Feedback: Infinitely respawning fighters and fully detached objectives in Corpus Railjack make the Railjack itself feel terrible compared to before the update

[MoonYuTsu]

EDIT: I posted this in the wrong forum - If you have things to say/reacts, it should probably go on this post instead since it's in the proper forum!

- I really dislike the infinitely respawning fighters in non-Skirmish modes. They make the Railjack feel like a liability rather than an asset. I've been playing with one other friend and 2 AI crew members, and when we're doing a side objective, someone basically always has to babysit the Railjack purely for the purpose of dealing with the constantly respawning fighters - if we both go off the Railjack, it just gets harranged by fighters nonstop, so someone has to stay to drive it and kill them... but to no productive end, purely just killing them because if we didn't, they'd kill the Railjack. It makes piloting it feel like busywork rather than being fun and engaging. My suggestion to fix this would be maybe not making Fighters part of the objective in non-Skirmish modes, but perhaps giving each mission a set amount of fighter reinforcements, lower than a same-level Skirmish would require? Enough that there's still several waves of them, but also not so many that fully depleting the reinforcements feels like a chore. 

- Main objectives requiring all players to be present and locking everyone in feels antithetical to the point of Railjack. It feels like normal ground missions with 2 minutes of Railjack replacement bus service beforehand, rather than a situation that allows for the kind of cooperative-between-ground-and-ship team-style gameplay that the Grineer Railjack nodes have. Frankly I think the only fun mode in Corpus Railjack is Volatile, and that feels like it could just as easily be a normal mission type and it'd be just as fun, if not more because you wouldn't have several minutes of meaningless unengaging Railjacking beforehand. Lots of people have expressed this already, but I think a good solution is getting rid of the full-squad requirement of main objectives, and adding extra things that the on-Railjack squad can do to assist with the ground objectives, some ideas might be like:

• For Exterminate: a short defense-style objective that if successfully completed allows Cy to compromise the Corpus Ship's AI core disabling all Corpus proxies, or fires an EMP pulse throughout the ship that heavily reduces the max shields or outright disables the shields of Corpus units on the ship. 
• For Defense: Have reinforcement transport Crewships fly towards the main ship the objective is on each wave - the Railjack crew can destroy or hijack these to auto-clear, or reduce the number of units in the next wave for the ground defense crew.
• For Volatile: Perhaps include Ice mining spots that the Railjack crew can fly out to, defended by small groups of fighters - the Railjack crew could mine/steal some ice, refine it into a makeshift coolant and then somehow rapid-deliver that to the ground crew (maybe through a slingshot that makes the cooling canister spawn near the Reactor on the ship?) - the ground crew could then collect the canisters and throw them at the Reactor, like the Coolant Cans in the Exploiter Orb fight, to reduce the Reactor's heat gauge a bit.
• For Orphix: Let the Railjack crew erect defenses or something similar that Delays the spawn of Orphixes for the ground crew, or makes the Orphixes start already reduced below the first health and Resonator spawn gate. 
   

- General theming around the Orphix gamemode. It was kind of novel the first time in Orphix Venom but... it seems stupid to me that the Corpus keep attacking us while we're trying to save them from the Sentients. Back during Scarlet Spear, it was kind of understandable that the Grineer would keep attacking us despite the ongoing Sentient threat - they're not the smartest, and pretty driven by rage, so I could buy that they'd still insist on killing us despite the Sentient problem. It feels less believable to me with the Corpus - killing the Tenno and thus losing any chance of their ship being saved from Sentient control seems like it'd incur much more of a loss of profit than taking their "free help" getting rid of the Sentients. Simply put, thematically the Corpus don't feel like they should be stupid enough to get in the way of second-hand-help from the Tenno, especially since lorewise they've had experience with Orphixes before this now. To this end, I think the themeing of the standard Orphix gamemode could do with a retool of some sort. The three solutions I was thinking of were like:

