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Armored Core VI Announced, but will it have Patches?!

Paul le Fou

24/7 lofi hip hop man to study/relax to
(He)

I've never played an Armored Core game, but for a good long while starting in the PS1 era, the mech combat series was From Software's backbone. The last entry or entries had some overlap with Demon's Souls and Dark Souls release dates, but the series has been dormant for nearly 10 years. Leaks that they were working on a new AC game came out nearly a year ago, but it wasn't until last night at the game awards that we finally got an announcement trailer.

Has anyone played the older games? As a Souls-era From fanboy I'm completely sold on any new games they put out, but I've never armored a core before, so I might take this opportunity to dive into their back catalog at least a little bit. I'll look into emulating some of them, but I'm not sure whether to start from the beginning or pick up some middle entry.

Tell me about Armored Core!
 

Falselogic

Lapsed Threadcromancer
(they/them)
My brother played the Armored Cores but I never did. I should ask him about them.
 

YangusKhan

does the Underpants Dance
(He/Him/His)
As you might expect from pre-Souls From Software, they are very much an acquired taste.
 
I really liked the AC games on PS1, but I played them when they came out and never got around to the sequels on later systems despite interest, so I can't really comment on them reliably or in detail.

In broad strokes, in retrospect I can see the continuity between the extremely granular mecha customization and the kinds of character builds in the Souls games. This makes them a bit more flavorful but also more baroque in a way that is fun for some and probably too complicated for others. Basically:



My guess is that they're still good if you can get around early 3D gaming control schemes.

They have been high on my to play list for a while though, so I can say that most people recommend starting with AC3 (and its sequel Silent Line) or AC4 (and especially its sequel For Answer) as a way to get into the series. 4 and 4a are faster paced and directed by Miyazaki, if you want to trace Miyazaki's work in particular.

I did play Daemon X Machina not too long ago which is a kind of AC-esque game and unfortunately it didn't work for me like the PS1 AC games used to, although that might be at least in part due to Switch performance. If you regularly pick up the free Epic Games Store games (and I do), it was free on that some time ago so you might already own it. I've also been meaning to try that on PC sometime and see if that makes it work better for me.
 
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All I want is for it to play like the faster entries like For Answer, and that it doesn't fall into 5's weirdly shallow pool of mech parts (or maybe it wasn't and I just didn't unlock many, point is I want it to have a huge variety of parts).
 

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
I'm hopeful they're bringing back the series because they see value in its formative style of mech game, and not because it's an opportunity to apply more recent FromSoft trends into. Within the series itself, I hope it leans toward the granular garage tinkerer clunker sim expressions of the earlier entries, though who knows--most mech properties would rather embody Zone of the Enders-style high-speed robot action as an aspirational end goal, and the games Miyazaki was involved in previously definitely veered toward that direction.
 

MetManMas

Me and My Bestie
(He, him)
"will it have Patches?!"

For Answer already did. Here's Patch the Good Luck:
latest
 
Oh, also, I've been playing through the games in release order (replaying the PS1 games, everything else is for the first time, currently in the middle of the fifth game—AC2:Another Age ), and I think this was true:

My guess is that they're still good if you can get around early 3D gaming control schemes.

It's kind of amazing how much it's more or less all there already as a game as of the very first entry. I found AC1 to honestly be better than my already positive memories, coming back with more familiarity with controlling 3D games in general. I am excited to get to AC games with twin stick controls (only two more games without them left), but also there's something thematically appropriate about the fiddly-ness of L2/R2 to look up and down that kind of works. And, with a few exceptions, for the most part the games seem to be designed fairly for the control scheme. (Maybe I'll make a thread to document playing through these older AC games, if I feel like doing longer writeups.)
 

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
I'm doing the same right now (early in AC2 at the moment) without ever having played the series before, for what it's worth.
 
Please feel free to make the thread if you would like to! I'll probably do it eventually if you don't, but not today.
 

Paul le Fou

24/7 lofi hip hop man to study/relax to
(He)
This is out now! Who's playing?

The first/tutorial boss was a real tough cookie, but I found that the secret wasn't to try and avoid its fire via LOS while I plinked away at it with guns and missiles, it was to get up in its face and use my laser sword. That was the only way to do enough damage to win the damage race, and I just barely did - I only had 112 AP left when the thing finally blew.

