Railjack Feedback

[master_of_destiny]

So....watched the dev stream.  Let's get that out of the way first.  Bad points....none really.  It was a semi-professional affair, and you seem to actually have a plan and organization.  The positives....I cannot concisely offer without a list.  Let's just bullet point.

1. The demeanor was not a bunch of people with no plan shooting the breeze for an hour.  Fantastic.
2. You guys still seem to have a personality.  This reads as less of a corporate mandate, and finally getting things together.
3. Ghoul Saw when...with actual demonstration of it.  Yeah, it's years late, but this hopefully is the signal of a shift in tone and promises being realized.
4. Zephyr getting some love...  The only way I could be happier is if this wasn't a wipe-out themed situation, and the ever "soon" skin shown and rebuilt was what was actually being released.
5. A prime demonstration.  Not bad.  It's largely looking like just a coat of paint, so I guess the benefit here is like Equinox.  Less garbage grind.  Can't happen too soon, as the 20 minute derelict runs and Simaris scanning are not fun.
6. I have to say this again, this felt professional.  Kudos.  Please, more like this.  

 

 

Now, let's talk about the railjack experience, per your discussion about attempting to rebuild the thing.  I've managed to run through this twice....and it does not age better.  I'd like to cut my feedback into sections, as I think taking everything at once would be too much.  Let me parse this into Intrinsics, Avionics, Loot, RNG, and finally to technique and reality.  This should allow me to have something mildly navigable.

 

Intrinsics

So let's further subdivide this into progression, integration, and interaction.  Progression will discuss the structure of the rewards, integration will discuss how the rewards are received, and integration is going to discuss how these thing interact with the rest of the game.

Regarding progression, railjack sucks.  Let me be blunt and brutal here, but this should not be news to you.  When you rebuilt the enemy health/armor/shield scaling you admitted that a power function was an idiotic way to do things in this game.  Instead of understanding this, you decided that each intrinsic level was going to be 2^x cost, meaning that every new level costs 1 more than everything you've already spent.  This is great for the low levels, as you get stuff quickly....but it isn't in practice.  The low level missions require that you grind your face off, because they don't offer the same rewards as higher level ones.  Yes, this means the incentive here is actually to only do missions once, and grind whichever gives the most intrinsics.  Once you can access the next area leave the low level stuff forever, and never look back.  This is a repeat of the mistakes from the star chart from "core" warframe, and it's effectively requiring insane levels of grind to get those last couple of intrinsics.

How insane is the grind?  Well, without affinity boosting, I could get about 10 intrinsics with a competent team.  With the cost of a level being 512 at the highest rank, this is 52 mission runs.  There are 4 of these, so 208 mission runs. Compared to stuff like the operator schools, which do scale up but have earnings constantly.  That's forgetting the need to fundamentally change how enemy health works.  Finally, it's forgetting that progression should feel good.  One run allowing you to get 3 levels (1+2+4=7 intrinsics) feels grand....but after that it's pulling teeth.

 

Moving onto integration, let's discuss the intrinsics changing how the game is played.  I'll first have to frame this.  If you leave the railjack in an archwing you will die without invincibility.  Archwings are going to be swarmed, they cannot take hits without stagger, and stagger will block any evasion.  This means the only use of archwings is to Amesha, or style on enemies while dealing with a bad pilot (or poorly equipped railjack).  

Now that we've got some background, let's peel back those powers.  There are a total of 40, so you'd think that some of them would feel good.  You'd be dead wrong.  4 are dedicated to making the archwings less than completely useless.  2 decrease crafting costs.  The final 4 powers are only slightly useful given that they have a lot of situational or RNG components to activation.  Gunnery requires 2 unlocks for the forward artillery and the archwing slingshot.  You then have basic movement abilities like drifting and boosting locked behind other requirements.  Half of these powers are unlocking basic features and making things feel better.  That's miserable.

Let's be real here.  Pare out the archwing upgrades.  Incorporate them into the archwing missions on the star chart, as upgrades that you can earn for playing those missions.  Not RNG rewards, to be abundantly clear.  Reward us something similar to a ship segment, and maybe extend the RNG playability with costing railjack resources.  Give us the basic features of the railjack unlocked at the beginning, and force us to do a shakedown mission first.  Solo mission, have Cephalon Simaris walk us through controls and explain the basic features, and have a brief battle against some fighters to start things off without the "free roam" first Proxima location.  

Now that you've removed these segments, it's time to repopulate.  If necramechs are going to be a thing, and the Tempestarii are a faction, incorporate the relaunch as a story mission where our ship crashes on one of their facilities, and they rebuild the ship and Cephalon with mech integration.  All of those new slots get repopulated with mech boosts, and suddenly there's a link between the mech and railjack content islands.  

