Railjack mini raid?

[Vit0Corleone]

Have been thinking about this for a while, but only now had some time to flesh it out better.

What do you guys think? Would you like to see something like this? I want to post this under feedback, but was thinking it would be cool to first get some feedback and discussion going 🙂

This is supposed to be a sort of mini raid, combining Railjack and traditional Warframe style missions, which essentially is a sequence of activities/missions tied together along side with optional goals. 

Title: Grineer Galleon raid

Mission: Disable a Grineer Galleon and its leadership that has been wrecking havoc throughout the Sol system.

|--- Initial Approach

1) Drive Railjack to Galleon position
2) Eliminate X amount of fighters/crewships/ramsleds protecting the Galleon
3) Proceed carefully to the galleon entry door
4) There are auto cannons protecting the door that are invulnerable and will easily destroy the Railjack and archwings
5) Someone goes on Archwing and remotely hacks the cannons while in cover ( tactical menu ).
  Notes:
   - Cannot entry Galleon before enemy forces are eliminated and cannons hacked

|--- Disable defenses! - optional

6) Disabling the Galleon's defenses is an optional step that can be done to make sure that no enemies will try to attack the Railjack while the squad is inside
7) Proceed to the bay area, destroy the parked ramsleds and disable the emergency beacon to stop fighters from being called to protect the Galleon.
😎 Disabling the beacon is a quick defense mission, where you have to hack a console and stay in the area protecting the beacon while a short 30s timer runs out.
*) Doing these steps will ensure that the full squad can proceed to the the rest of the mission without worrying about the Railjack. Basically some options:
  a) One or more stays on the Railjack and defend it while the rest of the squad goes in
  b) Everyone goes to disable the defenses first
  c) Split squad, some proceed to the rest of the mission, while others disable the defenses, and then join the rest of the squad.
  d) Everyone ignores this phase, and instead uses Omni tool to go back and forth between Railjack/Galleon

|--- Insertion

9) Inside galleon, fight your way off to the Galleon bridge
10) While proceeding throughout the Galleon, there will be several sections with locked doors, needing to hack 4 consoles each.
11) After hacking, each console will behave similar to disruption coils on disruption missions and will be targeted by suicide units, which you have to kill before timer runs out.
  * Squad can hack several at the same time, or one, or two .. depending if they can handle the incoming attacks.
  * Like in disruption missions, the more you deal with at the same time, the faster the mission goes.

|--- Boss fight time

12) Reaching the Galleon bridge, your squad will be faced off against 3 Captains and 1 Commander - Arena style
  * The number of captains varies based on how many squad members.
  * The abilities, strengths, and weaknesses and weapons will be randomized
  * Captains will essentially behave like level 3 Liches, and the Commander (Level 5 Lich alike) can only be killed once you eliminate the captains first.
13) After eliminating the Commander, he will drop a key. Pick up the key and proceed to the Galleon engineering bay

|--- Disable the engines

14) On the engineering bay, place the Commander's key on the engine core slot. This will trigger a timer of 3 minutes.
15) While the timer is running, every 1 minute a special unit will spawn and try to one shot the console. So will spawns of regular enemies that you have to fight off.
16) You can either extract and end the mission here returning to the Railjack, or proceed to the optional hijack objective below for moar loots.

|--- Hijack! (OPTIONAL)

17) Proceed to the Galleon docking bay and fight your way off to hijack the Crew Ship that is parked there
18) This crew ship contains special access codes that automatically unlock Vaults in space if nearby
19) There are 4 Vaults spread out in space that you may want to search for
20) Squad needs to drive the crew ship to each vault while protecting it from incoming attackers
21) Ideally you would want to have 1 crew ship driver, and the rest of the squad using Railjack/Archwings protecting the Crew ship
22) When nearby each vault, the Vault will become accessible, but it still requires a special Grineer key to open
23) Grineer keys can be built in the Dojo, and like Dragon keys can be equipped and will also impose penalties that will affect the Warframe/Archwing
24) As with Derelict Vaults, if you want to ensure you get the 4 vaults, each squad member needs to bring a different key
25) Solo players can only bring one key, and therefore can only get one Vault
26) One crew member goes outside in Archwing and hacks a console to unlock the Vault, which takes 30 seconds to complete.
27) Meanwhile, squad needs to keep protecting the Crew Ship
28) Vault opens, and everyone gets the loots

Notes:
- Throughout the raid, you can use tactical menu to remotely deploy Warframe abilities of your own squad mates like you can on normal Railjack missions.
- (Ab)using intrinsics such as tactical 4 and tactical 10 can provide a considerable advantage

 

[(XBOX)NuclearSquiddy]

Could be cool, if railjack didn't suck. I'd start of with mission types first and bug fixes, then we can talk about raids.

