A couple of suggestions to improve k-drive so we don't all ignore it again post-Yareli

[pook-pook]

Since Yareli came out, I've been trying out k-drive some more and going around Fortuna (and Deimos a bit) it still feels like a minimum of effort was spent on level design for k-drives. Outside of some really rare places it's almost impossible to rack up combos.

• There's only 2 places where it's reasonable to rack up large combos. And going around a circle, or back and forth on a pipe, is not fun. There's almost no long rail opportunities beyond those two places. So many of the guard rails are broken up into short stretches far away from anything else for seemingly no reason, with little thought to whether you chain long combos along them. Let alone that there's still issues with guard rail connection jank which can just randomly break a grind.
• The bonus point floaties are basically placed at random, a lot of them with not even the slightest thought of how they might actually enhance a combo. You would be lucky in most cases to be able to include them in a combo, let alone try to get more than one in a combo. And they're one-shot uses.

All of this means everyone just going around in circles in that one place or back and forth on the one stretch of pipe. Not fun, or creative :(

I believe there's a couple of changes, either could significantly help:

• A level designer makes more places to combo. Just add more grind rails. This is hard, because it requires thought and planning.
• Add a move like SSX has where you can "nose press" between other moves to keep a combo going, not just limit to grind rails. This is trivial to add, mostly just some animation.

[FrostDragoon]

I see this argument from time to time, but it's backward.

It's not that levels aren't designed well enough for K-Drive, it's that K-Drive wasn't designed with level design in mind.

K-Drive isn't fixable. It should have stayed the abandoned / dead content it was.

[pook-pook]

5 minutes ago, FrostDragoon said:

It's not that levels aren't designed well enough for K-Drive, it's that K-Drive wasn't designed with level design in mind.

I believe that my second suggestion comes from that angle?

[FrostDragoon]

4 minutes ago, pook-pook said:

I believe that my second suggestion comes from that angle?

No, you're still thinking about it in terms of trick chains. That's not the actual problem with K-Drive, despite being a broken, buggy mess itself. The actual problem is that Orb Vallis is the only zone in the game that was given any consideration on how K-Drive would interact with it and visa versa. K-Drives don't work properly in any non-open world zones at all (Merulina), and is almost entirely pointless in Cetus or Deimos outside of achievement/Nightwave nonsense (which are just tack-ons, not proper design considerations).

Even when this feature was new, there were plenty of threads and videos asking for it to be more useful because Archwing supercedes in every category that matters. K-Drives don't have a purpose or point in the game. Trying to revive it with this frame because the devs noticed nobody does Vent Kidz was just meant to be a time sink. They did nothing to make it more fun, interesting, or useful, and they didn't bother to fix any of the things that kept people away from it as content.

[Infirito]

I very much doubt you can change Ks in a way that would make me care about them at all. There's nothing they bring to general gameplay and there's no reason to ever use them outside of "sick flips, bro", which isn't a reason for most people.

[Yamazuki]

How does this change the fact K-Drives are useless...?

K-Drives were/will be ignored because:

-Not needed for progression

-No boss required it; for other "ignored" equipment, DE had bosses that forced you to use it

-Its only use is for mobility in Orb/PoE, but is outclassed by multiple options

Making it "fun" or "easier" to do tricks doesn't change the fact they're useless. They could be the best thing ever, "fun" wise, and I'll still forget they exist.

Improving K-Drives further beyond fixing the bugs regarding Yareli is a waste of development resources. Not that it really matters, since DE likes that.

[Marvelous_A]

Remind me again why K-drive is a thing in the first place?

Right because DE thought "it's fun". But no it's not fun nor it's useful. So it's pretty much born dead. Like half of the features in the past years.

[lowgrav]

where are the board tricks that dont require a lip to grind on or are not classed as air tricks think the type is called manuals (board handstands , wheelies , ect) they link tricks together on the ground but k drives dont have that board trick type

[Aldain]

Just make a customizable skate park for Dojos and call it done.

Throwing anything more than that is just pitiful at this point.

[FrostDragoon]

4 minutes ago, Aldain said:

Just make a customizable skate park for Dojos and call it done.

Throwing anything more than that is just pitiful at this point.

