Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon

[Julius]

Just completed NG++ and got the third ending, and all I can say is: wooooooooooow. 

Love the approach they took to the other endings in this. Obviously it's down to the game being mission-based, but when the paths diverge on subsequent playthroughs, they REALLY diverge, and that means a whole host of new missions and so much more context. 

That final boss fight had me grinning from ear to ear  beat it first time, too!

All that remains for my Plat is to get the rest of the collectibles (through replaying the NG and NG+ missions for Chapter 5), and then it will be a case of getting S-Ranks, and that'll be that. 

I'll make a longer post with more cohesive thoughts on, and videos of, my time with NG+ and NG++ once it's all wrapped up, but yeah...hell of a game! 

[Julius]

Me and my friends weren't in the mood for BG3 tonight, so all ended up doing our own things. One of my friends ended up on AC VI and the next mission he had to do ended in Balteus, so him not knowing this, I asked if I could watch him via Share Screen. He hasn't played a From game before this, and while very different from their other offerings, I think the customisation and mechs is exactly why he was willing to pick it up after my recommendation. 

Took him a while, long enough for me to redownload the game and beat it with my NG+/NG++-clearing build, and then again with the build I used the first time around, both on my first attempt. As he was having trouble and another friend was watching I had them watch me beat the fight - no pressure, right? - and I beat it first time again, and shared a bunch of tips with them, and showcased how aggressive and in-your-face fighting just seemed to work out better. 

He then did it on his next attempt, so I'm pretty proud of him 

So, just bumping this to give the game some more love. I ended up getting the Plat a few months back after around 54 hours with the game, and while I think there are better quality games which have released this year, I think it's my personal GOTY. 

The fact that I'm thinking of going through it again after just seeing and replaying the same missions a few times tonight is testament to that, I loved it! 

Edited November 10, 2023 by Julius

[Julius]

Vaati has uploaded his first video on the lore of AC VI, and it's a doozy! 

Man, I love this game  

Must...resist...the urge...to play again...

[Hero-of-Time]

I was hoping to pick this up in the Black Friday sales but sadly there doesn't seem to be any retailer that has discounted it. Same goes for Lies of P.

[Julius]

24 minutes ago, Hero-of-Time said:

I was hoping to pick this up in the Black Friday sales but sadly there doesn't seem to be any retailer that has discounted it.

Yeah, so far I think the lowest I've seen it at so far is £40 for the PS4 version, and that's how it was before the sales started to kick off  fingers crossed it drops somewhere in the coming week for you! Would be super interested to hear your thoughts on it 

The Black Friday sales stretching out to more than a week before the actual day really makes it hard to get a read on the best deals this time of year, guess the corpos know what they're doing there though 

26 minutes ago, Hero-of-Time said:

Same goes for Lies of P.

Man, the reviews and pre-launch impressions for Lies of P have me really curious, but I'm trying to resist by burying the thought of playing Lies of P behind wanting to play Bloodborne again and forcing myself to play anything else to get my mind off doing just that. That being said, I did re-install Bloodborne on Friday, so I'm not sure how well that's working out for me 

[Hero-of-Time]

6 hours ago, Julius said:

Man, the reviews and pre-launch impressions for Lies of P have me really curious, but I'm trying to resist by burying the thought of playing Lies of P behind wanting to play Bloodborne again and forcing myself to play anything else to get my mind off doing just that. That being said, I did re-install Bloodborne on Friday, so I'm not sure how well that's working out for me 

There's a stupid amount of praise for the game. Been catching up on various threads on here and see @RedShell also loved it.

I could do with another Soulslike game. I recently played Wo Long and really enjoyed it but it lacked the dark and depressing feel that the Souls games bring to the table. Lies of P looks to capture that perfectly.

[RedShell]

21 hours ago, Hero-of-Time said:

There's a stupid amount of praise for the game. Been catching up on various threads on here and see @RedShell also loved it.

I could do with another Soulslike game. I recently played Wo Long and really enjoyed it but it lacked the dark and depressing feel that the Souls games bring to the table. Lies of P looks to capture that perfectly.

I did indeed love it, game is an absolute no-brainer for anyone that enjoys the Souls formula.

BTW, you just reminded me that I need to try and get back to Wo Long at some point! Not played it in a few months, but was pretty far into it I think.

[Hero-of-Time]

3 minutes ago, RedShell said:

I did indeed love it, game is an absolute no-brainer for anyone that enjoys the Souls formula.

BTW, you just reminded me that I need to try and get back to Wo Long at some point! Not played it in a few months, but was pretty far into it I think.

I appreciate Team Ninja's approach to the genre. If Nioh was their attempt at a Souls game then Wo Long was certainly them having a stab at making something like Sekiro. 

[Hero-of-Time]

I see Smyths have knocked the price down to £29.99, which is what I was looking to pay. I may check the store that's on the way back from work and pick up a copy.

[Julius]

14 minutes ago, Hero-of-Time said:

I see Smyths have knocked the price down to £29.99, which is what I was looking to pay. I may check the store that's on the way back from work and pick up a copy.

[Julius]

Booted this up again tonight as my friend has slowly been chipping away at it and unlocked Nest, the online PvP mode. 

Wiped the floor with him with my Tristan MK-I build for well over an hour, but eventually he figured out that a tanky build might work best (I'd mentioned before about the tanky builds being broke, the Songbirds and to fly up when using them, etc.), and yeah...it was no longer as intense or as fun for either of us  the only way to combat it, really, was with a tanky build of my own, so we were just there like a bunch of little kids bashing these big ol' goofy mechs against each other  the high HP, high defense stats and being able to fit the hardest hitting weapons to it really makes the game play so differently, in a way I personally didn't enjoy (not because I started losing, but more because there was very little skill involved when we both landed on the same tanky build). 

