons, etc, separate from the rest of the drop table.
Honestly, I'm just spitballing with what the cache could contain. The point is that there should be a cache with rewards that we care about, giving us reason to even bother with these Railjack missions - because loot is what we all really care about at the end of the day!

--

I would like to think of this whole thing, for the record... as me suggesting a "hard mode" option. And yeah, again, I get it... some of y'all find that level of enemy pretty easy still. So far, DE seems reluctant to go over level 120 outside of endurance runs, so let's bear that out for now, and y'all can keep enjoying your meta builds.

If we put all of that together, I think it could be a lot of fun. I'm not sure if my ideas here are way off base or not, but I'd love to discuss other ideas, too!

Edited December 20, 2019 by DrakeWurrum

[Vit0Corleone]

The "connection" part that DE alluded to, is related to the squad link feature, which isn't live yet.

But in general, yes, beyond even squad link, DE could do a lot of interesting things to make Railjack feel more connected to the traditional Warframe.

The potential is certainly there, and if I had to guess, they are likely already working on that. I mean, it seems pretty obvious that that would be the way to go.

[DrakeWurrum]

7 minutes ago, Vit0Corleone said:

The "connection" part that DE alluded to, is related to the squad link feature, which isn't live yet.

I am aware. I'm speaking to what the players really want with Railjack, and is something they've very briefly spoken on before, but never really talked openly about.

[peterc3]

The Railjack is extremely large for a full squad, but it's positively cavernous for a single person's ship. I would not want to ever have the Railjack as my Orbiter.

[DrakeWurrum]

1 hour ago, peterc3 said:

The Railjack is extremely large for a full squad, but it's positively cavernous for a single person's ship. I would not want to ever have the Railjack as my Orbiter.

Since it would start out with a Railjack mission, it's likely you'd want to take a squad anyways. There are, however, many people demanding solo anyways, so...

[Steel_Rook]

9 hours ago, DrakeWurrum said:

Firstly

Secondly

Agreed. I've suggested something similar in my grab bag of Railjack suggestions, under "forge and supplies." Basically, turn that large multi-storey room into an Orbiter. There's plenty of room in the little recessed area on the bottom floor for all of the important consoles. Move the Arsenal there, include a Forge, a Mods station, an Incubator and a Void Relic station and some console from which we can access our Intrinsics. Also include an Operator chair, maybe in the little back room with the Reliquary Drive, across from the Drive itself. That particular room amidship is currently entirely empty of interactive elements and could easily house all of this and more. Finally, introduce a "between missions" state for the Railjack, allowing us to access all of these consoles while we travel through the Void Tunnel. Rather than letting us pick a new mission straight away, let us "Extract" from the current Railjack mission and go into the Void Tunnel, from where we can interact with the Nav console again and pick the next mission at our own discretion. I mean, if the Starship Enterprise can spend entire episodes in Hyperspace with nothing but streaks of light out the windows, so can we.

 

9 hours ago, DrakeWurrum said:

Thirdly

Also agreed. I can't find where I posted it so no reference there, but: Bringing Railjack to planetary nodes is likely not going to happen for technical reasons. However, we absolutely CAN bring planetary nodes TO Railjack by implementing them as Points of Interest and additionally implementing some "parking" mechanic for the ship itself. Find a nebula, asteroid field or other anomaly to put the ship in, shut it down so it's not detected, exit on your Archwings and approach a Grineer Galleon / Corpus Obelsik / Grineer Asteriod, etc. Board it, and do a standard mission from there. Maybe instead of a single large instance, the mission could be comprised of 3/4 smaller instances each with its own objective, ala Spy or Mobile defence. Maybe the mission could have just one central objective but you don't know which of three or four ships it's in. If you manage to extract quietly, you can just jump back into your Railjack, fire up the engines and slink away. If you trip too many alarms, you need to fight back a few waves of Fighters and Crew Ships responding to distress signals before you can warp out, or shut down a suppression field. This already works for space maps and could probably apply to Jupiter where no ground is ever visible (because gas giant). It may be able to work on the ground if the combat layer were set either above the clouds or at least 5-10 KM above the ground, with holographic icons denoting facilities below that you can interact with in your Archwing to "dive" down and spawn inside an existing tileset point of interest.

Basically, there are plenty of ways to reuse existing Railjack mechanics in order to do a close approximation of ground missions. The only requirement would be the ability to park and abandon the Railjack, which can either be achieved via going into anomalies like I said, or via some kind of cloak with a 15-30 second activation time which cancels on taking damage and locks the ship in place, but then makes it unassailable for the rest of the mission.

