Restructuring Railjack

[Joezone619]

Easily DE's worst received update, even today. Railjack was supposed to be so much more then what we got. Going back to the 2018-2019 tennocon previews, they aren't even close to what we have now. They are actual battles in space with space ships, not just the normal star chart's mission. I know despite all its shortcomings, some players still find a way to have fun with it, but personally, they only thing fun to me are the grineer skirmishes, missions like those are what we were actually promised.

IMO, I think harsh action is needed for railjack. Simply put, its copy-paste gamemode in its current state, that needs to change yesterday. First let's go over its shortcomings and some of the problems we'll need to fix.

 

Current Shortcomings of Railjack
-Corpus proxima is a taxi service for normal misions.
(no real way to sugar coat that, it's just the normal star chart slapped into railjack, a blatent lie compared to what we were promised)
-Grineer has 1 mission type.
(we were told upon railjack's first release they'd add more mission types. 3 years later and aside from volatile missions, we still got no new mission types at all, for grineer or corpus)
-Orphix Venom doesn't belong in Railjack.
(this was originally an event, and one that was clearly made for the normal star chart as there was no railjack sections at all in the event. After the event ended and we got corpus proxima, they just slapped it in there, meanwhile everyone expected it to be in the normal star chart like defection missions, or simply remain an event)
-Sisters/Lichs are only able to defend... Poorly...
(they got a lot of health, but w/o our builds or weapons, not alot of damage. These are former enemies that once commanded entire fleets and your telling me the only skills they have is point and kill?)
-Sisters/Lichs cannot have their weapons changed or modded.
(on top of only being able to defend, they only get unmodded kuva weapons. Crew members with modded weapons have troubles fighting in higher level sections, kuva lichs/sisters NEED better weapons, ours)

 

Suggested Course of Action
-Delete corpus proxima missions, start over.
(this is the "harsh action" I was talking about. Sorry DE but this was a colossal waste of everyone's time. Normal star chart missions need to stay in the normal star chart. Aside from volatile missions, none of these resemble any sort of new mission type, let alone ship to ship missions railjack was supposed to be full of like skirmish)
-Add new mission types, actual space ship battle missions for all factions.
(See "New Mission Types" for suggestions. With corpus proxima scrapped, both grineer and corpus will be in need of new missions, lets make them actually feel like railjack this time yeah?)
-Move orphix venom to star chart.
(these should never have been placed in railjack to begin with. Simply slap one on pluto and one on sedna, no need to scatter them everywhere)
-Give kuva lichs/sisters more purpose and moddable weapons.
(lichs/sisters should have all the same roles as normal crew. along with that, you should be able to apply your mods to their weapon if you have the same weapon. I agree that swapping out their weapons doesn't make sense, but at least allow us to use our builds for their weapons if we have them from killing other lichs/sisters)

 

A bit of a harsh restructuring, but I do believe all of that is necessary to turn railjack into what it was meant to be in the first place. I really hope DE doesn't just stick with the lazy copy-paste route on this and leave it abandoned like so many other things in warframe.

 

With corpus missions removed for actual missions, I have a few guidelines for what real ship to ship railjack missions should look like:
-Someone should be needed inside the ship at all times.
(at no point during a mission, should we be able to just abandon our ship in the middle of a battle field and go for a stroll in an enemy capital ship while the railjack sits just outside unattended. Someone could steal it!) (as consequence of leaving the ship unattended, there should be a chance that it gets hijacked and we'll need to retake it)
-On foot sections should be kept to a minimum.
(we're here to fight against other ships, not infiltrate and execute tasks like normal mission. These missions should feel like we're battling it out in space, ship to ship. Not face to face)
-Missions could show more of the tenno as a faction of people, not just warframes.
(oddly enough, out of all the factions in the game that we know everything about, we know almost nothing about our own. Railjack is a perfect place to expand upon the tenno as a faction in the system. Have missions with tenno capital ships, tenno fighters, tenno stations, etc)

 

New Mission Types (These are just my suggestions, I encourage others to post their own in the comments.)
Skirmish: Clear the sector of enemy activity. (no changes, just added for corpus)
Volatile: Expose and exploit weak-points in an enemy capital ship to destroy it. (again no changes, just added for grineer)

Defense: A tenno relay/station is under attack, fend off waves of fighters and crewships until tenno reinforcements can arrive. (hitting extraction after 5 waves will spawn tenno capital ships and enemies will stop spawning. this allows the players to simply pick the next mission from the on-ship navigation instead of being forced to the relay/dojo)
Mobile Defense/Escort: Escort a civilian capital ship through enemy territory. Taking on fighters and keeping the capital ship's health from hitting zero.
Survival/Diversion: Attract attention by attacking an enemy station to allow civilians to pass by safely elsewhere. Destroy fighters and crewships before they overwhelm you. (life support replaced with enemy activity bar, if it gets too high the mission fails)
Rescue: A valuable tenno asset/ship  has gone missing in an asteroid field, find it and escort it out safely. Fending off fighters and crewships as you avoid environmental factors.