• Instead of a hostile ship, have the Orphix gamemode take place on an allied ship - perhaps a Steel Meridian or Perrin Sequence ship that's fallen under attack by Sentients. Recontextualise the gamemode as rescuing this stricken ship - remove the humanoid Corpus units, but maybe keep the Proxies, and frame it as the intial Sentient assault compromised the AI control systems for the Proxies, so they've gone berserk and turned against the Tenno and their allies.
• Have the ship still be a hostile Corpus ship, but have the commander's response be more panicked. Have them reacting with their inability to deal with the Sentients by calling to evactuate and a backhanded remark of something like "We can the Tenno deal with this and reclaim our assets later". Again, you could keep the Proxies, remove the humanoid units... or just frame it as the humanoids that do stay are stubbornly trying to defend in the hopes that by beating the Tenno AND the Sentients, there might be more Profit in it for them. Or simply have the commander react in a cowardly and selfish manner, fleeing themselves while ordering the rank and file units to fend off the Sentient and Tenno. 
• Have the ship be pre-abandoned, and contextualise it as us stopping the Sentients before they fully assimilate the ship. Have Cy/Father warn us that the ship is full of berserk/mentally-amalgamated Corpus and Proxies that'll try to get in our way of stopping the Orphixes.

[Urulai]

3 minutes ago, MoonYuTsu said:

- I really dislike the infinitely respawning fighters in non-Skirmish modes. They make the Railjack feel like a liability rather than an asset. I've been playing with one other friend and 2 AI crew members, and when we're doing a side objective, someone basically always has to babysit the Railjack purely for the purpose of dealing with the constantly respawning fighters - if we both go off the Railjack, it just gets harranged by fighters nonstop, so someone has to stay to drive it and kill them... but to no productive end, purely just killing them because if we didn't, they'd kill the Railjack. It makes piloting it feel like busywork rather than being fun and engaging. My suggestion to fix this would be maybe not making Fighters part of the objective in non-Skirmish modes, but perhaps giving each mission a set amount of fighter reinforcements, lower than a same-level Skirmish would require? Enough that there's still several waves of them, but also not so many that fully depleting the reinforcements feels like a chore.

This is an instance of the absolute schizophrenia of the warframe playerbase. One set complains that RJ feels like a "taxi" which is both a bad argument and completely ignores the facts of the gameplay.  Having part of the crew have boots on the ground while the other is in space is literally part of the intended RJ gameplay loop.

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- Main objectives requiring all players to be present and locking everyone in feels antithetical to the point of Railjack. It feels like normal ground missions with 2 minutes of Railjack replacement bus service beforehand, rather than a situation that allows for the kind of cooperative-between-ground-and-ship team-style gameplay that the Grineer Railjack nodes have. Frankly I think the only fun mode in Corpus Railjack is Volatile, and that feels like it could just as easily be a normal mission type and it'd be just as fun, if not more because you wouldn't have several minutes of meaningless unengaging Railjacking beforehand. Lots of people have expressed this already, but I think a good solution is getting rid of the full-squad requirement of main objectives, and adding extra things that the on-Railjack squad can do to assist with the ground objectives, some ideas might be like:

• For Exterminate: a short defense-style objective that if successfully completed allows Cy to compromise the Corpus Ship's AI core disabling all Corpus proxies, or fires an EMP pulse throughout the ship that heavily reduces the max shields or outright disables the shields of Corpus units on the ship. 
• For Defense: Have reinforcement transport Crewships fly towards the main ship the objective is on each wave - the Railjack crew can destroy or hijack these to auto-clear, or reduce the number of units in the next wave for the ground defense crew.
• For Volatile: Perhaps include Ice mining spots that the Railjack crew can fly out to, defended by small groups of fighters - the Railjack crew could mine/steal some ice, refine it into a makeshift coolant and then somehow rapid-deliver that to the ground crew (maybe through a slingshot that makes the cooling canister spawn near the Reactor on the ship?) - the ground crew could then collect the canisters and throw them at the Reactor, like the Coolant Cans in the Exploiter Orb fight, to reduce the Reactor's heat gauge a bit.
• For Orphix: Let the Railjack crew erect defenses or something similar that Delays the spawn of Orphixes for the ground crew, or makes the Orphixes start already reduced below the first health and Resonator spawn gate. 

This is probably done for technical reason but I can't say for sure but I'd be more than happy to have some folks go on the cap ship and others stay aboard.  I heartily agree that there should be a choice here but I can see why it isn't for the moment.

I also entirely agree that some kind of EW activity would be something I would enjoy in warframe both as a pilot or as the Tac Com either in the mission or aboard the Railjack.  Hell I suggested somekind of Hacking/Electronic Warfare Station on the Railjack before it even came out in 2019.