 

9 hours ago, DrakeWurrum said:

Fourthly

HARD disagree. What does "difficulty" have to do with integrating Railjack into the rest of the map? Wouldn't the ability to play all of the missions be the point? Why does every bit of new content have to come with bloated enemy levels? Hell, the levels of enemies in Railjack are already massively bloated in comparison to the rest of the game, especially against Grineer armour. If you want missions with boosted enemy levels then make that suggestion. Slipping it in as an addendum to Railjack-related suggestions feels drastically out of place. Even if I buy into the notion that people wouldn't do a thing they have incentive, what you're proposing is a DISincentive. I HATE this game's enemy scaling system and fight enemies at and above level 100 to be dull, uninspired bullet sponges and I certainly don't care for anything beyond that. Locking something as major as integration between Railjack and regular content behind enemies so high-level that the combat system starts to break down is not a good idea and is in fact off-topic.

For everything else, I agree. For this, it feels like an entirely separate suggestion hidden in-between the lines.

[DrakeWurrum]

33 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

HARD disagree. What does "difficulty" have to do with integrating Railjack into the rest of the map? Wouldn't the ability to play all of the missions be the point? Why does every bit of new content have to come with bloated enemy levels? Hell, the levels of enemies in Railjack are already massively bloated in comparison to the rest of the game, especially against Grineer armour. If you want missions with boosted enemy levels then make that suggestion. Slipping it in as an addendum to Railjack-related suggestions feels drastically out of place. Even if I buy into the notion that people wouldn't do a thing they have incentive, what you're proposing is a DISincentive. I HATE this game's enemy scaling system and fight enemies at and above level 100 to be dull, uninspired bullet sponges and I certainly don't care for anything beyond that. Locking something as major as integration between Railjack and regular content behind enemies so high-level that the combat system starts to break down is not a good idea and is in fact off-topic.

For everything else, I agree. For this, it feels like an entirely separate suggestion hidden in-between the lines.

I consider the "official level cap" to be about 120. I've noticed that's about the highest Kuva Lich content ever gets, and... DE tends to specifically design content such that it doesn't go higher unless you go to an endurance run. I prefer 90-100 myself, but just saying that's where DE seems to pump the brakes. That's about where enemy scaling really stops being good, too, so it's a good stopping point.

I proposed these missions as being of higher level because... we need a real reason to actually care about being able to go to E Prime from the Railjack. Unless the reward was just THAT good, but then we're blazing through the lowest-level mission in no time at all for a reward that's way too good for effort the mission takes. In order to justify an increased reward for doing content from the Railjack, it's understandable to have the mission be a higher level.

I also can't help but think that, by the time we get the Railjack, we're pretty far along in the game. Maybe the Railjack missions are where they could introduce the "level scale" slider thing they were talking about in that one Devstream?

33 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

Also agreed. I can't find where I posted it so no reference there, but: Bringing Railjack to planetary nodes is likely not going to happen for technical reasons. However, we absolutely CAN bring planetary nodes TO Railjack by implementing them as Points of Interest and additionally implementing some "parking" mechanic for the ship itself.

I was thinking of it more as... a two-stage mission. The first stage is a Railjack mission that involves us working to get to the second stage, which is just the regular non-Railjack version of the mission. This would reduce just how much work it would take to really integrate Railjack into the rest of the star chart, although it's less interesting. It would also ensure the normal map design doesn't just become totally obsolete.

I would definitely prefer it your way.

Edited December 20, 2019 by DrakeWurrum

[MJ12]

While we're at it maybe Railjack Battle Avionics should be an alternative ground support tool. If only because it would be hilarious to suddenly drop 50 homing missiles onto a battlefield because you have Seeker Swarm equipped.

[Steel_Rook]

16 hours ago, DrakeWurrum said:

I consider the "official level cap" to be about 120. I've noticed that's about the highest Kuva Lich content ever gets, and... DE tends to specifically design content such that it doesn't go higher unless you go to an endurance run. I prefer 90-100 myself, but just saying that's where DE seems to pump the brakes. That's about where enemy scaling really stops being good, too, so it's a good stopping point.

