Integrating Railjack into regular missions

[Vespilan]

Hi!

A common complaint with archwing and railjack content is that it is not connected to regular missions but just a single-standing content island. A valid complaint in my opinion. My suggestion here is to tie Railjack /Archwing in with regular missions.

Before going over the singular mission types and how Railjack is implemented, let me answer the question; What if you dont have a Railjack yet? Railjack comes relatively late in the progression of Warframe to the point where you probably only have your own after you already finished the starchart. Archwing, however, comes quite early in progression, making it reasonable to rely upon. The idea to remedy this is that;

1. missions never require the use of Railjack. Instead the Railjack is always a supportive tool to run missions more efficiently.
2. players are given access to any Railjack any partymember owns, should they not own their own. And should nobody have one:
3. players are forced to use Corpus /Grineer Crewships should nobody have their Railjack available. Note that this is not available should nobody in the squad ever have owned a Railjack, this is to prevent newbies accidentally stumbling into open space.
4. should the Railjack /crewship be destroyed, players are thrown into archwing where they can either board a new crewship or retreat back to the area where the main mission is playing. In the case of the Railjack, players are ejected and Cephalon Cy makes a remark about pulling out instead of the Railjack being destroyed. The Railjack then will need repairs and can only be used 30m later or at the start of the next mission. In the meantime, other player's Railjacks become available.
5. ground-squad and space-squad share item pickups.

 

Really trying here to make the post not too long, but before we get into the mission types, here are some things to keep in mind;

1. If a mission type is missing that means Railjack can not be used to help here. This is either due to the Railjack simply not having any sensible implementation or the mission being already quick enough (i.e. Exterminate) or requiring the focus of the entire team (i.e. Excavation, Disruption).
2. There would need to be a new, smaller extraction tube tile for every tileset (similar to the extraction tube we see connecting the Railjack to the Orbiter).
3. Going into Railjack should not reduce the enemy spawns for the ground team.
4. For fissure missions; Railjack crews share reactant with ground crews and will be topped up to 10 if all ground crew members reached ten reactant.

Missiontype	Explanation	Railjack gameplay	Ground gameplay
Capture	Should the capture target manage to escape, they can be further pursued in space.	Board the capture target's crewship (not fleeing, default crewship behavior) and capture them as usual.	Capture target after escape.
Defection	The Railjack provides cover for fleeing defectors, allowing many more crewships to fly at once since they do not have to stay stealthy any more.	Protect the escort route from attackers.	Doubles Kavor count per squad. Quicker reward rotations, but potentially harder to protect.
Defense	Intercept incoming attackers!	Destroy a certain amount of enemy ships within a certain window to skip defense waves.	Less defense waves, quicker rewards but potentially more difficult defenses.
Disruption	Pick up Sentient Void Links by killing sentient units in space to either alleviate negative effects from conduits or keep conduit buffs (not stacking) throughout a mission.	Destroy sentient units. Drops sucked in generate a Sentient Void Link in the Railjack /Crewship. Deliver that Void Link to the ground crew where they can slot it into a conduit.	Pick up Void Links, slap them onto conduits.
Hijack	The Fomorian Core /Corpus Rover must be transported into outer space for destruction /to a Tenno operative for salvaging.	Protect the cargo while transporting it to its destination. Railjack will suffer a speed and maneuverability debuff but the cargo can not take damage.	Skipped escort phase.
Interception	Deploy and protect additional radio towers in outer space to quicken the decoding process of the message.	Protect two radio towers in space. They are initially in Tenno control but can be captured by enemies.	Protect ground radio towers.
Sabotage	Bring the Railjack into position for a quick escape after sabotaging the ship.	Destroy galleon sentries that would hinder your escape and reach a waypoint for the Railjack to become available as a quick escape.	Railjack tube-tile near spawn and near sabotage-area. Escape immediatly available after sabotaging the reactor, no need to clear blast doors.
Survival	Assist the Tenno operative in scavenging supplies or life-support.	Mobile defense-style mission; Drop the Tenno operative into asteroid bases, different parts of the galleon, abandoned orokin towers etc. and protect these for two minutes while they scavenge.	Adds one minute to the survival timer per scavenged base. This allows bonuses to be carried over into the next round. (NOTE: Endurance runners can still keep track of their time through the mission-duration timer in the progress screen)

Congratulations to you if you actually read through the entire thing!

Q&A:

• Q: But Railjack is stupid! I like my Warframes, I don't want this!
  A: Nor are you forced to use this. You can keep running missions as usual. This is optional.
• Q: Wouldn't this make misisons just much riskier and harder to run?
  A: Yes, yes it would. Players need to evaluate whether or not they are prepared to take this risk.
• Q: Yeah but this encourages grief play, like players intentionally leaving behind their teammates and not doing anything.
  A: We have worse instances of opportunities for grief play in the game already; Feeding all fuel cells to one excavator if it looses a bit of shield and wating them in the process. Nuking maps to feed your ego and making reactant drops in fissures scarce. Inserting the coolant cell in sabotage missions. Limbo. Yes if you are really out to destroy other people's fun you can do that and get reported for it.
• Q: And what if newbies stumble into this? They never ever even used a Railjack, they would not know what to do and just ruin the mission for everyone!
  A: That is why it is gated behind atleast one squad member owning a Railjack. They, atleast, should know what to do. Other than that, this does not introduce problems Railjack does not already have (i.e. inability to force someone out of the pilot's seat).

