Never underestimate the insatiable appetite gamers have for giant robot battles. That appetite has propelled Armored Core 6 to the top spot on Steam’s global sales charts more than a decade after the last numbered entry in the series was released, knocking Baldur’s Gate 3 off the top spot.
In a summer filled with huge releases, few could have predicted that Armored Core 6 would be able to find such a large audience. The phenomenal success of last year’s Elden Ring certainly didn’t hurt. Speaking to GameIndustry.biz, Bandai Namco Europe CEO Arnaud Muller explained that Elden Ring has given FromSoftware a “guarantee of quality” among fans.
The negative reviews on Steam are hilarious. Most of them have 0.5 hours on record and are complaining that they can’t beat the first boss. Which means they most likely spent no more than 10 minutes trying.
It’s not like their complaints are entirely without merit though. I expected difficulty with a From Software game but usually there is an on-ramp to the difficulty.
In AC6 that’s completely missing. You’re given four trivial fights with almost no tutorialization before being put against a boss that expects you to know about the (yet unexplained) stagger bar and also expects you to use your sword against the helicopter which is somewhat unintuitive, especially since you’ve only been told to use the sword once and it was against enemies with a shield which reinforces the idea that sword beats shield, and the helicopter has no shield.
Honestly, welcome to Armored Core. A brutal first mission is a staple of the series.
Fair enough. This is indeed my first Armored Core experience and I expected an uphill struggle coming in on iteration 6 of the series, but clearly I wasn’t prepared for this :P
I’ll get there eventually. Just need to keep ramming my head against it until something clicks
Depending on how you approach Dark Souls (there are many ways to approach it, it literally begins with a character creation screen that fails to explain your options), sometimes it does not have a difficulty curve - and people who get that experience generally stop playing all FromSoft games.
Sure, but in Dark Souls there’s still significantly better design at work.
Some differences in Dark Souls:
AC6 on the other hand lacks all of that. It gives you no tutorialization. You’re told to use a sword against shielded enemies and then you’re suppose to somehow infer that the helicopter is also weak to swords. You’re meant to build up a stagger bar to open a window for big damage, but they haven’t even mentioned the stagger bars existence at this point in the game. You’re stuck in a single mech loadout with no way to customize.
Imagine if you had to fully kill the asylum demon the first time you encounter it. You’ve got no plunge damage, no gear, no grasp of the controls, you’re just forced to walk out of the jail door and beat the boss before you can engage with any other elements of the game. That’s much closer to AC6’s presentation
Laughs in Asylum Demon
It didn’t die to 15 seconds of me standing still shooting it in the armor! This is elitist bullshit!!!
Tbf a lot of people give up on all souls games after they can’t beat the first boss, I’ve known people that can’t even get to the first boss
DS3 literally starts with a boss that is quite challenging if you’re not used to DS already. Just “here is a sword, here is how to swing it, here is a bear of a man with an oozing snake hand - kill him”. A lot of players bounced off him.
Fromsoft isn’t in the business of making easy games, it’s just different variations of challenging. For people that like that it’s great. For a lot of people that very understandably is a turn off.
Gundyr on purpose acts as an early check for the player if they would enjoy the rest of the game or not. If you can’t beat him and don’t like the trial-and-error learning process required to do so, then you most likely wouldn’t enjoy or get much further in the game anyway.
I’ve beaten several games that I’d generally consider hard by their endings, but I honestly think FromSoft is just really bad at doing difficulty curves and player teaching - they just defend it all through the theme of being “difficulty edgelords” that don’t follow mainstream design.
Yea there’s nothing wrong with making a game that’s not for everyone. Not everything needs to be easy, those that crave a challenge obviously love from soft for the pain. I’ve played a few of the games and won’t say I’m an uber fan of them like some but I enjoyed them. I’m looking forward to ac6 but will have to wait til I’m tired of bg3 and that will be a bit
Oooh, I gotta read those discussion threads, the ones for Baldur’s Gate 3 were delightfully spicy and filled to the brim with gamers who wanted the game to cater to their exact power fantasies.
Check this one out that I found https://i.imgur.com/9fvEX1k.png
Lol I say. Lmao
No need to shit on the other games in there, that person’s a complete dumbass all on their own if they seriously didn’t look into the basic premise of the game before buying it.
Their implication that starfield will be playable in the near future is just an additional layer to their raw onion opinion. I’m not disparaging starfield for nearly certainly coming out broken, I’m laughing at the review’s low info takes.
Gotcha, thanks for the context.
That’s me. I uninstalled it after the first boss fight. But I tried for Solid 2 hours 🥲
Close the gap with assault boost and use the left arm sword ability to break poise then use missiles and bullets send maybe more sword if it charges in time
whole fight can be won in like a minute, was a very fast paced boss fight
The first boss was kind of a PITA because it kept saying I need to get off the ground to avoid the explosions, so I’d launch into the air and just get smashed by direct hits. I finally beat it by landing up on top of the fucker and using the laser sword.