Call of the Tempestarii: Rating & Review

[Joezone619]

Overall Rating: 2/10

P.S. If I don't mention a section of the update here, its because I either have not tried it, or have no intentions to based on the update notes and existing info. I will also be trying to keep bugs and glitchs out of my ratings, as those will get patched regardless.

Quest

The quest was ridiculously short compared to almost every other quest, including the tutorial. That said, It had decent story, but lacks any form of attention to detail. There is also a lot of technical talk, which would be nice if we understood any of it, to me though it just sounds like conversation filler rather then actual speech. We have this new character introduced to us called "Vala", but no backstory or anything. There is also no confirmation if she is an introduction to corpus lichs, or going to be a recurring character.

Another point I'd like to make, refers back to the deadlock protocol. That quest's ending is very confusing. Does parvos die? Does he escape? Is he a friend or a foe? Dialog at the end seems to point towards he is a friend, but this new quest and other parts of the game seem to point towards him being foe. I bring this up because this new quest draws on the conclusions of the deadlock protocol... which conclusions are confusing and easily misinterpreted. To this day I'm not sure if parvos is a friend or foe, he talks about fortuna and eudico, offering you all a seat on his board of directors, but he's also supposed to be our enemy?

I'd rate the quest a 4/10, its decently made, but is built upon existing story, lore, and quests that we still don't know the conclusions of or the answers to. Its also very short, and for as cool as it is, this shorter length takes away from the feeling quickly once you realize its over already.

 

Void Storms

I believe this is an example of a great idea, bad execution. Having void fissures in railjack does give us more reasons to play railjack, and i believe this is one correct way to make railjack more relevant. Unfortunately, the corpus proxima update ruined a lot of what made railjack fun, and now most players, myself included, deem railjack as just a mission taxi. The missions are 10% railjack 90% normal mission, all the railjack does is bring you to the door, that's it.

On top of railjack missions just being glorified normal mission to most players, the actually mission types used are either very slow going, or get old quickly, making them all very boring. Defense is incredibly slow and uninteresting to me, and orphix is its own whole can of worms, locking 90% of your gear and being forced into using something turns a lot of players off, myself included, and so until that gear is unlocked and able to be used, I refuse to play orphix.

But to get back to void storms, the mission types railjack has are all just boring or uninteresting, we need a survival mission type, a spy, sabotage, all the other mission types we normally have. Everyone has their own preferences on what missions they like, but from what i gather, i think most of us agree that the mission types railjack has are very limited.

I'd have to rate void storms a 3.5/10. Its a step in the right direction, but the ground its based on is flawed. Railjack just doesn't have enough mission types, and the ones it does have get very boring and uninteresting very quickly. On top of this, railjack isn't its own gamemode anymore, with it being 10% space and 90% normal mission, we are basically just playing normal missions but getting to see how we got in, making these "void storms" feel like just normal fissures.

 

Sevagoth

I haven't played sevagoth himself yet, but i did do the quest, and the quest has you using his shadow at one point, so this is mostly based off of that, and how his abilities look on paper. Lets start with how his shadow plays, this is essentially just a 4th ability weapon to me. The abilities of the shadow are pretty pointless, with the 1st ability being the most useful, being able to drag enemies closer. I'm still not sure what the shadow's 3rd ability does, if it does anything, but the second ability is essentially just a dash, which you could've just bullet jumped and cleared without spending energy.

Now for sevagoth's main abilities, his 1st looks like a simple AoE cone damage effect, this is always limited in how useful it is, but its a decent first ability from what it looks like. His 2end ability is a spherical AoE damage, which just based on that makes the first ability pointless, as the first ability can't go 360 and this 2end ability seems like can. The 3rd ability is an AoE slowness ability, which can be useful with enough range, and we have already discussed his 4th ability.

Now this provides an issue, his 3rd ability likely is going to be the most useful, as you have to direct his 4th ability personally, and can't use the normal 1,2, and 3 while doing so. His 3rd ability is based on range, but you also need strength for his 1st 2end and 4th, meaning it looks like either build toward slowing enemies, or killing them, guess which one players will choose.

I am also beginning to get tired of new warframes always having a second gimmick to energy, sevagoths seems to be soul power, but i don't know much about this gimmick, so i won't including it in my rating, just the fact that new frames always have one, and old frames don't. Which brings me to another point, never thought i'd say it, but I am getting tired of them always making new warframes. They need to go back and bring the older frames up to speed, like frost, hydroid, revenant, nyx, all of those have fallen behind and don't have good cohesion with their abilities, aside from maybe frost.

