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.
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
Laughs in Asylum Demon