Five Game Challenge Day 25: Archwing Adjustments

The big news of the latest Warframe update — Rising Tide — is of course the ability to add the Dry Dock to your clan dojo, and from there your Railjack. The spacecraft that we’ll soon be taking off in!

Exciting stuff. Our Clan Dojo required some rearrangement to allow for the build of the Dry Dock, so we’re still not done yet. All the clan materials are together though, just a day or two away before we finish up and can start on the personal builds of our own ships.

The personal build requirements are not exactly small, either.

Other than the new resource types, I think I have it all. The 6m total credits is a little rough though. That’s roughly my total credits so far. I see more Index in my future.

Anywho, not the focus of today. The video linked under that image from Tactical Potato will tell you all, if you want to know more about building your own.

The part perhaps not getting as much attention so far is the changes to the Archwing flight model.

Archwing is going to take a heavier role in the game again with the Empyrean update. There will be times it will be used in a supporting function, and times when you’ll be a speeding rocket from the safety of your Railjack into the hull breach you just caused in an enemy ship to become the ground force.

Conceptually, really cool stuff.

But you know the only thing worse than an Archwing mission?

An underwater Archwing mission.

Now, I don’t know if the adjusted flight model is suddenly going to these old Archwing missions into the best things since sliced bread. In fact I’m pretty sure the years of pent up rage will pretty much ensure this doesn’t happen.

But maybe… Just maybe, they can make the Archwing portions of a Railjack mission someone other than the job of the guy who just lost a best of five rock, paper, scissors match.

The two changes that did make the notes are actually just a small part of this:

• The afterburner keybind has shifted from W (to initially build up space), then holding Shift+Space to just W (initially) and then holding shift.
• Every Archwing has gained a ‘blink’ ability.

The bigger change in my opinion is the loss of drift and momentum felt in flight. You can now stop on a dime. Before after engaging the afterburner you could stop the burn, turn around, and then have a fair bit of struggle to come to a complete stop or build momentum in the direction which you came from.

It was essentially a Newtonian flight model.

One part of me thinks something has been lost in this simplification. But then the other, much louder part, reminds me that no-one — not even me — actually liked Archwing in the first place.

So how much of a loss was it, really?

Everything feels much more precise now, and less floaty.

I think the Archwing mod diversity (or rather, the lack thereof) is still going to make any extended combat missions in them a real pain. But it might be a step in the right direction, at least. And a signal that Digital Extremes are at least thinking about how to make the system more fun to engage with before it becomes a bigger part of the Warframe play experience around Railjack next month.