/acg/ - Armored Core General: Stop Sucking Edition

Good one

But honestly, those haikus are a little depressing with a hint of optimism, that sometime only make the depressing part worse, no that I dont like it.

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If you had to choose a single AC game to make the best first impression on a potential new fan, which game world you guys choose? Personally I'm learning towards either For Answer or Verdict Day.

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2 or Nexus depending on how likely they are to complain about controls.

AC3.

>

It happens. We just work through it.

nice
i'd say the first one but are also good starting points
it's just a shame nexus is a bit bland in comparison to some of the other stand outs (namely last raven but that's not really a beginner's game)
starting him with FA is almost guaranteeing him to hate the rest of the series, but it's still a great game
also hi /acg/

Nexus was the first game I played, then I went back and played Last Raven and Silent Line because it was during the PS3 era and the new fast paced AC games really scared me

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>starting him with FA is almost guaranteeing him to hate the rest of the series
I dunno man I played 4A first and then I played the rest and I like them all, so it's probably not a bad place to start.

What does /acg/ thinks about the next game having a romantic sidequest with a consort, following this sidquest can affect the ending.

Generally 3. Possibly Nexus if they absolutely can't deal with the old control scheme.

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bump

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AC3. It was the best combination for AC beginners, and the analog helped a ton.

I thought analog wasn't a thing until Nexus, though. I mean, it's been a long fuckin' time since I've played anything PS1/PS2, though, so I guess I could be wrong.

Bump.

use emu

>I am of exams

No.

Bump.

We actually survived the night.

Rays upon the snow
Sunrise over horizon

Words as flower seeds
Sprouting from beneath the ice
Night conquered 'til tomorrow

It's not a Haiku, but a Tanka

>I thought analog wasn't a thing until Nexus, though.
No, you're correct. Nexus was the first to introduce dual analog controls

>Sunrise over horizon

youtube.com/watch?v=Jf0VlrNpixw

Armored Core 3 if they are a fan of PS2 games.

Armored core For Answer if they're a wee baby newborn who has only played GOTY titles.

LR and Verdict Day are way too sodomizing for AC virgins.

FA is the most accessible for people who aren't specifically looking for Gran Turismo-like mech games. To the average gamer, it's much more approachable.

"it's just like my japanese animes"

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4

That depends on how you want to think about it.
2 was the first game to utilize the sticks. Granted, they were only used as part of the Limiter Release command, but that still counts.
I believe Another Age was the first game that let you use the left stick for movement.
It took them until Nexus to realize that there is a right stick and that it could be used for more than the R3 button.

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Oh, thats right, isn't it? It's been so long I completely forgot.

Going to have to agree with this.

3 is the perfect blend of old-school AC gameplay with more modern conveniences, and the difficulty scales pretty well -- completing missions is fairly easy, while S-ranking them can be fairly challenging. Ditto the arena; the first couple of tiers can be handled without much issue, with the later tiers and post-game opponents being pretty brutal. It's a good way to ease people into the series. 2nd gen (2/Another Age) were a little tougher than most newbies will be prepared for, and would be considered 'clunky' by a person who's never played AC before.

4th gen will be more appealing for people that aren't actually into the kind of game AC is just yet, as it's more familiar to traditional action game fans.

Bump.

The one downside to 3 is that it's so long that for a first title, if you play it and enjoy all the content, you'll be disappointed at how short the other games in the series are. It had 70 arena enemies, about twice as much as any other game.

I'm replaying AC4 and I'm realizing how goddamn better designed it is than ACFA.

It doesn't "feel" as cool because you're limited, but I found myself actually needing to use strategy and managing my EN carefully against normal arena opponents, and I actually spent more time customizing than I normally do because of that.

FA might have fixed 4's problems but it definitely eliminated the best parts about 4, too. Especially all the beautiful graphics and incredibly pretty-designed missions (Swarm of Red Eyes, holy shit).

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>all these ads
I can't believe I'm actually enabling AB+ on Veeky Forums.

Lol there's a story mission in Verdict Day where you have to fight several rogue UNACs, but you can just hide in a corner and wait for the Reaper Squad to come and kill everyone. I did it normally the first time and lost quite a bit of money cause I went with my UNAC and it got badly damaged. Most effortless mission ever?