I'd rate sevagoth a 5.5/10. New warframes are always nice, but we still need reworks for a lot of the older frames. The newer ones are always getting these new "gimmicks" like soul power, or no energy costs only cooldown, or using shields instead of energy. These gimmicks are interesting, but when half of the warframes have them, they lose their value a bit.

 

 

In Conclusion

I can see that DE are trying to make better updates, but their mistakes of the past are coming back to haunt them. In my opinion, i think they need to take a step back, and re-evaluate the current state of warframe, and see where they should go from here. Personally, i think they need to go back, fix up the free roam areas, fix up railjack, and just in general, update the rest of the game before making anything new first.

 

[Myscho]

Warframes Creed: Space Pirates edition, now DE need to add option for AI that sing songs

[Zoero]

0/10. Won't bother to close D2 at this point.

quest is short, the new weapon in the quest seems to be MIA. Frame is nothing to write home about. Helminth is already eating it after i bought it with plat. The void storms are a MASSIVE and i mean ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE 20000000% waste of time. railjack portion takes longer than a regular RJ mission, on top of that you only open ONE relic. 

To compare, doing that solo is a good 10-15 minutes. In that time you can open 3 relics on survival.

 

Void storm rewards are garbage on top of that. Apart from frame/weapon which lets be honest, once you have them you dont want to see that again, what else is good? endo? pfft. please. radiant relics? do we need more relics? I already have more relics than il ever be able to open.

 

in conclusion, 0/10. If i could give it negative 10 out of 10 i would.

[CephalonCarnage]

I'll tell you one thing about the new void storm missions:

 

FLASH!

BANG!

FLASHFLASH FLASH! FLASHHY BANG FLASH!

 

I coulnd't see a thing half the time. And there seems to be soem mechanic where it does massive damage, I joined a squad on their RJ and before I could do anything there was a massive blast and I was on my ass with the "press x to revive" dialog showing. The stuff about reactant is confusing - whilst I read reactant drops (from ground troops) are shared, this didn't appear to work reliably, possibly because I joined one RJ where the host already had picked some up, so he was good to go, but the rest of us couldn't pick up enough to get to 10 once he had his quota filled.

[Steel_Rook]

1 hour ago, Joezone619 said:

The missions are 10% railjack 90% normal mission, all the railjack does is bring you to the door, that's it.

I keep hearing this metric cited, and it keeps making me wonder - did you guys play anything past Neptune Proxima? There's plenty of Railjack on Pluto and in the Vail. Easily as much as the 80 fighters in Skirmish, though perhaps a bit less so now that fighter spawns aren't infinite.

[Joezone619]

1 minute ago, Steel_Rook said:

I keep hearing this metric cited, and it keeps making me wonder - did you guys play anything past Neptune Proxima? There's plenty of Railjack on Pluto and in the Vail. Easily as much as the 80 fighters in Skirmish, though perhaps a bit less so now that fighter spawns aren't infinite.

perhaps its a bit of an exaggeration, but the point still stands, these missions are mostly just "take your railjack to the door and enter" instead of fun space battles. They're basicly just normal missions at this point and it kills the fun for me.

[Vernoc]

vor 2 Stunden schrieb Joezone619:

Overall Rating: 4/10

thats more then i would give

[Steel_Rook]

1 hour ago, Joezone619 said:

perhaps its a bit of an exaggeration, but the point still stands, these missions are mostly just "take your railjack to the door and enter" instead of fun space battles. They're basicly just normal missions at this point and it kills the fun for me.

But they aren't, though - that's my point. The space layer only pauses for the main objective. The entire rest of the time, there's a space battle going on outside. Volatile even has a "destroy 3 Crew Ships" requirement as part of its critical path. Moreover, Corpus fighters are substantially higher level than Grineer fighters of the same general bracket, which is never as clear as in Veil Proxima. Grineer ships cap out at ~30ish. Corpus ships go up to 50-60, and the difference is not academic. My Railjack can sleepwalk its way past pretty much any Skirmish mission with no real breaches but for Boarders. I need to fight for real in Corpus Veil Proxima missions because the fighters hit substantially harder and move substantially faster.

