Railjack heading in the right/wrong direction?

[STUVash]

Even if it meant reducing the number of enemies and making them stronger so that each enemies are worth 5 instead, I'd still wouldn't remove the freedom that Skirmish had.

At least now we know why it is the way it is. The honesty is greatly appreciated.
I suppose there are ways to make me like Corpus Railjack a bit more, if I make it so the mission seems to have more Railjack than Core Warframe in it, it gets  more enjoyable.
I still prefer Skirmish but I suppose the real problem for me come from the Really fast and short objectives.
In Veil Proxima Corpus it Can look like this sometimes.

-"Destroy 3 Security nodes" => they get blasted in an instant, it's like they weren't there to begin with.
And
-Disable 1 Priority Target => it takes a bit of time but it's not that long either.
Or
-"Destroy 2 Crewships"

Then you're done with Railjack, you go into Capital Ship.
Even the very first Railjack mission on Earth has more Railjack objectives than that. First mission is 2 Crewships and 35 fighters to destroy.

I get the idea is to make most missions take a similar time, so if your mission is both Railjack and a Core Warframe mission. One of the two will be shorter than usual if not both.
And since some mission like Exterminate are already shorter than Endless missions, you could want to avoid shortening the Core Warframe one.
It also wouldn't be possible to shorten a Defense or Orphix mission since it's Endless.
Yet I still think Exterminate and Volatile could have been treated differently.

There's probably multiple ways to go about AI Count, some better than others.
 

Révélation

1) "Stronger enemies" for fewer enemies is a good idea and can be applied for Space combat aswell. It's already the case with Crewship I assume but as a way to really cut the cost on Railjack Space Combat temporarily we could take it a step further and double down on the idea. Players don't like enemies that take forever to die on ground except some bosses but maybe for Railjack Space Combat it would be more appealing.

Like a Special Crewship enemy (worth 5 usual Crewships) you can't board so that you don't have to meet other AIs, with multiple parts protecting it that you can remove with firepower from guns and/or by planting a bomb through the use of Archwing near a weakpoint that you'd have to discover while fighting it and/or by scanning it.

If done right, the multiple parts of the missions, Point Of Interest, Space Combat and Core Warframe mission can rotate their AI Count respectively.
There would be a priority system, so that one part of the map could call for more AIs to be used. If so, the other parts would have less enemies there. Once the wave of higher number of enemies died AND if the other parts are done fighting their LowCost sequence (like the Special Crewship for Space Combat) we'd rotate.
Space Combat would have more enemies, Core Warframe would have less enemies for a while, then we rotate again.

One could think that rotating the places where enemies spawn one after another might let players have a better control on where enemies spawn and thus regulate the difficulty. Which is true but not entirely correct. The difficulty is technically higher for everyone regardless of whether or not they understand how it works.
If there are space fighters or a Crewship, you can't ignore them so you split, you leave at least one pilot to flee away from the enemy.

If the Special Crewship is destroyed and the system is waiting on the Core Warframe part to finish their round, the Railjack Crew can Teleport or give a hand to the Away Crew through the use of Tactical Ability Kinesis. They could also use that time to loot around or use the Forge. Maybe some members of the Away Crew might need to come back to the ship to help with some Space Combat or even the forge itself.

And once the rotation occurs, every parts should be played properly again.

 

Révélation

2) Assuming the problem is to have AI on multiple locations. Instead of locking all Railjack, why not just lock the other Point of Interests for the duration of the Core Warframe mission.
While it'd be fun and efficient to be able to go to an Ice Mine while others are in the Capital Ship, most of the mission should be around the Capital Ship, If locking Point Of Interests mean having enough performance for the Core Warframe mission and Space Combat outside, that seems more interesting to me. But only devs can tell.

 

Révélation

3) There are more experimental routes that they already started to explore like the OP-Link. I'm not expecting them to go that way but technically you could solve the AI count issue by splitting 2 squads calling for assistance in their mission.
You'd have either 2 squads who started Space Combat at different places (not same map) or 1 squad starting Railjack and 1 squad on ground mission like they showed at the Tennocon.

If there's already 1 ground mission squad, Railjack squad gets alot of space combat, kinda like Skirmish but more oriented around Capital Ship. Tennocon was talking about a Disruptive Field slowing Railjack Squad progress needing Fish Team, it's a decent representation of what could be in this scenario.

If there are 2 Space Combat squads looking for OP-Link assistance, the two could help each other, if no ground squads are available. Mid mission, they'd get some voicelines from Cy. each will Conveniently find something that could help the other.

