We have some information regarding Armored Core VI, FromSoftware's latest highly anticipated game which has drawn a lot of intrigue since its announcement at The Game Awards 2022. Today, the game's developers talked to IGN about the upcoming game's mechanics.
The radical shift in question comes from the fact that the game will purely focus on working with what made Armored Core work in the first place rather than adding Soulsborne elements to it. If you remember an earlier story, a FromSoftware insider stated that Armored Core VI would have some Soulsborne elements. However, FromSoftware President Hidetaka Miyazaki stated the opposite, talking about what FromSoftware is aiming to do with this entry:
The essential direction of [Armored Core VI] was to go back and take a good look at the core concept of Armored Core and what made that series special. So we wanted to take the assembly aspect, assembling and customizing your own mech — your AC — and then being able to exact a high level of control over the assembled mech. So we wanted to take those two core concepts and reexamine those in our modern environment.
[...] So the real impetus for this project, I think, or at least one of the real appeals for me comes from that aspect of assembly, and being able to really freely assemble and customize the mech, I think is what we really highly focus on in Armored Core. [...] There's actually a much higher degree of freedom here, and being able to see these effects both in game, and as part of the world building, and as part of your player choices, we feel like this is a very big part of what makes Armored Core special.
Masaru Yamamura, Armored Core VI's game director, also chimed in with a few of his thoughts regarding the direction this new entry in the Armored Core series will take:
For [Armored Core VI], by continuing to attack even the strongest enemy, the force of impact can break the enemy's posture and inflict a large amount of damage – a critical hit. This is the starting point for the slow and fast speed change of the battle, and when combined with long-range firefighting and close-range melee combat, the enemy and his machine engage each other violently, creating a more aggressive and dynamic battle that only mechas can engage in.
You want to create chances for yourself in combat and turn the battle to the player's advantage. So what we feel is this is going to create a really nice back and forth flow in battles in Armored Core VI, and create this nice mix of offensive and defensive play… but we want the player to feel like they're constantly able to pressure the enemy and that's why we incorporated some of these systems.
The lead talked about the wide variety of weapons that players will have access to. Rather than purely focusing on close melee combat, players will majorly have access to guns, ordnance, and missiles. There still will be some nice options for melee-based players in Armored Core VI, though.
Yamamura also confirmed that the game will feature a mission-based structure to the single-player component of the game. He talked about how Armored Core VI's story will also be a fresh take with no direct links with the previous games in terms of the continuing story. The developers also briefly talked about the game's difficulty, with Yamamura stating the following:
With Armored Core VI, what we wanted to focus on was this really intense and tough mecha battles. We have generally tried to keep it on the challenging side, but it's not to say that it's a flat difficulty line throughout. We wanted to have some nice tempo changes and some nice balance to the difficulty and the level of challenge.
It can vary depending on the mission type. It depends on the enemies you're coming up against in those missions. It depends on how you want to assemble your mech. But this is one approach we wanted to have, is to have the player decide how they wanted to assemble and how they wanted to approach each mission, and then to have this nice balance of level of challenge throughout the missions and throughout the campaign.
Lastly, the game features a multiplayer mode. Like previous Armored Core titles, players can customize their mechs and take them into battle with others. However, details surrounding this upcoming multiplayer experience will be revealed later.
Some avid readers might have noticed this already, but to make this even blunter. The game will stray away from many of the Soulsborne elements to focus purely on what made Armored Core a recognizable staple in FromSoftware's library.
Armored Core VI Fires of Rubicon launches on yet-to-be-confirmed platforms sometime in 2023. We will keep you updated on the game as soon as more come in on it, so stay tuned for all the latest news.