Sure, playing solo does take a chunk out of that action as the player HAS to disembark and clear out Points of Interest, but this is no different from Skirmish mission containing 2 Points of Interest. A single player can afford to disembark and hope the AI crew can handle themselves - which they usually can. A team of players can usually split up, with one player staying + AI staying in the ship and another doing ground combat. This is precisely how I've always done Railjack even as far back as Skirmish. One player manages the Railjack, one player flies off and does the Points of Interest on their own, one player handles boarding Crew Ships, returning to the Railjack just to use the Archwing Slingshot.

Previously I would have argued it's even worse, because Corpus Proxima missions never stop spawning fighters, but that appears to have changed with Call of the Sea Shanties. I'll obviously have to give it more time and figure out just how much of a reserve the Corpus have before they stop spawning, so maybe the game mode WILL come down to mostly ground missions. However, prior to this patch I'd almost always spend more time in space than on the ground because I need to take out the Crew Ships shredding my Railjack that my crew can't handle on their own. I see Corpus Proxima as not terribly different from a Skirmish mission with a more substantial Point of Interest. In fact, even more so considering I used to just troll Grineer fighters with Tether in ways that don't really work any more, with the move to Warframe energy.

 

On Call of the Tempestarii:
It IS a very short quest. I finished it literally in be-tween making these posts. The ending is unsatisfying as I was hoping for something more significant than what we got, but that one "Below Below" moment is worth its weight in gold. I'm an old cynical bastard, and I still had to applaud that segment. It's a very simple premise from a gameplay perspective - basically an arena fight you can't lose. However, between the sad story of the VILLAIN and the beautiful music, it's an absolute standout moment for me. That and it has Railjack Spy in it - which works. The quest feels very rushed and undercooked, but I'm eager to see more.

[Vaml77]

overall 0/10

too short, weird and with no conclusions.....who is valla? Friend or enemy? 

I'm so disappointed with the update in general that I don't even want to play it anymore ...

[houselyrander]

I just want to know why it's a Solo quest. I think the last Multiplayer quest to be released was Glast Gambit, which was back in December 2016. That's over 4 years ago. And if this quest is short and uncomplicated... what's preventing this from being Multiplayer?

[Talon881]

Liked the song, dug the atmosphere the quest had, would VASTLY enjoy having the energy field that the Temp's 'Jack skin has as an option for the other skins because the actual ship beneath the energy field looks completely overdone. 

New frame? Only tried the bit in the quest with him, not one I will be spending plat or focus on grinding out. If I get the parts through other play, sure.

Storywise? Antagonist has no build up or background to care about her, forced retreats from a ship type I had blown up six separate times in the last hour? Laughable. The Temp itself has some interest, I liked the storms, *loved* the artstyle and new visuals it gave the space missions.

Overall, like damn near *everything* DE does these days, two steps forward, three back. 

Also Orphix missions are still ass. 

[Cerikus]

6 hours ago, Joezone619 said:

Quest

The quest was ridiculously short compared to almost every other quest, including the tutorial. That said, It had decent story, but lacks any form of attention to detail. There is also a lot of technical talk, which would be nice if we understood any of it, to me though it just sounds like conversation filler rather then actual speech. We have this new character introduced to us called "Vala", but no backstory or anything. There is also no confirmation if she is an introduction to corpus lichs, or going to be a recurring character.

Another point I'd like to make, refers back to the deadlock protocol. That quest's ending is very confusing. Does parvos die? Does he escape? Is he a friend or a foe? Dialog at the end seems to point towards he is a friend, but this new quest and other parts of the game seem to point towards him being foe. I bring this up because this new quest draws on the conclusions of the deadlock protocol... which conclusions are confusing and easily misinterpreted. To this day I'm not sure if parvos is a friend or foe, he talks about fortuna and eudico, offering you all a seat on his board of directors, but he's also supposed to be our enemy?

I'd rate the quest a 4/10, its decently made, but is built upon existing story, lore, and quests that we still don't know the conclusions of or the answers to. Its also very short, and for as cool as it is, this shorter length takes away from the feeling quickly once you realize its over already.

At the end of Deadlock protocol Parvos escapes and takes over the Corpus. He is leading them now, that's why they are becoming such a great threat.

I feel like Vala got a very nice backstory. She was working on a Corpus vessel when it got destroyed. She is sure it was the Tempestarii.
She was blown into space in her exosuit and was drifting alone among rubble and dead crewmates. She probably went a bit mad. As she was drifting she dreamt about her dead sisters singing. That's the song.
Vala is focused only on revenge. That's why she wants the Tempestarii so much.
Since she is able to save herself in the end by escaping to granum void and is met by Parvos himself there, I guess she is going to be the number one Corpus lich.