 

Void storms will need some changes too, enough to bring them up to the same level and pace of railjack missions.

Void Storms:
-Make reactant drop from fighter ships.
(not sure why DE didn't add this in the first place, but we kinda need it, especially in skirmishes. with railjack missions changing to be actual battles involving the railjack, it will need to be added, or some other system to get reactant)
-Allow players to crack 2 relics, but only choose 1 reward.
(this was a popular suggestion when void storms first came out and I agree with it. railjack misions just take too long for 1 relic to be worth it, but at the same time they shouldn't be so rewarding as to de-incentivise normal void fissures, so a compromise is in order)(this means that out of 8 possible rewards, players will only receive one)
-Increase the reactant requirement to 10 per relic.
(this also makes the idea of cracking multiple relics more fair. More relics would naturally mean more reactant to crack them. I still think the maximum relics you can crack should be 2 though)

Extra Suggestions
-Add ability to rename/nickname crew.
(the random names are cool and all but impossible to pronounce and kinda meaningless, give me bob, i want bob on my team)
-Decuple railjack energy from warframe energy.
(this was a mistake. you have frames like hildryn and lavos which make railjack energy look like a joke. Before this was added, separate energy incentived players to actually coordinate with each other, giving the pilot energy to use railjack powers)

 

 

 

Again, I encourage others to come up with mission suggestions, I'm interested to hear what others would like to see in railjack.
(Mission Name):(Description)(side notes)

Edited January 14 by Joezone619

[Okaazkul]

Boarding : Go inside a capital ship to steal his ressources, by delving throught the enemies vaults.
Goes similarly to an excavation mission, but your limited to max 4 vaults before leaving the mission. Maybe make it only reward Railjack ressources and planetary ressources, but just give it in MASSIVE quantity compare to other missions types.

And also, WHY can't I have Khal-175 as a crew member in my Railjack ?

Edited January 14 by Okaazkul

[Fred_Avant_2019]

First of all I'd like to thank you for this thread, because it goes straight to the point of what makes railjack fun and what does not.

But I'd like to go a little further than this with my grain of salt.

So here's a list of details that bug me over RJ related content.

• Archwing missions themselves need to go, like be deleted from main star chart and become entierly integrated with Railjack. Here's why :
  • First of all, these missions bring basically nothing to the player in terms of "space flight" content.
  • The maps are clunky corridors if the faction is corpus and is a wide mess of asteroid junk if the mission is on the grineer faction.
  • There is no reason why main star chart progress should be halted by any of it.
  • The two modes are already tied in together.
• Railjack's damage system does not work well enough for it to allow scaling content :
  • Despite popular belief, the actual single best turret you can get is Lavan Mk 3 Apoc canons, due to their higher status chance and full Puncture and Slash effects greatly weakening enemy defenses, something you can truly notice if you do any Veil Proxima skirmishes and fire on crewships.
  • Due to its damage type unbalances, most everything is just dealt with a couple Seeker Volleys fired throughout the mission, due to this mod being far too buffed and other "battle avionics" too nerfed.
  • Nothing is ever a form of danger (aside from Veil Proxima missile batteries if you're dumb enough to hug them), and no enemy is ever worth more half a braincell of attention. There needs to be a larger type of crewship that requires a little more thought than "hey hit their side engines with Tunguska Cannon"
  • Speaking of the latter, the Tunguska Cannon is the only option Railjacks have in the forward artillery slot, which is a huge letdown, there is so much more that could be created to even just have a different feel than your usual death star laser. Though it's funny discussing that when the "railjack meta" is so stale.
• It's 2024 and the entire star chart is still not present.
  • Grineer are still missing Mars, Ceres, Uranus and Sedna for absolutely no specific reason that would justify locking them out (which also means there is no such thing as grineer Neo voidstorms btw, thanks DE, really love having to go to Neptune Proxima only to go do some ground missions with a 3 min intro). Also why isn't Kuva Fortress a thing for Railjack when the entire thing is already in space?
  • Corpus Proxima is missing JUPITER of all things, as well as Phobos and Europa.
  • On top of what I previously said, Mars and Phobos are a zone of conflict between grineer and corpus, as you could tell from Crossfire mission types. I think Europa is in the same case as well?
  • Invasions totally would have a reason to be integrated into Railjack, which would lead to some nodes changing dynamically over time *cough cough* ANOMALIES *cough cough*, with the mission type being changed to crossfire and us entering a zone of conflict between the two main factions.
  • Speaking of anomalies, they're only sentient and only occur in grineer veil proxima skirmishes, but the Murex poses no sort of threat whatsoever to anyone involved, including the grineer investing it, there are no sentient fighters even guarding the damn thing rendering Sentient Scalpel useless, yet we drop stacks of it. Orphix mission type is lame and has nothing railjack about it, it's JUST the orphix venom operation except worse in all aspects.
• What about the Infested faction?
  • Mercury, Deimos and Eris are still missing but can't really be implemented without some sort of tie-in with the infested, having infested crewships is a good horror concept.
  • A reccuring demand is to create an Infested nemesis, just like the Sisters and Liches, if it'd go anywhere, it should be there.