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Bump.

Bumpx2

I think the mission was designed for you to snipe out the UNACs (considering the map) while the reaper squad tank kicks them.

However, the reaper squad tank can very much get killed by the UNACs, though rare, and it will pull out and you'll be forced to fight them all head on.

Where are these pictures coming from? They're all very clear, almost CGI like.

Or you can kill him yourself, which is fun until you realize that you did it too early and have to deal with the rest of the UNACs yourself.

Killing the reaper squad is the preferred method for getting the boost kick / majority kill bonus rewards

Thanks God they aid you, the first mission were the UNACs go rogue, the one where you start the mission while protecting a down helicopter, was hell.

bump.

So apparently FROM is working on a new AC game.

I am very sad that it will, in all likelihood, be much closer to 4th and 5th gen than it will be to 3rd gen and earlier.

I miss 'real' AC.

>Swarm of Red Eyes
>good

That mission looked like ass and was just a black backdrop with red crap filling the screen. Worse yet, it was based around you hitting an invisible hitbox among the red drones, so you often missed one and lost your S rank.

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They should let us drop in on other people's missions and fight them to death Dark Souls style, does gen 5 have something like that?

Sounds interesting. But I don't think it'll work with AC's mission structure.

AC6 when

Forever bumping
Resuscitation futile
Yet we continue

Where is everyone

/acg/ is sleep

Posting in a dead general.
I really hope the next Armored Core gets a pc port.
It's the only way to save the franchise.

they could make 2 story modes, one for singleplayer and another that focus more on co-op/invansion, with longer missions and stuff.

>just a black backdrop with red crap

But that's the entire point, it was very good visual design. Just because it's simple doesn't make it bad. 4's missions were way more cinematic and better-looking than anything in FA. Almost every mission looked distinct and every mission looked composed.

Swarm of Red Eyes
Operation: Descent
Desert Wolf
Icebeaker Defense
A Dark Night's March
Operation: Ascend
Sea of Blood
The Womb
Break the White Lance
Silent Avalanche
Pillar of Light
Sol Dios
Marche Au Supplice

These missions all immediately make me remember how cool they looked, and they were all so unique. That's 13 out of 37 missions or 1 out of every 3. No other AC game has this high concentration of "high quality" missions. And that's not counting a few (like the one where you destroy Rayleonard) that I remember but not by name.

FA has:
Attack on Richland
Take Back Cradle 21/Defend Cradle 03 (same map/visual so I'm counting them as 1)
Motherwill
Great Wall
White Glint / Line Ark
Red Rum and Starka
Answerer
Orca's arms forts

That's 8 out of 41 missions, 3 of which are just ugly maps with cool arms forts. Everything else is either an uglier version of an AC4 mission or a boring, generic map. It seems like with FA they just stopped caring about how the missions looked.

I think AC4 is a lot more underrated than people give it credit for.

The franchise is already safe, it's just a matter of time. From is such a hugely successful company now that people are going to buy their shit regardless of quality for at least a decade.
Think of Sonic. There hasn't been a game that was above average in that franchise for at least 10-15 years now. They had two giant disasters, Boom and 06. Yet the franchise is STILL going because people buy things that are labeled Sonic the Hedgehog. Same with CoD. Franchises like Mario could just stop producing hood content and they would still make money.
And since From is apparently gonna stick to their long-running series, the franchise is not in any real danger. It's now merely in hibernation. As long as they can get their publisher to drop *any* money at all into advertising, AC6 will sell at least decently. Just imagine it, a cinematic trailer set in a wasteland, containing epic fast-paced robot fighting, with "FROM THE MAKERS OF DARK SOULS" stamped all over it. People are going go eat it up.
Regardless, this is still a turning point for Armored Core. They're VERY likely to try something new again, and if may even be a full reboot. I'm not against using mechanics from their other titles that would work well, as well as them applying what they have learned here, but if they dumb the main draw of the series - customization - down to make it more "accessible" or something like that then the series that we like might as well have ended, because it will lose it's original appeal entirely.

>hood content
Um. I meant good content. Fugg

The last sonic game I actually played and enjoy, was generations.