[ant99999]

It's all great, but there's a twist - we were promised and even shown something extremely close to that on previous Tennocon.

So... where is it?

[DrivaMain]

Ah yes, forced CO-OP game modes. Something that a lot of warframe players don’t want. It will probably end in the same fate as old raids (lack of players playing isn’t worth the upkeep cost) unless DE allows Solo players to complete it because you are isolating a large portion of the player base from doing this gamemode.

 

[Vit0Corleone]

19 minutes ago, DrivaMain said:

Ah yes, forced CO-OP game modes. Something that a lot of warframe players don’t want. It will probably end in the same fate as old raids (lack of players playing isn’t worth the upkeep cost) unless DE allows Solo players to complete it because you are isolating a large portion of the player base from doing this gamemode.

 

What part you see as forced co-op here?

I tried to be careful and make sure that solo players could do it, although of course not optimally. Maybe I missed something?

[Vit0Corleone]

28 minutes ago, ant99999 said:

It's all great, but there's a twist - we were promised and even shown something extremely close to that on previous Tennocon.

So... where is it?

What we saw at Tennocon was simply board galleon, kill commander.

Which is basically what we have already in Railjack missions with the Commander Assassination objective, albeit watered down since there's no squad link.

This one I designed has multiple stages, kinda like chained missions if you will.

[ant99999]

6 minutes ago, Vit0Corleone said:

What we saw at Tennocon was simply board galleon, kill commander.

In the essence they are similar - a multi-stage mission, requiring coordination between players and involving doing different objectives based tasks.

My point is - the devs had a simpler version of what you're proposing in the works, but didn't manage even that. There's a long way before we see something of the Raid scale in rj.

[DrivaMain]

21 minutes ago, Vit0Corleone said:

What part you see as forced co-op here?

I tried to be careful and make sure that solo players could do it, although of course not optimally. Maybe I missed something?

Oh I didn’t read the big OPTIONAL text . But 1 question, will the optional mission add an exclusive reward? If it does it will split the community’s view on attaining said item. If that’s so, I prefer if doing the optional stuff gives a higher chance or quantity of the item instead of just the only way of getting it.

[(PSN)robotwars7]

we need a LOT more bug fixes first, Scarlet Spear is still riddled with UI glitches and blackscreening.

also, I don't want DE to revert our railjack to being a Taxi again. if we're gonna do something like this, the Railjack needs to take center stage. it annoys me to no end that the Railjack isn't that important at all in Scarlet Spear: why go to the trouble of getting Mk3 parts we aren't allowed to use? it's meant to be a fighting ship; let it fight!

[(PSN)sweatshawp]

1 hour ago, DrivaMain said:

Ah yes, forced CO-OP game modes. Something that a lot of warframe players don’t want. It will probably end in the same fate as old raids (lack of players playing isn’t worth the upkeep cost) unless DE allows Solo players to complete it because you are isolating a large portion of the player base from doing this gamemode.

 

They didn’t remove because of lack of players they removed because they removed lor and Jordas because code is sloppy. And also raids weren’t forced at all

[AuroraSonicBoom]

1 hour ago, (PS4)sweatshawp said:

They didn’t remove because of lack of players they removed because they removed lor and Jordas because code is sloppy. And also raids weren’t forced at all

Of course they removed it because nobody played it. They even showed a player chart citing that it's not worth for them to keep fixing the bugs for such a low amount of players. In hindsight, I'm actually glad trails were bugged to hell and back, cause if they hadn't been we'd still have arcanes locked behind forced coop to this day.

[nslay]

3 hours ago, (XB1)NuclearSquiddy said:

Could be cool, if railjack didn't suck. I'd start of with mission types first and bug fixes, then we can talk about raids.

They need to add to the list of things to break... Radiators? In one mission, we steal a Galleon and instead of bringing a data mass and letting Ordis hack into the systems, we attack the cooling systems to open the door. What?

I mean imagine Spy if we could do this? We could just go and attack the HVAC system of the Corpus facilities and voila! What about Exterminate? Attack HVAC and they'll surely drop like flies (Saryn-style)! Mobile defense? Blow the HVAC up!

[Loza03]

3 hours ago, ant99999 said:

It's all great, but there's a twist - we were promised and even shown something extremely close to that on previous Tennocon.

So... where is it?

Actually, no we weren't, what we were shown at Tennocon was basically just 'get on board ship, kill captain/lich, ship mysteriously starts exploding'.

