Railjack, Command Intrinsics, and Liches

[Seankle]

Nothing is perfect, but we might be able to be a voice that helps make it better.

We know we are waiting for Command Intrinsics to open up for use and we know we have the ability to call upon our Kuva Liches. I think it would be unfair to say that the idea of Kuva Liches being tied to Command Intrinsics hasn't already been hinted at, but what if we took it in an unpredictable path, and brought in multiple railjacks to a mission with the command intrinsic having a hand in it?

What if the next step, especially with the Deadlock Protocol being newly released on systems, we take the updated Corpus ships, some of the Kuva Lich concepts, and Railjack, and tied them all together?

I think it would be cool to have multiple people bring in their railjack (if the game can support obviously) and then with the differing levels of the command intrinsics, we get the ability to command a kuva lich to do stuff on our Railjack and, at higher levels, help command OTHER railjacks or at least a fighter in some way. I imagine a cool way to implement the new Corpus ships would be to bring in the Corpus version of Kuva Liches, and then teams could take down the Corpus Fleets for a fast tracked process on their 'Corpus Lich' hunts. I don't have any clue on what that process is going to be, but in the same way everyone gets murmurs from Kuva Thralls, all members could attain the information from the fleet engagements.

In my mind, nothing would be cooler than a fleet on fleet engagement in game where our railjacks mean something. If you have trouble thinking of a scene, the beginning scene where the Reavers emerge from the space clouds in Serenity and surprise the Alliance, would be a cool entry scene into the concept.

That concludes my TENNO Talk. I'll take any questions you may have.

 

[Marine027]

*clears troath* "Railjack will be the #*!%ign Battle of Endor!" /s

[Seankle]

19 minutes ago, Marine027 said:

*clears troath* "Railjack will be the #*!%ign Battle of Endor!" /s

I didn't understand your comment. After some quick searching, I see what you mean. Not even close to what it is vs. what was expected I guess. I was just providing an idea or two now that we have railjack and kuva liches instead of hypothesizing what it is actually going to be based off a quote and idea before being implemented.

[master_of_destiny]

So, here's the issues associated.  

1. Railjack is still buggy.
2. The last time more than 4 players were viable was on Raids.  Those died because they broke basically any time things were updated, and arguably were buggy.
3. Compounding points 1 and 2, let's throw 60+ fighters and 6-8 crewships into a single instance.  You've now effectively increase the chances for bugs.
4. Compounding the extra enemies, you've got multiple liches, power interaction, and people playing on systems barely capable of running the game or with some bad internet connections.

 

So here's my ask, why?  If you're looking for this level of combat you've got to do a lot of offloading to servers, so that you aren't beholden to someone with a bad connection.  This means more and better hardware, placing a financial strain on a free to play game.  How does it exist elsewhere?  Well, you've basically pointed out what draws people to Eve.  It's massive space combat, but compensates with time dilation depending upon the amount of combatants.  It also requires a subscription or grind to pay for the subscription.  The issue is that would mean potentially making 10 minute missions into hour long missions, and in a game advertised as a fast looty-shooty grind with space ninjas you've lost the battle here.

 

 

So, this said the idea isn't terrible.  I would argue that instead of a gigantic space battle with multiple railjacks you introduce a commander that is locked into the Railjack, getting access to the artillery, crafting, and pilot positions.  Command would lock out the side guns, and have them manned by Liches.  This effectively means you'd only need 1 person manning the railjack.  All other tenno would then be encouraged to battle in archwing, or go steal a crewship.  This would need to be combined with the enemies spawning in small wing formations, from more locations.  The effect here is to have more action, to devalue wide area attacks like tether, but to make things feel bigger by having much more, if smaller, instances of active combat.

What I actually think command is going to be is barely viable.  If the game requires 3-4 liches to be maintained simply to man a railjack there's no incentive for the play with random groups.  That effectively means command is going to have to be an addition, rather than a game changer.  I hope I'm wrong, but I see more resource cost decreases and minor quality of life improvements rather than a significant game changer like you've proposed.

