Hello Racers,

First, I'd like to thank all the Racers for playing and enjoying Season 5. We've been listening to your feedback since our last update, and we're happy to report that many of the things that you've been asking for are what we're working on right now.

We're always sorry for making you wait, but we promise to continue improving as many areas as possible that were lackluster in the last update. We're already working hard on the next update.

Today, I wanted to give you a quick preview on what we're preparing for the first update of next year. And the biggest section we're working on, the one you'll notice the most, are the upcoming changes to Speed and Item modes.

In the early days after the launch of KartRider: Drift, we tried to drive gameplay with hopes that people would enjoy an even mix of Item and Speed modes, much like with the original KartRider. However, I think that this effort has made the game monotonous for many Racers, and made it harder to enjoy playing for longer periods of time.

As such, we have a number of upcoming changes that will let Racers focus on their favorite mode, whether it's Speed or Item, while still making sure that players of all types can enjoy the game.

As we mentioned in the previous Dev Blog, we plan to increase the number of ways that karts are balanced in Speed Mode. This will encourage more karts to be used to adapt to the challenges that different tracks provide, creating a more exciting and varied experience in gameplay. With these updates and more, we hope to capture as much of the excitement of the original KartRider's Speed Mode as possible.

In the long term, we are preparing various boost types like Double Boost and Exceed. We also recognize that the difficulty of Speed Mode can be quite the entry barrier for Racers, so we're planning to improve the in-game Speed Mode guide material gradually.

As for Item Mode, we're going to try something we have never done before in the KartRider series IP: We plan to highlight each character's quirks in a way that incorporates them into Item Mode races, making each one different from the last.

While there were passive skills in the original KartRider, like the item kart, we're planning to have never-before-seen active skills to keep things interesting, and we hope to show them off in the next update.

Our primary goal is to move away from the current meta for Item Mode with character skills to help shake things up, and allow players to have more fun with their choice of character for each race.

Along with these changes, we're also working on additional UI changes for a more convenient gaming experience. We'll continue to work hard on the next update so that we can share more details about the development progress in our upcoming Dev Blogs.

Again, we apologize for the delays and we thank you for your patience. We wish you happy holidays, and we'll see you in the next Dev Blog!

Thank you,

-Director Jaewoo Seo and the KartRider: Drift Team-