wassup everyone and welcome to a bit of a talky video, as well as looking at my current solo railjack build, so sit back, put your feet up and relax.

Railjack has only been out for a couple of months so far, and already, a lot of the initial excitement has turned into frustration and dissapointment, and I wanted to talk a bit about my feeling about railjacks launch and where we go from here.

It was about 18 months ago at tennocon that railjack was announced, to a lot of hype. The reaction from the crowd there was incredible and my own excitement was amazing. I've been wanting a space style part of the game, with warframes normal flair on things, and thought the 2 would be something that if properly implemented, could seriously enrich the game, and really help tie things together in a way that archwing never really did. What was shown looked amazing over the time that it was talked about, which even included another tennocon reveal, ground to space transitions, capital ship battles, lich command ships, squad link, AI crews, tactical interfaces, intuitive ship systems that needed some thinking instead of just modding up to max.

Fast forward to release 2 months ago, when it finally released, and lets be honest, of all the things shown, next to nothing made it in, and what was in, ended up essentially being 30 nodes of the same game mode, a self made problem and paid solution to modules and the mode itself being, well, lets be honest, barely playable whatsoever. Lets be real, in terms of missing features, this is literally no mans sky levels of missing features at this stage. Almost nothing of what was teased and talked about is in. In fact, massive shoutout to Quiette Shy here, because her video called "why i'm so cynical about railjack" sums it up in a much better way than I ever possibly could.

But personally, this barebones release didn't put me off. And I constantly told people on stream not to worry that it would be getting regular updates. A couple of months before railjacks release, DE did a tennovip in Japan, where it showed off railjack once again, and talked about after launch, supporting it with monthly content updates, a video I'll link in the description below. I think we all knew at this point that it sounded ambitious, but with how badly saying things and not delivering on them has gone in the past, surely they must have been incredibly confident they could pull it off. So, based on that, I wasn't worried about barebones launch, surely thats the start of the monthly content that they talked about right? Well 2 months on and all we got were a couple resource tweaks and removing the pay to skip from the module grind. No new mission types, no new features. All the focus went on fixing the lich system. Something that did badly need to happen, but I want to give my thoughts on in another video.

We do know that more content is coming for railjack, the event that was mentioned on the last devstream, operation scarlet spear, which sounds like it might be the start of the sentient incursion into our solar system, plus the corpus railjack faction. But with no idea when any of this is coming, and DE being cautious about dates because thats not gone well in the past, the game mode is an almost literal ghost town. I don't think anyone on my friends list plays it any more, and if I check how many open squads there are, theres basically none on almost every single node. Sometimes none at all.

All of that in a game mode that was by design not supposed to be soloable. I mean, it is soloable, but only if you are actually semi decent and have a very well fitted railjack, something which I'll show my build for a bit later. Command was supposed to be bridging this gap between content not designed for solo, and those that don't want, or can't play in squads for whatever reason. But recently, we've heard nothing about it, we heard that it wasn't ready to go out in the initial release, which again, I think most people were like, ok, its not quite ready yet, it will be out soon after. Lets ignore the couple weeks where DE were on their christmas holiday, they are human too, they deserve their christmas break, so a month and a half later, the game modes a ghost town, and the one thing that could keep people that want to play and don't have a maxed out railjack playing, is still up in the air. Especially with a potential event just around the corner, how are people supposed to get their railjacks prepared and ready for that event when nobodies playing at all. Its an annoying catch 22, however its something that is going to be a potential problem when the event does launch.

Now I am going to say that, its shameless plug time. Wednesdays and Fridays over on twitch I do stream warframe starting at 8pm GMT. On these streams, I am going to be running a railjack boosting service, so if you are finding it hard to get a squad, head on over to my stream, the links in the description below, and I'll take you on my railjack and we can grind out some MK3 parts and some key avionics and make sure that your railjack is as ready for the event as you can be.

But this is the thing, while all I've said so far sucks, it sucks even more that in all honesty, I enjoy the base gameplay of railjack. I find it fun, i find it refreshing and its something I can see myself losing a load of time playing around with in the future, when I have a reason to go there.

Right now, just like literally everything that gets added recently. Its another content island. You go to railjack to do railjack stuff. And this opens up another topic that I want to talk about in another more talky video, the idea of content islands and that warframe is a bunch of random mish mashed ideas, put together with not a lot of feeling that its part of the same universe. But still, railjack is the latest idea of that, you go there to do railjack things and thats it. And this is why the lack of content for it so far is hurting so hard. Whats the point of going to railjack to play railjack stuff. To get avionics for your railjack that you can't fit because avionic capacity isn't even close to being enough to put a proper build on. To get resources that you only use in railjack. To get upgrades for your railjack to make getting upgrades for your railjack easier to make getting resources you only use on your railjack easier. Its this insulated closed loop gameplay without any real substantial content that is killing it off faster than any game mode since Lunaro.