I've only done one mission since, so far, where I had to take down artillery embankments, which the stun mechanic (ACA? Something like that? The "structure bar" that results in you shuddering to a standstill for like a whole second) made me take two tries to finish.

Movement feels really smooth and responsive, with nice momentum on the boost slide. Targeting is interesting, the way the reticle takes a moment to track to the camera lock-on target (that's a stat that can be improved, iirc).

Speaking of stats, I opened the full stat sheet for a part in the parts shop and immediately closed it. I will...worry about the granular stats later. Maybe. If I ever figure out what they all mean.
 

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
I'm playing; somewhere probably in the middle or late parts of chapter 3. It's Armored Core... for the most part; the gripes are mostly in the nuances and particular preference informed by the first four games in the series, which are all I've played previously and very recently, as mentioned above. Mainly I think the basic, shared movefeel across all AC leg types is a little too smooth for my liking and flattens their individual characteristics (I'm a tetrapod faithful) too much, for an effect that is probably appreciated by most players, and only a point of contention for those that have really imprinted on the earliest games in the series like myself--games which haven't been the standard for many decades now, so that's that. Other things that have arisen are the general dour outlook of the game--yes, compared to the earliest ones in particular. Kota Hoshino does the music and there are only the occasional moments when music is even prominent in the presentation, and stylistically it's far more appealing than anything From have put out for a long time... but it's still too little, too sparing and too much like the audio direction they've settled into. For the last, the game is generally adherent to the series's established formalism in delivering its narrative, but some aspects of it ring a little odd in the ear, like the consistent radio chatter during missions from the opposition and your allies which is often dedicated to massaging the player's ego for the way they're tearing through said opposition. "Power fantasy" is not the Armored Core tone as far as how I've internalized it, so those moments aren't my favourite; otherwise the game seems content to pick up where things left off a decade prior without missing a beat--I presume, anyway.

Maybe there's one other thing that could be highlighted, in that I feel like this game is overtuned in ways that don't really fit the series and its structure. The big bosses, the ones with the lifebars and big arenas to fight them in: they are mostly bogus to me, because they're antithetical to what I find interesting about the action part of playing Armored Core. The series is at its best to me in its short and compact, and from the very beginning, very diverse in objective design play where the challenge is figuring out a loadout (and supplementing it with player skill) that can survive the allotted demands of that specific section. Thus I think the general play experience benefits the most from varied terrain and sustained formations of minor to midboss-like enemies, to put your crowd control skills to use, as well as your ability to conserve resources and make both the ammunition and armour points last to the end.

The way VI does it--and from my perspective changes things; I don't know if this shift came earlier--is that it uses mid-mission checkpoints that incur no penalties in relying on them, and they restore all your resources to full, so sometimes it's even strategically beneficial to die and pick back up with a full complement. It places supply drops in front of each major boss encounter in a similar fashion, and what these both do from my perspective is divorce those larger battles from the holistic design of the rest of the mission, where there's an expectation that most players will die several times in practicing them, like any other modern From game. Sure, ace pilots can replay missions and pursue actual graded rankings, wherein not continuing is a prerequisite for an S-rank... but that it is theoretically possible not to die doesn't change the impression that the existence of these checkpoints allowed the developers a fallback in making these individual bosses much harder than they really need to be, or should be for what works best in Armored Core's play structure. The addition of a stagger mechanic (video games, calm down with this, please) further prolongs the fights needlessly so the experience is just sort of dull and protracted when taken in aggregate, and it's one of the clearest tells to me of modern From sensibilities informing a school of design that's very divorced from contemporary trends and which they otherwise maintain.

Those are the criticisms, but the game should be lauded for its successes as well, which in this context of being a little tired of From's recent doings it does well in simply looking back toward their past in recreating a status quo that existed back then and did not stop being valid for any real reason except the people involved stopping making things like it. The mission design is a little samey early on but seems to gradually pick up, the garage-head customization remains as interesting as ever (and is not as overwhelming as it seems; these games are quick and immediate arcade romps at heart despite all the serial numbers and stat sheets involved), and the arena still provides goofy pilot biographies and the best expressions of the game's mechanics in a duel setting, where matches lasting a minute would be considered lengthy. For the most part, Armored Core hasn't changed, and that's a relief in itself.

u398rHK.jpg
 
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Fyonn

did their best!
*Ahem*

Linear rifle good.
Game good.

