I am impressed by the variety of gameplay in Railjack

[Bakaguya-sama]

We have 25 Railjack mission nodes of one single game mode: Skirmish. All connected in a straight line of progression. That's rather impressive.

Every mission follow the same pattern: Destroy a large number of fighters, some crewship, then sprinkle some sabotage/assassination objectives on top (objectives that people want to avoid as much as possible).  

Seriously though... is this it? Is it gonna be the same when Corpus ships are released? Same type of missions over again?  

Like, even just tweaking the numbers and enemy spawn can radically change the gameplay flow. For example, why not have a Blockade Breaker mission type where you spawn in a map surrounded by 10-18 crewships and have to destroy them all (no fighter requirements)? Boom, you have a new game mode primarily focusing on ship to ship combat. 

If it's too difficult for some people? Make the node branch out from normal progression like the standard starchart. They don't have to clear it to advance to the next level. Give these missions some different rewards (higher reactor drop chance etc.) to motivate people into doing them.     

For Earth nodes, instead of shoving weak new Railjack into exterminate mission right away, why not have some resource collection nodes? Going around, destroying asteroids/resource caches and earn X amount of resource for mission completion. Enemies will spawn but you arent required to kill them, only need to survive and collect. This will smoothen the transition into railjack for many players, allowing them to test out the mode and collect the resource for it to strengthen their own railjack.  

Add more type of objectives. Like spy missions/exterminate/rescue missions inside grineer galleon/asteroid base. 2 guys stay on the ship to keep it running why another 2 guys complete the objective (kinda like Sentinent anomaly missions are right now). Shift the focus into something else other than squatting fighters by the droves.  

Honestly, I like Railjack and have been playing it a decent amount (the space combat itself is not bad). But it is just... incomplete. In its current state its more akin to a tech demo than an actual product. The severe lack of gameplay variety shows that. 

 

Edited January 25, 2020 by Bakaguya-sama

[peterc3]

14 minutes ago, Bakaguya-sama said:

Seriously though... is this it? Is it gonna be the same when Corpus ships are released? Same type of missions over again?  

Yep. This is precisely all of the new game content they will ever release. They haven't said they will be releasing anything else.

[CyborgKombat]

8 minutes ago, peterc3 said:

Yep. This is precisely all of the new game content they will ever release. They haven't said they will be releasing anything else.

Hm? I think they said on some devstream that they will implement new mission types to railjack.

[Aldrr]

What we currently have is just the foundation. I expect new mission types to come with the new factions / locations.

[(PSN)guzmantt1977]

41 minutes ago, peterc3 said:

Yep. This is precisely all of the new game content they will ever release. They haven't said they will be releasing anything else.

You didn't anticipate that you needed to put the /s, did you? 

[peterc3]

2 hours ago, CyborgKombat said:

Hm? I think they said on some devstream that they will implement new mission types to railjack.

Nope. Clearly fake news. Literally nothing has ever been said about Railjack being released in pieces.

2 hours ago, Bakaguya-sama said:

But it is just... incomplete.

DE said it was incomplete. You've cracked the code.

[CopperBezel]

It doesn't strike you as odd at all that it was released in a state where all the nodes were the same, and mission requirements only vary by number and whether it's a missile platform or a galleon at the end? They could have created a very artificial but somewhat effective sense of variety in the content by toggling a few switches, as it were.

Edited January 25, 2020 by CopperBezel

[0verridden]

Scott even mentioned in a devstream prior to empyrean's release that the mission type varies depending on the map type. It got me so intrigued, like it was a brand new thing. No longer would a node be a fixed mission type!

 

Aaaand they're all skirmishes. I guess he was referring to the fact that some maps may or may not have an asteroid base or something like that? But frankly his description of warframe-specific railjack abilities, and mission types being generated from a pool of possible types depending on the map layout sounded like something far greater than it actually was...

[Avienas]

3 hours ago, CopperBezel said:

It doesn't strike you as odd at all that it was released in a state where all the nodes were the same, and mission requirements only vary by number and whether it's a missile platform or a galleon at the end? They could have created a very artificial but somewhat effective sense of variety in the content by toggling a few switches, as it were.

