Armored Core 6 Looks to be More Armored Core Than Soulsborne

ign.com:

When FromSoftware announced Armored Core VI at last week's Game Awards, the top comment in the dedicated subreddit's announcement thread read simply, "May this subreddit rightfully grow from obscurity."

Always a cult series at best, Armored Core was further overshadowed by the rise of the so-called Soulsborne genre, which propelled FromSoftware from obscurity to one of the top studios in the world. But Armored Core has been a around a long time — far longer than Demon's Souls or Dark Souls. During its heyday on the PlayStation and PlayStation 2, it earned a cult audience with its strong designs; deep array of parts, and intense split-screen combat. The last Armored Core — an ambitious online game that pit squads of players against one another on a large multiplayer map — was released in 2012.

With the Soulsborne sub-genre becoming such a dominant part of FromSoftware's brand, it's easy to wonder whether Armored Core will follow suit. Will it be Sekiro with giant robots? Will it take place over a large open world? Right now, the answer to both of those questions seems to be "no," though there is some nuance to that comparison.

"No, we've not been making a conscious effort to try to direct it towards more Soulsborne-type gameplay," says FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki, who provided the concept for the game. "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.