[Dilema_Prime]

(vet player this is my first post ever made)

In my opinion, the whole music was cringe wordy and out of place, shanties belong in the sea, space should be something more soothing more like interstellar and when you turn into shadow more like devil may cry, industrial type stuff.

Idk where these companies are getting their art directors but to me this seems like they got some woke ass, incompetent junior non binary fresh out of uni to come up with these ideas.

As a vet player all I see is DE trying to trend, Nigthwave you have the stereotypical black woman speaking on the stereotypical condescending manner (like a black person from the hood) babbling about dreamers because this was back when Trump wanted to prevent illegal migrants from crossing the border and the whole Daca and the Dreamers stuff was all you would ear from the mainstream media, and DE obviously had to drink some of that juice.

Fortuna is copy paste from Plains but with corpus.

Daemos is copy paste from Plains but with infested + Mechs

Railjack is copy paste regular missions + Linear ship mission that gets you to the door of regular mission

PS: they are hiding comments on their youtube channel, only shill comments are being allowed

Very disappointed tbh

[DrivaMain]

Just now, Dilema_Prime said:

What you call tinfoil hat regular people call common sense, you should try it sometime.

Where is your actual proof on this statement? This is a pretty bold claim.

 

14 minutes ago, Dilema_Prime said:

As a vet player all I see is DE trying to trend, Nigthwave you have the stereotypical black woman speaking on the stereotypical condescending manner (like a black person from the hood) babbling about dreamers because this was back when Trump wanted to prevent illegal migrants from crossing the border and the whole Daca and the Dreamers stuff was all you would ear from the mainstream media, and DE obviously had to drink some of that juice.

 

If you can’t find it. That means you’re just talking nonsense. 

 

15 minutes ago, Dilema_Prime said:

Fortuna is copy paste from Plains but with corpus.

Daemos is copy paste from Plains but with infested + Mechs

Railjack is copy paste regular missions + Linear ship mission that gets you to the door of regular mission

With this mentality, you can say most video games is a reskin of other video games :
 

• Devil May Cry is a reskin of God of War but with Demons.
• Overwatch is a reskin of TF2 but futuristic.

With this mindset... Why play video games at all?

[Joezone619]

I just realized how much more the song in the quest interests me over the actual update.

[Colyeses]

9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

But they aren't, though - that's my point. The space layer only pauses for the main objective. The entire rest of the time, there's a space battle going on outside.

That's the problem though. The fact that the space layer pauses at all during a space layer mission is jarring and disappointing. When Railjack was expanded, people were hoping to get more Railjack, but instead, we still just have Skirmish. The only thing that changed is that in the new missions, you do Skirmish, then a regular mission afterward. At that point, just the Skirmish itself would be closer to what Railjack players want. 

The Railjack reworks were focused on making the gamemode 'less Railjack': Less squad interdependency, less space combat, less material value to the Railjack itself. I understand that the original vision for Railjack was a hard sell, but the direction this is going is just tying off Railjack as a failed experiment. That's why Railjack is not a big part of the new Railjack missions, it's made subservient to bog-standard Warframe, and that's the issue people are having with these updates.

Railjack didn't become any less of a content island. Sure, there's void storms now, but why pick a void storm when they are slower, more cumbersome versions of the missions we already have?

I made a suggestion back in October as to what Railjack relic cracking could look like: 

 

It's focused on new gameplay styles and is oriented on accentuating Railjack's strengths. This in contrast to what we have now, which is simply the old Warframe experience we already know.

[Steel_Rook]

5 hours ago, Colyeses said:

That's the problem though. The fact that the space layer pauses at all during a space layer mission is jarring and disappointing. When Railjack was expanded, people were hoping to get more Railjack, but instead, we still just have Skirmish. The only thing that changed is that in the new missions, you do Skirmish, then a regular mission afterward. At that point, just the Skirmish itself would be closer to what Railjack players want. 

I'm going to ask for a citation on "what people were hoping to get." I'm people and that's certainly not what I was hoping to get. You can pull any of my posts since Railjack's release for a reference. Here's a recent one. Here's a less recent one. I'm hardly the only one, as you can see from those threads, and as I can cite from anecdotal feedback from friends and acquaintances. While I'm sure there were enough players who enjoyed Railjack as Archwing 2.0 or Guns of Icarus - Warframe Edition, a majority of players ignored it because it was a separate, unconnected mode. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Railjack on its own is shallow - always has been. Since inception, since its release in 2019, it was a shallow hollow space shooter with much better alternatives out there. The same goes for Archwings and Necramechs. On their own, they're a hollow addition with extremely limited shelf life.