Bit late to putting a quote but yeah, there are plenty of factors that can be taken into account that they screwed they system up badly without needing to do an extensive amount of game play to confirm things.

• Why Did D.E. put so many repeat missions? Do they plan to replace them with unique mission types later? Why could they of not only had maybe 1 to 3 exterminate missions per region instead on the base if nothing unique would be present on each node per planet besides the enemy count basically doubling/tripling from the base and some sub-objectives?

 

• Why Did they add avionics like elemental reduction which have given for a fact has never been useful for a specific elemental reduction unless its a sortie map where its CLEARLY stated if enemies got some massive Elemental damage bonus added to the? Why even add some avionics, where even if they could reach rank 10 value, that have such ridiculously poor stats that the increase value would be between 5% to 20% and the latter is still being kind of generous?

 

• Why Did they not realize that having regular vacuum systems with no Loot radar and actually did not think to run a simulator at the time to loot for certain resources would taken? They could easily run 5 different missions and clock how long it takes them to kill all the enemies and how long it would take them to farm the loot on average and see something, Like the Titanium per mission gain rate, on how long it would take to amass enough titanium just to craft one part. Such as if one got around 900 titanium on average per run and it cost 12k titanium for a MK III part, plus it takes on average, 20-30 minutes per run. Then that would takes 13.3 instances or 247ish to 499ish minutes before loading times and resets are taken into account. This is of course just a rough estimate and does not count for recent fixes such as having all loot fully `loot shared` to the entire party instead, nor any loot fixes that PC has received vs. console, which might as well be 8+ hotfixes behind now. Meaning it can take between 4 to 8.3~ hours just to prepare a single railjack part on titanium alone.

Never the less, If they only planned to release the FRAME WORK for railjack at first, they could of saved alot of time and resources by not putting so much of it out and releasing sections of it down the line, but then i guess the whole `certification b.s.` card would come into that fiasco. But they could easily of locked away the excessive nodes and then unlock them later after `updating` them with unique mission content, instead of just releasing a bunch of nodes with exterminate.

Either way, despite the fact i should be getting my hands on those special battle avionics like black hole and what not, its hard for me to care about obtaining such when console is still stuck on a very early hotfix and i am just mostly making use of coupons that show up to get discounted rush-drones since i have not much else left to use coupons on, so i can just rush any good weapons once the hotfix does come and the Cryo shot-gun turrets get nerfed to hell because D.E. only knows how to nerf the op stuff and not buff the other options to have some way they are useful in some manner against absurdly tankie types of enemies.

Which also does not help that Console Pilot players do not have a useful measure to aim the turrets while piloting, which means they have it WAY worst when it comes to shooting down enemies with Turrets.

[Steel_Rook]

It's because DE decided - for whatever reason - to kick Railjack out the door despite it being clearly unfinished. This is why we got the farce that is Kuva Liches with basically no new systems and a ton of grind, and the buggy unstable unbalanced mess that is Railjack WITH major pieces of the system missing. We have one mission type against one faction because that's all DE could get done in time for the Game Awards. Supposedly they've committed to actually finishing Railjack's initial release by adding more factions and more mission types to it. If they stick to that commitment, then Railjack does have the potential for greatness, I think.

[Avienas]

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

It's because DE decided - for whatever reason - to kick Railjack out the door despite it being clearly unfinished. This is why we got the farce that is Kuva Liches with basically no new systems and a ton of grind, and the buggy unstable unbalanced mess that is Railjack WITH major pieces of the system missing. We have one mission type against one faction because that's all DE could get done in time for the Game Awards. Supposedly they've committed to actually finishing Railjack's initial release by adding more factions and more mission types to it. If they stick to that commitment, then Railjack does have the potential for greatness, I think.

Sadly alot of companies are adopting the B.S. notion of `potential for greatness` logic in order to cut corners on shipping out content sooner and some basically just pull the SEASON PASS style of content release where they sell you a promise of fancy content and after you pay for it, you end up waiting a long while till said promise of content gets shipped out.