The roles are chosen randomly upon finding op-link assistance.
One is helping by luring most of the fighters to them, they won't have the ability to board their Capital Ship. They'd have more Space Combat to do until they're allowed to board their Capital Ship. This would justify not having that many Space Combat to do for the other squad.

And the other is doing the current Railjack Corpus mission we have, very few Space Combat and a Core Warframe mission.
If the Core Warframe oriented squad is done sooner than the Space Combat squad, they get to extract before them but the Space Combat squad gets the right to fire at a defenseless Capital Ship with weakpoints exposed. Putting an end to the mission with some bonus reward given to each for giving OP-link assistance.

This way, both have no AI Count issue, and the Corpus Railjack would make more sense.

Of course, the three can also be combined.

[CoalitionOfGears]

3 minutes ago, Vit0Corleone said:

So you want challenge and coordinated co-op.

That would be great, but outside of possible future raids and the semi co-op that already exists for optimized farming, it's just not DE's focus I don't think.

They are clearly catering for the 90% casual, not the 10% that want that. Or whatever is the ratio.

Casual co-op is a thing, too. It doesn't need to be challenging, it only needs to incentivise player interaction in order to achieve a goal. We kinda had that in the first iteration of RJ - the best way to do it was in a two-man squad, where the pilot needed the engineer to replenish flux, ammo, take care of repairs, whereas the engi needed the pilot to do the mission. It wasn't really challenging once you've learnt the ropes/built a proper ship, though, was it?

While I personally do want challenge, I don't consider it mandatory, but it would be nice to have it as a legitimate option for a change. Hence the wave 5 threshold I mentioned. Isn't that a win-win scenario?

[Vit0Corleone]

5 minutes ago, STUVash said:

1) "Stronger enemies" for fewer enemies is a good idea and can be applied for Space combat aswell. It's already the case with Crewship I assume but as a way to really cut the cost on Railjack Space Combat temporarily we could take it a step further and double down on the idea.

That is what they did when Railjack was first released.

And the reason they mentioned was the same that is being discussed here, to keep the AI at manageable levels and yet keep some sense of challenge, they decided to make the enemies stronger as a way to balance things out. Less enemies, but stronger.

Lots of people complained, and eventually enemies got nerfed to the ground on the first revisit pass.

[STUVash]

il y a 7 minutes, Vit0Corleone a dit :

That is what they did when Railjack was first released.

And the reason they mentioned was the same that is being discussed here, to keep the AI at manageable levels and yet keep some sense of challenge, they decided to make the enemies stronger as a way to balance things out. Less enemies, but stronger.

Lots of people complained, and eventually enemies got nerfed to the ground on the first revisit pass.

Yeah I know, but I think the one I wrote was different probably ? You don't need to have tanky Space Fighters, nor does it make sense for a Crewship to tank 2 to 3 forward artillery shots considering the big cannon was made to be fired at them. But those were the basics.

Then we get introduced to Crewship with a shield, giving you some extra steps. This one would have even more steps to make up for the total lack of Space Fighters and AI inhabitant, some kind of Mini Boss for Space Combat. This is what I meant by doubling down on it for better performance, and it's only temporary like I explained.

[Vit0Corleone]

4 minutes ago, CoalitionOfGears said:

Casual co-op is a thing, too. It doesn't need to be challenging, it only needs to incentivise player interaction in order to achieve a goal. We kinda had that in the first iteration of RJ - the best way to do it was in a two-man squad, where the pilot needed the engineer to replenish flux, ammo, take care of repairs, whereas the engi needed the pilot to do the mission. It wasn't really challenging once you've learnt the ropes/built a proper ship, though, was it?

That is exactly the purpose of a challenge. It motivates you to build up, progress, improve your player skills, coordinate.

Once you did that, you have beaten the challenge.

If there's no challenge, there is little to no motivation to even bother with any of that, as is the case now.

And yes, RJ on its initial release was exactly that.

6 minutes ago, CoalitionOfGears said:

Casual co-op is a thing, too. It doesn't need to be challenging

You said "Now imagine a defense mission where the ground team of your squad actually struggles to defend the sleeping beauty". 

The scenario you described seems to call for *coordinated* challenging co-op, if you do mean struggling.

Non coordinated co-op is what we have throughout the whole game, it's basically a group of people each doing their own stuff.

[Ham_Grenabe]

I’d say—based on the issues DE explained—it’s going in no direction. The future of Railjack is the same as the present: normal, full-squad mission modes with brief space flight tasks happening before and/or after (or if you’re nostalgic, you cango to the Grineer proxima).

