Railjack Crew: Capture vs. Defeat

[Steel_Rook]

Have you had a Railjack crewmate downed during a mission and counted out before you can get to them? They spend the rest of the mission sprawled on the floor with the rest of us having to step over their limp body. It got me thinking - could we have some way to bring them back to full performance? Obviously, we can just let them respawn on their own, or make them invincible, or leave them in bleedout indefinitely, but... Could we do something more interesting and involving? Thus, I came up with the idea of enemy boarders "capturing" downed AI crew members, rather than just killing them outright - with the option of saving them! Here's how this would work:

 

The initial defeat: The system would work like it does now up to a point. Boarders board your Railjack and shoot down one of your crew. That crew member goes into bleedout with a 20-second countdown. If they are not revived, however, they don't just "die." Instead, the crew member is teleported off your Railjack. At that moment, a brand new and unique Crew Ship enters the map - a "Brig Ship." The Brig Ship would be very similar to a Crew Ship, with one exception - one of your Crew Mates would be on board.

The rescue: The Brig Ship would work almost the same as a Crew Ship, with a few exceptions. As mentioned above, the Brig Ship would contain a "brig" - a jail area with a locked door requiring the player to find and hack a console to open it. The brig would contain one or more Railjack AI crew members - all the crew members "killed" up to that point. Unlocking the door would release them into the Brig Ship at large, assisting the player in combat. Once all human players have left the Brig Ship, all rescued AI crew would teleport back to the Railjack and resume their duties.

The destruction: Players are unable to "destroy" a Brig Ship before all Crew Members are rescued. Sabotaging its reactor or shooting it with the Forward Artillery would permanently disable the Brig Ship, killing all crew, but would not destroy the ship itself. A player would still need to infiltrate it and free the AI crew therein, before the Brig Ship will explode. This is done to prevent human players "team-killing" each other's AI crew, either intentionally or accidentally. It's also done as a safety net to make ship identification less of a life-or-death situation.

The details: AI crew member can be captured any number of times. If a Brig Ship is already on the map, captured AI crew members are teleported there. If its brig is already breached when another AI crew member is captured, it will re-lock itself and would need to be breached again. Any players or rescued AI crew trapped in the Brig when it relocks itself are forcibly returned to the Railjack. Destroying Brig Ships and rescuing Crew offers no reward whatsoever, beyond the enemies defeated in the process. The reward for destroying a Brig Ship is getting your AI Crew back.

 

Basically, the idea here is to incorporate the "death" of AI crew on the Railjack into the mission's own objectives. Let them die to boarders, let them get captured, let players put in extra work to get them back. I feel that would make losing crew less painful while offering a bit more physicality and a bit more engagement.

[Lokidus_Prime]

Certainly an interesting idea that I personally wouldn't mind see implemented.  Could even be taken a step further where if you don't rescue your crew from the Brig Ship before completing the mission, then they get temporarily locked and you get a special rescue mission to go save them before you can assign them to your railjack crew again.  Could also have something like a loyalty level that slowly ranks up as you take them on missions, rescue them and such, and the higher their loyalty level the more efficient they are, maybe could even unlock certain abilities they can use or something. But I could see why some people might not like my ideas lol.

[Steel_Rook]

1 hour ago, Lokidus_Prime said:

Certainly an interesting idea that I personally wouldn't mind see implemented.  Could even be taken a step further where if you don't rescue your crew from the Brig Ship before completing the mission, then they get temporarily locked and you get a special rescue mission to go save them before you can assign them to your railjack crew again.

That's an interesting idea, yes. Borrow a design concept from XCOM, where fielding multiple sets of soldiers is necessary in case your other ones get wounded, kidnapped or killed. I worry a little bit, though, because that technically creates a harsher penalty for AI crew member death. Right now, losing an AI crew member is just inconvenient - no different from losing a pet. It's annoying until the end of the mission, but then they come back on its own. Creating a more severe penalty by locking out a crew member might be a birdge too far. My hope here was to make failure into part of the gameplay loop in the hopes of making people less leery of losing crew. It's a delicate balance, at the end of the day. I want players to be willing to lose a pilot or a security ops without worry about consequences too much.