Which is pretty much what we got. The only differences between tennocon and now was squad link, which a lot of people said 'that parts gonna cause problems DE'; and void storm 'random' modifiers which DE took OUT of the base game because people found it annoying.

[Vit0Corleone]

1 hour ago, (PS4)sweatshawp said:

They didn’t remove because of lack of players they removed because they removed lor and Jordas because code is sloppy. And also raids weren’t forced at all

It was a combination of both. High maintenance design ( bugs, etc. that kept consuming dev time ) vs. not enough players playing it to justify the effort.

[Vit0Corleone]

2 hours ago, DrivaMain said:

Oh I didn’t read the big OPTIONAL text . But 1 question, will the optional mission add an exclusive reward? If it does it will split the community’s view on attaining said item. If that’s so, I prefer if doing the optional stuff gives a higher chance or quantity of the item instead of just the only way of getting it.

No idea about rewards. Haven't thought about that. That's the easy part thou, as long as the mission is fun.

I do think that rewards should come in stages, as you complete each of the chained missions.

The vaults could be something that is not unique, but worthwhile the effort. Example, rare avionics/components like the ones that have a 0.1% drop chance, could be 5% on the vaults. I'd also add to the pool evergreen stuff, so that players keep playing it and feel rewarded.

Edited April 19, 2020 by Vit0Corleone

[Vit0Corleone]

1 hour ago, (PS4)robotwars7 said:

we need a LOT more bug fixes first, Scarlet Spear is still riddled with UI glitches and blackscreening.

also, I don't want DE to revert our railjack to being a Taxi again. if we're gonna do something like this, the Railjack needs to take center stage. it annoys me to no end that the Railjack isn't that important at all in Scarlet Spear: why go to the trouble of getting Mk3 parts we aren't allowed to use? it's meant to be a fighting ship; let it fight!

Not at all a taxi.

If you look at the several raid stages I wrote, you have 2 phases that are centered on Railjack.

The first one where you have to eliminate the defenders, and the last optional one where you have to defend and escort a crew ship.

I even wrote that on the first engagement, you can't board the Galleon unless you finish eliminating the fighters escorting the Galleon. This is precisely to avoid players basically bypassing all of that and using Railjack just as a taxi.

[Hypernaut1]

I think they should buff AW to be like the wings of the RJ and make 6-8 player RJ coop raids. 

I don't mind some content needing cooperation. We need more use out the mic though. That's a big roadblock to having engaging coop raids in WF. 

[Vit0Corleone]

3 hours ago, ant99999 said:

In the essence they are similar - a multi-stage mission, requiring coordination between players and involving doing different objectives based tasks.

My point is - the devs had a simpler version of what you're proposing in the works, but didn't manage even that. There's a long way before we see something of the Raid scale in rj.

Assuming you're talking about Tennocon 2019, where they go in and assassinate a Commander, in fact what we got is basically that, minus the squad link part and the fact that the current Commander looks like a Lich but it isn't.

There was no "multi-stage mission" requiring coordination etc. , apart from squad link. At least not more than what we already have.

[ant99999]

56 minutes ago, Loza03 said:

Actually, no we weren't, what we were shown at Tennocon was basically just 'get on board ship, kill captain/lich, ship mysteriously starts exploding'.

Which is pretty much what we got. The only differences between tennocon and now was squad link, which a lot of people said 'that parts gonna cause problems DE'; and void storm 'random' modifiers which DE took OUT of the base game because people found it annoying.

 

32 minutes ago, Vit0Corleone said:

Assuming you're talking about Tennocon 2019, where they go in and assassinate a Commander, in fact what we got is basically that, minus the squad link part and the fact that the current Commander looks like a Lich but it isn't.

There was no "multi-stage mission" requiring coordination etc. , apart from squad link. At least not more than what we already have.

Now, I suggest you two to actually watch the video of its presentation before arguing over nothing. Here, I got it for you, Galleon related stuff starts from 16:30

The commander assasination there needed to be done in multiple stages and highly encouraged using Squad Link.

It started from exterminating the escort ships, guarding the Galleon.

Then the ship activated the force field, which a ground team needed to destroy as a sabotage mission, modestly characterized by Steve as a "mother****ing Battle of Endor".

Then the adversary of the Lich needed to infiltrate the Galleon and get to the bridge.

Then the Lich, whose specialization back then was tied to Empyrean mission, had his special ability kick in, which in case of Tennocon was an invulnerability field powered by the Galleon.

So the rj team needed to destroy generators powering the field.

