Drive System Overview & Guide

A guide to the new Drive system in SF6.

Intro

Hi! I'm Sophie, I've been playing Street Fighter for most of my life. I used to be involved with running and streaming fighting game tournaments here in Ireland, including Celtic Throwdown which was a Capcom Pro Tour event.

During my SFV streams[twitch.tv], I played a lot of Chun-Li and focused on sharing my game knowledge and just having a fun time learning new combos and playing sets together with my viewers. I thought I'd put my SF6 knowledge into steam guides so they're more accessible.

Thanks to Capcom, I've had the opportunity to play Street Fighter 6 early and examine the new game modes and mechanics.
This guide is based off the Drive System Overview from my Street Fighter 6 review which you can watch here:

Hope you find this guide helpful!

If you'd like learn more about SF6 or just meet other SF6 players, you can check out the Street Fighter section of my discord[discord.gg]

Drive System Overview

The Drive System

The Drive System consists of multiple new moves and mechanics in Street Fighter 6.

These are:

• Drive Impacts
  
• Drive Parries
  
• Drive Rush
  
• Drive Reversals
  
• Overdrive

Drive Gauge

The Drive Gauge is the green bar located directly under your health bar.

Performing any Drive move will consume a part of your drive gauge.
Blocking also reduces your drive gauge via chip damage.

Once your Drive Gauge is empty you enter a burnout state, which means you can no perform any drive moves until it's refilled.
It also means that while blocking you will take chip damage directly onto your health bar instead of drive gauge.

Drive Impact

Drive Impact is a large flashy armoured attack which can open up your opponent to a large punish on hit, but also pushes them back on block.

This is super useful in the corner, where you can get a wall splat on your unsuspecting opponent which let's you juggle them into the air.

Even more devastating is that if your opponent is in burnout and hit a wall splat, they'll be completely stunned for a short while so you can get in that super optimal combo you've been labbing for the last week.
One they recover from stun, their Drive gauge will recharge.

How do you counter a drive impact?

You have a few options here besides blocking, but due to pushback it's best to punish their activation in one of these ways:

• Neutral jump and then whiff punish
  
• Parry the drive impact
  
• React to your opponents flashy activation with your own Drive Impact

The existence of this move really tests your reaction speed.
You'll see people throwing these out a lot during the early days of this game, so be prepared to hit back with your own.

Drive Parry

Drive Parries can be held down in order to stay in a parry stance that will absorb hits.
Holding this parry stance will continuously drain your drive gauge though.
But if you do parry an attack you'll recharge a portion of your drive gauge.

So there's a delicate balance of drain + recharge.
Be careful activating when your drive gauge is low because in your instinct to parry an attack you could immediately place yourself into burnout and your parry will fail.



Parries aren't a perfect defense though, you can be grabbed out of a parry, and you can accidentally place yourself into a burnout state if you're not keeping an eye on your drive consumption.

For the perfectionists out there, you can also perform a perfect parry. If you activate your parry with perfect timing, the game will slow down briefly, and you'll be given a chance to interrupt your opponent and get that punish in.

However, be careful when perfect parrying jump ins, a lot of the time your enemy will still have landed safely on the ground by the time your perfect parry animation finishes and you'll end up whiffing your attack.

Drive Rush

Drive Rush allows you to cancel certain normal moves with a dash (double tap forward) at the cost of 3 bars of drive.
It allows you to close the distance and create longer combos that you wouldn't be able to perform otherwise.

You can only cancel out of certain normal moves. Special moves cannot be cancelled this way, this is not an FADC from SFIV

You can also Drive Rush out of a drive parry for 1 bar instead.
Either

• Hold Parry and then double tap forward

or

• Tap forward, press parry and tap forward again in quick succession for a buffered dash out of parry immediately

It's a great way to suddenly get into your opponent's face when they least expect it.
I like to Drive Rush from mid-screen this way into a grab to catch a blocking opponent.

You'll recognise these with the bright neon green swooshing effect

Drive Reversal

Drive Reversal is similar to V-Reversals from Street Fighter V.
While blocking, you can expend some drive gauge to push your opponent away and give yourself some breathing room.

Overdrive

Overdrive is this game's version of EX moves from previous Street Fighter games.

You can expend 2 bars of your Drive Gauge to perform a more powerful version of a special move.

In Classic Controls, the input for the special is the same as your regular special input, just with an extra punch or kick button.

In Modern Controls the input is your Drive Parry button + special button

[ArachnoLord]

NUTS
They should really think to add that for perfect parries only

[mscupcakes]

Completely missed ArachnoLord's comment. There's no 3S style parries in this one, it's closer to SFV Ryu's V-Skill parry where you press both medium punch and kick together to parry, and no air parries

[♥Violence♥]

You've gotta buffer the DR during the cancellable attack's active frames, from what I've seen.
Also, no forward parry option, that just gets you bodied. Perfect parries are the closest we've got and that's just timing your stance parry within I think a 10 frame window? Not sure on the exact numbers.

[kerwell]

it seems the timing can be really weird for drive rushing a cancelable move. sometimes cannot do it realiably

[ArachnoLord]

Hey, I heard there was an option to be able to Parry with Forward, like in SF3 but can't find it anywhere, can you confirm or deconfirm? thanks.

[FERDICIYIZ.06_46]

nice

[mscupcakes]

yep, that's correct. I mention that in the Drive Rush section

[mscupcakes]

It also works by holding drive parry and then double tapping forward, but good shoutout to include the buffer explanation too!

[♥Violence♥]

To use 1 bar instead of 3 you need to buffer a parry cancel.
One tap of dash, parry, second tap of dash while activating parry.

[Tecnologgamer]

What I need to do to use 1 bar instead of 3 in Drive Rush?