Warframe completely overhauls its contentious space combat
Warframe's ship-to-ship space combat is one of its most ambitious features, but when it launched back in 2019 it was clear it needed a lot of refining. Building and upgrading your Railjack spaceship took hours and hours of grinding, there weren't a lot of missions, and the whole thing was super complicated—even by Warframe's standards.
Digital Extremes has spent the last year making improvements to the system, but today's update is easily the most comprehensive. Called Corpus Proxima and The New Railjack, this patch overhauls the entire Railjack experience to be more streamlined and friendly to solo players while also adding new missions, enemies, and more. It's big.
If you've played Warframe in the past year, the new Railjack experience is probably going to feel completely different. Entire systems have been redesigned or removed entirely, but in general everything is much more straightforward and simple. The patch notes are a short novel.
If you haven't played Railjack yet, one of the best changes will be a greatly simplified process for obtaining one. The materials required and the time it takes to build a Railjack have all been significantly reduced, and players will no longer need to be a part of a clan who built a Drydock in order to build a Railjack. And if you're impatient, you can also skip the grind entirely and buy one from the in-game marketplace using Platinum (Warframe's premium currency).
You can read the full list of changes here, but some of the most notable are that Avionics have been replaced entirely with Railjack Mods which function similarly to the mods used to improve weapons and individual warframes. Like everything else in this update, the new version is much simpler and requires less grinding. There's also been a ton of improvements to matchmaking so that players can jump straight into missions, and a more robust NPC crew system means you won't need to recruit friends to help pilot the Railjack unless you want to.
In addition to a complete overhaul, there are now a bunch of new missions related to the Corpus enemy faction. There's three new planets with Railjack missions and a bunch of new enemy and mission types, too.
As Digital Extremes explains, all of this is to set the stage for Warframe's next big update titled Call of the Tempestarii, which will introduce a new quest about the Sevagoth warframe, introduce a new villain, and add more Railjack missions. Until then, though, it sounds like there's a ton to explore with the overhauled Railjack. You can read about all the features in this new update on the Warframe forums.