And this is whats leading into there being nobody playing. Those that played when it came out, spent their time doing stuff, got their avionics, got their reactor, their mk3 weapons and are playing Monster Hunter World, or Destiny 2 now. Rather than using their railjacks in railjack missions because there is no incentive to. They've done the nodes and apart from hunting mastery in intrinsics or grabbing the couple weapons that are exclusive to railjack, thers nothing else to chase. Content islands like plains of eidolon or fortuna worked ok because they had the content to back it up, railjack doesn't, and thats really biting them in the ass now. After the disaster that was liches 1.0 and then railjack, the average player count in warframe on stream dropped by nearly 11 thousand. The lowest peak and lowest average player count since before the plains of Eidolon. Its recovered a bit now due to the lich changes, but when was the last time that a major update came out, a huge system announced a year and a half ago, and then 10 thousand people stop playing. Honestly, this does speak volumes about how badly railjack went down with the community, and its going to be hard to recover it.

Depite the lack of real content, there are a couple of other issues that need addressing. Most notably the fact that right now, the guns feel pretty awful for the most part. I don't feel powerful and neither does the railjack that I just spent so long working on, even the animations and sounds don't make up for it and don't make the ships guns feel powerful. Not to mention something I alluded to earlier, the avionics capacity problem. You'll see my build later, but I have I think 4 empty slots, i have downgraded some avionics and unranked some others. And this is with a maxed out reactor. So even if you get lucky and get that maximum capacity reactor, you still can't fit anything properly. Maybe we have mark 4 and 5 reactors coming at some stage with the corpus, but right now, you get to a point where you feel that you should have a maxed out railjack, but you physically can't do that, which is not a particularly fun feeling. Doesn't exactly feel much like the time invested has the reward that it deserves.

The stupid thing is that even listing all of these things which I feel are major problems right now, I still enjoy railjack at its core. I think the core gameplay is solid, and if it gets fully and properly integrated into the rest of the game, could be something that elevates it, adds another dimension and really allows for a different style of gamplay to switch things up a bit. But it needs to be expanded upon extremely quickly, with command for a start. Not only does that allow for the solo play when player numbers are down, but also gives additional things to do with crew recruiting, tying in the lich system for example. I just hope that command comes a little bit before the sentient event, because if not, I can forsee a lot of forums threads talking about their railjacks not being close to ready for veil because they can't get squads together. I don't think railjack is unsalvagable, and I think once things start moving that it will be good, but oh boy, its off to a really bad start.

While I've been chatting away about railjack and my feelings on it, I've had some solo railjack gameplay in the background. And I really wanted to show my build that I am using, and give you an idea of how I have mine built now. Its mostly just a mix of speed, damage and survivability. Bulkhead and hull weave for health and armour, had to drop hull weave down due to lack of capacity, which is annoying. Polar coil to fire guns longer, secton density for crit damage, hyperstrike for gun damage, downranked predator only drops like 2% crit chance but is easier to fit, conic nozzle and ion burn for speed, helps us do these anomaly runs without needing to abort spam. Tactical is unranked breach quanta in case I am on a crew ship when I get a catastrophic, fire suppression to put out a lot of the fires and heal the railjack, void cloak to hide as often as I can to take fire away from the ship, especially if I am in the middle of a few crew ships, or dealing with the grineer boarding parties. Just helps live longer and then void hole to group enemies up to hit them with the mk3 seeker missile that you get from the dojo. The void hole groups them all up in the centre and a single seeker will kill them all in 1 go, which is really nice for clear. Front guns as you can see I have some zekti apocs. I don't like the cryos as much since their damage got cut in a patch recently, I much prefer the apocs, providing you know how to aim.

As for gameplay, I mean this is a completely unedited run, so you can see the exact gameplay in the background. There are things I can do slightly differently and potentially more effectively, but actions speak louder than words in this case. Its an expensive build, requires a great reactor and void hole which is a very rare avionic, but this is what I've ended up with for my solo build. And hopefully you can see what I mean about avionic capacity being a pain in the ass and not even close to being enough for a proper build.

So thats basically it really. I am super interested to see your thoughts about all of this in the comments below. Do you agree with me, do you think railjack can be salvaged and are you still even playing it? Let me know in the comments, I will be reading and responding as much as I can! But for now, many thanks for watching, hit that like button if you enjoyed the video, sub for more warframe content and I shall see you in the next video!