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Armored Core 6 tops Steam chart, overtakes BG3, “thanks to Elden Ring” (www.pcgamesn.com)

submitted 1 year ago by inclementimmigrant to c/pcgaming

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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.

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[–] TesterJ 38 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (20 children)

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.

[–] fenynro 31 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

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.

[–] Katana314 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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 points 1 year ago* (last edited 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

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