Warframe may be a free game but the critical issue is that wait for what people are promised. Which we all know with games like Fallout 76 & Anthem and similar situations, could turn into a B.S. fiasco where what we `got` was just a load of garbage and we can`t exactly take back that time & money we wasted, clinging on for that BIG`old hype of goods we were promised. Where it ultimately became a better idea to instead of straight up buying that promise, you are better off playing something else instead till you can actually play what that promise is.

Even if they give a 20% or even 40% discount to buy it early, as most season passes work, The game itself has to rely on a PROPER base value to justify if its worth investing. Heck honestly, Season passes is just playing the Investor game, we are sinking our money for the promise to get a value worth what we paid for and then some. 

Anyway i`ll try to avoid getting too invested into giving examples, but try using Destiny 1 & 2`s first 2 DLCes that were part of the year 1 expansions for both of them when activision was still affiliated with bungie and Borderlands pre-sequel`s content that was released, if you were to compare it to Borderlands 1 & 2.

[(XBOX)DA ZACHYZACHY]

But... I like Exter- Skirmish. So intuitive and interesting, and every so often it gives you a side objective! It’s not like taking down a Galleon ship would be a cool mission type or anything, no just leave it to be an assassinate side objective.

What a missed opportunity.

[Steel_Rook]

On 2020-01-26 at 7:57 PM, Avienas said:

Sadly alot of companies are adopting the B.S. notion of `potential for greatness` logic in order to cut corners on shipping out content sooner and some basically just pull the SEASON PASS style of content release where they sell you a promise of fancy content and after you pay for it, you end up waiting a long while till said promise of content gets shipped out.

Right, though I wasn't trying to justify it. That's just what happened and why Railjack is as barebones as it is - it wasn't even remotely finished when they released it. Steve gave an explanation on the last Dev Stream that they felt they were spinning their wheels with Railjack and needed to release it for their own sake. Whether you buy that or not will probably come down to how much you trust DE. I personally feel the release was a gigantic farce which did lasting damage to the brand, but am still hopeful that something good can come of it. I'll let you know once they implement AI crews and I can actually play it without wanting to slap people over the Internet.

 

15 hours ago, (XB1)DA ZACHYZACHY said:

But... I like Exter- Skirmish. So intuitive and interesting, and every so often it gives you a side objective! It’s not like taking down a Galleon ship would be a cool mission type or anything, no just leave it to be an assassinate side objective. What a missed opportunity.

One can only hope, but this could become a thing in the future. The way DE talked about it, I think they were trying to create procedurally-generated missions, kind of like in Star Trek: Bridge Crew. Honestly, SO MUCH of Railjack feels like playing that game... But that is to say, we weren't supposed to go to specific missions. Rather, we were supposed to jump from sector to sector, explore to find Points of Interest (hence why they're called that), disembark and go find loot or secrets in them. To me, it's pretty clear that DE couldn't really make any kind of exploration gameplay work in time, so they threw together a dirt simple Extermination mission type last-minute and made Points of Interest into randomly-generated side objectives.

Assuming we can trust DE to keep working on Railjack before getting distracted by the next new shiny (Duviri, New War, etc.), I fully expect to start seeing what amounts to complete "ground" missions within the Railjack system. I remember someone said that "You can't bring Railjack to ground missions, but maybe you can bring ground missions to Railjack." And you probably can. It's not simple, but being able to either "park" the Railjack safely or have Cephalon Cy fly it out of the sector (do something where we can leave it and not worry about it getting killed) would mean we could explore large, extensive Points of Interest pretty much the same way we do ground missions now. The only difference need be that we arrive in the Railjack, rather than via loading screen. Even better, those missions could be split between multiple facilities, each done as a separate Point of Interest rather than on one large, monolithic map. Ground missions could be accessed by the Railjack flying high above a "google maps" ground with only specific places where we can Archwing "down to the surface" and show up into an instance.

Basically, if DE want develop Railjack then the system can have a REALLY long tail. I'm just worried that Railjack will turn into the next Archwing...