The Power of a Ship of AI Crew Mates
When the Railjack Retrofitted update come out, the first thing I did was throw some mods on my Railjack and do one mission. Not wanting to waste time, I just did a quick mission on Earth. Once I had one single Intrinsic, I went and unlocked the Command Intrinsic, then headed to Fortuna. Ticker had a crowd around her, and for good reason. The lovely chap had crew for us to hire.
My first choice was obvious. There were a couple of people from each Syndicate, but one stood out to me. A Perrin Sequence guy called Serv Nob. How could I NOT hire this guy. Especially when he’s so chipper!
They have personality!
Sure, it’s the same handful of lines between each faction, but our crew mates actually do have personalities! Each Syndicate’s potential crew mate has a personality relating to that syndicate. Cephalon Suda’s minions are fascinated by your ship and want to examine everything. The Steel Meridian folks are clearly stressed and suffering from PTSD, but are pushing through it. Perrin Sequence’s crew mates are chipper and slightly anti-capitalist while Red Veil’s guys are reliably creepy. The crew you get from the Arbiters of Hexis are basically Tenno fanboys but eh, that’s still kinda fitting. The New Loka crew though seem to just hate everything. But that kinda fits in with their weird, hippy-Nazi things.
Really, the only problem is that our crew mates don’t stand still for long enough to be able to hear them speak. So the personalities are kinda wasted.
You can also completely customize their looks. So, of course, I made mine bright yellow, and have them all wearing the Uru Syandana. Of course.
They’re actually pretty good.
There are four roles that crew can take: Defenders, Engineers, Gunners and Pilots.You can assign a crew mate to any role, and you can switch them up mid-mission. Engineers are great at patching holes, but don’t seem to use the forge much. Defenders don’t really do much unless you get boarded, but they are pretty reliable. And ‘pretty reliable’ is good enough, when Gunners are excellent at their jobs. Gunners are probably as good as actual human players. Then again, they ARE AI aimbots, so it makes sense.
Only the pilot is a bit crap. But honestly, I… kinda don’t blame them? If you look at the normal enemy AI, that’s also a bit crap. I’ve seen plenty of ships crash into walls and stuff. The pilot is kinda okay, but I wouldn’t trust them with the ship for too long. The way I see it, you just want someone who will keep the ship moving while you do an objective.
While a crew of competent players will do the job better than your AI crew, for the most part, these guys do fine.
The Command Intrinsics overall though isn’t great.
Most of the Command skills are just “get one extra crew person” or “add one point to crew’s stats”. They’re very unimaginative. Only levels 8 and 9 are vaguely interesting, and even then they’re not spectacular. Level 8 allows you to hire a Lich as a Defender, while level 9 allows you to summon one crew mate in normal missions, like a Specter. Unfortunately, they only last 3 minutes, despite being only just as good as a Warframe Specter.
Level 10 Command Intrinsics isn’t even out yet, but frankly, I don’t expect it to be any good.
Liches are… alright I guess.
Hiring a Lich is pretty fun. They are very reliable Defenders and are insanely tanky. Sadly, you can’t do much else with them, since they can only be Defenders, they can’t take any other role. A cool level 10 upgrade would be the ability to train a Lich to do other jobs, but for now, they just shoot whoever gets on board. That being said, with good gunners, you actually get very few ram sleds even getting close to your Railjack. So you actually might be better off hiring a normal person.
There’s another downside: Liches don’t say much. And that’s kinda weird because normally Liches constantly talk. They definitely need some voice lines.
Really though, despite my criticisms of the rest of the update, the crew system seems pretty alright. Sure, it could be more in-depth and have better AI, but it does the job without too many hitches.