Warframe Lead Designer Discusses The Future Of Railjacks

EDITOR'S NOTE: An earlier version of this piece used an incorrect pronoun in reference to Quite Shallow. This has been corrected. Thanks to MMOBomber Matthew for the call out!

Recently, Warframe lead designer Scott McGregor joined YouTuber Quite Shallow on one of her videos to discuss the game. The result is an hour-and-a-quarter-long video covering a variety of topics. (The whole video can be viewed below if you have a bit of time to kill.) It loosely addresses things like how the shift to working from home has impacted the game's development, how the development of individual Warframes is managed, how rewards are distributed during events, and what solutions they're coming up with in regards to scaling future content testing before releasing it.

Of course, a good bit of discussion in the video has to do with one of the newer systems added to the game, Railjacks. As is noted during the cast, the Railjack system isn't as refined as other systems. For the most part, this is because it's relatively new and hasn't had approximately 7 years worth of refinement. So, when players compare the ground and space missions in the Scarlet Spear event, there is an obvious difference. (It also didn't help that the work the team was doing was waylaid by the shift to work from home.)

Right now, the Warframe team is working to redesign the Railjack system, tuning and balancing it in order to make it more fun for players. As McGregor noted, the current Railjack system makes it feel like it's "drowning all the time". Players spend a lot of effort on simply fixing things on the ship -- putting out fires, repairing holes and the like. The economy needs to be balanced. Weapons could be more useful as well.

The problem is that Railjack is pretty much like building a brand new game. There are a lot of interconnected systems that are all out of balance with each other at the moment. So, the team is working from the ground up -- fixing base systems like weapons, general balance, enemy farming, and the like before moving on to some of the finer details. One thing that's being changed -- and is in reference to that whole drowning thing -- is that disaster events like fires are being limited. They'll happen less frequently but when they do happen they will be bigger.

As noted, the whole discussion can be heard in the video below. The actual video content is general gameplay -- lots of fishing. So you can probably do something else while you listen.