Fwoom fwoom pew pew chutchutchutchuuuuuuu vwreeeeeeee PEEEEEEW fwoom fwoom ZWWEEEEEE ZWWEEEEEE BADOW
This has been a dramatic recreation of fighting with a linear rifle, missiles, and a pulse blade.

I also tried shotgun out. It seems effective, but so sweaty. So much effort has to be put in to get it to pay off. A suitable pairing for a pulse blade-focused AC, though. I imagine you'll get more ease-of-use mileage out of going machine gun / pulse blade. But after the dark times where the first order optimal solution for ACs, uh... 2, Another Age, 3, Silent Line, Nexus, Ninebreaker, Last Raven, 4, and For Answer was "equip a machine gun and an extra ammo unit," I refuse to use rapid-fire weapons.

Imagine, an Armored Core that isn't sacrificing playability in service of mechanical distinction while also having some of the most distinct-feeling weapons in the franchise this far. Imagine, if you will, an Armored Core that has multiple safety nets to catch you in case you brought an ill-suited armament for a mission. Honestly just putting in punching was enough, but there are also AC5-esque restock points, and melee finally feels as fun to use as it is rewarding (it used to be rewarding but miserable to use). Used to be that I had to seriously consider whether the drop off in effectiveness was worth the safety net of having an energy blade just in case. Now I can't imagine sacrificing my pulse blade for anything. I'd sooner go Bazooka/Blade than Gun/Bazooka. And shields! Wow! I think they look bulky and stupid, but I'm happy to see them present in such a comprehensible form.

There's a lot to be said for how the game uses the training mode (with free part rewards) as an excuse to put you in control of a wide variety of ACs and weapons. That's the core, er, primary fun of Armored Core, but it's something you previously had to discover and seek out of your own volition. I've finished multiple training missions and went "I have to equip that right now."

And the simplicity! Head, Body, Arms, Legs, Thruster, Fire Control System, Generator, and one (1) Extension part. That's it! I was SO worried we were gonna go back to the complexity of late AC3/AC4-era customization, but nope! AC6 takes and refines the playability improvements from AC4 and AC5 and goes "hey, actually there was nothing wrong with the AC Assembly from AC1 and 2 though."

I hope I can get an extension or option or shoulder part that gives me a down boost lmao. For the first time ever in the franchise I've though "Oh no! I can't boost down!"

Obligatory photo mode:
18881602023082514013.png

"Snake, we need pictures of [the Armored Core] from the left, right, and center."

18881602023082604104.png

Linear Rifle charged shot~ 😍
 
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Fyonn

did their best!
Near the end of Chapter 1, you get access to an Arena-based level up system. And I just want to advocate for your first level up being Weapon Bays. That way you can bring more damage types, and AC6 appears to be serious about expecting you to leverage different damage types. Alternatively. Hey, you know how swords have a cooldown? What if instead of waiting for the cooldown you just... switched to a different sword? I also took Assault Kick, so one time I locked the first chapter's boss down so hard with sword, sword, kick, sword, sword combos that it used its phase transition attack at 15-20% health left. I still did not win that round.
 

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
I've just pumped damage on energy and explosions through those mods, mostly. Anytime I've run into a trouble spot in this game and thought "hmm, this might require finesse" I've subsequently eaten pavement, and the actual answer has 100% of the time been to start blasting indiscriminately. It's a very, very aggressive game, even compared to precedent.
 

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
Finished this; went straight into the second loop. It's a very good game but the highs are met by equal parts frustration... or at least disinterest in the kind of design it wants to espouse. The boss design issues I mentioned earlier only exacerbated themselves over time, until I felt like I was piloting a Scopedog and asked to take down Qubeley. A shooty-bang mech game still defaulting to sweaty melee combos as its hardiest challenges, this time just delivered by sci-fi-flavoured swords, indicates to me that that pesky current From influence is indeed present in this revival, and I wish they'd had the restraint not to go to that familiar well so readily and literally. Most everything else works so well that I saw no need to craft so many incredibly severe walls in the form of rote bosses, all on the mandatory path. The previous series precedent of leaving the ultimate duels and opponents to the optional arena battles is much more to my preference, and that bosses didn't use to be so prominent in the overall design also helped mission diversity--there are some definite winners here, but from literally the first game on, the breadth of different objectives was much more varied than it is here.
 
