My Feedback for Corpus Rj Update

[Lokidus_Prime]

As the title says, here is my feedback list for the Corpus Railjack Update. Any intrinsic / command intrinsic stuff has been put in the appropriate feedback thread and is not included here.  Will probably add to this as I think of and/or come across things. 

1. Mission Type Issues : You removed Giant Point, but didn't address the problem as to why it was popular:  it was fast, efficient, and one of the very few nodes of all proxima regions to offer pure railjack gameplay.  Almost every other node had the same 4 PoIs cycled throughout every single region  and now the Corpus regions have the same exact problem only worse: the same 4 modes across 4 regions, all of which are basically taking the railjack from point A to point B then get off and ignore it completely for the rest of the mission. 

• There needs to be more stuff that actually involves the railjack instead of using it to get from point A to B, then abandon it.  I understand the attempt to integrate normal starchart missions into railjack and having some missions like this is fine, but there really needs to be other mission types that are just pure railjack gameplay to add variety to the regular integrated missions.  As a friend has put it, calling these Railjack missions is like calling Uranus Spy an archwing mission.
   
•  Orphix Venom being added in as a gamemode without being changed from its initial release is easily my most disliked aspect of this update.  The main problem is that it both pulls you from actual Railjack gameplay like all the other corpus RJ missions, but also practically invalidates nearly everything else you have - all your warframes, weapons, operator to an extent, etc, because the whole mode is focused on shoehorning the necramechs into something and it just feels very unsatisfying.
  • And for the love of God, please remove the free mechs laying around.  They are effectively useless at best, and infuriating at worst - they have terrible survivability and generally get shredded in seconds, and cannot deal anywhere near enough damage to effectively deal with anything at those levels.  Accidentally entering them is absolutely infuriating as their animation is very long, unskippable, and can't be cancelled when people never wanted to use it in the first place.
     
• Defense and Exterminate need something to spice them up compared to just being regular defense/exterminate missions slapped into railjack.  Defense in particular.  The map for defense also just doesn't help as it's easily one of the most disliked maps for this mission type among the people I know, myself included.  The map itself suffers from the "Eris problem": cool and interesting in design + concept, but just not all that fun in actual gameplay.
  • Friend had an idea for the exterminate where we could have an optional/bonus objective to take out the Corpus Captain on the capital ship which I think would be pretty cool
     
• Most of the gameplay of Volatile is fine and is a nice more-active twist on Mobile Defense with some Sabotage vibes, though it's not without its issues:
   
  • The ending sections of the mission where you run to extraction after making the reactor vulnerable and shooting the reactor weakpoints just feel underwhelming.
    • The corpus try to stop us from reaching extraction, but they pose practically zero threat because even if they were remotely dangerous, they have practically no hope of being able to actually catch us. It just feels like our ability to recall back to the railjack is removed for the sole purpose of making us do extra running and artificially extend the mission.
    • Shooting the reactor weakpoints with the artillery cannon is also pretty underwhelming, since by that stage in the mission there is essentially no acknowledgement from the enemy, no fighters or crewships or anything to stop you as you're preparing to land the final shots to annihilate the capital ship.  It's just dead silence, with the occasional generic line from the corpus captain about shooting missiles or w/e until the whole ship blows up.  
       
  • The overall mission doesn't really make much sense to me.  The end goal is to destroy the ship by making the reactor vulnerable to the railjack's artillery and yet you fail the mission cause the reactor overheat and melt down, which... also destroys the ship.  We already cause reactor meltdowns for Reactor Sabotage which take place on Grineer/Corpus ships, so I don't think it's a stretch for us to deliberately cause the reactor(s) to melt down in Volatile with the railjack disabling/weakening key points from the outside (not necessarily in that order).  Reactor meltdown would cause signal interferrence for the recall and so the away-crew has to escape the ship as its blowing up, with a reasonable-but-pressing amount of time to escape, with some moderately threatening hazards (mission lv could dictate how severity of time limit + hazards) and players who dont make it out in time die in the explosion (like how crewships should be imo).
     