 

The list could go on for much longer, but I decided to not spend my entire day listing everything that's wrong or lacking with Railjack.

Raid : Take on a fleet of enemy capital ships to halt their progression in the system.
( Basically a Railjack version of an Invasion, with the same type of progress bar. The mission would be like a Volatile type mission, with less emphasis on boarding or have it closer to what we have on Skirmish, but still involve the Forward Artillery. The mission requires you to destroy the capital ships, but you may also board them to hijack them to destroy each other, except it's far larger than a Crewship, and far more potent as well. )

 

Infiltration : Steal an isolated patrolling crewship to board a carrier-type capital ship. Avoid detection and hijack their database, leave undetected.
( A more traditional take on Spy missions, with more emphasis on stealth with more punishing consequences on failure. )

 

Exterminate : Just like what was Gian Point before railjack 2.0 removed it. Just fighters and crewships.
( In short, the mission type that felt the most "railjack" of them all, because there was no part where you had to go out of the railjack to do ground mission things, just pure space. )

 

Also make Scarlet Spear 2.0 happen except the big bad is Pazuul. Yes, Scarlet Spear was a big bugfest, but it has been infinitely better than "hey look, we made you guys an operation so you can buy arcane energize, except it's some standard mission you've seen a million times" and it brought so much more and had so much ambition. Shame it was met with outrage from delusionals that have since left the game altogether. For those who can't remember, the space part of it was a mobile defense of sorts with a satelite you had to grab and place with your railjack, it was clunky but the concept was there.

[Famecans]

On 2024-01-14 at 4:29 AM, Joezone619 said:

Again, I encourage others to come up with mission suggestions, I'm interested to hear what others would like to see in railjack.
(Mission Name):(Description)(side notes)

• Railjack is not friendly to all warframes/players, I am not a toxic player but it is predictable that the mission will be slow and difficult after joining players with warframes that are not Hildryn or Lavos.
   
• The Railjack must have the passive to regenerate energy when collecting resources, this will solve the problem mentioned in the previous paragraph, I think the DE knows what it is doing with the numbers but can I suggest that when collecting 1 type of resource a total of 200 energy will be regenerated, the cooldown will be 1 second avoiding spam and the user interface must show the player that resource collection is regenerating energy.
   
• Slingshot must work 360º XYZ, it's horrible trying to hit the target and the piloting player has no synergy with the slingshot player. Another situation is that the piloting NPCs also ignore the slingshot's target, so make the slingshot's aim 360º XYZ.
   
• The slingshot should automatically explode all shield nodes on enemy ships protected by nodes, this will make the slingshot more useful. An internal protection node on the enemy ship can make the slingshot even more useful as the enemy ship needs to be destroyed internally by an invading waframe.
   
• The piloting NPC must remain inoperative when the player is pressing the main cannon's button, it is horrible to leave the railjack in the target's sights and realize that the piloting NPC will interfere with the cannon's fire.
   
• Internal railjack repairs should be instantaneous and fast, remove that bizarre mining-like user interface. If you want to keep the theme pleasant, just place tertiary robots/drones interacting with the railjack's internal repair.
   
• The tactical menu open a mouse pointer action and this is horrible, I recommend that the tactical menu indicates buttons 1 2 3 4 and 5 for each desired location within the railjack. Increase the size of the teleport points/icons would also make mouse action easier, but associating each teleport with a button is faster, more pleasant and tactical for gameplay.
   
• The railjack's internal tactical teleport should teleport the player directly to the action station, that is, the teleport should teleport me directly to the piloting, weapons, cannons, forge menu, etc... this action is only ignored if the station is occupied by a player and any NPCs will be removed from the tactical post automatically.
   
• I wouldn't mind the lack of power if the artillery worked accurately. The automatic aiming of the artillery avionics is not working because there is no fun in killing enemies with common artillery, there is that feeling that the shots cannot hit the enemies with precision. The solution to this is to make the automatic aim completely magnetic to the target, similar to what we have in the Rockstar Games GTA-SA.

I won't comment on new missions until the operation between warframe and railjack is actually enjoyable. good topic 👍

Edited January 15 by Famecans

[Exelcto]

Not sure if anyone pointed it, but I hate the fact that enemies, lockers etc. doesnt drop resources you would normally get on the planet where mission is located. In my opinion it just makes the gamemode more disconnected from the rest of the game. 

[Novashank]

Thank you for this thread, I too would like to see Railjack and Archwing at their true level of potential instead of being another abandoned project by DE.

On 2024-01-14 at 9:50 AM, Fred_Avant_2019 said:

Also why isn't Kuva Fortress a thing for Railjack when the entire thing is already in space?

What a great point! I bet a lot of us, including DE of course, never even considered this! There's a lot of potential there.