K-Driven: A K-Drive Rework

[Sintag]

Does anyone remember K-Drives?  Those neat hoverboards that were hyped to hell with the Orb Vallis?  Seemed like a good idea, but then they launched to... radio silence and zero fanfare.  There's a few reasons why this is, so before I get into my rework, let's go over why K-Drives flopped as hard as they did;

THE PROBLEMS FACING K-DRIVES:

Spoiler

 

Crap first impression and too much asked of the player to improve their board

• Now, I get it, the Bondi K-Drive is free, and it's meant to be a new player's fastest means of traversing the open worlds, which is a nice thought and all, but it leaves veterans who use their Archwings wondering what's in it for them.  And, sadly, the Bondi is a miserable time that you're forced to slog through until you can make your first proper board with the Ventkids.  Which runs you 20K Standing and all the grind that entails, all with an unmoddable board that leaves a really bad taste in your mouth.  And for a new player, 20K Standing is no mean feat.  For MR4, this means it'll take, at absolute minimum, 4 days to make their first K-Drive, and that's if they farm out the Standing needed for each and every part.  With the same.  Monotonous.  Board.  All this minus the material cost and the Gilding, not to mention the Mods needed to make their first board more then just a reskin of the Bondi, just to have a K-Drive that's beyond 'bleh' when, in that same timeframe, they could've easily made the Archwing Launcher and rendered K-Drives moot.

Archwing's faster by a country mile

• This is the big one.  If Archwings are always going to be faster then K-Drives, even across land, why bother making use of K-Drives?  It doesn't matter if you get there in style if the current mission's half-done by the time you finally arrive.

Archwing lets you use weapons and abilities; You're effectively unarmed on a K-Drive before modding

• You can shoot your guns, you can use the Archwing's innate power set, you can compete in the DPS race while jetpacking.  The K-Drive, meanwhile, has a few attacks that are all high up in the Ventkid Syndicate, all mods that are competing with QoL and stat tweaks, and all useless due to low damage values and low range, and all requiring you to trick first.  No running into enemies or landing on them to simply do damage that way, nope.  You gotta do tricks and land within 8m of the enemy to deal about 1,200 Blast damage to them.

All that changes with each part is the visuals; No stat tweaks, nothing

• If your first built K-Drive's the exact same thing as all the others, why bother making more, outside of Mastery?  Why bother using the more expensive parts if your board's just gonna perform the same?

 

•  

Okay, I think you have the idea.  Too much effort for too little gain.  So, how do we go about fixing all this crap?

MY PERSONAL SOLUTIONS

Spoiler

• Make the Bondi K-Drive Moddable, and start with Damaged versions of all K-Drive Mods

Make no mistake, the Bondi K-Drive is a piece of crap.  By making it modifiable, unable to be Gilded (So no potatoes) but giving the player 3-rank, Damaged mods with lesser effects, they can try out builds and make it a bit less painful to use, giving an overall better first impression.

• Have parts affect statistics

This one seems obvious and all, but I don't just mean 'make better Jets move you faster'.  I'm talking having the Boards affect, say, your Gravity and Grinding, your Reactors affecting Jump Charge Speed and Jump Height, your Jets affecting your speed and adding different Boost Multipliers, and your Noses affect, I dunno, your Trick Multiplier and the speed at which you earn points.  This is me throwing things at the wall because it was 1 AM when I typed this, but you get my point, right?  Make the other parts mean something.

• Add 20% base speed to all K-Drives

One of the end goals with this rework idea is to make K-Drives, if not exactly able to move in lockstep compared to an Archwing user, at least capable of getting to the same destination within, say, 10-20 seconds assuming the user doesn't crash-land.

• Let us cast powers on K-Drives

This is actually an extension of a known behavior;  K-Drives, unlike Archwings, don't cancel out any powers currently in effect.  Why not let us cast those Powers while on a K-Drive, excluding Channeled ones, so Warframes with offensive capabilities don't have to first leap off the board before, say, tossing Shurikens at people or growing Spores?

• Addendum:  Give K-Drives intrinsic attacks

This is all-new.  If I ram someone at top speed on a K-Drive, I want them to feel it.  Make them ragdoll with Impact damage or something!  Hit them with a knockdown/heat proc if I land on them from a large height!  K-Drives are fast-moving objects, they should be able to at least tickle the enemy before I start modifying it!

