Armored Core 6 - Fires Of Rubicon

Yeah Armored Cores lie somewhere along the line between Western "walking tank" mechs and Eastern "mobile suit" mechs. Armored Core 4 comes pretty close to mobile suits, Armored Core 5 comes a bit closer to walking tanks, and Armored Cores 1~3 are a bit closer to the middle. I'm almost wondering if the AC game you tried was in the 4th generation.

If I had to pick between one or the other, I'd definitely lean towards Western mech designs as well. I really like the weight and obviously mechanical moving parts. Because you're right: if it's too agile, why bother describing it as a giant robot in the first place. But the one thing that makes me prefer the Armored Core middle-ground is that they have the weight and inertia of a giant machine but with a little bit of dexterity and agility offered by having limbs. Because without any of that, the limbs are just kinda there to look cool, yet ultimately make the craft a much larger target and easy to topple over.

Yeah, Armored Core 6 is the first AC game with a decoupled camera and no more "turning speed" stat. In a game that otherwise perfectly conveys the weight of the machine you're using, the fact that you can pull a 270-degree turn in the blink of an eye kinda kills that immersion. I'm guessing they tried to keep a turning rate with the decoupled camera and hard lock-on and it felt really awkward.

I also didn't like how some of the later versions turned into Doom FPS with mechs and lasers. We'll see what this looks like going forward, make ammo cost reasonable or remove it entirely (I'm in favor of removing it) and the combat a bit slower paced instead of Mobile Gundam Anime Edition.

Yeah, the 4th-generation games - AC4 and its sequel ACFA - don't appeal to me as much as the other generations for that reason as well. It honestly kinda reminds me of Smash Bros Melee, where at casual levels it's fine, but it goes into such blinding speed at higher levels of play that the only people who can even watch it and understand what they're seeing are the people who themselves play it. Thankfully AC6 looks like it's going to have similar weight to AC3 and AC5.

As for the ammo cost, it's there, but it looks sort of negligible. In fact, the net profits look high enough to encourage players to keep a healthy stock of parts this time around. Which makes sense, since if you restart at a checkpoint, you can only swap parts that you currently have in the garage.

EDIT: I finally found someone's mission summary screen. The mission rewarded a whopping 150,000 credits. Repairs cost 16,092, and ammunition cost 10,800, netting them 123,108. It cut about 17% into their gross profit. Compare that to AC1 thru AC3 where you're lucky to bring home that much LOL

The reason I think ammo costs should be removed is that, like all computer games, Opposing Force (OpFor) is magnified to ridiculous levels. Like no way in hell is a single Solid Snake Ultra Soldier going to go in and win against 20+ opponents. 20:1, 30:1 odds are the definition of suicide missions, even 2:1 is considered a bad trade off. Yet to have a mission where we kill three enemies and "win" would be "boring", even though it would be more "realistic" to what a mercenary would be doing solo. So if the game is going to throw hordes of enemies at the player, it needs to not penalize the player for shooting at those hordes.

They sort of skirt around that by making Armored Cores canonically 100 times more effective than any other weapon. You're in a multi-billion-dollar mech with more armor and firepower than a battleship, but with the agility offered by having legs. And I don't think it's trying to be realistic, it's just encouraging you to be smart about ammo use so you aren't going into every mission with 5 machine guns and just holding down the trigger until the mission's over.

Granted, I don't disagree with you. I don't think it's a necessary thing to the game. But at this point, if they made too many changes I don't think fans would be all too happy.

I had a bit of a discussion with my fellow Armored Core fans on what we'd consider the ultimate way to handle expenses in the game. One thing that a lot of people brought up was the negotiation mechanic in MechWarrior 5. Depending on your standing with an employer, you could ask for higher pay, more spoils, or even your expenses covered. I like the idea of your employer covering the first big chunk of your ammo expenses and not paying you the difference, because it still encourages you to play smart, but without making your wallet gasp every time you pulled the trigger on your grenade launcher. It makes the optimal play-style the one where you use your whole ammo budget to take down enemies quickly so as not to incur too many repair costs.

Honestly, the one change they've added to Armored Core 6 that I can't wrap my head around is the "repair kit" feature. They work instantly and seem to incur no penalty. And unlike Estus Flasks, you're given exactly 3 per mission and they never recharge. So why not just give you that health by default? It's adding a whole extra button to the controller, taking up UI real estate, and giving the people decrying "Mecha Souls" another thing to point to.

I dunno. I think it could be a neat feature if it, say, took 5 seconds of you standing still in order to use, so it could only be used outside of combat. Or it drained your Energy meter, so you had to duck behind cover to use it in the heat of combat.

But the way it works, they might as well have just increased everyone's AP by 9000 (each kit heals 3000 AP) and called it a day. It just seems to me like FromSoftware have deliberately designed all these awesome features such that even if they had to take one step backwards they also took two steps forward. So the repair kits just seem out of place lol

Or just use energy weapons, problem solved. Though it's beyond hilarious how they put "ammo" to energy weapons as though you aren't riding around on top of a portable fusion reactor of near limitless energy. Like some mechanic somewhere hasn't figured out how to build a cheap power couple to have your reactor recharge the energy cells in the beam weapon.