If that’s the case, maybe it means they’ll redirect personnel away from Railjack and toward other things. 

[CoalitionOfGears]

1 minute ago, Vit0Corleone said:

You said "Now imagine a defense mission where the ground team of your squad actually struggles to defend the sleeping beauty". 

Originally, yes, that's what I said. Afterwards I was offering a different solution, negotiating, or whatever you want to call it.

 

10 minutes ago, Vit0Corleone said:

The scenario you described seems to call for *coordinated* challenging co-op, if you do mean struggling.

I mean 'struggling' as in 'putting in potentially great effort', and 'co-operation' will suffice. The word 'coordination' in this game makes me think of Eidolons and I sure as hell don't want any more of that.

16 minutes ago, Vit0Corleone said:

Non coordinated co-op is what we have throughout the whole game, it's basically a group of people each doing their own stuff.

Since you're such a stickler for semantics, 'co-existence' is probably the word you were looking for with that definition... unless holding elevator doors for people is what passes as 'non-coordinated co-op' these days.

[DrBorris]

I find it hard to believe that the "right direction" was for Railjack to have as little traditional Warframe combat as possible.

From day one DE has said Railjack was going to be a thing to tie the game together, not a new content island. Because yes, that is exactly what "Railjack needs to have more Railjack" people are saying, they want Railjack to be its own thing, that is as close to a textbook definition of a content island as I can imagine. Having some mission types that have a larger focus on Railjack co-op gameplay is great, but I think that the focus of DE's development should be on integrating it into the game first. A good foundation first, space battles later.

 

Also Scott literally said "both". I don't know why this discussion has become "DE is removing the Railjack from Railjack! It is doomed! It is impossible that they would make multiple mission types!"

[Vit0Corleone]

18 minutes ago, CoalitionOfGears said:

Originally, yes, that's what I said. Afterwards I was offering a different solution, negotiating, or whatever you want to call it.

 

I mean 'struggling' as in 'putting in potentially great effort', and 'co-operation' will suffice. The word 'coordination' in this game makes me think of Eidolons and I sure as hell don't want any more of that.

Since you're such a stickler for semantics, 'co-existence' is probably the word you were looking for with that definition... unless holding elevator doors for people is what passes as 'non-coordinated co-op' these days.

I think I understand what you mean. I got side tracked by the word "struggling" there, which for me comes across as something different.

It sounds like what you're looking for is the co-op coordinated effort, not driven by the challenges the game presents to you, but rather driven by the motivation to do things efficiently, faster. Farm more, farm better. Did I get this right?

If that is the case, I think for your scenario what is really missing is a reward structure that supports that.

If the rewards are there and the gameplay is fun, people will do precisely that - optimize, coordinate - to milk the system as best as they can. This is what already happens on other game modes/systems I would say. 

[Lutesque]

10 minutes ago, DrBorris said:

I find it hard to believe that the "right direction" was for Railjack to have as little traditional Warframe combat as possible.

I mean... You say that but that's what Archwing and K-Drives Did...

 

[Vit0Corleone]

7 minutes ago, DrBorris said:

Because yes, that is exactly what "Railjack needs to have more Railjack" people are saying, they want Railjack to be its own thing, that is as close to a textbook definition of a content island as I can imagine

I don't see it that way. I think that wanting more Railjack doesn't have anything to do with content islands.

People just want their Railjack to be relevant. Why bother building the thing, grinding, optimizing, if it has little to no use.

It's the "I'm all dressed up and no where to go" syndrome all over again.

[DrBorris]

13 minutes ago, Vit0Corleone said:

I don't see it that way. I think that wanting more Railjack doesn't have anything to do with content islands.

People just want their Railjack to be relevant. Why bother building the thing, grinding, optimizing, if it has little to no use.

It's the "I'm all dressed up and no where to go" syndrome all over again.

All of the grinding for your Railjack is still very relevant in the Corpus missions. You don't need to have an objective saying "kill x fighters" to still need to kill fighters. In order to efficiently do the objectives leading up to the main on-foot objective of Corpus Railjack being able to keep the swarm at bay is basically necessary. The crew can make it feel like you are just using the Railjack as a taxi but the reality is that your crew are replacing co-op players. If you were in a full party you would need people doing Railjack combat, just like "old" Railjack.

The Railjack isn't just a taxi, its purpose may be to taxi people from A to B but in order to do so it still needs to be properly defended. Emergent gameplay is far better than an objective check-list. Nothing about Corpus Railjack makes me think DE is moving away from Railjkack's combat role, I don't know why people are so up in arms about a problem that doesn't even exist.

