Railjack Mission Variety

[(PSN)AyinDygra]

This is not a "Priority" topic at the moment (but will be once Railjack begins to grow beyond tech demo.)

I understand a barebones system was put out to get it out "on schedule", so more is obviously coming. The vision for Railjack is to connect the entire game world together like glue. From comments on Devstreams, etc, it is my impression that you want us to be able to fly to a planet and engage in the nodes there, (without needing to open the original star chart,) through a combination of Railjack support and away team infiltration, (even going to/from open world surfaces) and even more with Squad-Link in the future - a lone tenno operative is... -...

 

Current Railjack nodes have RNG variety built into them. This is good and bad.

They have variety, but it's hidden by RNG. What I mean by that is, they're all marked as "Skirmishes" as far as I'm aware. This hides the number of different mission types:

• Skirmish (all nodes)
• Assassination (kill galleon/base captain)
• Sabotage (coordinated Railjack/Away team attack on a base)
• Espionage (Steal prototype crewship)

Just having these alternate mission types listed (guaranteed encounters), would psychologically increase the player understanding that there is more variety in Railjack missions, as well as provide locations where you know you'll encounter a certain gameplay scenario. OTHER random objectives could also appear in an "Assassination" node, like fighting past a Missile Base (Sabotage) on your way to the galleon... but the Assassination mission is the core of the node that is always there.

 

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Expanding/Trimming Mission Gameplay Objectives:

Currently, they ALL require killing a small fleet of enemy ships, ramping up from 20 fighters, 2 crew ships, to stupidly high 90 fighters, 6+ crew ships, from what I gather from the wiki (I'm still on Saturn, only really progressing through nodes when I can play with 1 friend.) I'm only guessing here, but the skirmish objective (to kill a certain number of enemy fighters and crew ships) is there to set a limit to how many enemies you will encounter in the mission, creating an "end of mission" opportunity and prevents endless runs (because there has to be a good point for people to get their rewards, since there isn't a good "solo extraction" method to Railjack yet) ... but it also sets a minimum "kill this many" stipulation, that kinda dampens the fun, and makes them all feel "same-y," IMO.

So, they're all like exterminate missions, with a "Just kidding! It's not just an exterminate mission..." it's also a "change of plans Tenno, go sabotage this Grineer ship/base over yonder." or "kill a captain of a galleon." (and the stupidly scheduled Sentient ship anomaly) That's the thing I dislike about Capture & Mobile Defense that suddenly become exterminate everything (I chose those nodes for a reason, thankyouverymuch.) So the missions are very random and you don't really know if you'll get the experience you want out of selecting that place to go to.

The inclusion of the "exterminate" skirmish part of EVERY SINGLE NODE also gets old fast (especially as the numbers required per mission are ballooning up. The interesting side objectives that require away teams should be the focal point of certain nodes, while space combat is emphasized in others, and peaceful mining and resource gathering is the focus of others.

 

Having certain nodes always include certain points of interest (like a Ship Killer platform, Grineer Galleon, Sentient ship), with limited enemy ships (some without any Crew Ships, just fighters.) along with a UI change of "node type" indicators, would go a long way to making them feel less monotonous. So instead of all "Skirmish" markers, you'd have nodes like:

• Skirmish (another name for Exterminate, really)
• Disable Carrier Ship (Lots of extra fighters to fight off, perhaps no Crew Ships. Destroying the hangar prevents them from launching more. - focus on railjack combat)
• Assassinate (Galleon Captain, base commander, lead scientist, Kuva Lich (more on this one later))
• Coordinated Sabotage (Ship Killer Platform, Pulse Generator, Missile Platform - Away-team/Railjack-team cooperative base take-downs - needs a better "name")
• Investigate Infested Derelict (very few or no enemy ships, since they're staying far away from the infestation. Space-mining would yield more pustrels near these places.)
• Intercept Top-Secret Courier (disable/slingshot into ship, board, loot cache or hack computer, escape - no other fighters, crew ships, etc)

Normal Mission nodes with Railjack Assistance (Remote Hacking) - entered during Railjack missions, not star chart:

• Sabotage Grineer Galleon (hey, that's one of our current non-railjack nodes... yeah, exactly. Wouldn't take much to port this one over. This is not the coordinated version above, it just works like the normal node.)
• Rescue (Just like the regular rescue nodes - objective-wise)
• Spy (I know limited versions of the tilesets were implemented, likely due to memory concerns, since it's dealing with all the Railjack stuff simultaneously, so it may take some fancy tricks to make some of the old mission types work within the framework of a railjack mission going on simultaneously - not that all of them need to be simultaneous... some nodes could just have a quick railjack skirmish on the way in with a few fighters followed by cloaking the ship and the whole team infiltrating the location like any other mission node while Cy moves the Railjack to the extraction point.)