Yeah, I'd like the idea behind energy weapons to be that they don't ever run out of ammo. That never made sense to me either. Same with the right-arm physical weapons in AC3 which somehow have only like 10 uses.

Incidentally, I'm glad they're bringing the pile bunker back in AC6. It looks like it deals absolutely bonkers damage if the target is staggered.

Same reason they charge insane prices for ammo, artificially complicated difficulty. About the repair kit, do you still need to "pay" for the damage it fixes. Like if you had 5000 AP, ended at 3000 AP but used "repair" twice for 3K each, does it charge you for 9000AP worth of repair?

I can't say for sure, but I'm almost positive it does charge you for it. There's no incentive to not use them since being any less than full AP could mean you get one-shot KOed.

Only about 24 hours until it unlocks on Steam!

So far it's got pretty decent reviews as well. Consensus seems to be that it's not afraid to be an Armored Core game, even if that means it's still somewhat niche and not for everyone. That's good news for me, at least!

"once something is alive, it won't die easy"


this is so cringe i almost love it

Oh yeah. Big time hammy dialogue <3

best part about it really is that they do the whole cliche trailer thing: dim the music and SFX and just have one impactful quote...


but that's the quote.

In terms of "quality line", I definitely found the quote at the end of the gameplay trailer to be better. But every single line they used in this launch trailer was cheesy.

Runs well on PC, retaining 120FPS w/ everything at max incl. RT.

M+KB controls are also very good which is highly unusual for FromSoft. Only button I had to rebind was Purge.

How is the ammo situation?

ah ***

The game looks absolutely beautiful, also nice to see that they have native ultrawide support at launch for this, which elden ring didn't have.

The controls seems a bit overwhelming at first because the game feels so much faster than your usual soulsborne. It feels good once you get used to it though.

Pretty forgiving honestly.

Might try it out in a few weeks, some folks reporting janky controls or weird FPS issues, but that's pretty common for a new release.

So far I'm really enjoying it. I've gone into it with the mindset that it's not going to be my favorite Armored Core, but that it's still going to fill the niche that only Armored Core can fill. And it's even better than I expected. What really went understated was how different every part feels, especially leg types. It honestly feels like you're playing a completely different game with each part change.

It's not perfect, but considering it's only $60 (and no microtransactions or other gimmicks) in a world that charges $70 for any old garbage, it's definitely worth picking up. The part designs are cool, the worldbuilding has been really compelling, and the gameplay feels suuuuuper tight.

This. On a mission where you make like 300,000 credits, your repairs and ammo are like 15k apiece. And energy weapons now also cost money, so they aren't the end-all for missions. It still encourages you to not waste ammo, but you'll never be in the red in this game.

My 7-year-old PC is still running this game without frame drops, albeit not at 120 Hz. And "janky controls" is just a byproduct of giving you more control over your character than almost any other game. Using mouse and keyboard, I've had no issues performing any actions on a whim.

So far I can accurately describe almost all the dialogue as "EDF, but not funny"

The FPS issues aren't hardware related, likely some sort of performance related bug in specific situations. Same with the control issues, they sometimes just don't work right. Again this isn't me knocking the game, most new releases of big titles tend to have these issues.


This is what I really wanted to know. If the cost is really small vs the reward then it's not punishing you for playing the game.

Going to copy paste here because I don't feel like coming up with a whole new set of thoughts. The quote was in relation to chapter bosses feeling cheap and potentially unfair.



I think if they put the CH1 boss, for example, into a Souls game it'd be comically easy due to iframes alone. It isn't a mechanically interesting boss or a particularly intricate one (despite people saying WOWIE THIS IS ONE OF THE BEST BOSSES FROMSOFT HAS EVER MADE!!), it's difficult because of the mechanics of the game not necessarily meshing well with the design intent of the encounter.

I change my controls whenever I change weapon load outs because I want my charge buttons the same.

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And yes the dialogue is not to be taken to seriously. Batman voice telling you to expect the unexpected is a complete non-statement. I enjoy making fun of it actively.

I actually really liked that boss. It took me a few tries because I was stubborn to learn its pattern. But then I was able to beat it once I was able to mold around what they wanted. Unlike Souls, which is "Did I dodge the attack? Y/N", Armored Core is more often "How much of the attack did I dodge?"

In general, bigger hits are more easily dodged if you conserve your energy for them, but punish you heavily if you don't. By contrast, you can usually dodge like 99% of the giant waves of smaller rounds coming your way, and that 1% that still hits you simply imposes a time limit because you can't keep taking those small hits forever.

With that boss in particular:
That said, the boss after it was one that I found particularly not fun by way of its gimmick. Some loadouts make comically short work of it, while other loadouts need to grind it for like 20 minutes. I didn't find it particularly hard, but I was disappointed how extra-punished I felt for going in with my usual well-rounded "tackle anything thrown at me" build for blindly going into a mission for the first time. That, I felt, was antithetical to the spirit of Armored Core.

That first boss is exactly the same way and has the same problem that you had with the 2nd, you just happened to already have the solution equipped.

The way Armored Core typically works is that most fairly-optimal builds can do away with a mission. But going back with the right knowledge in mind can get you an S-rank and a better payout. The same could be said for the boss we're talking about.