Anytime I've run into a trouble spot in this game and thought "hmm, this might require finesse" I've subsequently eaten pavement, and the actual answer has 100% of the time been to start blasting indiscriminately. It's a very, very aggressive game, even compared to precedent.

Having played through 3SL at this point, I think this is mostly true of the early games as well. Especially as soon as money stops mattering in the mid- to late-game, switching your build to high DPS weapons with absurdly expensive ammo is the simplest strategy for most challenging bosses. (With good aim and enormous expensive rockets, basically anything goes down in a few seconds. You could optionally learn to fight it, but...) The main exception tends to be Arena enemies with broken/impossible Human+ (or whatever) builds, where being able to turn fast matters more than DPS because you need to get behind their backs (or at the very least not let them get behind your back) or you basically instantly die and never see them.

I also think that honestly mission variety never really got better than Armored Core 1 and its expansions, in terms of both narrative and gameplay objectives. I don't think it got significantly worse, either, but AC1, Project Phantasma, and Master of Arena are more experimental with their mission design and especially their integration of gameplay and narrative. The AC2 and AC3 games reel it in a little bit, creating fewer "what am I supposed to do?" frustrations but also fewer "oh wow that was clever" moments. (The AC1 games also have a lot of Dungeon Crawl But With A Mech type levels that I imagine are divisive but basically don't really come back between AC2 and AC3SL.)

This isn't to say AC2 and AC3 bring nothing new, because they do. The PS2 allows for battles against enormous armored weapons, AC2:AA plays some fun little tricks that subvert expectations, AC3:SL introduces some near-infinite or infinite flight (depending on your build) style stages, float legs create new possibilities for level design with water, etc...
 
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Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
Armored Core games generally aren't long; VI is no different. It's probably 15 to 20 hours for a clear, depending on how badly you get walled by whichever section (and because of the immense variety in player approaches, no one can really predict the exact problem spots for others). The most trouble I had in this game was a boss that had me stuck just attempting it over and over for four hours until I lucked out a clear, and some others took a while too. But that's all variable depending on individual skill--as a rule Armored Core is structured short, replayable, and having substantial new things to see after you've rolled credits the once.
 

R.R. Bigman

Coolest Guy
Having a 15 to 20 hour game that‘s fun to play again sounds very appealing. I think I might get this next month.
 

Paul le Fou

24/7 lofi hip hop man to study/relax to
(He)
That playtime will depend very heavily on how stuck you get on certain bosses. Like me! I'm still at the beginning of chapter 2 because the Cleaner boss is giving me plenty of trouble.
 

spines

cyber true color
(she/her, or something)
unless i suddenly start finding the rest of the game really easy i'm already at like 15 hours in early in chapter 3

i figure i'm also making things harder for myself on average as a melee enjoyer who likes the reverse legs a lot and generally lightweight play (though it did work really well against the chapter 2 boss...). there's a lot of stuff i didn't really figure out dabbling in some previous games before this but also i just...don't like the bosses. in multiple ways. i think after chapter 2 i've got a slightly better concept of how to build against them (roughly: 3 weapons that are strong against its movement/defenses and one huge payload you reserve to unload after a stagger) but their movement and the attack patterns tend to be so fast and and overwhelming that it doesn't feel that easy to tell if your build is completely horrible or if you're just not engaging with the right approaches and timings (especially because the things i've gotten stuck on the longest are enemies which can repeatedly ready bazooka shots at you while retreating...). and i feel like stagger exacerbates that by just overriding every kind of defense? i don't think it's necessarily ideal in AC vs AC combat either but at least it's funny to shred 60% of an enemy's hp with the pilebunker or other weapons you would never hit with otherwise, but in boss fights the pace it enforces feels unnecessarily layered and frustrating (you have to keep attacking to keep the bar up and eventually fill it! but if you fill while certain attacks are happening/about to happen you still can't do anything), and they stick out even more because so many regular enemies and setpieces are mostly trivial

still, overall it's fun. not going to beat cookie and cream though. i do need to get deeper into the older ones because it seems like they'll have a lot of what i'm liking without as much of the elden ring frustration times
 