[Aldain]

1 hour ago, DrBorris said:

Nothing about Corpus Railjack makes me think DE is moving away from Railjkack's combat role, I don't know why people are so up in arms about a problem that doesn't even exist.

Honestly I think the only major gripe is how disconnected some of the ground missions can be from Railjack.

Like the transitioning to ground Exterminate/Defense missions and just turning the Railjack invincible rather than having to weigh the options of boots on the ground vs keeping the Railjack alive (though I'll be the first to say ground Defense was a bad choice, should have been something like Disruption instead at least).

Like I said in my earlier post, I don't think they have it wrong, I just think they didn't do it in the best way, but that's just me.

[Felsagger]

16 hours ago, vanaukas said:

it's the right direction,  

Agreed completely. 

DE discovered that Rail Jack can be good. This update proves it. Rail Jack is finding its way into the game giving great results but these are the first steps towards something great. DE is starting to play their own game. The activity and transitions are way better. 

The first Grineer maps may get a good revision too. They need to be crowded. I think RJ has a future because DE decided to put effort in it. Now I can dive into it in full force. This feels part of Warframe. 

 

[Loza03]

9 hours ago, Vit0Corleone said:

That is what they did when Railjack was first released.

And the reason they mentioned was the same that is being discussed here, to keep the AI at manageable levels and yet keep some sense of challenge, they decided to make the enemies stronger as a way to balance things out. Less enemies, but stronger.

Lots of people complained, and eventually enemies got nerfed to the ground on the first revisit pass.

As one of those people, I can justify why. Simply put, DE have painted themselves into a corner regarding enemies. Their neglect of balance has seriously limited the number of avenues they have for making enemies stronger in a way that's palatable. Enemies having massive healthbars and huge damage output in hitscan is hard, but it's not enjoyably so, since it often winds up locking out a lot of build diversity and has a tendency to wind up with 'Oh sorry, you're dead now, RNG said AI hit you for 5000 damage when your shield was down' with no ability to meaningfully to do anything about it.

If that wasn't bad enough, when you take into account how much cheese power players have, it's usually not even that, unless you make the enemies invulnerable to CC and able to see through invisibility. But at that point, you take away the value of powers because there's a bunch of much less cheesable powers that are getting screwed over too.

If I recall, one of Shys dev interviews had one of the devs (I can't remember which one) comment on this very problem. That they'd be interested in making better and more interesting AI, but they're pigeonholed out of it because of how little impact enemies have.

[32768]

I don't know. This all sounds very important, but since patch I wasn't able to launch my railjack without switching to solo mode. So solo/coop aspect sounds mostly irrelevant to me.

What is the point of farming and maxing your gear (railjack) if you can't even use it? I guess I'm waiting for railjack to die again so I can use my railjack again, but I don't really want railjack to die. Therefore I don't know, I was kind of ejected out of railjack stuff (not that I touched it very often anyway).

In my opinion they need to fix their matchmaking and let people play their game.

[bad4youLT]

14 hours ago, ShortCat said:

 

And what exactly is the design necessity in Volatile to be over 1000m large map, while main action is limited to just one room, while the other 900m are empty space players just rush through. This is nonsense design.

Play area size isn't the problem , its the AI that is . Host machine has to calculate everything and send that data to other machines that are connected to it by the network , meanwhile said other machines are predicting what might happen and wait for host machine data to compare and sync data , then that sync data has to be sent back to host machine .

This process happens in a fraction of second , data has to be constantly sync to all machines . Static area's take up very little of bandwidth resources , most of it is taken by player and AI positions in three dimensional space and interactions ( damage taken , affects , spawning , etc. ) .

Good example for this is Star Citizen , that game has bad netcode management , the bandwidth goes over its capacity sense the game tracks literally everything there , from player and AI position to damage states of ships and interactable objects like various pick ups . Basically junk data that player who isn't in render range cant see nore needs to see and it gets sent to the machine , this results in lag , rubberbanding , player disconections and eventually server crash .

[Voltage]

9 hours ago, Lutesque said:

I mean... You say that but that's what Archwing and K-Drives Did...

We had the Jordas Verdict. People seem to forget that Archwing had presence around the whole game and was even integrated into a Trial. I'm not sure why, but DE basically stripped away all Archwing content and now nobody plays it because there's no point. Railjack could be integrated like Archwing was in JV, but I doubt players would be thrilled to need to coordinate something instead of having the ability to blindfold themselves the whole mission and hardly fail.