 

1 hour ago, Lokidus_Prime said:

Could also have something like a loyalty level that slowly ranks up as you take them on missions, rescue them and such, and the higher their loyalty level the more efficient they are, maybe could even unlock certain abilities they can use or something. But I could see why some people might not like my ideas lol.

AI Crew progression is something I'd love to see. I'd be shocked if the Rank 10 Command weren't that. The ability to level them up and improve their stats and maybe even unlock hidden powers would be really nice. I'm honestly kind of surprised that's not a thing already, but DE do seem to be struggling to keep up with Railjack development. I assume we'll get a progression system of some kind. As I said in another thread, though, I'd like a system where progression only goes forward, never back. I'm leery of using a "loyalty" system because it's such a terrible inclusion for Kubrows. I'd rather use a simpler XP/Affinity system, where they either earn XP for stuff they do or passively off of what I earn.

We'd also need to consider what to do with crew who aren't on the ship, as well. My full complement only comes with me when I solo, with crew going away when players join me. On the one hand, that makes sense - they only level up when they're on the ship, and they're mostly on the ship to help solo and small teams anyway. On the other hand, this does offer incentive for NOT playing with other people, which is problematic all on its own.

[Lokidus_Prime]

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Creating a more severe penalty by locking out a crew member might be a birdge too far. My hope here was to make failure into part of the gameplay loop in the hopes of making people less leery of losing crew. It's a delicate balance, at the end of the day. I want players to be willing to lose a pilot or a security ops without worry about consequences too much.

Yep, that's the reason why I said some people might not like the idea for very valid reasons.

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

AI Crew progression is something I'd love to see. I'd be shocked if the Rank 10 Command weren't that. The ability to level them up and improve their stats and maybe even unlock hidden powers would be really nice. As I said in another thread, though, I'd like a system where progression only goes forward, never back.

Shoulda clarified that in my first post that the loyalty idea was intended be forward-progression only, cuz yeah, having something that slowly ranks up passively being able to regress would be pretty frustrating.

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

We'd also need to consider what to do with crew who aren't on the ship, as well. My full complement only comes with me when I solo, with crew going away when players join me. On the one hand, that makes sense - they only level up when they're on the ship, and they're mostly on the ship to help solo and small teams anyway. On the other hand, this does offer incentive for NOT playing with other people, which is problematic all on its own.

That is certainly a problem with Command Intrinsic in general, that it doesn't really have any incentive for people who primarily play with full-player squads.  It's very nature makes it tough to come up with viable solutions as it's focused on enhancing solo play.  I don't think an AI crew loyalty system would really make much of a difference for incentive to use it - it would benefit those who already use to system, and probably not have much impact on those who don't.  Still not a great predicament, but I think Command Intrinsic as a whole would need to be adjusted to provide incentives for those who prefer multiplayer before addressing other things like a loyalty system. If DE ever does that though, I just hope they do so without messing up what already works for solo/partial-player squads.

[continue]

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

We'd also need to consider what to do with crew who aren't on the ship, as well. My full complement only comes with me when I solo, with crew going away when players join me. On the one hand, that makes sense - they only level up when they're on the ship, and they're mostly on the ship to help solo and small teams anyway. On the other hand, this does offer incentive for NOT playing with other people, which is problematic all on its own.

affinity sort of addresses this in dividing your affinity among your equipped weapons. you could possibly do something similar thing for crew. the only issue there would be you would still be incentivized to play solo with a single crew member if you only had a single crew member to level. could possibly tune it with minor scaling based on the number of squadmates or crewmembers present.

overall i like the idea and don't think it would be too intrusive or a point of friction since crew are primarily for undersized pre-made squads or solo

[DrivaMain]

This should come with a good incentive or crew members will suffer the same fate as companions (Kubrows in particular). Too much maintenance for such little gain.