• Finally, buff all attack-based mods

As it stands, the attack mods feel more like jokes.  As noted above, they either do too little damage to mean anything in a fight, or hit over too small a radius.  They all need to be tuned up somewhat if you want to compete with Archwing and me simply shooting a gun.

So I'm not sure if this rework would do much of anything to help K-Drives out of the ditch they've been left to bleed out in, but I like the idea and the fun behind these hoverboards and want to see them able to compete with Archwings, something their current incarnation simply cannot do.  If this is a good idea for reworks, or if it needs improvement, let me know.  Thanks as always for reading.

[FimbriaPrime]

I feel like K-Drives are a story that hasn't happened yet. Lore-wise, their primary users are a bunch of kids; of course their boards aren't any good yet. Some day DE will release a Fortuna update in which Roky gains a few years and reveals all the improvements he's made to the K-drive that make it a legitimate adventuring tool.

Mechanically, you are absolutely right. K-Drives are hard to get into and offer little payout when you do, and these changes would help fix that. The only one I disagree with is the speed increase. Maybe it would be good for one specific board built to go fast, but I think there are other directions to go with the board that don't necessarily involve speed.

For example, K-Drives could be used for mounted combat. I hadn't noticed that powers persisted, but that is an interesting feature and one that plays well here. In addition to using powers on a K-Drive, why not go one step further and give the ability to use weapons on a K-Drive as well? It would be fun to ride through a crowd with a glaive and send enemies ragdolling into orbit, or wield a gun and zip around the perimeter of a field like a horse archer. If K-Drives could be used as a combat style, they wouldn't need to compete with Archwings; they would compete with walking, and that's a very different playing field.

Another direction they could go: One unique mechanic of the K-Drive is that they still exist when you get off, unlike Archwings which simply vanish. That's a mechanic which could be played on. What if you could mod a K-Drive with an aura, so that anyone standing near the board gained some benefit? Even players who have no intention of riding the K-Drive at all would still invest in it as a movable buff totem. Such a feature would give players a little extra power without requiring a change in playstyle, and therefore draw new people to the K-Drive.

[Tesseract7777]

Posting so I will remember to take a closer look at this later... I've posted about k drives before recently, and I would love to see DE take a closer look at them soon. 

Just scrolling through your post as much as  I can while I have time, I think you have some good ideas. 

You definitely hit on some of the biggest main problems with k drives in general so well done there. 

[Tesseract7777]

45 minutes ago, FimbriaPrime said:

What if you could mod a K-Drive with an aura, so that anyone standing near the board gained some benefit? Even players who have no intention of riding the K-Drive at all would still invest in it as a movable buff totem. Such a feature would give players a little extra power without requiring a change in playstyle, and therefore draw new people to the K-Drive.

I love this idea. 

In general I think this is really tricky when it comes to them versus archwings though. Should they at least be closer to as fast if you have a modded one with the right parts? Or should their focus be different? How do we get people to use them for movement at all, even if they do have something like a totem buff, people will not use them for movement if archwings are far and away the better option, unless they are just doing it for funsies. 

And archwings can also fill the role of mounted combat, by flying low to the ground, and they can do it faster, and with the full modding of basically a warframe. 

I think a speed boost of some kind and parts that make them even faster and actually have stats may be necessary, unless we are just giving up on them being a legitimate sidegrade to movement. 

Of course, we could also nerf archwing movement, but I'm not sure that's the right answer as it would just make people mad. Which is why I support k drive speed increase or something. 

I've also heard people suggest operators be able to ride on them and use their amps and abilities, which would help operator movement, but unless you had operator only missions (which is the opposite of integrating content and would make people mad), again, people would just use archwing for mobility or mounted combat (unless again, the k drive was at least close to as mobile as an archwing on an open world instance). I mean, maybe doing kiddy missions for the vent kids could be a lore reason to have operator only missions on k drives, but it would also be a literal content island as you are purposeful separating game mechanics meant to be integrated. 

It's a tricky issue to be sure. 

[Steel_Rook]

The problem with K-Drives is they're a joke with no punchline. While superficially seeming to have a use, K-Drive occupy the same space as Peculiar mods - they're a thing DE threw into the game because they thought it was funny but never really intended for players to take seriously. This is why so much of the system is focused around performing pointless Tony Hawk's Pro Tenno tricks which don't really serve any purpose, at the expense of taking up keybinds and functionality. If you wanted to travel, then doing kickflips and 900s is the slowest, least optimal way of doing that. Not to mention falling off our boards, which is funny the first time it happens and eye-rolling after that. But you fall and break your neck in those skateboard games from 20 years ago, so we fall off our K-Drives.

