At Summer Games Fest on June 9, Dot Esports was invited to a 30-minute hands-off preview of Armored Core 6 to see exactly how it’s shaping up ahead of its Aug. 25 launch. Now, I have never played an Armored Core game in my life, nor am I a fan of all things Gundam or mecha like Transformers, but even I found myself salivating at the sight of the mechanized carnage I saw.
The lead producer of Armored Core 6, Yasunori Ogura, opened up the demonstration with an ambitious goal for the title. Combining the “fundamental fun of the Armored Core series with the design philosophy of recent FromSoftware titles” such as Elden Ring and Dark Souls.
At first, I scoffed at this ambition. After all, both genres are so unique that it felt fundamentally impossible to combine the two—but then I remembered I was watching a FromSoftware presentation, so if any studio can do it, it can.
Throughout the hands-off demonstration, we were shown the exact scale of the worlds you will operate in, and they are truly massive. You’re not a little guy running around in the big bad world anymore. You’re piloting an Armored Core that can fly. That usual FromSoftware environmental flair is still there. If you see something in the distance, you can get there, but you don’t need to take the long route. Fly, dash, go through the main door, or climb through a vent above it.
It isn’t all plain sailing though. What makes these environments different, and more challenging than the Soulsborne games is the need to watch all 360 degrees for enemies and ways to progress. Rather than a flat plane, you need to watch all angles for enemies that might be looking to snipe you if you fly too close. You may be in a jet-powered rocket-equipped tank, but so are your enemies.
This massive world, and the ways to go about it, were key when designing how the game would play out. Ogura told us that while the goal of the mission that was being shown off was to get to the heart of the facility that the level was based on, how you get there is completely up to you, and it all depends on your loadout.
Customization is king here, with the demo focused on how players will find it difficult to pass through specific parts of Armored Core or take on certain enemies unless they modify and change their setup to suit their needs. While I’ve no doubt seasoned players will get through the game with specific builds, changing and modifying your loadout will be paramount for most of us to adapt to everything the game throws at us.
In one boss fight Ogura showed us, the Armored Core was equipped for close-quarters, not ranged attacks. There were a bunch of explodable fuel tankers that could have shredded the heavily-armored foes’ armor, but due to the loadout, the player has no choice but to engage in close combat and run the risk of those same tankers damaging them instead, adding a new element of tactical thinking to the fight players must actively think about.
As you might expect, the fight was just too much and the player was destroyed. This is where Ogura and the rest of the team showed off a new feature to Armored Core 6—the ability to change your loadout during respawns to tackle the fight you were struggling with differently. Using the new assembly feature, the player was able to shift their mech to take more advantage of the battlefield and blasted the boss from afar.
The more I watched, and the more the team showcased, the more I began to see exactly what Ogura and the team had envisioned come to life. Taking the Armored Core identity and breathing new life into it with new FromSoftware philosophies has actually worked. I’ve been transformed into a mecha fan. I’d better watch Neon Genesis Evangelion now.