 

[Steel_Rook]

11 hours ago, DrivaMain said:

This should come with a good incentive or crew members will suffer the same fate as companions (Kubrows in particular). Too much maintenance for such little gain.

Keep in mind that what I'm proposing is in addition to the current system, rather than replacing it. Currently, if you ignore a downed AI crew mate, they just disappear for the rest of the mission. In my proposal, they would do the same, except they'd also be available for rescue inside a newly-arrived Brig Ship. I understand that not everyone will feel like bothering to rescue them, but at least some will. If people don't bother to revive their downed crew, then nothing changes because that part of the system remains as-is. I personally fell that's an overall "win."

 

12 hours ago, continue said:

affinity sort of addresses this in dividing your affinity among your equipped weapons. you could possibly do something similar thing for crew. the only issue there would be you would still be incentivized to play solo with a single crew member if you only had a single crew member to level. could possibly tune it with minor scaling based on the number of squadmates or crewmembers present.

Hmm... We could actually go either the Focus route or the Mass Effect route. Let me explain.

The Focus Route would treat the Plexus as though it has a lens. Every X% of Plexus Affinity generates some amount of Crew Affinity. The player can then manually distribute this Crew Affinity among AI crew members of their choice. That way players can earn overall Crew progression just for playing Railjack regardless of whether they they're solo or on a team.

The Mass Effect route would be similar, except less controlled. Any Affinity gained on the Plexus is duplicated onto each AI crew member assigned, whether they were in the ship or not. That is to say - all three assigned AI crew members will gain XP even on a team of four human players where the AI crew aren't on board.

Now, one might argue that this is "unfair" since we're able to level up AI crew members without having them on the ship. This is true, but it's also consistent with Railjack. We can, after all, level up our own Railjack without ever using it, by playing on other people's much better ships until we get a MK3 item for every slot. Moreover, we can level up weapons without ever firing them in anger or even bringing them out via objective XP and Tenno Affinity. It seems fair we'd be able to do the same with AI crew, with a bonus of not offering superior progress for playing solo.

 

12 hours ago, Lokidus_Prime said:

I think Command Intrinsic as a whole would need to be adjusted to provide incentives for those who prefer multiplayer before addressing other things like a loyalty system.

Eh, I'm not sure that's necessary. I personally see nothing wrong with a branch of progression aimed at solo players and small teams which does nothing for full teams. In general, I like it when co-op games scale with team size, and options like these are a good way of doing it. The whole "crew" system is a pretty good idea overall. It's what a lot of L4D clones do, and what Payday 2 did particularly well. The fewer the human players on the team, the more the AI will do to assist. The more the people on the team, the more each has to do. It balances out. In fact, I've been playing Deep Rock Galactic of late, and I swear by Bosco - the solo helper flying drone. It goes away when even a single other person is on the team, but MAN is it helpful when nobody else is around.

Basically, I see the AI team as a REPLACEMENT for a human crew, rather than an addition to it. I see Command as an Intrinsics tree most useful to those of us who don't play public matchmaking, and it works fine the way it is. The more it helps full teams of players, the less it fulfils its original goal of helping small teams and solo players disproportionately.

[Lokidus_Prime]

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Basically, I see the AI team as a REPLACEMENT for a human crew, rather than an addition to it. I see Command as an Intrinsics tree most useful to those of us who don't play public matchmaking, and it works fine the way it is. The more it helps full teams of players, the less it fulfils its original goal of helping small teams and solo players disproportionately.

I definitely agree that it's meant to be a replacement for a human crew. I personally don't see it as a problem that it doesn't have much incentive for people who prefer full human crews, but just said what I said based on the concern of the loyalty level idea incentivizing solo play + people who expressed that they like the AI crews but don't have reason to use them because they play with full human crews.  Would certainly be cool if there was a way to accommodate both playstyles with out one trivializing the initial intent of command intrinsic, but that's certainly much easier said than done lol.