A Quick Look at Void Storms in Warframe

You ever wondered what a Void Fissure looks like from space? After all, in these missions, you see a burst of light, then everything goes gold. But what does that look like from above? Well, thanks to the Call of the Tempestarii update, we finally found out. Void Storms are the Railjack equivalent of Void Fissures. They look badass, but… well, from a gameplay perspective, they kinda suck.

Where’s the Reactant?

Honestly, the first thing I noticed when I did my first Void Storm missions was the lack of Reactant. Reactant is the shiny flaming golden orbs that corrupted enemies have a chance to drop when killed. In Void Storms, you open your relics in the same way that you do in normal Void fissures. By killing enemies on foot. Now, this is actually not too bad on Corpus missions, which require you to do a normal mission anyway. But on Grineer missions, collecting reactant is tedious, since the fissures have limited places to spawn. Points of Interest, unless you are assassinating a Grineer Captain, tend to be rather small, so you have to wait a little for the fissures to start corrupting things. Seems a tad inefficient.

Crew ships normally only spawn a few but most people won’t ever enter one, instead using Forward Artillery to destroy the ships from the outside. Luckily, it seems that reactant, like normal loot, IS shared between players, but that’s not obvious. And it’s kinda ruined by the fact that fissures can bug out, and might only spawn reactant if all players are present and in the same area. For now, solo is a bit easier than playing in a squad to get the reactant, but that means less potentially good rewards.

But what I don’t get is why do none of the ships flying around drop reactant? That would feel so much more… realistic. Even if it was at the rate that Survivals drop reactant, rather than Exterminates? It makes no sense.

The storms themselves are cool.

The visuals are incredible. Void Storms are massive and intimidating. Vast columns of lightning fill the air as an ominous void cloud swallows the empty space above the nearby planet. These things are massive, dwarfing the planets they appear around. When they said “void storms”, they definitely meant it. Especially as the storms get far more aggressive the longer the mission goes on for. Cephalon Cy gets noticeably more antsy and worried too, adding to the atmosphere.

Not only that though, but they do actually hurt. The Void Storms will happily destroy smaller ships and immobilize crew ships. They also do pretty good damage to unaware Railjacks, and will start gnawing through your shields.

However, you also get sparks of Void inside Points of Interest, Corpus locations and inside your Railjack, if you’re close to these columns of lightning. And these sparks are painful. On release, they could trigger repeatedly, blinding you with white energy. While the effects have been toned down significantly, the void sparks are still a nuisance. They also have the nasty habit of downing your NPC crew, because they’re not smart enough to not walk past the shimmering slits. That being said, considering how many can spawn, depending on where you are, I kinda don’t blame them.

The missions take too long.

The biggest problem by far is that these missions take too long. In the time it takes to do one Void Storm mission, you could probably do a normal Mobile Defense Void Fissure. And those are among the least efficient ways to open relics. If you are in the process of leveling up your Railjack, then Void Storms are pretty damn good, since you can combine farming for Railjack parts with opening relics. But once you have a good Railjack, efficiency becomes key once more. Especially when farming for various parts like Carmine Penta or Epitaph components.

It also doesn’t help that there’s only a handful of missions available. There’s no endless Railjack fissures either, so way more loading has to be done. And unlike normal missions, Railjack missions do tend to take much longer to load…

Yet again, the visuals and art are great. But the gameplay is kinda lacking…