Meanwhile, K-Drives are painfully slow, their jump limited and clumsy with the charge-up mechanic, their double-jump is tied to performing tricks and you can't use them indoors even though newer tilesets have more than enough room to support them. Oh, and the only real way to progress them? Waste time doing doughnuts at the Pearl or go up and down the pipes at the lake, because you sure aren't going to earn enough score from tricks going to missions. Ain't nobody got time for that!

 

If you want to improve K-Drives, you're going to have to scrap K-Drives and start over, preferably with a design that's not based solely around an unfunny joke. You'd need to design them as a transportation tool with a focus on getting us places more easily. I just don't see DE doing that, plus I expect people who like the K-Drive "skater kid" jokes would complain.

[selig_fay]

To be honest, the only problem I see is that archwing is better than k-drive. So maybe the problem will be less global if content appears where k-drive will be the only vehicle. However, I think I will still use a fast frame than it. Maybe some people could get some fun on normal missions, just make the boards a little slow. Maby need a couple of mods to make k-drive more friendly for normal missions, such as driving over walls and hitting walls more gently. But I think it's also going to be necessary for the player to be able to use at least a pistol to make it look like a fight. I know that this was only intended to be done by transport, but it seems to me that this is a great option to get some people to use the boards more.

[Drasiel]

So what I always felt Kdrives were missing was a niche. Archwings are faster for travel so that's out but my idea was to make them the looters choice of travel on open worlds. As soon as you step on your kdrive you lose all ability to "detect" things on the map but if you didn't kdrives would become the go to travel method for mining, hunting, and collecting open world resources.

add kdrive mods that:

• add enemy radar
• add loot radar
• add mining node sensors
• add animal tracking sensors.

 

[Sintag]

Re-visiting post-Tennolive and this post blowing up all of a sudden.

So ICYMI, Bug-Drives are a thing, and you can fire pistols while riding them.  I'm gonna assume this also applies to K-Drives, which, if this is the case, has solved one of my major problems with the board, namely that they're hot garbage in combat.  Would still enjoy 1H-abilities being castable, but I will take any bone I can get with regards to this system.

You guys suggested some good ideas, so here's a revised-ish list of fixes;

• K-Drives do not override radar mods and have innate 20m vacuum, and will auto-break containers they run into (provided they already don't)
• Customization still needs meaning; Boards affect Grinding statistics, Jets affect Boost Multiplier and Base Speed, Reactors affect Jump Charge Time and Height, and Noses affect Point Multiplier and Point Acculmulation Speed.
• You can use any one-handed Ability while riding K-Drives
• Better first impression; Make the Bondi moddable and provide 'glinty' versions of the mods.
• New Mods that allow K-Drives to track Conservation Start Points
• New 'Aura' mods that give all Tenno within 30m of a K-Drive, moving or dismounted, various buffs;  For instance, one that increases fire rate and reload speed
• 10% Speed Boost to all boards, because I still feel like they're too slow.
• Intrinsic combat; Ramming enemies ragdolls them with Impact and Slash procs, landing on them knocks them down with Impact and Heat procs.

Thanks for the suggestions, keep 'em coming!

[(PSN)Vexx757]

I like these ideas but one thing I`ll add to this is that they need a place to be used at which is were my idea comes in, it would be sick if they did a saga all-stars racing with k-drives in the conclave.

Here is a post I put up about how it could work, tell me what you think.

 

[keikogi]

On 2020-07-31 at 5:39 PM, Steel_Rook said:

you want to improve K-Drives, you're going to have to scrap K-Drives and start over, preferably with a design that's not based solely around an unfunny joke. You'd need to design them as a transportation tool with a focus on getting us places more easily. I just don't see DE doing that, plus I expect people who like the K-Drive "skater kid" jokes would complain.

Well seems like in the heat of deimos they could fire secondaries from the k drive and infested are vulnerable to thr player just moving backwards and shooting. If the infested have as much anti arching non sense as the grineer had on POE release the K drives would be remotely usefull. But they still a rather bad alternative due to lack of skill set of their own or any meaninfull amount of durability.

[DrakeWurrum]

We just need an area to use it where Archwings aren't feasible. Maybe Deimos won't allow Archwing?