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
New Game+ went well! The bosses that previously stymied me were either one-and-dones, or for the biggest contrast, the four-hour nemesis this time took ten minutes. I changed my entire AC to try something different, and whether it's old missions, new missions, or new twists in old missions, there's also an inherent shift in playstyle that I've observed beyond just the current loadout--mainly that I'm using assault boosts much more aggressively for traversal, and mid-combat too; the kick you can do with it is such a fun wrinkle on tactics for both fodder and bigger enemies, where it serves different needs in either conserving ammunition or extending "combos" when other weapons are on cooldown or reloading. It was a sometimes-literal blast to replay the game, which is something this series excels at in ways From's other games often don't, where merely numbers are inflated for returning players. Highly recommended to keep going if the desire is still there after the initial conclusion, because it's not rote repetition at all in what there is to do afterward.
 

Paul le Fou

24/7 lofi hip hop man to study/relax to
(He)
That playtime will depend very heavily on how stuck you get on certain bosses. Like me! I'm still at the beginning of chapter 2 because the Cleaner boss is giving me plenty of trouble.
I finally beat the Cleaner and ran immediately into an even harder brick wall with Sea Spider, which has repeatedly crushed me so fast and mercilessly I'm barely even sure what I'm meant to be doing. I'm getting frustrated at the difficulty of the boss fights in general. It seems like this is one of the big things brought into AC6 based on From's last decade of games; the idea that there need to be big epic boss fight setpieces throughout the game. Especially since like Spines said, a lot of the non-boss stuff can be pretty easy, or at least much simpler.

I've always liked From games in spite of the difficulty, not because of it, and it looks like this one is no different.
 

Fyonn

did their best!
Just beat the game. Loved it. Amazing. Everything I wanted and more. It's an Armored Core where a Gundam-style build is actually viable, and where melee builds are a hell of a lot of fun. I got to the point where I would bring different melee weapons for different fights. Hell, never mind that, it's an Armored Core game where single-shot rifles are good and the ammo limits are balanced for missions, not PvP.

Story wise, I think it adhered to the tone of Armored Core while also delivering a more satisfying story than most mecha games offer. It's frankly astonishing that we got a real-ass Plot with Characters and payoffs for character relationships from a From Software game. There are moments where I shouted for how excited I was for things happening on screen.

For those that have finished the game, I supported the Rubicon Liberation Front. Also, I love Rusty. Holy shit Rusty. Such an excellent From Software Comrade. Arbequs Balteus, huh? What a brutal fight. I figured out the key for my build was to look for opportunities to Assault Boost into Pulse Blading his shield. And the final boss? Amazing!

General Advice: You want Assault Armor once that is a sentence that makes sense to you. Once you can afford to, pre-prep and save a few archetypes of AC that you can switch to if you die via AC Data. At least have a pair of reverse-joint and quatraped legs on-hand just in case. Also buy a variety of weapon types - you can re-equip after a death, too.

Break in case of emergency build advice for anyone who gets stuck in the arena or against SOME bosses: reverse joint legs, fastest quick boost boosters you can get, dual missile pack, vertical missile pack, and once you can, two handheld missile launchers. Until the final two bosses, anything that gave my main AC trouble would flop over comically easily to hoppy missile boy. Do *try* with your build for a bit before you bust this out - this build is funny but it's not super fun, and won't stand up against the absolute hardest bosses anyway.
 

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
Cleared New Game++. Lots of good, different stuff in there, so maintaining that it's worthwhile to keep playing if the itch still remains. There were some obvious "the game gets serious now" bits, but for personal experience I'd become accustomed to what worked and what didn't at this point that nothing stopped me for long. "Be aggressive and kick faces" really helped a ton as a guiding principle, and made movement much more fun too once assault boosting became second nature. I could go looking for mission-specific parts or the missing combat logs, but those don't intrigue that much--I got what I wanted out of the game many times over in settling in with its central mechanics, so it might be curtains at this point. It has been a great time.

I'll partially amend the comments made about the game's music in that I think it's a soundtrack that I'll like much more outside of the game context. The sound design is so throttled by constant ambient SFX, clanking mech noises, combat explosions and endless radio chatter that all but the most arrestingly composed setpiece tracks are drowned out by it... especially when Hoshino and pals seem to have adopted a Vangelis-come-lately synth warble for the majority of the game's tracks. Still, there are some really great pieces spread out through the game, and it's a far cry stylistically from many other From offerings, in a good way.
 
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