After that the Lich and his enemy finaly got to have a battle, as a result of which the Lich did not actually die and would soon be reborn and have another Galleon under command.

During the events there supposed to be an environmental hazard in a form of a Void storm, limiting the time the team had to complete the mission.

 

So...

Was it a multi-stage mission - yes

Did it require coordination - yes

Did it include objective based gameplay - yes

Was it simpler than the concept in the OP - yes

Did DE manage to implement it - no

-We don't have Squad Link as promised (basically don't have it at all), which suddenly isn't a big deal for you, although it was the pivotal part of the presentation, and its current implementation is not much less than a spit to the playerbase's face.

-We don't have Liches as promised

-We don't have rj missions as promised

 

My point remains - DE is not in a state to do this Raid stuff right now. They're better to at least provide us what they promised, which would still be a great mission by the way.

[Vit0Corleone]

17 minutes ago, ant99999 said:

 

Now, I suggest you two to actually watch the video of its presentation before arguing over nothing. Here, I got it for you, Galleon related stuff starts from 16:30

The commander assasination there needed to be done in multiple stages and highly encouraged using Squad Link.

It started from exterminating the escort ships, guarding the Galleon.

Then the ship activated the force field, which a ground team needed to destroy as a sabotage mission, modestly characterized by Steve as a "mother****ing Battle of Endor".

Then the adversary of the Lich needed to infiltrate the Galleon and get to the bridge.

Then the Lich, whose specialization back then was tied to Empyrean mission, had his special ability kick in, which in case of Tennocon was an invulnerability field powered by the Galleon.

So the rj team needed to destroy generators powering the field.

After that the Lich and his enemy finaly got to have a battle, as a result of which the Lich did not actually die and would soon be reborn and have another Galleon under command.

During the events there supposed to be an environmental hazard in a form of a Void storm, limiting the time the team had to complete the mission.

 

So...

Was it a multi-stage mission - yes

Did it require coordination - yes

Did it include objective based gameplay - yes

Was it simpler than the concept in the OP - yes

Did DE manage to implement it - no

-We don't have Squad Link as promised (basically don't have it at all), which suddenly isn't a big deal for you, although it was the pivotal part of the presentation, and its current implementation is not much less than a spit to the playerbase's face.

-We don't have Liches as promised

-We don't have rj missions as promised

 

My point remains - DE is not in a state to do this Raid stuff right now. They're better to at least provide us what they promised, which would still be a great mission by the way.

Yet, if you remove the squad link/fish team part of the demo, the mission is pretty much the same as we already have with the Commander Assassination PoI. Sure, there are small differences ( like shooting the radiators, like we do on the other PoIs ), but nothing substantial. The game play is actually very close to what we have.

You're talking about DE not having implemented that, but they have. Again, as I mentioned, except for squad link and the fact that the Commander isn't a Lich ( even thou it looks like one ).

Squad link is a big deal, but if you're comparing the mission design I described with what they have developed so far, my mission doesn't require squad link at all, so not sure why are you even pointing that out? Squad link is a cool thing, but doesn't have to be present everywhere.

Is DE in a state where they could implement a mini raid like the one I suggested? I don't know the answer to that. Likely it is too soon. But that is a good thing, feedback should come in early on so they can/may consider it, which is the whole point of this thread.

[Loza03]

25 minutes ago, ant99999 said:

It started from exterminating the escort ships, guarding the Galleon.

As it is right now.

25 minutes ago, ant99999 said:

Then the ship activated the force field, which a ground team needed to destroy as a sabotage mission, modestly characterized by Steve as a "mother****ing Battle of Endor".

Squad link, something a fair few people were like "Hey, if we need this, then there's going to be problems".

25 minutes ago, ant99999 said:

Then the adversary of the Lich needed to infiltrate the Galleon and get to the bridge.

As it is now.

26 minutes ago, ant99999 said:

Then the Lich, whose specialization back then was tied to Empyrean mission, had his special ability kick in, which in case of Tennocon was an invulnerability field powered by the Galleon.

So the rj team needed to destroy generators powering the field.

People complained about this bit, because it's pretty much busywork. Besides, is there any reason, other than showmanship in the Demo, that a live version of this couldn't blow it up first? Thereby making it less of a stage, and more just busywork?

Otherwise it's pretty much 'team goes in, then somebody has to go/stay out'.

And this is also erring far more to a sin of the Lich system - not Empyrean.

29 minutes ago, ant99999 said:

After that the Lich and his enemy finaly got to have a battle, as a result of which the Lich did not actually die and would soon be reborn and have another Galleon under command.

And thus it's once again exactly the same.