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- General theming around the Orphix gamemode. It was kind of novel the first time in Orphix Venom but... it seems stupid to me that the Corpus keep attacking us while we're trying to save them from the Sentients. Back during Scarlet Spear, it was kind of understandable that the Grineer would keep attacking us despite the ongoing Sentient threat - they're not the smartest, and pretty driven by rage, so I could buy that they'd still insist on killing us despite the Sentient problem. It feels less believable to me with the Corpus - killing the Tenno and thus losing any chance of their ship being saved from Sentient control seems like it'd incur much more of a loss of profit than taking their "free help" getting rid of the Sentients. Simply put, thematically the Corpus don't feel like they should be stupid enough to get in the way of second-hand-help from the Tenno, especially since lorewise they've had experience with Orphixes before this now. To this end, I think the themeing of the standard Orphix gamemode could do with a retool of some sort. The three solutions I was thinking of were like:

Expanding the Orphix mode I can 100% get behind. But I can also understand why the corpus attack us.  From one of the Corpus Captain's dialogue "Don't let them interfere." these corpus want sentients aboard their ships.  Probably seeing some profit opportunity or they consider us a threat to their own security net.  IRL different groups of people can have the same goal but still be hostile to each other because of how to implement that goal or because one doesn't have the power over the other.  Three way conflicts are not as uncommon as one might believe.

[MoonYuTsu]

3 minutes ago, Urulai said:

This is an instance of the absolute schizophrenia of the warframe playerbase. One set complains that RJ feels like a "taxi" which is both a bad argument and completely ignores the facts of the gameplay.  Having part of the crew have boots on the ground while the other is in space is literally part of the intended RJ gameplay loop

I'm not good at words, so I might be being misunderstood and misunderstanding you, so I guess I'll clarify - I'm very much in the camp of liking the two-party "one on the ground, one in space" style of Railjacking, I feel like that's the kind of gameplay the Railjack modes should encourage. My problem with the infinitely respawning fighters is like, as the person staying to fight them off, it doesn't make you feel like you're killing them to any productive end. You're not killing them to achieve anything. You're staying and killing them over and over because if you don't, the Railjack will get destroyed - not to help your team win, but because if nobody does it, you'll lose. 
 
It doesn't feel like I'm helping when I'm fending off the endless fighter spawns - it feels like I'm doing a chore that just has to be done, it doesn't feel good killing 4 just for 4 more to spawn, over and over forever. Speaking as somone that loved playing previous iterations of Railjack with squads, I definitely did not feel like I was just doing a chore by flying the ship. 
 
My suggestion to make the fighters an exhaustible resource for the enemy "Team", but that isn't required outside of Skirmish, is to basically give a soft "goal" and end in sight for the person on the ship - I think it'd make it feel less nebulous and less of a chore to have a goal and endpoint to killing fighters, and you'd get a sense of accomplishment from getting rid of them all once it's done - that simply doesn't exist as it currently is, you just have the knowledge that you kill these 4, and then there'll be another 4, and another 4, and another for and this is your life now until all the side objectives are done and you can go play the main objective.

[TheGuyver]

https://forums.warframe.com/forum/1219-feedback/

[MoonYuTsu]

 

9 minutes ago, TheGuyver said:

https://forums.warframe.com/forum/1219-feedback/

Wups. Why did I for some reason think this Forum didn't have a Feedback section, my bad!

[HoustonDragon]

The requiring everyone to be there to start the actual ground mission is very annoying, as it can lead to trolling and also bugs (like people standing in their Necromech where the airlock won't register). It seems like they intentionally wanted to separate the ground and RJ stuff, since the RJ becomes immune, so I don't know if it's possible to have them truly split up. I would love to have seen an actual Scarlet Spear type thing where we'd have split screen showing the RJ on one side, and the ground mission on the other, and still retain the ability to port back and forth as needed.

 

I also would love to see a purely space combat based Corpus mission where your Railjack would be fighting against ever increasing waves of fighters/crewships in a Survival type mission. Sometimes I just wanna blast stuff with my Archgun :P

[Chewarette]

44 minutes ago, HoustonDragon said:

I also would love to see a purely space combat based Corpus mission where your Railjack would be fighting against ever increasing waves of fighters/crewships in a Survival type mission. Sometimes I just wanna blast stuff with my Archgun :P

Exactly... Gian Point was not only the most profitable node affinity-wise, it was the most enjoyable at all because there wasn't tons of gimmick "do this, do that, then hit this point, then wait for X, then...". Leave me alone, provide me with enemies to slaughter goddamnit