[Seankle]

I've been brewing on this a while and I think I have a response @master_of_destiny, though it may be long and drawn out. First I'd like to say, these are suggestions, and to be honest, I wouldn't know how to implement them into the game via coding, just brainstorming ideas that seemed to interest me. I'll try to retort with your initial issues and then continue on to answer your questions.

1. Definitely. But it has gotten better, and who's to say it won't continue. I imagine that Railjack, given the effort that was put in by both DE and the players, has made itself a staple in the foreseeable future of Warframe. Instead of trying to implement new open areas, or mission objectives, why not focus on what we have on hand already? It's not like we have to make a new tileset for space (relatively empty and we already have the proximas) or a new tileset for corpus ships (just came out with deadlock). At some point, you have all the framework for something and with better implementation, it would make sense that you could create a new addition to railjack with minimal (obviously not minimal from a coding perspective, but more-so not from scratch) effort.
2. I was not around for raids on Warframe, but having played some OG Destiny, I did enjoy the teamwork experience a lot. I'm sorry to have missed the experience for purposes of clarification and so I could understand what you are referencing. If it is anything like destiny raids, I also had my fair share of people internet vs the game vs the server vs the actual enemy on screen.
3. I think in my initial statement, I did in fact, guide everyone to one train of thought, lots of ships vs. lots of ships. We have, and many times before, been told in game that we are doing something that is part of something bigger (i.e. the survival missions where a lone operative is doing something and we're buying time). In that sense, it would also make sense that we could effectively create an environment were we saw the end goal being this very large ship that we couldn't access, but we fought its fleet in space maybe in a 1v1 setting and it's support is a bunch of effects, defensive mechanisms, and maybe fighters. We already see that they can implement a galleon in some of the veil proxima missions, why not expand that to the corpus. No better time to show off the internals of a Corpus ship than with a ship that has to be boarded in that same sense.
4. Understandably, but if we're complaining about people's connections and platforms, why even have multiplayer at all? The biggest appeal and the most fun I have in this game has been with a full squad of people going after an objective or running around with our heads cut off. This is the same for railjack. Before we all understood the limitations it was a bunch of chickens and barely scraping by. Now we can solo most higher tier missions after some grind, but that's no different than most other areas of the game.

Long story short, I want to see Railjack MEAN something.

What a cool concept to have a ship with a crew full of Tenno who are no longer bound to planet-side campaigns. At some point, regardless of how much you conquer the land, the skies are going to be filled with 'enemies' (obviously depends on point of view) who cannot feel the effects of the ground battles. You'll have to zoom out and make an impact in space at some point, and it would be cool if we used the tools we had at hand. I think Scarlet Spear was a great effort to try to show that, however short it fell of the expected/anticipated result, or its issues. We had a ground team and a space team, semi-simultaneously. This idea isn't new by any means. Back in the day of PS3, there was a game called DUST514 that tied directly into the computer game EVE, like you mentioned. With a combined effort, you could take over planets on ground and call in for space support, and they were both real time. The interactions on one effected the interactions in the other, and I would argue that it was way ahead of it's time in the idea of cross-platform gameplay. The downfall of the game was the ability to get Sony to allow CCP (EVE Creators) to talk on their own servers. Now we don't have to worry about that since it's all in one place and we're not chasing down permissions to do so.

I would also argue, now that we are on the EVE topic, that EVE has moved more towards the free-to-playu mentality, and provides an alternate means to play and accessibility to all of it's players if they so choose. Similar to Warframe, as you get higher up in that game with skills/training, you get to the same 'end game' results, and you can play enough of the game and earn enough in game currency to continue to pay for the premium subscription via said in game currency. I think the two are closer in that sense than we make them out to be. 

 

That being said, I do feel that what we will see in the end is that last statement that you made: 

3 hours ago, master_of_destiny said:

What I actually think command is going to be is barely viable.  If the game requires 3-4 liches to be maintained simply to man a railjack there's no incentive for the play with random groups.  That effectively means command is going to have to be an addition, rather than a game changer.  I hope I'm wrong, but I see more resource cost decreases and minor quality of life improvements rather than a significant game changer like you've proposed.