Almost done*

Still need to remove it from Yareli and give her a real kit.

[DrivaMain]

Remove the annoying ragdolls, oh and make them available in all missions too. Do that and I will consider using them from time to time.

[Butterfly85]

K drive is useful if you're new and haven't the ability to grind up what you need for an archwing launcher.

I still enjoy doing races as a change of pace from time to time, or just doing dumb stuff. It's a toy to me, a distraction.

If you have a group of friends you can do your own races around the open worlds with them.

One thing is like to see changed is you know when you dismount and the board shoots off ahead of you. I'd love that to do damage/ kill mooks if you hit them with it. I'd be obnoxious a.f with that if we could 😂

[MonsterOfMyOwn]

K-drive were released after Archwing, so it wasn't even a good option upon release.

• They are supposed to be "hoverboard" but the mere rock makes you fall and/or fly away
• They added "damage" mechanics but that doesn't scale and are only useable against lvl 15 mobs
• They allowed us to use secondary which are impracticable while moving appart from spray and pray

I've maxed ventikids rank, I've farme Deimos race to get the new K-drive, I've maxed K-drive for mastery. but I don't want to use them, and the more they push them without changing things the more I dislike them.

Make them deal the equivalent of melee damage in AoE without getting muscle stress, make it scale with tricks why not, the appropriate damage would be around 150k damage every second in 9m AoE once maxed trick thingy. And of course make them proc status : fire, viral, slash and perhaps tox and radiation (others are almost useless)

[DoomFruit]

2 hours ago, Butterfly85 said:

One thing is like to see changed is you know when you dismount and the board shoots off ahead of you. I'd love that to do damage/ kill mooks if you hit them with it. I'd be obnoxious a.f with that if we could

https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Slay_Board

It's as useless as the skateboard itself. 400 damage... when my fully automatic pistol does 7x that per shot, 8.27x per second and it's not even a crit weapon.

[FrostDragoon]

2 hours ago, (XBOX)TyeGoo said:

That's literally what i said about Archwings and titania back in the day. Also wanting it removed.

Yareli isn't perfect, but she's a stepping stone for DE to collect data and feedback regarding K-Drives to make them better in the future.

The difference is that Archwing is fun and had some semblance to the actual game. K-Drive has no excuses.

[Venus-Venera]

vor 6 Stunden schrieb pook-pook:

Since Yareli came out, I've been trying out k-drive some more and going around Fortuna (and Deimos a bit) it still feels like a minimum of effort was spent on level design for k-drives. Outside of some really rare places it's almost impossible to rack up combos.

• There's only 2 places where it's reasonable to rack up large combos. And going around a circle, or back and forth on a pipe, is not fun. There's almost no long rail opportunities beyond those two places. So many of the guard rails are broken up into short stretches far away from anything else for seemingly no reason, with little thought to whether you chain long combos along them. Let alone that there's still issues with guard rail connection jank which can just randomly break a grind.
• The bonus point floaties are basically placed at random, a lot of them with not even the slightest thought of how they might actually enhance a combo. You would be lucky in most cases to be able to include them in a combo, let alone try to get more than one in a combo. And they're one-shot uses.

All of this means everyone just going around in circles in that one place or back and forth on the one stretch of pipe. Not fun, or creative :(

I believe there's a couple of changes, either could significantly help:

• A level designer makes more places to combo. Just add more grind rails. This is hard, because it requires thought and planning.
• Add a move like SSX has where you can "nose press" between other moves to keep a combo going, not just limit to grind rails. This is trivial to add, mostly just some animation.

and it is not worth investing working time in it!
why k-drive when archwing does EVERYTHING much better?
and there are also mechs ...

there is already strange content in warframe ... but i don't log online to fish, mine, collect animals (WTF?) or even farm daily rep for vetkids (staring at the wall is more fun).

[FrostDragoon]

3 hours ago, Butterfly85 said:

K drive is useful if you're new and haven't the ability to grind up what you need for an archwing launcher.

Most players, even new ones, will have their archwing first since there's a quest for it and getting the K-Drive stuff is significantly less obvious.

