Persistence for all vehicles

[Steel_Rook]

Point of clarification: When I say "vehicle," I'm referring to anything in the Vehicles section of the Arsenal - Archwing, Heavy Weapon, K-Drive, Necramech. When I say "persistence," I'm referring to the vehicle in question remaining in the world after we've unequipped/dismounted it. As such, let's examine the four vehicles for Persistence and see what could be changed or improved.

 

K-Drive: The K-Drive is currently the best-designed Vehicle in the game in terms of persistence. The K-Drive auto-equips when called via the K-Drive Launcher. When dismounted, the K-Drive remains in the world. Interacting with the K-Drive allows us to re-mount it where we left it. However, reactivating the K-Drive launcher removes the old K-Drive and summons a new one which we immediately auto-mount. I would like all other vehicles in the game to work like this.

Necramech: Bugs aside, Necramechs are incredibly well-designed in terms of persistence. When we dismount our Necramech, it remains in the world and can be re-mounted. The Necramech retains its stats and becomes invulnerable to enemy fire when not in use. The Necramech Launcher goes on a 3-minute cooldown when it's used, but this cooldown starts the moment we summon the mech. As long as our Necramech survives 3 minutes at a time, we can instantly resummon it. The only downside to Necramechs is their lack of automted mounting. Summoning a Necramech places it in the world, but we have to manually approach and mount it. I would recommend automatically Transfering the player into the Necramech when it's summoned, for the sake of convenience.

A note on Necramech transference. Right now, transference between Warframe, Operator and Necramech is somewhat fiddly. I propose a simple change - press vs. hold on the Transference button. Pressing the Transference button would toggle our control between Warframe and Operator. If we're currently controlling a Necramech, pressing Transference would bring us to our Warframe. Holding the Transference button would toggle between Necramech and Operator. If we're currently controlling our Warframe, holding Transference would would bring us to our Necramech. This covers all 6 possible swaps with just one button.

Heavy Weapon (aka Atmospheric Archgun): Currently, our Archguns have pretty poor persistence. Their only positive is that they're automatically equipped when summoned via the Archgun Launcher. However, when we unequip the Archgun (via triggering the Archgun Launcher with a Heavy Weapon equipped), the Archgun disappears. I propose that it should be dropped on the ground with its remaining ammo, allowing us to walk back over it and pick it back up by interacting with it. This would allow us to quickly grab and move Batteries and Datamass objects without locking ourselves out of our Archguns, since we can simply return and pick them back up. Worse, the Archgun Launcher only goes on cooldown when the Archgun is un-equipped, meaning that we're locked out of it on unequip most of the time. I have the following propositions to address this cooldown issue:

We have two options here.

• Option 1: Start a 3-minute cooldown when the Archwing Launcher is first used. In the meantime, the player can drop the weapon and pick it up as many times as desired. The weapon can only be resummoned with full ammo once the 3-minute cooldown has expired.
• Option 2: Remove the Archgun Launcher cooldown entirely. The player can resummon their Archgun as often as they like, but the Archgun retains current ammo when resummoned. The Archgun naturally regenerates ammo when dropped on the ground and not in use.

In either case, let us swap out of the Archgun via the weapon swap keys, rather than requiring a repeated use of the Archgun Launcher gear item.

Archwing: Currently, our Archwings have poor persistence, largely mitigated by the lack of any sort of cooldown on the Launcher item. When summoned via the Archwing Launcher, our Archwing mounts automatically. When dismounting it, however, it disappears. To stay consistent with K-Drives, I propose that the Archwing itself drop to the ground, where it can be interacted with later to be re-mounted. Obviously, we'd still have the ability to use the Archwing Launcher even with an Archwing on the ground. This would un-summon our existing Archwing from the ground, call in a new one and equip it, exactly as we can now. This final proposal is unimporant and exists solely for the sake of consistency with previous suggestions.

[keikogi]

20 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Necramech: Bugs aside, Necramechs are incredibly well-designed in terms of persistence. When we dismount our Necramech, it

There os another problem with mechs , they can't keep up with the squad. This is easy too fix they could just allow then to use that flying form the enemy mech uses to fly into the heart if deimos.

20 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Archwing: Currently, our Archwings have poor persistence, largely mitigated by the lack of any sort of cooldown on the Launcher item. When summoned via the Archwing Launcher, our Archwing mounts automatically. When

I don't think AW would benefit much from persistence. I think it would be better to just give a default imput to call down aw. Something like hold space bar for 2 seconds mid air to mount. It would make the transition pretty seamingless.

The aw guns solutions are quite good.

 

[Steel_Rook]

3 hours ago, keikogi said:

There os another problem with mechs , they can't keep up with the squad. This is easy too fix they could just allow then to use that flying form the enemy mech uses to fly into the heart if deimos.

This is true - Necramechs can use more means of covering distance quickly. I'd personally prefer to see them lose their Stamina bar and be able to "headrush" without limitation. That's fast enough to cover ground most of the time. It's out-of-scope for this thread, however, as I wanted to focus on persistence first and foremost.

 

3 hours ago, keikogi said:

I don't think AW would benefit much from persistence. I think it would be better to just give a default imput to call down aw. Something like hold space bar for 2 seconds mid air to mount. It would make the transition pretty seamingless.

I don't necessarily disagree with you there. The only reason I brought up Archwing Persistence is it felt odd not to given that I'd touched on all the other Vehicles in the game.

 

3 hours ago, keikogi said:

The aw guns solutions are quite good.

That was the main thrust of the suggestion, yes. Right now, there's no way to briefly swap out of an Archgun without putting it on a long cooldown, short of just not having fired it. Treating Archguns (in the heavy weapon slot) with persistence would allow us to swap out of them for the purposes of handling batteries, quickly using our own weapons or any other reason without losing the gun entirely. At the same time, it would give them a bit more of a sense of "physicality," as we'd need to manually return to where we dropped our Archgun to pick it back up. It works for K-Drives, I feel it can work for Atmospheric Archguns.