Let's review.  Carve out the basic features, and give them to us day one.  Give us a proper tutorial.  Create bridges between content islands with resources and a restructuring of what intrinsics do.  Do all of this not to make players happy, but to create an experience that doesn't feel like a tertiary pinky finger.  That is to say, something bolted on accidentally which feels like it should be excised.

 

I've already started to discuss this, but the integration with archwing and railjack is a joke.  Archwing was years of useless, until it could be summoned on the open worlds.  It was then relegated to a single choice, because blink made it the only mobility option.  Now everyone has blink, so Amesha is the only option because of invincibility.  Grinding through railjack can have you unlock much better archwing....which implies how bad the default is when upgraded you still only have Amesha as a viable choice.  

Please, remove the archwing intrinsics.  This is so deeply flawed that I don't even know where to begin.  Should I start with the inability to use archwing?  How about the slingshot being a bad joke after you unlock the artillery?  What about the still questionably implemented invincibility during boarding, which to this day makes it potentially suicide?  Let me sidestep this, and just suggest that if the default for a thing is so bad that you want to integrate buffs, but the buffs require you progress along far enough that even the buffed archwings aren't viable, then you've really managed to hit the goal post on this one.

 

Avionics

If you get the best reactor, then grind for materials to fuse it, and manage to get absolutely all of the capacity you can have, you still cannot apply an avionic in each slot.  Turning around, there's a modifier that gives you a bonus for each of your avionics capacity not utilized.  All of this is of course locked behind heavy RNG, with the ability to earn the best avionics capacity literally locked until you have a rank 7 intrinsic.  For those at home not willing to do math that's 127 (1+2+4+8+16+23+64) intrinsics earned, and that means you're going to spend a long time with either powerful avionics in only a few slots, or a bunch of very minor buffs.

Now you've finally set everything up.  All of the basic mods are installed, because you need them to not be a flying box of dynamite.  The requisite avionics are health, armor, turret cooling, flux capacity (because the reactor required has the worst), turret damage, artillery cheap shot, artillery damage.....wow.  After saying all of that you've really got about 3 slots to play with.  Guess you get to build for crit turrets, damage elsewhere, or slight QoL improvements because you can simply cheese most missions by equipping tether and a good missile so that none of the other things matter.

 

Moving onto the battle avionics, there are 3 slots.  One is Tether; period, end of sentence.  It used to be Void Hole, but after the nerf it's Tether.  Nothing else matters.  That's right, someone who has earned about 8200 intrinsics literally can't tell you why either of the battle avionics is useful.  That's a glaring issue.

 

Finally, the avionics for the ship.  Closing any breaches or fires is nice....but the final bonus for one of the intrinsics is remote repair.  No use there.  Void cloak is nice....but with the cooldown and penalty it's just not useful unless you're a solo player.  That means our primary intrinsic here is Battle Forge, to deal with the painful secondary resource management grind.  Oh boy, an avionic that literally exists to make a forced wait timer go faster, for resources that require crafting from in-mission drops.  It's almost like you've literally said "we know this is miserable but instead of fixing it we'll hand out another band-aid mod."  Joy, another corrupted mod style -1 ammo count with faster reload.  It's the Vectis Prime all over again.

 

If this isn't clear, the problems here are multiple fold.  One, the capacity for avionics is mathematically wrong.  Two, the earning of the reactors is an artificial grind that makes earning them be a chore instead of feeling like a reward.  Topping this off, you don't have competing avionics.  Your avionics either don't give multiple ways to do something, or more painfully compete against the intrinsic system.  This is exceptionally broken design.

 

 

Loot

Let me state the blindingly obvious.  Loot that makes it easier to grind a content island is not a reward on that content island.  

 

Why state this?  Well, I think there's some bad RNG and concentrated rolling going on here, that players stop caring about after some time because it's not worth coming back.  Let me state this in order.

• Riven shards suck, because it's 1 per week.  Yes, you can earn hundreds grinding railjack, but that only means half a year of weekly logins to deplete inventory.
• Reactors/Engines/Shields are stupid rewards.  There's literally a "best" option for each.  
• Once you get a Reactor/Engine/Shield it seems like all subsequent drops are weighted to have the same bonus ability....so grinding for those bonuses is pointless.
• Speaking of RNG drops, weapons seem to spawn until you build one, then stop.  If I run with a character who has all Zetki weapons maxed, all subsequent weapon drops seem to be heavily weighted to Vidar.  If I have all Vidar weapons at III except the Pulsar and Photor I seem to only get those two Vidar weapons, and Lavan garbage.  Yeah....it's not a fluke after about 20 runs....which implies DE is doing some weird RNG manipulation or have a hidden mechanic here.
• Dirac is pointless.  You get it for recycling avionics and parts.  Parts eventually accumulate in inventory, because 30 slots is a joke.  This means well before you have rank 10 in each intrinsic you're sitting atop a gigantic pile of unusable Dirac.  Oh boy....that means all subsequent drops of it as loot are another non-reward.