I keep hoping for an "open world" that's literally the interior of an asteroid, intercrossed with a bunch of tunnels for us to navigate by K-Drive - with plenty of rails to grind!

[Steel_Rook]

3 hours ago, keikogi said:

Well seems like in the heat of deimos they could fire secondaries from the k drive and infested are vulnerable to thr player just moving backwards and shooting. If the infested have as much anti arching non sense as the grineer had on POE release the K drives would be remotely usefull. But they still a rather bad alternative due to lack of skill set of their own or any meaninfull amount of durability.

The problem is that you'd need to get rid of the "tricks" nonsense to do that, since such a major part of the Tricks system is tied to left-click and especially right-click. Depending on their character rigging, it might also be difficult to impossible for DE to let us shoot a vehicle. There's a reason all Archwing weapons use the same grip, and why none of the alterante Warframe animations generally work while firing. I could be wrong on that one, though.

Like I said - I'm absoolutely in favour of improving K-Drives and letting us shoot from them. Yes, even primaries and Archguns. It would just have to come at the expense of the "tricks" system.

[keikogi]

54 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

The problem is that you'd need to get rid of the "tricks" nonsense to do that, since such a major part of the Tricks system is tied to left-click and especially right-click. Depending on their character rigging, it might also be difficult to impossible for DE to let us shoot a vehicle. There's a reason all Archwing weapons use the same grip, and why none of the alterante Warframe animations generally work while firing. I could be wrong on that one, though.

DE does not even need to kill the tonny haws simulator it just needs to turn it on the side show it is meant to be. For example just give skills to k drives like arc wings have. The first skill engages the tonny hawks mode and you get a bigger boost when you do tricks , if you don´t do a trick on that time you just get a normal boost when you leave it. Hold just skips the combo window all together and gives you a boost. 

Late edit: it is better to tap for quick boost , hold to engage the trick for bigger boost mod so the system does not accidentally gets on the way of someone just trying to get somewhere.

 

 

[FimbriaPrime]

On 2020-08-02 at 10:58 PM, Sintag said:

Thanks for the suggestions, keep 'em coming!

Okay.

There's a mod - Thrash Landing - which deals damage in a small radius when landing a jump. The damage is pitiful, the radius is tiny, and wind-up takes far longer and far more button-mashing than any three other weapons combined - but behind the terrible numbers, you can see that the developer wanted to make a combat move based on vehicular ground slams.

I can support that.

Maybe Thrash Landing isn't supposed to represent the final damage. Maybe instead, it's the base damage. The player is supposed to add a mod of extra raw damage and two mods of extra elemental damage and a specialized mod of 5x damage in this one specific case which they have engineered to happen on every attack and a mod of +300% radius. (Totemists really like the mod of +300% radius.) When the player does all of those things, they get a weapon with a long and complicated wind-up, but it often takes out squads in one or two hits. They plan to jump from one group of enemies to the next like an exploding pogo stick, which I think is a real band name somewhere, and finish off any stragglers with their real weapon.

Then they get greedy. If high wind-up time gives them a respectable explosion, what happens if they wind up even more?

Introduce a mod which increases mod radius according to the board's speed. (Totemists have to think about this one.) The player builds a board which sacrifices their short range maneuverability for maximum long range speed. They plan to spend several seconds racing into the distance, then return, arcing over the hills like a ballistic missile. At fully optimized speed with all other mods on an S-rank board, the blast radius would cover most of a Grineer camp on the Plains of Eidolon.

[Sintag]

On 2020-08-07 at 11:46 AM, FimbriaPrime said:

Okay.

There's a mod - Thrash Landing - which deals damage in a small radius when landing a jump. The damage is pitiful, the radius is tiny, and wind-up takes far longer and far more button-mashing than any three other weapons combined - but behind the terrible numbers, you can see that the developer wanted to make a combat move based on vehicular ground slams.

I can support that.

Maybe Thrash Landing isn't supposed to represent the final damage. Maybe instead, it's the base damage. The player is supposed to add a mod of extra raw damage and two mods of extra elemental damage and a specialized mod of 5x damage in this one specific case which they have engineered to happen on every attack and a mod of +300% radius. (Totemists really like the mod of +300% radius.) When the player does all of those things, they get a weapon with a long and complicated wind-up, but it often takes out squads in one or two hits. They plan to jump from one group of enemies to the next like an exploding pogo stick, which I think is a real band name somewhere, and finish off any stragglers with their real weapon.

