Railjack Mission Ideas

[GivenFlesh]

I love Railjack. I love the concept of it, I love a good chunk of its execution since the refit. I love how a lot of it works. But I also think that it could be a LOT better. One of my core quibbles is things like the exterminate and defense missions which are just... those missions tacked on to Railjack. Orphix and volatile are similar in that they are neat, but the railjack section is vestigial. I would love to see Volatile on the regular starchart, though for lore reasons I'm perfectly fine with Orphix remaining in the Railjack section, I think I'd still prefer it being separate so as to allow for railjack-focused Proxima progression.

What I love about Railjack is the teamplay. One of us is piloting and then something goes wrong and we need to fix a hull breach or a fire, while one or two people are in the gunner seats, and then we get boarded, and then we have to send a couple people off the ship, and we're switching roles and everyone can do everything but still people will prefer certain skills to another. All of that is amazing, and it's exactly what I want out of teamplay. So, keep in mind that any of my suggestions are here to maximize that feeling. If that's the part of the game that you hate, I would say we're on very different spectrums.

 

Empyrean Defense:

Instead of forcing all 4 members inside a big immobile ship...

Have us disable something slightly larger than a crewship and have a point of interest inside. Now allow Tenno to board the ship and hack something, exposing a data core that's still performing operations. Now, there's a countdown, enemies spawn inside the ship as they try to shut down the data core... and ships spawn outside as they try to simply blow up you or the ship you're extracting data from. 1-3 Tenno need to stay inside to keep it safe from the enemies inside, 1-3 Tenno need to stay outside to keep it safe from the enemies outside. Every 5 minutes, a usable piece of data is extracted. At high levels this will heavily encourage use of the tactical 'teleport to crew' intrinsic, as well as encourage necramech play on the 'on foot' section.

 

Empyrean Survival:

A small allied fleet is disabling an outpost. They need all the time they can get to finish, but a fleet has been detected approaching their coordinates to provide overwhelming backup. Provide them with a tempting target and survive their onslaught. Have a giant warship show up that releases fighters and crewships to attack, as well as fires missles and charges scary lasers to dodge. Every 5 minutes get rewarded or exit, with the option to board the warship with some Tenno to temporarily disable lasers and missles.

 

Infiltration:

Archwing could use a place in Empyrean too. Have a base that doesn't need to be boarded on foot, but needs to be infiltrated via archwing by having corridors that are too small for your big railjack ship, with hackables past the platforms and tunnels that have been littered with laser traps. The Railjack crew needs to stay on alert as the base attempts to destroy the exit strategy, and perhaps needs to shoot down points of interest from the outside to open doors or shut down security.

 

Empyrean capture:

A new type of fighter is being tested and we can't be caught unaware. Take out the fleet protecting their new toys and hijack it so we can study it back at base. Possibly include a bonus objective to take out a science vessel or factory that had been working on it.

 

(reworked) Volatile:

I think all this mode needs is ships spawning outside trying to take out your railjack while two crew members have to stay inside. Maybe rebalance the difficulty a little if you need to so that it can be done with an average of two Tenno inside, but... just don't force the entire crew inside, and give us pressure outside, too. Railjack truly does shine when we have to work on multiple jobs at once and it's a little frantic. I was enjoying doing this when the only reward was 'completing a node', but if you make a good reward table, I'm gonna be playing this for months with my friends, easy. I love Volatile in that it's juggling different jobs, I just don't want to lose the railjack portion of it to those jobs, I want to balance piloting and gunning and fixing the ship during all of this, call me crazy if you want.

 

(reworked) Skirmish:

I love this mode and hate this mode. I love it because there's nothing that needs to be changed for how I feel it introduces new players, it works well for what it is, just...

As a quick aside, for solo play? We need more ways to command the crew. Why not use the waypoint button, something that doesn't work when piloting normally, to issue commands? Hold it and get a quick radial menu, and select "Forward artillery" on a crewship to have a crew member set to gunnery aim there and fire, or to use a special ability. Allow us to summon our crew to certain sites so we can do certain points of interest with them, or at least to reliably hit the outside targets while we're inside.