If this isn't clear, nothing in railjack feels like a reward.  It's all grinding to be more efficient at grinding.  Now that's fine if the game mode is inherently fun, but this isn't.  I'm getting ahead of myself, but the simple truth here is that given what railjack is right now, there's not enough differentiation to care about what mission I'm on.  I only really care if there's a chance at a 5% drop (Pennant and Quellor), and if I have to board a ship.  Best case it's a sentient ship for some cosmetics, and worse case it's an asteroid base that can infinitely spawn boarding parties well after being blown up....because that was a fantastic design decision.

 

RNG

If it isn't clear, this game mode is trashy. 5% drops from a single enemy at the end of a segment is bad.  Riven shards are great....until you realize that they'll accumulate in your inventory.  Railjack resources are nice....until you have the objective best weaponry and nothing more to spend the resources on while you grind out 4092 intrinsics.  Cap all of this off with what might be bugs, or features, or maybe just unintended mechanics in the game.  This is just an exhausting grind, spread out by bad RNG mechanics, power function progression, and nothing at the end of the rainbow except some token MR....Ouch.

 

 

Techniques and Reality

Let's review the past.  Upon release the fastest way to get intrinsics was with Ivara and stealth kill affinity multipliers.  Then, it was infinitely spawning crewships and stealth kills.  Those "exploits" got patched, so now it's a massive grind on Gian Point, because the RNG level creation doesn't spawn the galleon/platform/asteroid base events.  Oh joy.

 

That was not a pointless jab.  It's where we are.  Your choice of turrets is pointless, because Tether wipes enemies like Void Hole used to.  Your turrets are useless against crewships, so your artillery is viable.  The artillery charges are 5...and spawn is 6....so you've got to use artillery cheapshot of have an engineer only engaged with crafting consoles.  The crewships got shields, but the secondary weaponry can pop all 3 nodes on a ship as long as it's a missile.  Oh boy.  Turret choice is immaterial, Avionics are about 80% required, without enough capacity to do all of them.  Artillery is a requirement because slingshot is a suicide by mass of enemy weaponry unless you're invincible.  Secondary has to be a missile, because if you choose the other two options they cannot pop shields as effectively.  Oh look....railjack is just about useless unless you've got a meta loadout.

 

I was under the impression that a railjack would be my own.  Instead of having my own ship, this is a situation where my only real choice is how far out my color pattern is, and whether I should grind efficiently or do a mission with such a low drop rate that could grind for literal days without getting a reward.  That math is about 135 runs to guarantee a drop (1-.95¹³⁵= 0.9990 or 99.90%, meaning 1 in 1000 still would not have a drop), 20 minutes per run, 4700 minutes for 135 runs, or 78.333 hours.  Literally 3.26 entire days of grind, which is depressing.  This is our current railjack experience.  Grind, grind, grind, poor rewards, content locked to this content island, no real choice, grind, and did I mention that with an average 10 intrinsics per Gian Point run it's only 410 mission runs to get everything all the way up?

 

Let me summarize my railjack feedback into a palatable paragraph or two.

Railjack is not rewarding.  Intrinsics are insanely costly, for effectively no return at higher levels.  The drops and mission rewards are useless long before you have completed grinding out your intrinsics.  Finally, the lack of effective choices for your railjack is frustrating.  None of this needs to be addressed by nerfing what little we have, because that will drive away anyone still stupid enough to do the grind.  We need more parallel alternatives, someone who can verify that avionic capacity max>avionic cost with all slots filled assuming the best option is taken.  We really need someone at DE to sit down, and develop a plan.  Right now railjack is just not worth engaging with on any level, and it shows when you cannot find any random group out there.

None of the above will be fixed by using the second level of the relays.  All this will do is  make it easier for even less prepared players to hit this grind wall and simply give up.  If you're actually listening....then I thank you for your time.  This has been hard to write, because I would just prefer to never bother with it.  Railjack was so premature.   It's been more than a year, and our last real update was a broken event and a requirement to engage with this for Nightwave.  Somebody really needs to iron this out, before it's Lunaro 2.0.