• All optional (white marker) PoIs consist of running in, hacking the console, and leaving.   Would be nice if there was something a little more to them like hidden caches in the freighterlinks, scoring some bonus cryotic in the icemines, some little puzzles, etc.  I genuinely really like how the ice mines look and would be cool if there was a reason to spend more time there, even if only a little tiny bit.
  • Friend had an idea that elaborated a little more on the ice mines idea: area turns into a mini exterminate to clear out the mines, then can free the solaris workers in there that could give some Solaris standing and/or cryotic from the ice they've been harvesting

 

2. Forcing the whole squad to board ships is bad:  Grineer RJ Assassinate nodes already had the functionality of being able to board a ship, run through the tileset, and complete the objective without these limitations. The objectives are easy enough for most players that it really only needs 1~2 people to finish anyway.  This a major part of the issue of taking the Railjack from Point A to Point B and abandoning it for the rest of the mission.  Friendship doors are also a nuisance.  

3. The Sentinel Problem: Not directly a RJ problem itself, but a new sentinel was released that's acquired from railjack content, but sentinels still struggle to survive in higher lv content, especially with all of the electric procs in Corpus RJ if you don't have a means of cleansing/negating the proc.  They need to have some major boosts to their survivability, otherwise people are just going to keep using things like Vulpaphyla that are functionally immortal.   If nothing else, it would be nice if there was a gear item to repair dead sentinels and make Djinn's revive mod universal for all sentinels.  Having both would give players the option of choosing to expend resources for faster revives or free revives at the cost of a mod slot + time.  Regen + Primed Regen still need to be fixed so that it works properly if players revives themselves or a new mission is started.  

4. Bring back Flux energy:   From a gameplay point of view its making people feel forced to use frames with high energy pools and/or abilites focused around energy restoration and generally allows for the near-unlimited spam of railjack abilities.  From a lorewise point of view, it doesn't really make sense to use the warframe's energy at all either.  Overall it's a change that wasnt really necessary or wanted.

5.Desired QoL Features: 

• we should be able to see how much revolite, munitions, etc we have in the tactical menu
• better reward incentives: some of them feel a little lackluster:
  • things like the '100~400 endo' rewards
  • more suitable spots for Oberon/Ash parts - the grind for these frame parts are significantly worse than before, especially considering the ease at which Oberon parts were previously acquired.  They generally are pretty underwhelming rewards for higher lvl areas as well, especially since many players running those missions have no need for those parts
• Plexus modding screen doesnt show how many times its been forma'd (unless I'm blind and missed it), and it should
• having the ability to chose whose railjack to use regardless of who is hosting.  Sometimes hosts don't have the most stable connection but squad wants to use their railjack for one reason or another
• we need a better way to find/see loot that's floating out in space - namely the resources and such that don't have markers of any kind
• ability to change reticle color/brightness for the Railjack's turrets to help with visibility (and necramechs too while we're at it)
• being able to configure everything with the railjack from our orbiters.  We can board our railjack and start missions from our orbiters, so we should be able to configure them from there too
• ability to set waypoints from the railjack while piloting/gunning that the whole squad can see
• let us access the arsenal in the Railjack when there are no active objectives. Since this was apparently repurposed to be the new spot for the turrets, probably would need a different spot for it now though.

 

[Vaml77]

Nice feedback!

Me and others here on the forum have warned DE many times about this. The time spent and the money invested was only to downgrade railjack, which now boils down to a means of transport between points and with conflict using almost nonexistent railjack. As for the flow, we also warned and nothing was done.

Three things that need to be removed or go back to what it was ... remove the defense, extermination missions and return to the skirmish missions. As for orphix, there are people who like it (I believe it is a very small number of players). It will only serve to level up necramechs in the future. And the new mods that are faction-oriented, forcing us to always change to the desired faction, which is quite annoying and inconvenient.

I hope DE will review all of this because the way railjack is is dead.