Then they get greedy. If high wind-up time gives them a respectable explosion, what happens if they wind up even more?

Introduce a mod which increases mod radius according to the board's speed. (Totemists have to think about this one.) The player builds a board which sacrifices their short range maneuverability for maximum long range speed. They plan to spend several seconds racing into the distance, then return, arcing over the hills like a ballistic missile. At fully optimized speed with all other mods on an S-rank board, the blast radius would cover most of a Grineer camp on the Plains of Eidolon.

There is a part of me that's thinking that this sounds super close to normal gameplay with tons of base damage, two 60/60s, and a Riven, and that this might be a riff on that.

There is another, much louder part of me that then considers we're already bonkers OP on land anyway, what's adding a hoverboard with a (possibly literal) nuclear landing going to do, so I might as well support the system's angriest pogo stick.

There is a third part of me that actually wants to make Thrash Landing's base effects intrinsic as well since it's already pitifully undertuned to begin with, on top of the ramming and landing effects.  After all, if you're a Tenno who's nuts enough to enter a firefight doing frontflips and ollies, you kinda deserve to see an explosion for your efforts that knocks guys over.

And there's a fourth part of me that's saying 'wait we can buff Thrash Landing' so I'll do a hypothetical buff below on top of making the undertuned crap mod intrinsic to all K-Drives:

• Changed from an R3 Rare Mod to an R0 Rare Mod
• All effects now scale with points, going from 40% to 100% and 4m to 30m between 100-1,000 Points, instead of a bunch of undertuned flat values
• Range and damage buffs cap at 1,000 Points
• Can break the 3,000 damsge threshold, and is subject to any modifiers

 

[SaiKrithik]

Simple solution:

those damages from these k drive heat dmg mods, electricity dmg mods which take effect after doing a certain trick, make them scale a bit with enemy level so they still make sense. 

The same damage when completing a trick, reducing half of the hp of one corpus of lower level , and  barely doing a damage to some corpus at a higher level doesn't make sense. Think about vaubans fletchette orb, it shoots some needle like darts but the level scaling makes it viable. 

Also abrupt speed increase, sounds good theoretically, till u use it in an open world. Problems like frequently hitting and ragdolling will be more to the point where getting ragdolled becomes the new "meta-transport" method, overtaking archwings. 

I already get ragdolled at the blink speed of archwing by bumping into some invisible pebble or something. Maybe some more speed variations would make sense and solve this, not just this switch by using shift: speed -> boosted speed in k drives (it works well for on foot movement but bad for vehicular movement). A gear system of control, 1st gear, 2nd gear, 3rd gear like a car or some accelerator system like a scooter to vary the speeds from 0 to an upper limit would make this better when travelling. Holding shift to accelerate like how you would in a scooter by twisting the handlebar back, then a single tap after holding shift key would maintain the speed we set. Speed can vary from a base speed like 10 to a max accelerated speed of say 40 or 60 meters per second. And a brake to slow down, like holding rmb (the key which is useless in ground and only useful while doing tricks). 

Lastly all of this when seen only in the available 3 open world missions when there is some potential in this for some of the tileset missions is a bit sad. 

[DCaedus]

K-Drive mods are a joke, stats are too low, and most times effects are very niche.

[DCaedus]

Allow K Drives to use blink, but with longer range and cooler animation.

Make the point score on tricks can be stored to enhance next blink cast.

And I say longer range bcus AW blink is a joke.

Also they need to fix the K-Drive bugs, they are far too frequent and terrible. Often locking you out of the game entirely with no easy solution, or solution at all.

[Teridax68]

I think the fundamental question when considering changes to K-Drives is the following: will they be faster than Archwing? If not, what alternative benefits would or should it offer? It's not enough to make K-Drives less clunky than they are, because at the end of the day, if they're still not worth using over AW or even regular movement, then they're still not going to be picked, because there would continue to be no reason to pick them over those.

There was once a time when I wanted to justify K-Drives in the game by turning them into a super-sprint, and making AW drastically slower to make it the 3D combat option. When I thought about it more, though, it didn't really make sense, because we kind of already do 3D combat via our parkour, and we shouldn't be having to neuter one mode in order to justify another's place in the game. At this point, I don't even know what kind of place K-Drives are supposed to have, and clearly neither does DE, as their addition to the game wasn't really thought-through beyond just offering us another gimmick, much like Necramechs with the Deimos update.