Let me know your thoughts.

[Evhans]

Very good ideas! DE is adding a new layer of gameplay with Railjack.

Soon, the liches, as it was shown during the 2019 tennocon will be part of the RailJack system.

Then this will be the addition of the Corpus content.
The Squad Link system will follow. I suppose.

And I am sure that in the long term, a good part of the projects that you approach here, will see the light of day in play.

All that to say, that the Devs are keen to integrate railjack into the remnants of the game, but it will take several more years before they have a full gameplay curve.

Be patient, RailJack and Empyrean, it's not just an expansion, it's a new take on the game and it won't be done in 5 minutes.

To sum up my ideas, [DE] Steve is tackling all of this in 2019 at the tennocon.

 

[Aadi880]

I think that, there should be a tie with open worlds. Lets not leave them out.

For example, a new railjack gamemode, that is identical to hostage rescue, except, you are rescuing 7-10 people, and they happen to be ostrons.

Essentially, you break all of them out of jail, get them inside the railjack in some way (since they can't fly in with archwings) (All while boarding parties and enemy fighters tries to stop/kill them), and to complete the mission, you need to drop them off to Cetus. Basically, it is its own variant of hostage rescue, whilst also tying it to open worlds.

If protecting them is too hard as they try to get in, the give the ostrons weapons to use. They will, by default, pick up dropped weapons from fallen enemies. Though your secondary is likely to do more damage.

[(PSN)camwyn-xenos]

I love archwing and railjack, so new ideas welcome. Railjack is basically exterminate exterminate (doctors who's darlecks say it best)

Archwing tilesets are tired and devs have said its in the list of works so i'm hopefully waiting.

[PhiThagRaid]

Great suggestions, there have been many posts asking for more integration with all the content we have, but none have given as much details to their suggestions as you have here.

It's great that you are suggesting adding incentives to "splitting the party". Sadly (IMO) most missions can currently be soloed. I like that your suggestions still allow running missions normally, but presents a bonus when doing it in the integrated manner. Splitting the party could definitely add some difficulty.

I love the survival suggestion since it plays into the mission briefing claiming we are distracting the enemy while another tenno is looting, but sadly it does fit as perfectly as I would've hoped since they will be on a separate ship/base. Regardless, this is something that would also be a nice addition to RJ, endless missions.

Just to clarify: Will the ground part of the interception still have 4 towers? I think that would play well with the risk-reward you seem to be going for.

As Aadi mentioned, implementations for the open worlds would also be great. I was actually hoping they implemented dual bounties since the objectives are already set up in open worlds. Something similar to what the Survival briefing is where one part of the team is drawing all the attention to them while another sneaks into a base to steal something.

[Vespilan]

1 hour ago, PhiThagRaid said:

Just to clarify: Will the ground part of the interception still have 4 towers? I think that would play well with the risk-reward you seem to be going for.

Yep 4+2 towers. If you hold all six you get a much quicker message decoding rate.

10 hours ago, Aadi880 said:

I think that, there should be a tie with open worlds. Lets not leave them out.

 

1 hour ago, PhiThagRaid said:

As Aadi mentioned, implementations for the open worlds would also be great. 

Yeah I think we were all hoping for Squad Link when Railjack was announced years ago. The goal of this suggestion was to implement Railjack /Archwing into the core-gameplay loop and thus I only look at core gamemodes of Warframe. Open Worlds, as much effort as DE may have put into designing them, are not within the core gameplay loop. Further I think it would be much more complicated than what I can reasonably cover in one thread

[Kaggelos]

I love those suggestions!

Sure, they might need some polishing here and there, but the core ideas are neat!

 

[(PSN)camwyn-xenos]

At present rank 2 and archwing quest are railjack restriction

I think i got this right your squad run normal star map missions as normal but if they choose they can split into a 1+1 1+2 2+2 or 1+3, with a party going to railjack?

There would need to be squad size and difficulty modifier for ground interception and possibly excavation /defense to the task should be adjusted so if a new player r2 is in squad so they can run mission and visa versa a 4 man rank 30 squad find it a nice decentchallenge. De is already adjusting some mission to squad size. But we're not all (spoilers) fully maxed so some difficulty modification needed. Seeing as devs feel everything should be inclusive.

If this was your idea it certainly a good solution to the scarlet spear squad link issue.

There was 1 big problem with scarlet spear squad link in that if there was no ground signal rj mission did not work depending a ground squad numbers you got Either a quick uplink or a long dragged out affair depending on squad numbers. Where as ground could be run without railjack presents. Equally you Couldn't play ground and then space therefore effectively soloing a mission. 

Railjack is a squad activity but there are players that like to run solo only not sure how they could play the railjack if it relying on a ground element?, hum musing here slightly but if DE took this all the way it could solve a few warframe complaints about there not being a solo mode and a squad mode difficulty also this would make things more inclusive as those that like the flying side of warframe can work with the none likers of flight without it being mandatory.

Maybe this could scale up to for 2 larger squads upto 8 player as well it would make a excellent group activity for a clan or alliance. Also would add to clans draw for recruitment along with research, lich trading, teamates. 

[DrivaMain]

Maybe Railjack can be used in open worlds to something like a support tool. Maybe some sort of targetting beacon where You can command the railjack to bombard an area instantly killing any vulnerable enemy regardless of level but with a cooldown of 5 minutes per use.