Mine was Sonic 2006

I think there's a big difference since From Software didn't get famous from Armored Core.

Think of the 10 years of games Sega had before they introduced Sonic. THAT'S what Armored Core is. We're like Outrun or Afterburner. Or Daytona.

Now, if another AC game comes out and it's like, GOTY or something, that's different. That's a Konami scenario, where Metal Gear Solid comes out an blows the minds of people who never played the originals.

Ranker please why are your ideas so bad. This would pointlessly split dev time in two and result in limited content, when you could just take cue from the one thing AC5 got right. The story missions were longer. Just take 4's visual design, LR's atmosphere (and add the first half of the difficulty curve that was missing in that game), use old school EN limitations and add in the elements that worked in 4th and 5th (cover, a toned-down QB, Drifting, viable tanks thanks to unique abilities, kicks or some similar mechanic, possiblywallkicks), give even more useful customization options, and sprinkle in some cues from what worked well in Souls - mainly the level design from DS1 and possibly an invasion mechanic. They already have experience devving for the new console Gen too. If they use that experience right and take the time they need for development, the next installment will be amazing. All they need to do then is get the word out there. Literally ANY advertising would be enough.
But they might fuck it up too for all I know. I'm just saying they have all the tools, funds, and experience to make Armored Core great again.

I see your point, but I feel like From is a bit different because people pay a ton of attention to the dev in their case. They went from niche company to one of the hippest developers in the business. As long as they remember to tell people who made the game, I'm pretty sure it will sell. You can see what I mean in some of the articles, where suddenly Armored Core is mentioned very positively even though those same sites gave pretty unfavorable reviews or didn't even know what an Armored Core was a couple years back.

I posted a big long response in a prior thread about what a good multiplayer for AC would look like, but the gist is that two modes would be annoying, and From hates having arbitrary mechanics (they try to justify everything in-universe, like using simulations instead of actual arena matches in LR).

Instead they should make the single player have a dungeon crawler (maybe randomly generated) exploration /territory type missions to a large world map, that you can go on indefinitely as a faction/team/garage building mechanic. You access story missions by expanding your territory and building faction loyalty. There are a few types of mission objectives (destroy AC, defend base, capture AC part), you can be offense or defense, the mission can come from any faction (which determines which MTs and ACs you fight) AND you have multiple maps. Add a difficulty curve that adjusts how strong the enemies are and how tight time limits and such are. Have the game let you pick between 3-4 missions at a time, and you could go on literally thousands of missions without seeing the same scenario twice, especially if you've already unlocked all the territory maps and such.

Now, for multiplayer, all you have to do replace the AI team members and AI enemies with matchmaking with other players, just like how Dark Souls will replace AI invasion with player invasions if you play online. You could do this with some story missions too.

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>Instead they should make the single player have a dungeon crawler (maybe randomly generated) exploration /territory type missions to a large world map, that you can go on indefinitely as a faction/team/garage building mechanic
This sounds like shit mate.

Somebody put that thing out of its misery

For some reason it's become a trend to add dungeon crawler and "roguelike" mechanics everywhere. Please don't do this to AC. There is no reason to throw the entire game out the window. Randomly generated content also has the problem of being either samey or an ugly mess, depending on how big the RNG factor is. This is not a good idea. The basic formula works, and content is always higher quality when it's actually made by a human, because this allows for DESIGN CHOICES. All it needs is a combination of all mechanics that worked in previous titles, along with some good level- and mission design.

I can't get good at AC4. I understand the mechanics, I know how to play the game, but I just can't do it. It's the only AC game I have that kind of trouble with.

As far as graphics, I do miss the filters in AC4. That one effect where everything is all reddish and burning was really cool, I wish they had brought it back in FA. Then there was the Kojima storm in the Mary Shelley mission, that one was really awesome.

It was a bad mission but I still think it looked cool, especially the effect with the "sunset" being created by the swarm of drones.

>TEN LEGS, only four of which are on the ground, and two are on top of the head
>two cores
>only mounted weapons are two unswingable moonlights and two barely deployable wing lasers

Who the fuck made this

>an entire game full of slightly less shitty burn runs
Please no.

The amount of legs a mech has is inversely proportional to it's coolness.

Discuss

Piss off, wanker.