All of these tools - Archwings, Necramechs, Operators, Railjack - all of them only really work as part of a combined arms system, as individual tools with an individual role. As the sole focus, sure - they have SOME appeal. Not nearly enough to carry the game on their own. As tools in a broader mission, though? They have tremendous potential. I would be very cautious about mixing up "what people want" with "what I want." Call of the Tempestarii already showed us what actual combined arms quests could be like, seamlessly switching between space combat, ground combat, multiple locations and multiple vessels. Yeah it's a short quest with an unsatisfying ending, but it serves as a tech demo of what Warframe could be.

If people want Railjack as an insular game mode defined by NOT having Warframe in it, then... I don't know? Fair enough, I suppose. But that's a dead end design direction. It's the exact same design direction which gave us the dead-on-arrival Archwings and the dead-on-arrival Operators. If you only use a thing when you absolutely HAVE to and never at any other point, then people will just go back to not using it. Railjack is unique in that its core system has the capacity to entirely REPLACE the game's full body of content. Railjack has the potential to entirely supplant Ground Missions as we know it. You can bet people will have the exact same complaints - why are you putting other game modes in my game mode. But that's pretty much the only way Warframe can stay relevant long-term. Its legacy content its by this point badly outdated.

 

5 hours ago, Colyeses said:

The Railjack reworks were focused on making the gamemode 'less Railjack': Less squad interdependency, less space combat, less material value to the Railjack itself. I understand that the original vision for Railjack was a hard sell, but the direction this is going is just tying off Railjack as a failed experiment. That's why Railjack is not a big part of the new Railjack missions, it's made subservient to bog-standard Warframe, and that's the issue people are having with these updates.

And again - citation needed. Are people having issues with the updates? Because I've seen a couple of threads and a couple of videos, but Railjack remains more popular than it used to be. You keep insisting that Railjack "is not a big part" of Corpus Proxima, but it is. Railjack is more than just a flying set of guns. It's a mobile base of operations and - yes - a transport. It legacy Warframe didn't exist, I'd actually go further in tying people to their Railjack by removing all regenerating ammo and ammo drops from Archwings, Necramechs and Warframes, requiring us to stock up at the Railjack and actually making ammo capacity a meaningful stat. I'd look into reworking Energy such that players can similarly stockpile it for sojourns outside the ship, but having to go back to recharge. I'd look into implementing high atmosphere and planetside missions, and maybe even underwater missions, as well.

Seeing Railjack as just a space shooter where any ground combat is unwelcome is the death knell for the entire concept. Introducing more ground content is the exact opposite of considering it "a failed project." On the contrary - Railjack is being used as the medium by which to implement missions moving forward. Yes, the original proposal of "Guns of Warframe" is a failed project. Anyone who's played Warframe for any length of time could have seen that coming. Hell, anyone who's played Archwing could see that coming. But the underlying concept of Railjack as the framing device within which all of the game's content happens? That's still very much a thing. Indeed - if DE were smart - bringing more if not all of the game's content into Railjack should be their primary focus.

[Colyeses]

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

While I'm sure there were enough players who enjoyed Railjack as Archwing 2.0 or Guns of Icarus - Warframe Edition, a majority of players ignored it because it was a separate, unconnected mode. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Railjack on its own is shallow - always has been. Since inception, since its release in 2019, it was a shallow hollow space shooter with much better alternatives out there. The same goes for Archwings and Necramechs. On their own, they're a hollow addition with extremely limited shelf life.

I am not contesting that. Railjack does lack a lot of depth, but my issue is that the changes made so far are missing that point. They're not refining the concept, but instead subsuming it in standard Warframe. The space shooter portions did not get expanded or woven into multiple gameplay facets, but instead got stitched together with normal missions.

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Call of the Tempestarii already showed us what actual combined arms quests could be like, seamlessly switching between space combat, ground combat, multiple locations and multiple vessels. Yeah it's a short quest with an unsatisfying ending, but it serves as a tech demo of what Warframe could be.

But the general gameplay of the Corpus Proxima do not match this concept. Sure, the skirmish that we know from the Grineer Proxima is there, and it does do a solid enough job at executing the general concept. But if your primary mission objective forces all players out of the railjack so it can shut down the battle theater and then even goes so far as cutting out Ceph Cy in favour of a very long-standing problem, it's not 'seamless' in the slightest. Again, it's stitched together. Crudely so. 