But that said... What I love about this mission type is that it is a perfect introduction into what Railjack excels at, it gives you a chance to board other ships, to get used to forward artillery, to try out gunnery and piloting, to see how points of interest work and how taking them out quickly can be beneficial, but also keeps the pressure low by letting you do each task effectively one at a time. Take out the fighters like an exterminate mission and not have to worry about more. Take out the crewships, no worry about more. Take out a point of interest, it's knocked out. It's actually perfect where it's at for teaching new players how to be a team, and it uses effectively exterminate and sabotage mindsets to tie it back to gameplay they're familiar with.

What I hate about it is that it also can be done one at a time. Take out the fighters, nothing else spawns. It's easy to have the pilot not need to do anything after the points of interest are boarded, and just waiting for everything to be done, or have so little to do that it's disengaging. I wouldn't want to change skirmish per-se... But I'd love a "Nightmare Skirmish" or something along those lines where enemies don't stop spawning and you have to fight through to get to the points of interest in all that chaos, and taking out the exposed radiator is a challenge because you're still dodging shots and trying to get into position. I feel like this would be a great thing to turn (some of) the veil-skirmishes into, while also having some sort of increased cache drop rate, or something. Risk and reward, you know? :)

 

Empyrean Rescue and/or Empyrean Spy:

I think you get the general idea of a lot of the themes of my suggestions. I think it wouldn't be hard to make a mission type where the railjack crew is focused on keeping an enemy occupied while an infiltration crew does an on-foot mission that allows Archwing in some capacity. Throw in an "Attention" meter that goes up as the railjack destroys ships and goes down whenever alerts go off inside, and if it gets too low, a timer activates to destroy data or execute a prisoner, but the higher it gets the more ship spawns there are. Have additional hackables inside the base where you could disable ports where ships are spawning from, or turn off tractor beams that try to lock the ship down or missles/lasers etc.

 

The Solo Caveat:

Now.... There is one problem with these ideas, I'm aware. Which is simply that many of these mission types will struggle with crews as currently implemented. Well. As it turns out, we already have that solution. For players entering solo... Make it work like it currently does where the railjack 'vanishes' if the only player on it enters the on-foot section. They have a crew taking care of it, the Lone Tenno going to complete that part of the mission. What I want to emphasize is that I love the teamplay element and think that Railjack offers it in ways that regular missions never could. For those who want to play solo, I think the corpus 'railjack and then on-foot' is pretty much the only way to get a lot of these done. But even there, I do have two more suggestions.

One: For the Tenno who wants to do the railjack segment itself, the piloting, but for whatever reason can't assemble a crew and doesn't want to engage with matchmaking, simply allow us to send 1-3 of our crew to do away missions, and have them complete it based on their stats. Have their stats and weapon DPS determine how quickly they accomplish an away mission, and how many bonuses they can accomplish. So a well trained, good-fit crew can do it at an average full party's completion rate, and a poorly trained poorly fit one maybe at an additional 3-5 minutes of wait time, while you're dealing with the railjack section itself, but minus some crew members so needing to take care of more things on your own.

Two: For the Tenno who wants to stick to the on-foot missions, have the railjack stats plus the crew stats determine how much 'help' the crew gives during the on-foot section. In an Empyrean Defense, have your crew chime in that they took out a wave of reinforcements, and so you deal with a half-length wave, or an ill fit crew mention struggling and that you're gonna have to deal with a full-strength wave, or in spy/rescue having your crew/railjack stats determine how many enemies are patrolling, stuff like that.

As an aside for making matchmaking less of a chore, whenever we finish a mission, can we get an 'extract/stay with team' popup? I feel like if it's easier to join and leave railjack crews that you'll get more use from the matchmaking. As is, it's kind of a Commitment to join a crew and you have to 'abandon mission' after it's already started to ensure you don't lose rewards if the host tries to force another mission. (Also, it wouldn't be bad to 'assemble/join a crew' being separate buttons and for us to get a count of how many open squads there are that need crews)

 

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed the thought of my vision for what Railjack could be, and I hope DE would be willing to look at any of these ideas, because I love the mode and want it to be the best. tl;dr: I don't like forcing the entire railjack crew into an on-foot mission and would like to see missions utilize having to multitask and split up/recombine dynamically.

[Cepheus_Antollare]

I just want an endless exterminate/defense mission in space where I fly a railjack to exterminate enemies without having to enter a station or ship.

I want to kill fights/crewships and fight off boarding crews on very high difficulty, I do not want to fly a railjack to do a defense/exterminate mission when I can just go to hydron or adaro for that much more easily