Railjack Revisited (Part 1): Railjack Pacing Feedback Megathread

[Bazanti]

Not sure if this belongs here but me and my friends still have one single main gripe with Railjack's pacing that has made sure we still have not build a single one to this day, and are sadly kind off losing interest again to put in the effort:

Rising Tide's  time gating.
The reduction in resources and crafting time back in 27.2 was a step in the good direction but the current situation still seems detrimental for my personal enjoyment for one simple reason:
Waiting 6 hours for 6 times in a row is just a bit too much if you can't find anything to do in between (veteran problem I know.. but its what it is) and all you really want to do is to start flying around in your own Railjack with your mates.
I would greatly appreciate it if you did not need to wait to get the mission to search for a new Railjack part until a former part is repaired.
Being able to gather all 6 parts at once and repair in any order as you see fit, or repair them all at once (ljust ike building the different parts of a Warframe for instance) would be more in line IMO with Warframe's general tempo and sequence of play / loot / gather / build.
It would just feel a lot more satisfying in my mind that way, ergo: reward the grind with a clear notion of progress, and give the player a clear shopping list of materials to gather if you did gather all 6 parts in advance, and give the player a clear timetable of when your SpaceNinjaShip can fly and you can play the new content.

As it now you as a player are not necessarily aware of the amount of Railjack parts you need to gather in total without checking the wiki / chat, and for some people its very demotivating to wait for 6 hours at a time until you are allowed to do the mission to find a new part, check what parts you still need, gather them and then you can do it all over again during the period of a week.. if you do not lose interest.

I think either reducing the individual crafting time even further (so several can be done in regular play session and you can build you Railjack in a few days) or allowing for all parts to be built at the same time will be enough.




 

[(XBOX)ShonOfDawn]

Finally got my hands on the update. And I almost hope I hadn't...

Sooo pacing. Fighters die instantly, and then I'm left fighting 6 crew ships one after the other. I don't mind the fighters very much, but if every squadron spawned with a creswhip, it would make combat a little more engaging and fluid, instead of being "Kill 70 fighters, then scout the void of space to pick 6 crew ships". Also, it makes no sense that you can leave the other objectives last, after having killed everything 10km away from, you know, the enemies' bases of operation in the sector. To be honest, I feel a third of the enemy forces should pursue you in open space, as they do now; however, if objectives are present, the remaining 2 thirds, equally divided between objectives, should spawn only when these are approached and patrol around them to protect them. This would make assaulting those points of interest much more dynamic and engaging.

[2ndPersonPlural]

• Spawning times of Enemies

Good, but I wouldn't mind if they were closer together.  There's a lot of downtime — this used to be when I would repair minor hazards and go to the forge, but that's never an issue anymore with the nerfs to enemies.

• Mission flow

I'd like to see more variety in objectives, maps, and enemies.

• Traveling through Railjack missions

Piloting the railjack generally feels good.  Piloting archwings does not, because you hit the "top" and "bottom" of the sky if you pitch up or down too much.  Why does space have a top and bottom?  We used to be able to fix this with advanced archwing controls.  Please bring it back.

As for the maps themselves, it would be interesting if there were more obstacles.  Maybe the husk of a burned-out dreadnought that you persue enemies through.  It might be good to take inspiration from games with similar flight mechanics, like Star Conflict.

• Mission Navigation

Please add a timer with voting, like we get for all other missions.  Also the ability for us to leave at the end of a mission without being pulled into another, like an endless defense.

• Frequency of Breaches and Boarding Parties

I have had exactly one major breach since the update — when I was soloing a veil mission and had to get up to talk to someone.  In my eyes, they are simply a non-issue now in group missions, and not dangerous when solo.  I do not like this change.

The frequency of boarding parties is good.

[Fran_Bow_Dagenhart]

Minor complaint: Railjack now auto-rolls to nearest arbitrary "horizon". I would like to have an ability to disable this, as the auto-roll stability greatly degrades when railjack faces world up and world down directions.

[(XBOX)JcAnfis]

Please add an avionic with boost time increase. Drifting which was incredible fun is Hart to use at the moment

[Laxmibai]

I've played Railjack before and after the enhancements and I really like the flow of combat and the accessibility to new players now. 

Here is my full review. Keep up the great work! 

 

[(PSN)AbBaNdOn_]

Pace killers

• shielded engines on crewships
• external radiators on POI's.   

I can solo wipe out all the fighters and crewships in veil in the first 5 mins of a mission.   But then I have to run around those stupid POI's back and forth, back and forth,  to kil hack the consoles and kill the radiators and then back to blow up the cores.   This part of Railjack is brutal and BORING.  I totally uderstand in an ideal world this should be getting run as a team.  In reality that is NEVER what happens.  I am either solo because I dont want to deal with jerks or I am playing with jerks who rush POI's waaaaaay before the fighters and crewships have been dealt with.....    

So please for the love of god redesign POI's to be solo friendly.   Lets us use weapons that have punch through to knock out radiators from the INSIDE.  Or just allow us to blast our way through bullet sponge doors/shields to proceed.