Level 5 Kuva Lich missions are level 90-110, as listed in the mission brief. Most enemies in them are ~90ish. Sorties cap out at level 100. We're splitting hairs here, however. I personally prefer level 40-50, because that's where enemy resistances start to scale into stupid levels and lock out the majority of my arsenal of weapons. Not everyone wants to play the highest level possible.

 

16 hours ago, DrakeWurrum said:

I also can't help but think that, by the time we get the Railjack, we're pretty far along in the game. Maybe the Railjack missions are where they could introduce the "level scale" slider thing they were talking about in that one Devstream?

Difficulty customisation is always a good thing regardless. Even people who are "pretty far along in the game" don't necessarily want to play the maximum difficulty possible. Look at any game with choosable difficulty settings and you'll find people overwhelmingly play median difficulty, even if said game's forums will make it seem like everyone is super hardcore. Forcing players into tryhard maximum difficulty with no chance select anything else simply means that plenty of us won't even bother. That's why custom difficulty is important, and not just in terms of enemy level. I'm of the opinion that an "artificial team size" setting is also important, so a single player can face larger numbers of enemies. Combine this with a level slider and you cover a lot of ground, between few but tough enemies to many but weak enemies to everything in-between and around.

Yes, right now I have very little reason to go back to Earth and run missions there, but Alerts, Kuva Siphons, Sorties and Lich missions take me back anyway. If I had the ability to CHOOSE my own level of difficulty for the node I'm attempting, I might go back there more often. This goes both ways, by the way - both because I want the enemy level to not be too low AND because I want the enemy level to not be too high.

 

16 hours ago, DrakeWurrum said:

I was thinking of it more as... a two-stage mission. The first stage is a Railjack mission that involves us working to get to the second stage, which is just the regular non-Railjack version of the mission. This would reduce just how much work it would take to really integrate Railjack into the rest of the star chart, although it's less interesting. It would also ensure the normal map design doesn't just become totally obsolete. I would definitely prefer it your way.

Well, my proposal came out of another conversation on the subject, where we came to the conclusion that integrating Railjack and ground missions via zone load is likely far more complex than just reusing the Point of Interest mechanic. You'll note that Railjack suffered MASSIVE issues related to loss of rewards and loss of reward display revolving around zone loads. Technically, all Railjack missions are hosted IN the Dojo, so swapping zones is volatile at best. What DE came up with for hosting ground instances for ship/station interiors seems like a simpler way to handle it since it already works mostly reliably. The major drawback, however, is that this DOES mean you have to go through the Railjack UI to get to those.

There's also the added issue of "parking" the Railjack. Right now, DE have an issue with just this very thing - people parking the Railjack behind a rock at the edge of the map and playing via Archwing only. Obviously that's a major issue with the mode since it fundamentally misses the point and leaves those of us actually trying to have space ship combat with a mutinous crew who jump out the moment they zone in. At the same time, parking the Railjack is absolutely vital if we want to emulate the flow of a regular ground mission. The entire crew needs to disembark and go into the interior, which requires some way to safely stow the ship without chance of it being attacked and killed while we're away.

The best I could figure was a compromise. "Ground maps" would have some map feature in space which allows us to fly the Railjack in there and "park" it safely while we fly off on the ground mission, but in a conditional fashion. Say we go with the Nebula approach. Maybe you can only hide there once you're off enemy sensors and not actively in combat, like when you first enter the mission. This would require some counterpart to the "alarm" system but for space missions, where we could "disable the alarm" and THEN hide the ship, but as soon as the alarm sounded it would pop up on enemy scanners and they'd attack it.

That's not a trivial issue to solve and would require "space stealth" systems to be devised which currently don't exist. I want to see it, though 🙂

[Iccotak]

I think it is likely that DE could be integrating the Orbiter, Archwing and Railjack together.

Remember the presentation that showed the Railjack attached to the players' Orbiter?

Their recent devstream discussed how they are going to be reworking archwing from the ground up to be apart of railjack and they have talked in the past redoing the existing Archwing missions because no one plays them or likes them.

So it seems to me that Railjack is just one step in overhauling how Space travel & combat works in Warframe.

[Intotsu]

For my part, I saw that as a possibility. They already have (pristinely updated) models of the existing Grineer ships and bases. which you can enter to find all the elements you would normally find in that ship model. Once they have grineer and corpus ships (since they don't have fully Infested 'Ships' per-say… yet) They can basically provide the player with the link to non-surface nodes through railjack for this heightened difficulty you suggest. That and Fortuna/Plains stuff, but i'm not as sure where they are going with that.