[FrostDragoon]

7 minutes ago, (XBOX)TyeGoo said:

I have fun with it, and when you read other threads about yareli there's others who also enjoy it. I have more forma in my kdrives than in my Archwings. 

Archwings don't require much in the first place, but I don't even potato my K-Drives. Why invest into a pointless and worthless piece of equipment? Archwings have uses these days, but I always liked them. The real thing that held them back was a lack of mission nodes to offer enough variety of gameplay, which caused people to get bored of them really quickly. I'd love to see new archwing frames, actually.

[FrostDragoon]

34 minutes ago, (XBOX)TyeGoo said:

I like Yareli, i prefer her over Sevagoth by miles. And I'm looking forward to changes to her, like access to Operator. Just like people looked forward to titania changes. Titania's initial release was clunky as hell. 

It was, but at the time I just thought of her as a "meh" frame rather than the "dumpster fire" tier that Yareli currently is. They even buffed her damage a little, but it doesn't matter because the mechanical aspect of how she plays is the problem. Here are a few things I would do to put her on a better path, but she'd probably still need some more work:

1 - Her 1 is basically fine afaic. Leave it.

2- Remove the crappy(er) version of K-Drive and make it a pet that she sics on enemies. Something like Khora's companion, but a bit unique in its own ways (these ways being somewhat open for debate/interpretation). Have her activate the 2 to command Merulina to tag all enemies in her field of view (limited by range), reducing their resistances--not stripping armor, these are different mechanics.

3 - It's mostly okay, but needs to scale with number of enemies in range. Additionally, I would let her charge it to ramp up the damage according to how much energy she's willing to feed into it, having the radius and damage grow proportionately.

4 - Instead of flinging enemies everywhere at the end, just drop them in place. Additionally, it should scoop up her 3 if it's active, inheriting its damage and growing in radius proportional to how much was charged into her 3.

 

So the basic idea is that her 1 is just a meager, but effective CC tool. It can help to set up her big wombo, but it's not necessary for it. Her big set up is to charge up her 3 as much as she can/wants to, then recover some energy quickly (if needed) to cast 4 to group up and shred a bunch of enemies. For tougher crowds, cast her 2 into the vortex to shred them harder. Each of these abilities is useful in its own right, but become amazing when used together.

[pook-pook]

It's kinda bizarre, so many responses like "it's not fun, why would you bother"...

 

Uh, the point of my post was simple things to *make it fun*...

[FrostDragoon]

The reasons it's not fun for those that don't enjoy it should be pretty clear from the responses. Not that bizarre, really.

[FrostDragoon]

17 minutes ago, (XBOX)TyeGoo said:

After careful consideration, your topic belongs in this section:

What made this worthy of "careful" consideration as opposed to "casual" consideration?

[OwlOfJune]

49 minutes ago, pook-pook said:

It's kinda bizarre, so many responses like "it's not fun, why would you bother"...

 

Uh, the point of my post was simple things to *make it fun*...

You can make the most addicting skate game mechanics into K-drive and it will remain abandoned because it has literally no purpose being in Warframe as a game, esp when there is already a superior method of travel in name of Archwing. It is nothing but a mini-game that devs should have left as mini game and forgot.

[FrostDragoon]

1 minute ago, OwlOfJune said:

You can make the most addicting skate game mechanics into K-drive and it will remain abandoned because it has literally no purpose being in Warframe as a game, esp when there is already a superior method of travel in name of Archwing. It is nothing but a mini-game that devs should have left as mini game and forgot.

It honestly didn't even need to be in the game. It's that pointless.

[OwlOfJune]

5 minutes ago, FrostDragoon said:

It honestly didn't even need to be in the game. It's that pointless.

Apparently the original intention was to make Orb Vallis as K-Drive only open world with Archwing unable to be used due to air current or sthing.

THAT might have given Orb Vallis a very different flavor to Plains of Eidolon if they went hard with it, perhaps Cambrion Drift having only-Nercamech for similar reasons. 

 

...But then they must have realized how buggy and slow K-drives were, allowed Archwing on every open world and forgot to check if K-drives can actually be used on those floors (because with the rate of how often these supposed 'hover' boards crash I cannot believe it was even tested), so they stay dead as they were on arrival.