Really "random" occurrences could be:
(these are not "objectives" but random things that you can encounter.) These do not appear in the objectives list, as it's not an objective required to clear the mission.

• Loot Supply Convoy (lots of boardable non-crew-ships with chests filled with planetary materials rather than Railjack materials) (not farmable, since you'll never know if it'll appear in your mission, but a pleasant surprise.)
• Void Storm (Void energy "pockets" appear in space that can be collected as void traces. Hitting these pockets has random extra results.
  • Randomly changing flux energy and warframe energy.
  • Higher variance in damage and falloff ranges as the void twists space.
  • Nova-like tunnels appear randomly.
  • Enemies drop void traces but are not corrupted - it's not a fissure and doesn't open relics - although, it could enable a planetary node to become a temporary one-time fissure through squad-link or something. The railjack team members would each be able to select a reward from the relics that the ground team open - and the ground team would earn a ton more void traces from the Railjack team's actions.)
• Abandoned Mining Facility (Low fighter presence - it's ABANDONED; higher concentration of Titanium, Asterite, etc.)
• more... just brainstorming for now...

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Kuva Lich related nodes could be:

• Treasure Ship (they're stealing all those resources... and they're going somewhere... this is where. Raid their treasure ships and get some stuff back, before you actually kill your Lich. Beware, your Lich may be personally inspecting his/her shiny collection.)
• Research Facility (Spy vault style mission where you hack their weapons-design-files and have an opportunity to obtain "Kuva Weapons", without killing Liches. Various activities during the mission could be used to influence the resulting weapon, from which type it is (gathering the parts), to its element (the power core you put in it) and bonus roll % (materials used to construct it). A Mobile Defense portion could be initiated at certain points where the Grineer try to stop you from using their equipment to fabricate the weapon and you have to protect it while it does its job. This could/should result in your Lich appearing at the end like an assassination target to prevent you from leaving with the weapon you create with their tech. The gathering of the parts, power core, and materials to construct the Kuva Weapon could be done in other mission types, but it all comes together in these R&D labs with much faster construction tech than our orbiters - they do have to outfit cloned armies really fast.. stands to reason they got fast at producing weapons too. Liches will still drop their Kuva Weapon on death, but it's not the only way to get one, now.)
• Massing Thralls (For some reason, many thralls have amassed in a certain location, perhaps to perform a special task for their Lich master. Looks like a good opportunity. They may drop nav coordinates to the Lich Fortress Ship) Taking on these missions could reduce Lich influence over an area, since you take out so many thralls, or prevent a Lich from taking over new areas of the star chart.
• Lich Fortress Ship (Create a LIch Fortress Ship "Key" from nav coordinates gathered from Thralls. This mission is only undertaken when you want to finally kill off your Lich or convert them into allies. Ideally, it's only when you want to switch to a different type of Nemesis, like Grineer to Corpus to Infested. The mission would progress as seen in the Railjack Demo, with opportunity for Squad-Link objectives.)

Suddenly, the Liches don't have to be quickly farmed bosses... they can become a Nemesis that you are battling, with ways to obtain the Kuva Weapons and stolen goods without killing them off real fast. There's more to this last point, but I'm just trying to keep it to Railjack Mission Node Variety.

 

 

Hope this inspires more variety.

 

[gluih]

All of this makes a lot sense. So far you never have to destroy more than 90 fighters and 6 crewships. This is still super annoying and at least when a different objective is on the map it should replace some of the exterminate objective.

Giving the missions different names instead of just skirmish would also help players to figure out where they want to go. It isn't obvious for example where you should go, if you want the pennant or the quellor.

Apparently the number and strength of the ground enemies is also limited, because you have the fighters in space at the same time. I think locking players out of certain objectives until a number of fighters has been destroyed wouldn't be a bad solution. This would also make players work on the same objective. Especially at the start, when loot wasn't shared, it was really annoying when someone completed the assassination while the rest were defending the railjack.

I like the idea of ships, that have to be boarded. Both as a requirement for mission completion and to get extra resources sound great. Boarding crewships is already a lot fun and good for completing the mission, but that's always in competition with the forward artillery and right now there isn't much use for the latter.

In general warframe always had very simple mission objectives and there is some real potential here to improve on that. Of course the end rewards have to be balanced accordingly, so you don't end up in a situation, where everybody just does the shortest one. This could also be done by adding optional objectives. Searching for hidden caches is generally pretty enjoyable, but since the time of getting extra prime loot from void sabotage, there was never a great reason to do it.