The team work angle is also stupid because you want a railjack on the outside to take out the radiators but you gave POI's space lasers, turrets, missiles and ramsleds so as a railjack you DONT want to be near POI's.  

Make POI's into straight up sabotage missions or SPY style missions where hack the consoles blows stuff up.  (make crewships/fighters spawn in space when people doing POI's make progress so the people on Railjack got stuff to do)

[GNDZer0]

As someone who consistently ran railjack I decided to give this some time to see if i could get used to it, but honestly the gamebreaker for me is how this effectively killed off boosting.
Increasing base speed was cool but honestly the downtime on boost makes it feel so much more boring.
It's less interactive, it effectively removes talents that require boosting and drifting. Capitalizing on this on parties that aren't premade and organized was already pretty hard, right now it's prohibitive.
The cool effect of having a ship going into a hyper drive looking state is so short lived it can go unnoticed.
Boost also takes forever to recharge so this is pretty much designing a feature that is in theory pretty cool but then telling people not to bother with it.

As for enemy spawns having a different number of fighters to fight withing a range in each mission is good flavor and after the patch enemies in general seem to not spawn very far as often, but due to the boost changes getting up to them when they decide spawn in the next galaxy feels doubly boring.
While much less often than previously, every now and then fighters still decide to go and do some house chores before spawning.
 

Boarding parties never were a problem, you could and still can avoid them entirely if you want to.

 

Edit: forgot to add that, Engineer 10 really needs to not overlap with teleportation points, cuz whenever used it disables teleportation and hazards often occur on top of those.

Edited May 26, 2020 by GNDZer0

[JydiLehi]

Here I am transcribing this over to the main thread.
 

So I absolutely love flying around in my big spaceship called a rail jack.  I love the different roles and the idea of working together to accomplish a mission.  It is all I worry about right now in Warframe.  I am still in the gearing up process, but having ranks 8 7 7 7 I have noticed somethings that could easily make it better.

Can I adjust my rail-jack armament mods without going to the Dojo like in the rail jack in-between missions or something.

Problem 1: 90% of people don't know what they are doing when they enter my ship even on high levels and do either nothing or waste resources firing all of my armaments at nothing.
   possible solutions:  - add some kind of tutorial before being allowed on rail-jacks simply explaining what the stations are and what they do.
                                  - (I haven't verified this isn't already a thing but) allow people to spend enough intrinsic to do basic things like use the artillery so that I can do things like teach other random tenno the joys of using the rail jack. I often find it common that people can't even enter my artillery.
                                  - allow the ship owner the ability to turn off the use of armaments on the side guns.

Problem 2: Programmers need more time to fix them bugs like tether not doing damage for not pilot and other issues.  As a programmer myself I know these are generally time constraint issues brought on by the need to get the product out fast enough to make any sort of money and that this is calculated in the the general "Agile" approach of programing but can we please bump up the bug fixes for rail-jack, the bugs are pretty egregious.

In closing I absolutely love the new rail-jack system and after I got over the silly name and actually flew in one; I was instantly in love.  I would love more of this kind of content and would love a larger part of the community the simple ability to participate and feel like they are helping.

What do you guys that read this think am I right or should there be other changes that more experienced people would know about.

[CoffeeElemental]

How about some environmental hazards (i mean, some real hazards)? Like the ones from those space rouge-likes (FTL, Everspace etc). Something that makes your playthrough less convenient but not necessary to destroy/shutdown to complete your objective (shield disruptors, sensor dampeners, you name it). We have some of those grineer mines, yes, but they do pretty much nothing (they could magnet to the ship at least; if they already do this - then they should be more aggressive with that).

Also, maybe some big resource deposits could spawn in missions from time to time (not as rarely as reinforced containers, but still rarely)? I know you've increased resource drops, but still.

Oh, and auto-roll is bad. It needs to be manual. 🙂

edit: a very good example of serious env. hazards - Sleeper Caches from Eve Online, those things make you sweat.

Edited June 10, 2020 by CoffeeElemental

[Raskalnickoff]

There are a few things that I think would assist with the flow of these missions, and to tell how the battle is progressing when you are within the safety of the ship. First off, nearly all the status updates are given by Cephalon Cy via audio and there are a bunch of lights within the ship that appear to be information displays. Could cephalon Cy be visually present anywhere in this ship?

Possibly these displays could show the mission status, the last thing Cephalon Cy told us was important or the status of the ship/cargo hold?

 

There is a large empty space in between the two side guns. As a gunner it become hard to determine where in the map our ship is in relation to the objectives and the swarms of fighters. Could this space perhaps be utilized as a 3D representation of the entire battlefield? This way as we run through the room we can orient ourselves and better judge how far away all the crew ships are for example.

 

Speaking of holograms, the Grineer Galleon is able to have a hologram of our ship. Can we also have a hologram, for the engineer to better locate where the current fires/boarders are situated? This could be placed between the two shipping creates.

 

I did a little more editing for this photo

 

Why are there safety handrails? we don't get hurt from falling this far and neither do the grineer. All this handrail does is make traversing the confines of the ship slower.

 

Another place my parkour gets me stuck is behind the lamps on the archwing exits. this defiantly impedes the flow of the game.