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

It legacy Warframe didn't exist, I'd actually go further in tying people to their Railjack by removing all regenerating ammo and ammo drops from Archwings, Necramechs and Warframes, requiring us to stock up at the Railjack and actually making ammo capacity a meaningful stat. I'd look into reworking Energy such that players can similarly stockpile it for sojourns outside the ship, but having to go back to recharge. I'd look into implementing high atmosphere and planetside missions, and maybe even underwater missions, as well.

And I would whole-heartedly support that. But that is not the direction these changes have taken. The changes made reduced dependency on the Railjack and decentralised gameplay in favour of a solo experience that harshly limits the potential of Railjack's general idea. 

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Seeing Railjack as just a space shooter where any ground combat is unwelcome is the death knell for the entire concept.

That's not what I stated, and it's not what I'm trying to say. My point is that Railjack should highlight the gamemode's possible strengths and play to that, not have it play second fiddle to what we already know. Railjack missions shouldn't contain sections where the Railjack is fully and completely dumped, utterly absent from the gameplay field. Once you're aboard the ship for the main objective, you're not playing Railjack anymore. At that point, you might as well have picked any other starmap mission. And that jarring contrast, the clear delineation of 'this is Railjack and this is not' just renders the ground missions moot.

The only thing that does work, somewhat, is the Volatile mission, since the Railjack is used to deliver the final blow. But this would be much more interesting if the temperature controls were split between ground and railjack, so that both gameplays would be woven together. 

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Introducing more ground content is the exact opposite of considering it "a failed project."

Considering this update is their idea of a Railjack focused update, what did they really add to Railjack? How did the Railjack experience expand in any way?

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

But the underlying concept of Railjack as the framing device within which all of the game's content happens? That's still very much a thing. Indeed - if DE were smart - bringing more if not all of the game's content into Railjack should be their primary focus.

I am pretty sure that's a lost cause. Railjack has cultivated enough animosity to be a very controversial thing to force into the majority of the content.

[Steel_Rook]

19 minutes ago, Colyeses said:

My point is that Railjack should highlight the gamemode's possible strengths and play to that, not have it play second fiddle to what we already know.

But playing "second fiddle" to what we already know IS Railjack's strength. That's precisely my point. Any time you try to create insular content that's just Railjack or just Archwing or just Operator, it comes up short. None of these systems have enough depth to be compelling long-term. No, not even "just Warframe." Look at Archwings. For years they had their own dedicated game mode for fans of Archwing only and nobody played them. It wasn't until they got tossed into the Plains of Eidolon that they became really popular where... Everyone used them as a taxi. Then as now, I argued vehemently that Archwing combat on the Plains and the Vallis didn't need to be expanded. All that was needed was for ability-ignoring, Archwing-disabling AA missiles to not be a thing any more. Archwings literally work better as a mobility tool with combat capability than they do as their own dedicated dogfighting mode - even if I'm sure you'll still find people complaining about the removal of Archwing banking or Archwing drifting.

You can argue this is anecdotal or just personal opinion, but I find Railjack's greatest strength by far to be the ability to transition from ship to space to ground in any order. Yes, ground-only instances do break the flow a little bit when they take too long - which is why Defence had no business being in there. However, that too is a selling point. The ability to run a near-perfect recreation of a ground mission within a Railjack context means I never have to run a regular ground mission again. Ideally, anyway. Obviously not yet, as Railjack has only a small subset of all ground missions. I don't see why we can't have ALL of them, though, across ALL tilesets.

 

32 minutes ago, Colyeses said:

I am pretty sure that's a lost cause. Railjack has cultivated enough animosity to be a very controversial thing to force into the majority of the content.

Has it, though? Purely anecdotally, I know a lot of people who DID have significant animosity towards Railjack. Most if not all of them have turned around on it as of Railjack 3.0, precisely BECAUSE it's no longer a dedicated "Railjack only" or "team only" game mode. In fact, I managed to turn a friend of mine around from swearing off of Railjack to grinding for Railjack parts :) Yes, there's obviously going to friction there. I don't think DE can just turn around one day and say "OK, all Ground missions are gone. It's all Railjack now." However, if they so much as manage to replicate Ground missions into Railjack with additional game modes and tilesets, that's going to transition a great many people to it. You'll always have holdouts, of course, but you'd be surprised how many people are willing to adapt when the cost of entry is low enough.

