37
votes
Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon – gameplay preview
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- ARMORED CORE VI FIRES OF RUBICON – Gameplay Preview
- Authors
- Bandai Namco Entertainment America
- Duration
- 27:36
- Published
- Jul 25 2023
I am so ridiculously excited for this game.
For folks who haven't played them before, AC is one of those which, once you get competent at it, you can breeze through each game very quickly. If you're a souls fan, it's very much like those, in the sense that your first playthrough is your longest and hardest. With the parts knowledge and muscle memory in place, a game that might take 30-40 hours the first time, takes 5-10 the second. I think at the peak I could do a run of Last Raven in all of 50 minutes. Same with For Answer.
AC is as old as fromsoft, too. It was their second game, and may have been the first concept they tried to work on (my understanding is technical limitations meant they went for Kings Field first). There's a clear trend within the series of it, iterating upon itself. The core concept stays the same, with different aspects either heightened or diminished depending which entry you play. The original game can be just as frenetic and fun as the latest, because they've stuck so closely to that game's fundamentals.
Playing through the series is a really, really interesting experience. Your knowledge and skill is totally transferrable; as you get good at one, all the others become easier bit by bit. And you can take your build ideas and further hone/refine them according to the mechanics introduced along the way. Within the series it also lets you transfer save data between certain games, which means you don't have to endure the experience of starting at zero every time. I can't recommend them enough. A lot of what makes souls what it is, is in these games too. And, similar to those, when you complete a game there is almost always a bunch of additional shit you can do, like more arena fights and extra missions/parts.
The way the games are balanced, the first playthrough really is the tip of the iceberg. As you go through, they've tailored later content to more advanced players, so kinda regardless how good you are it never stops being challenging. Very easy to emulate too, the AC discord server even has a bunch of premade packages for that.
Imo AC6 as best I can tell is a sort of "coming home" exercise. Returning to what used to be their bread and butter, new info and resources in hand, to see just how good they can do it now. Really exciting to see and what an amazing outcome following their string of hits. I can't wait!
Only halfway through the video but I’m excited. I never played the AC games back in the day, but a game like this was exactly what I’d always hoped for as a kid. Hopefully if there’s PvP it has better netcode than Elden Ring because I don’t think it would hold up to such fast paced combat.
The two things that make me excited about AC6 are:
The return to something resembling weightiness of the mecha. AC4 and 5 seemed to lose the feeling of weight to the mecha and made me less excited to play the game. They seem to have taken that idea to heart and I feel like we are indeed watching a heavy piece of machinery run around.
Storytelling that appears to be taking an influence from the Ace Combat series. Watching this gameplay trailer has a numbers of tells that make me super excited just for the storytelling alone. My memory may be failing me here in the 10+ years since I've last played one, but I don't recall previous Armored Core games being this heavy on the in-mission story telling methods. In Ace Combat, the story telling method is half the fun of that game. If they truly are doing that here, then we are in for a real fun experience.
Now here comes the hardest part: Ignoring all the videos on Youtube from here on out. If I'm not careful, I'll eat up everything and leave nothing new for me to experience myself. Wish me luck!
Exactly, huge Ace Combat vibes.
There's nothing quite like having two allies or even an enemy or two calmly but forcefully debating the finer points of warfare politics and philosophy while you're puckered trying to dodge a million missiles and not die.
I'm a bit mixed on the storytelling.
The last one i played through was FA, and I loved that it had the guts to really not have any happy ending. There's two flavors of bad and outright awful. I appreciate a story that can stick to the setting so well. You're some random merc (although insanely talented). Your ability to really shift the paradigm is mostly limited to who you support in combat, and there's not some plucky young group of do gooders made up of everyone with morals from all the sides (ye old gundam syndrome). There's a bunch of crappy mega corps and a couple of utter lunatics.
Further they were told in a very immersive fashion. Not a ton of major cutscenes, mostly just comms chatter (which is also pretty Ace combat to be fair).
So far we've got a lot of fire theming (vibes of DS) and it sure looks like a plucky upstart liberation army thing. Now, to be fair to FA, they ALSO had something akin to that, it was just not what it appeared, and I think 4 sorta has a much more traditional "hero protag vibe" (and while i played them I can't recall the actual major points of anything before that). Still I hope it's not as simple as "good path/bad path".
Granted having vented this out, it's fromsoft. They've got a pretty good track record with "wait what" path and "hold on that doesn't explain anything" path and "i guess that's uh...different at least" path so I'm probably worrying for nothing.
That's what turned me off of AC, I hated the jumpy quick movement. I liked the old ones and I loved armored core, wish they would make another of that. I'll look at others playing it before I buy still.
I've never played AC because I've had very limited experience with anything besides PC/Nintendo consoles. I have put a ton of hours into Daemon X Machina, though. How does AC compare to that, in terms of learning the controls? I'm definitely getting it, but I'm wondering how simple or difficult it will be to get into it.
Similarish?
DXM is certainly less complex in a lot of ways, and is probably most akin to AC4/FA with how easy mobility is.
This version seems to be striking a nice balance between 4/FA and 5 when it comes to mobility (you can be very mobile but not constantly).
The mech building choices tend to matter a lot more, and one of the big difficulty barriers thats still somewhat unknown is how they handle the FCS. In older AC games you had to choose your FCS system, so you could have one that took up most of the screen, but was very shallow, which made it great for up close engagements but terrible far away, or you could take something that covered very little of the screen but was extremely deep, so you could hit targets from far away.
You had to actually position this with the triggers on a controller to keep your target in the proper part of the screen/in range, and it could be quite difficult.
By AC4 they'd changed how the lock on/FCS worked to be much much easier, and this looks to be akin to that. If it is, that's the main difficulty spike gone, but I wouldn't be shocked if it's not quite the same.
There's just more to it in AC is the best I can think to put it. The control scheme in those games tends to default to you using six digits - thumbs on sticks, index fingers on bumpers, middle fingers on triggers. Triggers control boosting behavior, bumpers fire weapons, sticks move and look.
It's been a while since I played DxM so I don't remember its controls as specifically, but that setup has been the standard in AC since the latter half of the PS2 games. Doubtless it'll be the default in VI too. AC did always include remapping fwiw, so if for whatever reason it doesn't jive with you, you'll likely get options to make changes.
I'm much more familiar and comfortable with WASD and a 12 button mouse and I don’t have much of that controller muscle memory, so I bet I'm in for a ton of remapping and testing how stuff feels! I'm still very much looking forward to the game, though.
God it’s everything I ever wanted.
They’ve taken everything they’ve learned from 4, Elden ring, and sekiro and finally made all of it look great.
Hopefully a lot less “oh this is cool but it’s sucks”. Or at least it’ll be fun to use
It doesn’t look like it’s going to recapture how AC felt for me on the PS1 but I’m still getting this day 1.
I should clarify but since AC1 I’ve never felt the sequels were as “real robot” to me (if you know the genre).