Knocking RPG darling Baldur's Gate 3 off the top spot, Armored Core 6 has delivered on the hype with explosive sales in its first 24 hours.

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.

  • @fenynro
    31•1 year ago

    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.

    • @pastcoma
      12•1 year ago

      Honestly, welcome to Armored Core. A brutal first mission is a staple of the series.

      • @fenynro
        7•1 year ago

        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

    • @Katana314English
      1•1 year ago

      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.

      • @fenynro
        1•1 year ago

        Sure, but in Dark Souls there’s still significantly better design at work.

        Some differences in Dark Souls:

        • tutorial messages before the first major encounter explaining the controls
        • the difficulty scale between the entry level monsters and the boss is much smaller
        • the player can customize their build at least a little bit by selecting their starting loadout
        • the first boss is often difficult, but even if the player fails they can still progress the game since they’re expected to lose.

        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

    • PrimePeriapsis
      -1•1 year ago

      On ramp to difficulty

      Laughs in Asylum Demon