On The Abandoned Mess That Is Railjack

When Railjack originally came out, it was buggy and difficult, but it was interesting. Once the bugs were cleared up (mostly things like getting stuck between missions and rewards not being rewarded), the experience was great. Railjack was genuinely challenging, and required strong teamwork in order to not get completely torn apart. The Intrinsics system was grindy, the whole process of building a Railjack was very expensive and there wasn’t really any reward for any of it apart from Mastery, but it was new and exciting and different.

Over time though, the excitement died down. But at the same time, the barrier to entry was slowly lessened. The initial Railjack quest was made easier and less expensive, and enemy difficulty was dropped. The original Railjack Grineer, because there were so few of them, were bullet sponges, in order to pad out missions slightly, but they were fine-tuned to better match normal Grineer. And Railjack components all saw various buffs, as well as component cost decreases. And then we had Scarlet Spear. Our first Operation that featured Railjacks. Except the Railjack was just a taxi, and most of the mission was spent doing a Mobile Defense in the attacking Murex. You didn’t even really need the Railjack, since you could just park it safe inside the Murex, and it’d be safe from all harm. Again, things were made easier, to make it more accessible.

Things did change further after Call of the Tempestarii, which added Corpus nodes to Railjack, as well as unique Void Storms, which were Void Fissures in Space. However, these missions didn’t feel as fun as the Grineer Skirmish missions. The Grineer missions were somewhat randomized, but most of them were spent in your Railjack, doing Railjack things. You’d have an Away Crew who would board Grineer ships and do the leg work, but you were still needed on your Railjack, outside of assassination missions. But Corpus Railjack missions were “do these two tasks, kill some crew ships then do a normal mission”. The Railjack was a glorified taxi, the same it was in Scarlet Spear.

These days though, once you’ve leveled up your Railjack and gotten all your mods levels up and all that, Railjack is really easy. Railjack used to be insanely hard to solo, but now I can go into Veil Proxima and just have my AI crew do most of the work. My ship is completely leveled up and I can’t mod it to be any better, nor can I find better weapons for it to equip. However, I spent a LOT of resources doing all that, only to have had everything be made easier and easier as time goes on. I have not one but two messages from Cephalon Cy, refunding me resources because they made the quest easier. At the same time though, the only people playing Railjack are me and people with completely fresh, unmodded ships and default weapons. The grind is still there, heck, there’s 60k worth of mastery to be had, but no one is interested in it really.

What makes matters worse is that they moved a lot of content TO Railjack, in order to get people to play it. Okay, sure, farming Ash via Manics wasn’t fun, but they took Oberon, an easy to access, early game Warframe, and stuck him behind the Railjack grind too. Sevagoth is also trapped behind Railjack, to the point that they gave him away for free and then had a 2-week long event where you could get his components without doing Railjack. Why? Because they were releasing Sevagoth’s deluxe skin and realized no one actually had him – they either didn’t play Railjack or had gotten a Sevagoth and subsumed him and never farmed a second one. There are also a LOT of weapons tied up behind Railjack, namely 4 Sisters of Parvos weapons (all with a horrendously long grind for a new resource to obtain), the Ambassador and our old friend the Ignis Wraith. Which you can’t even trade for any more since they made the blueprint untradeable.

But still, with three Warframes locked behind Railjack, no one wants to play it. Because the grind for Railjack is awkward. The progression is all over the damn place. The default Sigma class gear is god awful, and you need to play Railjack in order to get basic Railjack mods. In normal gameplay, you are given the basic mods you need to survive, and farm towards better mods over time, but Railjack kinda throws you in at the deep end, and often on your own. I can leave my Railjack on its own because it has 4k shields and 12k health and goodness knows how much armour, but the starter Railjack has basically nothing. This still surprises me though, because so much has been done to make the Railjack grind easier.

That being said, it’s not that easy. You need level 3 gear to do higher level missions, and that gear only drops IN higher level missions. And what you get doesn’t automatically have perfect stats, you have to fuse components together to make the strongest gear possible, and this gear takes time to both earn and build. Sure, you have the same thing with Kuva and Tenet weapons, you can fuse them to make them better, but there’s only one level of weapon and a 25% gun is still perfectly usable. And with no one playing Railjack these days, it’s hard to do that without someone to carry you. So people kinda, just, don’t bother.

What can be done though to make Railjack more, I don’t know, pleasing though? They tried making Railjack more like normal missions, but that just turned into tacking Railjack onto normal missions. Honestly, what I think they should have done was gone even further away from normal missions. Make some endless game modes or something. Making Railjack more like everything else in Warframe may have helped bring in some people, but it also kinda took away what made it special.

Also, fuck Corpus crew ships. They are no fun.