While I absolutely loved my time playing through Armored Core VI with a very speedy build, it simply doesn't translate to PvP well, where tanky builds - like in the main game, I guess, seeing some of the meta builds after I beat the game - reign supreme. By all means, the adage "play how you want to play" applies perfectly here, and I think it will help my friend to push through the game some more and hopefully face a bit more of a challenge with some of the bosses, which would be cool. 

I just think that with the next game they should really try to balance things a bit more. The trade-off feels like it should be that the faster build is equal in that though it has less health it can dodge the attacks easier and more consistently, but the area of effect of some of the shoulder weapons are insane and just make it a bit of a no-go, so it doesn't work out that way, and so you end up unable to keep up and have way less health while doing so. I beat him a couple of times in the end and had some close run-ins but it wasn't anywhere near as fun as the more skilful battles we had early on with both of using lighter mechs 

Anyways, our different approaches to the controller is also very funny, as I can his button-mashing while I'm calmly going through the motions on my end  I think I'm going to give an anti-tank build some thought and testing, though, so if nothing else, this seems a brilliant excuse to return to the game here and there 

Edited December 2, 2023 by Julius

[Julius]

VaatiVidya is release a 5½ - no, that is not a typo: FIVE AND A HALF - hour long lore video for Fires of Rubicon later this week:

Quote

The full, 5.5hr lore video for Armored Core will finally be released this week!

As someone who LOVED ACVI...GIVE IT TO MEEEEEEEEEEE 

[Julius]

The game has officially sold over 3 millions units – making it the best-selling game in the series! 

This comes following Rusty's and Pater's Japanese VAs reporting that the game had sold 2.8 million units, which they'd heard via From, in October of last year. 

Great stuff. I really, really loved this game, and given its mission-based structure and the fact that past numbered AC titles have typically been followed up relatively quickly by a non-numbered title in the same "generation" (that's AC generation, not console generation), I think there's a decent chance that we could see another game in the series next year. Bonus points for sure if it follows past trends in the same AC generation of games and you can save transfer some stuff over to the new game! 

[Julius]

Where I'm at with combat in The Witcher 3:

[Hero-of-Time]

Did you buy another copy or something?

[Julius]

1 hour ago, Hero-of-Time said:

Did you buy another copy or something?

Did you ever get around to starting this up H-o-T? 

 

Anyways, to explain how I got here – I finally got to a point in The Witcher 3 I've never got to before: the game started to feel like it was getting good. It took, like, 13 hours for that to finally happen, and I absolutely understand why I and others have dropped the game after several attempts at getting into it, but still. 

There are good things and bad things about those 13 hours - which I'm sure I'll get into at some point - BUT, what really stood out, was that the combat in that game sucks ass. In fact, the combat in The Witcher 3 sucks ass so much that it genuinely had me craving a game with any semblance of combat which was good fun. Hence, a second copy of Fires of Rubicon arriving at my door this morning  I thought there was a decent chance I'd buy a second copy of Armored Core VI this year, but I didn't think it'd be so soon. 

So, with lessons learned from Persona 3 Reload last year about when to put a game down and when to go with the wants of my gaming gut, I've put The Witcher 3 down for a bit to tear into some good ol' mech combat and revisit ACVI. 

And I'm having a blast – I mean, that shouldn't be too surprising considering it was nearly my 2023 GOTY, but still! Last time I went with the pilot name Galileo (because, ya know, guy who discovered a bunch of planets, seemed fitting) and naming my ACs after the Knights of the Round Table; this time around, I've gone with the pilot name Ozymandias, and am thus naming my ACs after ancient and/or fabled cities which might have been the works we'd be looking on and supposedly despairing over. 

Currently I'm on the v3 build of my Jericho AC...

...where I'm using the reverse joint legs to allow for a greater weight limit while also keeping some of the speed of my favourite builds from my last playthrough, especially in dodging, allowing me to bypass some of the weak points of my Tristan build on the last page by having much more capable munitions on board. I didn't use the reverse joints much, if at all, on my last playthrough, so it's been fun to try a new type of build, and I think I might try the tank treads at some point - which I also never tried last time out - too. And yeah, I've just unlocked the Songbirds, so the game is about to become real breezy for this build. 

I'm about 3 hours in and I've just completed Chapter 1 and downed for the first time against a boss in Balteus, which, eh, is fine, it was only the once, and it was Balteus. I thought I'd hit Up on the D-pad to repair but forgot that when you're stunned that it doesn't register (even to apply the repair a bit delayed once you're no longer stunned) and so got taken out after thinking I was supposed to be healing. Whoops! Also finished the Arena up to and including E rank so far, as well as all the Training missions. 

Not quite sure how far I intend on going with this playthrough. Is it just NG? NG+? NG++? Am I going for the Plat again? I genuinely have no clue.

I'm not even sure I get straight back to The Witcher 3 after this, whatever the case, purely because one of my mates is very far ahead and I'm in no real rush to get through it, whereas another has dropped off TW3 to finally play Yakuza 0 and is loving it, so Infinite Wealth had been very much on my mind (also spotted @Happenstance playing 0 too!). My group kind of agreed as a collective it was a good idea to get through The Witcher 3 together, and it has helped two of us to push on and see it through to a point where it starts to finally click, but we've also agreed in retrospect that agreeing to play a game as undemanding and long as that in January of all months might not have been the best idea. 

Whatever I choose to do with this and what I play next, so long as I'm having good fun with it, I'm on the right track 

Edited 3 hours ago by Julius