So hey not my usual stomping grounds but I am currently writing a smutty (of course) one shot about Jack and The Railroad Man from Old Gods Of Appalachia, because who am I if not a rarepair lover?
Anyway, if you follow me for my Distress Signal/FNAF stuff but you still wanna give it a go I am attempting to make it as readable as possible even without much context (Jack is literally the Jack of All Tales and the Railroad Man is the evil personification of the railroad). I hope you'll like it because so far there's literally four works in the Jack/The Railroad Man tag which is absurd considering that TRM is voiced by Yuri Lowenthal.
It's cool to me how Railjack has some of the most detailed environmental worldbuilding in Warframe. Like, I finally cleaned up the gaps in my RJ starchart last night (I never finished the Corpus nodes that got added post launch), and spent a while just staring at the little details.
There are a lot of places with fully animated details, like the icedriver bases! They modeled and animated the entire production process for comet shards! You can just watch the comet shards get made! That's really cool!
There are smaller details too, like the derelict Orokin satellites, with Corpus elements hooked on to enable their study. Some of these are quick side objectives, allowing entry to see the interior-- full of Corpus machinery. Research equipment. Walls and elements of the original structure peeled apart for study. And it uses familiar assets, but cast in an unfamiliar new context.
Since we can fly between each of these places, we see their context. We know this is a ship, a factory, a research station-- and they all have distinct tilesets unto themselves, further distinguishing them. There's an ease of understanding the purpose of each location that we don't get a lot in regular tilesets, since those are meant to serve multiple gamemodes and mission nodes.
There are still plenty of cool things in the "normal" tilesets, don't get me wrong-- latter ones especially have gotten more detailed and included similar worldbuilding. But the clearer context, the freedom for each point of interest to be distinct, really makes these things feel more like parts of a broader world.
It's rad how much care was put into these spaces, and I find it unfortunate that they are some of the least visited nodes in the game.
I do actually enjoy RJ a good bit-- it's some of the coolest content in the game IMO-- and I can't help feeling a little sad that it never got to live up to its full potential. By that, I mean the original vision. How RJ was going to be the glue that connected everything else in the game together. Playing it now, you can still see glimpses of that plan.
The way you can navigate seamlessly between mission from your ship. How it combines four different gameplay modes (railjack, archwing, necramech, and warframe). The OG RJ design having our arsenals on deck. Oplink (for one brief moment).
I do wonder what Warframe would look like if they had pulled it off. I think it would have been cool as hell! We can kinda see another glimmer of it in Soulframe, in the way that you can enter your base at any time-- yet retain your place in the world when you do so. There's a really cool sense of continuity, in that.
But, I am biased here. I was one of the freaks who actually liked RJ even at release, and one of the sickos praying for the upcoming update to actually include RJ focused content (rather than taxijack). I still greatly enjoy Warframe as it is, and it is genuinely kinda cool that the game retains these layers that hint at its history and where it was going at different times. It's been around a while!
It's fun to peel these back and think about what the game was like at the time, what its goals were, and what could have been. In a way, it gives me greater appreciation for what *did* happen. The creative process, especially with a large, complex game such as Warframe-- isn't always straightforward. Seeing remnants of another idea within a work is like seeing a pencil mark on a painting. It humanizes it. Reminds us this is made by people, and like any of us, sometimes they need to throw things at the wall to figure out what sticks.
