fenynro

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

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

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.

Conversely, not every aspect of society needs to be monetized and capitalized.

There existed a time when players made guides because they were passionate about the game, not because they were trying to hit engagement metrics or ad revenue breakpoints. The website GameFAQs, for example, holds thousands of user created guides, and many of them are extremely high quality.

Obviously this is not to say that we should expect all creators to work for free, especially if they're trying to make a career of it, but there's decades of precedent for passion-driven user created content and I don't think it's right to label it as entitlement when talking about the loss of those elements in a shift towards icy veins/maxroll paid guides.