I want Railjack to be as grandiose in size to us players as it was in concept from DE. I want to see us take all the time put into creating/playing Railjack, and I want it to have an effect in current and future updates so that everything we've done is for something. 

As a revised idea, what if we ended up fighting a Galleon sized ship and differing amounts of damage/disabling on the galleon triggered another more intense defensive response based on the level we entered at and how long we stayed.(i.e. Eidolon hunting and the progression of difficulty between the three). I think we have the basic capabilities and missions in the game that would combine them together. Hell, you want board the ship to bring it down (like a crew ships) and destroy the reactor? Activate some kind of reactor meltdown and then defend that system for some short period of time? SABOTAGE/DEFENSE You want to take down the ship from the outside with your forward artillery hitting the weak points? ASSAULT. You want to expose the weak points on the ship? SPY. You need the captured Grineer fighters to help you fight the Corpus, but they're trapped in the hangar bay? RESCUE/DEFECTION. You need to bring down the defensive systems with a 'bug' Independence Day style? MOBILE DEFENSE. I once again, feel like we could combine all of these mission types into an atmosphere where they are all viable, and it would require a team of differing frames that would make the mission go smoother. Sure, one frame to rule them all (Ivara) but it'll take time and skill. 

And yes, it would take an amount of time to finish a mission, but the end result being a possible Corpus Lich or Weapon or whatever. Make the rewards worth the play. Railjacks can already take a hot minute to complete. What is two hot-minutes if the mission challenges the player and the rewards entice the player?

[SignatureChewy]

I'm not sure if multiple railjacks in one mission are viable, but I do think it would cool if we could bring our own fleet of sorts into battle. This could be done by giving each command crew member their own ship that they can deploy. For example, Kuva liches could deploy an outrider, solaris workers could deploy a mining ship, etc.

If you're running railjack solo, you can keep your crew onboard your railjack to run things. In multiplayer, you can have tenno crew the railjack while your AI crew man their own smaller vessels.

Otherwise, I think more emphasis should be put on the cross-squad aspect of railjack that was shown off  but never really implemented. Technically players don't need to be in the same server to send information between each other. A squad could be running a mission inside a ship while a railjack crew runs a mission outside the ship and as long as information about what objectives they're completing travels to and fro, they never have to meet. Personally I think that railjack should revamped so that almost every node on the starchart has the option to call in railjack support. For example, let's say you're doing a survival mission. Somewhere in the level is a terminal that, when hacked, jettisons a cargo crate out of the ship. That mission becomes some sort of mini-alert that any railjack crew can jump into. The railjack then has to eliminate some fighers and crewships and pick up the crate outside of the ship. Players inside the ship can make this easier by disabling exterior defense turret controls on certain tiles on the level. When the railjack successfully retrieves the crate, both squads receive extra rewards from the survival rotation. The railjack squad can now move to another mission while the survival squad continue their mission.

This would help close the content island that is railjack and link it to the rest of the starchart while creating a symbiotic relationship between the two.

 

[Seankle]

I do like the cross-squad idea. Not saying that there are ALWAYS squads running missions out there, but it would be cool if you were in railjack and the missions could influence people in their missions to help out like you talked about. 

I would say that this is too similar to Scarlet Spear in the sense though that you'd have have to rely upon other squads asking for support, and then if you didn't want to do so during your railjack mission, would you be able to opt out or would you always have these requests pinging in the middle of the mission?

It does seem that the influence is there, but we saw how scarlet spear turned from, "I'm going to help out my space crew/ground crew" , to, "space gets better rewards so I'm going to wait until thirty minutes in and only run space". I could see the balance not being fair if you didn't enter the mission as a squad together, which is why I like your idea, but maybe two 'connected' squads that are in for the same mission rewards instead of relying on a chance squad existing at the same time you railjack.