[Lutesque]

8 minutes ago, Voltage said:

We had the Jordas Verdict. People seem to forget that Archwing had presence around the whole game and was even integrated into a Trial.

I wasn't around during the Trial Days 😝... 

9 minutes ago, Voltage said:

Railjack could be integrated like Archwing was in JV, but I doubt players would be thrilled to need to coordinate something instead of having the ability to blindfold themselves the whole mission and hardly fail.

That plus Archwing Mods are a huge pain to Farm for.

 

[Aadi880]

18 hours ago, fatpig84 said:

Pretty sure Grineer RJ already fixed the problem. Just make it so after killing X amount of RJ enemies, they will stop spawning.
Then you can spawn as much enemies as you want for indoor tilesets.

Or limit the tileset size, so you don't need to put that many mobs. Go for higher mob density rather than sprinkling a few dozen here or there.

 

17 hours ago, PhiThagRaid said:

AI limitations must be a lack of processing power or the speed at which the data regarding the AI's movements can be sent.

If it is lack of processing power that sounds like consoles holding back PCs, the range of PC specs are so broad that it's almost impossible to say resources are a problem for all systems, or they have very inefficient AI resource usage. 

If it is an internet speed issue, then this seems to be a hole that will be almost impossible to be dug out of. DE can't control other players' internet speeds and it seems like dedicated servers will never be a thing.

64 is the hard limit of Warframe's AI count. You cannot exceed that, under any circumstances.

This is a following trend in Video games. Whenever there is complex AI involved, the limit for engines such as Evolution and Source. 64 tends to be the limit.

In Grinner Skirmishes, there were little to no enemies inside the buildings or PoIs. In fact, I believe there was no more than 10. The pace of the ground troops were linked with the space troops. So, you would have to wait for the space troops to destroy the radiators and in that short delay, the game could respawn any entity you killed behind the door of your next ground objective.

The problem with exterminate and defense, is that the pace of the ground troop exceeds far more than any space troop could do. How? In an exterminate, you can just blaze through all tilesets, ignoring the enemies, and walk straight into extraction. You don't do it, but you could if you wanted. The game would have to spawn new AI units every tileset you walk in. And remember, there are 74-100 enemies to kill. You see the potential problem?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I Believe what could be done to solve this problem, is a "locked room" method. Lets take exterminate: All doors in your tilesets will be locked and each tileset will house 30 to 10 enemies. It doesn't matter which enemy you kill, the final enemy you kill will drop a key card that can be used to spawn enemies in the neighboring tileset as well as provide access to that tileset. That way, you no longer need to thin out your AI units. You can just respawn the AI units you killed into the other tilesets. No need to increase the cap if you can't, just move them around to artificially increase it.

Previously, Grinner skirmish missions set a pre-requisite, and that was blowing up the radiators to progress into the other PoI rooms. Something similar should be done for the Corpus missions as well.

[Aadi880]

Forum bug

[Aadi880]

triple post bruh...

[Voltage]

8 minutes ago, Lutesque said:

That plus Archwing Mods are a huge pain to Farm for.

That's because since all Archwings and Archweapons are in research/Deimos/Fortuna/Syndicates now, you aren't playing anything that drops them. When Archwing had to be grinded through Archwing missions, you got quite a lot of all the Archwing Mods. Archwing Mods are a pain now because there is absolutely no reason to even touch the missions because they offer 0 rewards otherwise.

[Lutesque]

1 minute ago, Voltage said:

That's because since all Archwings and Archweapons are in research/Deimos/Fortuna/Syndicates now, you aren't playing anything that drops them. When Archwing had to be grinded through Archwing missions, you got quite a lot of all the Archwing Mods. Archwing Mods are a pain now because there is absolutely no reason to even touch the missions because they offer 0 rewards otherwise.

Makes Sense.... 

[SneakyErvin]

I prefer the new setup, it feels more like an actual mission, while still keeping the option to spread out in the early phase of it. I wouldnt mind if they throw in some corpus skirmish missions aswell, but overall the new missions feel more structured and "real".

And with the shear power of the RJ now, I see little reason why they should design missions only so people can split up. I mean, when you run veil grineer missions now, the enemy fleet is more or less annihilated before you even reach the indoor objectives. So what reason is there for anyone to ever sit in space at that point in the mission? Sitting there waiting for a 1-shot destructible to pop on the outside isnt very thrilling. But hold on, when you can spread out you get to wait for... 4 whole 1-shot destructibles to spawn, 2 at each objective! I cant take the excitement!