People will complain, but people will complain about literally everything, no matter the context. I strongly believe that people will be willing to adapt, especially if the old ways don't get deprecated overnight. Especially given the seamlessness of Railjack content. If Call of the Tempestari showed me one thing, it's that Railjack missions are themselves not insular. You can very much have a single instance which stretches across multiple planets and multiple jumps before reaching an end point. Railjack is the first - THE FIRST - chance DE have to implement their superior Bounty mission design system outside of the game's three Free Roam maps. DE stand on the cusp of creating easily the best mission system they've ever had, if only they can reimplement more content into Railjack.

Imagine a Contact giving us multi-stage missions run back-to-back across the entire Solar System, covering both Corpus and Grineer and a variety of mission objectives. That's my dream of a better Warframe, personally. Even if the Railjack takes up only a part of that experience, it would still offer a drastically superior experience to running ground missions now.

[GrayArchon]

On 2021-04-13 at 1:01 PM, Joezone619 said:

the deadlock protocol. That quest's ending is very confusing. Does parvos die? Does he escape? Is he a friend or a foe? Dialog at the end seems to point towards he is a friend, but this new quest and other parts of the game seem to point towards him being foe.

As to Parvos' fate, he does escape the Granum Void at the end of Deadlock Protocol. His last message is "By now, your friends have noticed that the overloading Void engines are preventing the exits you opened for my captives… from closing. Well done. And goodbye. Enjoy your stay." He then later sends you an inbox message inviting you to join his group, which he could not do from inside the Granum Void. He appears at the end of Call of the Tempestarii back in the Void, implying that he can go back and forth at will (which makes sense, considering he has Protea and the Granum Tributes all have portals to the Granum Void as well).

He is a foe. He was not happy with the current leadership of the Corpus, as he felt they had strayed too far from his ideals. The end of the quest is deliberately ambiguous, since he was pondering if he should reform the Corpus or just leave and make his own new faction. He invites you and Eudico to join his hypothetical new faction. The quest leaves it open-ended, but it's since been implied that Parvos decides to ultimately reform the existing Corpus faction. Some of the Corpus Captains you encounter in Railjack missions will tell you that you are intruding on "Granum space", implying that they serve Parvos. And, of course, Call of the Tempestarii pretty much confirms it.

On 2021-04-13 at 1:01 PM, Joezone619 said:

We have this new character introduced to us called "Vala", but no backstory or anything.

Her backstory is "I was working in an exosuit when the Tempestarii destroyed Lucretia Platform. I drifted for days among the frozen fragments of my crew. My sisters. I dreamed their dead, gaping mouths… were singing with me yet." That's more than we get for a lot of others, including Frohd Bek and almost every Grineer boss.

On 2021-04-13 at 1:01 PM, Joezone619 said:

There is also no confirmation if she is an introduction to corpus lichs, or going to be a recurring character.

There's no confirmation, but if you've paid attention to what DE says on streams, it's very clear that this is setting it up. Corpus Liches are confirmed to be the next content drop, in a putative Update 30.5. They're all going to be female – perhaps Vala's sisters? Spectres? Who can say. Why do you need confirmation that she will be an introduction to Corpus Liches, or a recurring character? What does that do for your enjoyment of the story?

22 hours ago, Vaml77 said:

who is valla? Friend or enemy?

Enemy. She shoots at you for the entire quest, and then you shoot at her and destroy her ship.

19 hours ago, Talon881 said:

forced retreats from a ship type I had blown up six separate times in the last hour?

This was a little weird. She had some kind of powerful attack ("multiphasic ordnance") that she used to incapacitate the ship. They could have talked it up a bit more and made it clear that her ship was too powerful to take on, but they didn't.

16 hours ago, Dilema_Prime said:

Idk where these companies are getting their art directors but to me this seems like they got some woke ass, incompetent junior non binary fresh out of uni to come up with these ideas.

A quick Google search will tell you that DE's art director, Matt Tremblay, has been in the industry since 1999.

16 hours ago, Dilema_Prime said:

As a vet player all I see is DE trying to trend, Nigthwave you have the stereotypical black woman speaking on the stereotypical condescending manner

Nora Night is explicitly based on the DJ from The Warriors. I'm not sure I'd call copying a movie from 1979 "trending".