 

Basically, the only differences between the Tennocon reveal and the final product is stuff that isn't Empyrean. Now, granted, that's an issue into itself - it's more island than we'd like. However, it explains why DE wasn't able to/willing to implement it from the word go - it requires a lot of disparate systems to all play nice. And given that they've taken a bit of a 'hot coal' approach lately thanks to their history of bugs, is it any surprise that they'd make it so that all the systems work individually before they get tied together? Was that the best path? Probably not, but hindsight is 20/20.

 

OP's suggestion, however, doesn't require any of that, so I don't see why the Tennocon demo is any reason why not. DE have proven themselves perfectly cabable of long, multi-part missions, such as assault.

[Hypernaut1]

Sometimes things aren't like the trailer. What's so surprising?

[ant99999]

1 hour ago, Loza03 said:

Squad link, something a fair few people were like "Hey, if we need this, then there's going to be problems".

Don't change the subject, please. The subject is: "Is what we have now the same as DE showed at Tennocon"

1 hour ago, Loza03 said:

People complained about this bit, because it's pretty much busywork. Besides, is there any reason, other than showmanship in the Demo, that a live version of this couldn't blow it up first? Thereby making it less of a stage, and more just busywork?

See above

1 hour ago, Loza03 said:

And this is also erring far more to a sin of the Lich system - not Empyrean.

And Liches supposed to be the part of Empyrean which is what I'm talking about.

1 hour ago, Loza03 said:

Basically, the only differences between the Tennocon reveal and the final product is stuff that isn't Empyrean.

However everything that was shown was in the part labeled 'Empyrean'

So imagine I bought a car after seeing its commercial saying that it has comfortable seats, air conditioning, and drives fast. But when it arrived, turned out that there isn't any air conditioning, seats are actually plastic chairs that are not even a part of the car, and the measurement of it's speed was actually done relative to a tortoise; and instead of what I was promised there's a letter from the manufacturer inside saying that everything else that was supposed to be there will come soon with future upgrades.

Well - that is what Empyrean is, but air condioning is Squad Link, seats are Liches and the car is Railjack.

 

1 hour ago, Vit0Corleone said:

Is DE in a state where they could implement a mini raid like the one I suggested? I don't know the answer to that. Likely it is too soon. But that is a good thing, feedback should come in early on so they can/may consider it, which is the whole point of this thread.

Ok, then I answer it. DE is now better not to focus on new shinies. They are better look back at what they had promised and what they provided and get the game to the state when it at least resembles the past Tennocon demo.

Your idea is not bad. If to think about it, they can even do as you say, I like it even more than Tennocon demo. But then they will still have to bring us Liches interaction with rj and Squad Link (or whatever they can call it, basically cooperation mode).

So they're better not to do very complicated stuff, they still have many things they promised that still aren't there.

[Galuf]

Imho the strengh of Railjack is where community sucks the most, aka multitasking and prioritizing things that can be handled simultaneously:

- Flying in the rj killing small ships 5, 10, 20 at once

- Doing objective missions

- Handling crew ships

- Knowing when you need to do the macro things(repairs/forge/boarders). Spoiler alert: the answer is almost never

Even if RJ is aging as a game mode(it has +-6monthes now) players on average performs extremly poorly. It is imho due to the culture of the game that is very player centric where everybody is self contained and performance do no matter while in RJ on the contrary you benefit from doing your own thing, and your swiftness of execution benefits the others a lot too. For example you can do in kuva liches missions and blattantly leeching, I don't mind doing the mission alone and helping mr8 players who have 10 days on wf(I'm genuinely happy to help even), in Railjack it gives me headache doing mr25+ players job almost every time I launch a mission, killing 6 crewships yourself is not long, however having the feeling at the end of the mission that you have done twice the efforts you should have made is taxing.

What could be added imho are:

- hardcore bullet sponges, like ennemies you'd want to use dead blossom + battles stations builds to kill

- races situations where on top of everything there are positions to reach at certain timers

- more complicated but maybe procedurally generated account bound missions where you initiate chains and follow ups with proceduraly generated objectives, mission events (each rj makes his own road)

For a RJ raid to work, it would require a lot of ressources to developp and imho and it should be on a 6 to 8 players crew or 3 to 4 crews with no mechanics like the first raid pads :).

Edited April 19, 2020 by Galuf

[(PSN)sweatshawp]

6 hours ago, Vit0Corleone said:

It was a combination of both. High maintenance design ( bugs, etc. that kept consuming dev time ) vs. not enough players playing it to justify the effort.

Not at all it wasn’t just the first and they even said it