16 hours ago, Dilema_Prime said:

babbling about dreamers because this was back when Trump wanted to prevent illegal migrants from crossing the border and the whole Daca and the Dreamers stuff was all you would ear from the mainstream media

"Dreamers" is a term for Tenno that has been in the game since The War Within (building off a concept introduced in The Second Dream).

16 hours ago, Dilema_Prime said:

DE obviously had to drink some of that juice

You know they're from Canada, right?

13 hours ago, Colyeses said:

That's the problem though. The fact that the space layer pauses at all during a space layer mission is jarring and disappointing.

Scott said on the last devstream that this is for technical reasons – they didn't want it to be this way.

13 hours ago, Colyeses said:

The Railjack reworks were focused on making the gamemode 'less Railjack': Less squad interdependency, less space combat, less material value to the Railjack itself. I understand that the original vision for Railjack was a hard sell, but the direction this is going is just tying off Railjack as a failed experiment.

The concept of Railjack (ship that you fly around in space) has always been the goal, since before Warframe was even released (according to Steve). The execution of Railjack is less important, so they change it until it is something most players want to engage in, since all that matters is that players are using Railjack.

[(PSN)DISCOgnome83]

On 2021-04-14 at 5:48 AM, Dilema_Prime said:

In my opinion, the whole music was cringe wordy and out of place, shanties belong in the sea, space should be something more soothing more like interstellar and when you turn into shadow more like devil may cry, industrial type stuff.

Well said Dilema; I thought I was the only one cringing through that ill placed sea shanty. I've seen some ropey stuff in Warframe but this one was painful.

[Ham_Grenabe]

Aside from being shorter than a sortie, the quest appeared to be entirely built around making you listen to the song. The Shadow scene is exactly as long as the song, and you don't actually have to do anything during it unless you like clunking around in shadow form. Hell, they hotfixed the update so that you must hear the song during the fight, even if your music slider is all the way off.

Now, the song is of workmanlike quality, but it's really weirdly out of place. Being forced to hear it? Fifteen demerits for DE.

[Bakaguya-sama]

The song is good, but there's a massive tone mismatch between the quest and the song.  

Sea shanties denotes some form of difficult struggle. It's for sailors in the old days, as a way to keep morals high during long periods of hardship sailing at sea. And the Sleeping In The Below kinda fits that tone.  Except while the song is playing, you are mass murdering corpus with Sevagoth's ghost. Like... wut? That makes no sense. We aren't struggling against anything. We are the storm that is leveling everything we touch. That's like playing prison work songs while performing Smokin' Sexy Style combos in Devil May Cry. It's confusing at best, and inappropriate at worst.  Unless DE is trying to say that we the Tenno are the evil ones, and the Corpus are the ones struggling against us? 

Songs like these would be more fitting in a game where we have to struggle against difficult enemies and overwhelming odds. Warframe in it's current state is a game about committing war crimes. Each player is mass murdering every faction by dozens a second and zipping thru the map with no resistance. We aren't the struggling underdogs that DE is trying to portray us as.   

 

[(XBOX)Shodian]

2 minutes ago, Bakaguya-sama said:

The song is good, but there's a massive tone mismatch between the quest and the song.  

Sea shanties denotes some form of difficult struggle. It's for sailors in the old days, as a way to keep morals high during long periods of hardship sailing at sea. And the Sleeping In The Below kinda fits that tone.  Except while the song is playing, you are mass murdering corpus with Sevagoth's ghost. Like... wut? That makes no sense. We aren't struggling against anything. We are the storm that is leveling everything we touch. That's like playing prison work songs while performing Smokin' Sexy Style combos in Devil May Cry. It's confusing at best, and inappropriate at worst.  Unless DE is trying to say that we the Tenno are the evil ones, and the Corpus are the ones struggling against us? 

Songs like these would be more fitting in a game where we have to struggle against difficult enemies and overwhelming odds. Warframe in it's current state is a game about committing war crimes. Each player is mass murdering every faction by dozens a second and zipping thru the map with no resistance. We aren't the struggling underdogs that DE is trying to portray us as.   

 

The song wasn't about us. It was for Vala, and her struggle to keep going. The tempestarii destroyed the vessel that she was in but because she was in an exo suit she survived and she went a little insane cause her crewmates all died and she imagined them singing to her. In a way it kind of painted us in a dark light and I really liked that.

[(XBOX)AMONGTHEWEAK]

I guess we will just chalk this up to COVID-19 constraints. 

At least there are some good points we can draw from this update, even in spite of the glaring issues this update has presented. 

Things can always be changed.

Time will tell.