Armored Core VI Interview: FromSoftware reveals story details, the future of the franchise, and how they work differently from other developers

Over the last decade or so, FromSoftware has risen to be one of the modern legendary developers. Everything it touches seems to turn to gold, but many of its die-hard fans seem to be attached to the developer following the success of its Soulsborne series of games. With the next title from the studio being a long-awaited return to the Armored Core franchise, we sat down with FromSoftware and discussed how Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon will welcome new fans as well as old, alongside some key details about story endings and where the future of Armored Core lies after this.

Check out our full transcript below, where we spoke with game director Masaru Yamamura and producer Yasunori Ogura.

Q: Due to the massive success of the Soulsborne games, there's going to be a lot of new people coming to Armored Core with this game. How have you found balancing this game to be appealing to both new and old players?

A: Yamamura - "Obviously, this being a new Armored Core game we want it to bring back what made Armored Core special and fun for us. A big part of that is the assembly aspect, this idea of taking your beloved mech, customising how you want, painting it how you want, and having full mastery of it on the battlefield. We feel like this is a universal and borderless appreciation for mechs that will withstand the test of time, and we want modern players to experience that just as we always have. In keeping with that, we wanted to take know-how and experience that we've accumulated from the last ten years and apply that knowledge in ways that make sense to AC. This includes things like our approach to map design, how we design these large, three-dimensional spaces and how the player moves through them, and our approach to combat design. How the player is engaging with the enemy, how that enemy gives them feedback, how they learn from their attack patterns and observe their movements. So this way we've kind of cultivated our battle design over the years, has been introduced in Armored Core VI as well, and we hope this is a nice marriage of old and new in that respect."

Q: It seems like there's a lot of ways to build your mechs and a lot of building mechs on the fly, is this to challenge the idea that one mech can accomplish everything and to keep the players on their toes?

A: Yamamura - "Of course with assembly being a main staple of the series and something we wanted to bring back, yes, we want to encourage players to interact with it as much as they can. To that end, we have onboarding elements such as tutorials, training missions, and boss fights that encourage the player to switch up their build as necessary, just to experiment with different things to see if they can find their favourite mech types and weapons. However, once players have a better understanding of that system, and they start to hone in on their preferred playstyle and mech, they should be able to let that carry them through the game if they so please, maybe changing their weapons up once or twice as the situation demands, but we hope there's enough there to introduce players to the assembly aspect and let them understand it."

Q: Now that Armored Core is making its big return, will the franchise see regular updates or is this more of a one-off to gauge interest in the series after so many years away?

A: Ogura - "Currently we don't have any plans to revive any of our other franchises or titles. Right now the focus is on Armored Core VI, because this is a title we've always wanted to continue. Due to the right circumstances and allotment of resources in the company, we finally reached the point where we could do that, and so we're happy to be making Armored Core again. Of course, we'll keep that thought going forward and you might see some more plans in future, but right now we're concentrating on AC6."

Q: The story details released thus far mention multiple factions on Rubicon, will we be able to join any of these or will they remain as our enemies?

A: Yamamura - "As to the setting of the game, the player is an independent mercenary throughout the campaign, and they will not belong to any specific faction at any point. However, as you say, there are these multiple warring factions and corporations and as the campaign progresses, you'll start to have these decisions on which side you're working for and which missions you want to take on. And these will have branching paths through the campaign, resulting in multiple endings. And so by the end, you're making these big decisions that are going to affect the ending you get. We hope players enjoy repeated playthroughs to enjoy these multiple endings and mission loops as well."

Q: As we return to a more linear style with Armored Core after the behemoth that was Elden Ring in terms of scale, I'm wondering what the team prefers, a big open-world title or a more familiar linear game?

A: Yamamura - "Actually, in the initial stage of development, we did consider taking it in a more open-world direction. But we opted against it purely for the fact that we wanted to concentrate on the assembly aspect and the level of freedom that assembly brings. So if you're building a game like Elden Ring, you want to concentrate on the exploration and traversal aspect of that world. Whereas in Armored Core, we wanted to concentrate on this freedom of assembly. So this means you don't want to put too much of a restriction on how the player moves or how they're able to customise their level of movement. If you have a massive open world map, you have to start putting restrictions on where the player goes, how they move through that map, the mech's speed, things like this. And that would cause stress that we didn't want to add to this game. So we wanted to open that up a little bit. And with these more confined and curated maps, we could control that little bit more and allow more of that freedom on the way these mechs through the maps."

Q: With a new fully-fleshed AAA title coming out just 18 months after Elden Ring, I have to ask, how do you guys do it?

A: Ogura - "In terms of how we operate, it's maybe a little bit unique, in that we don't try to have a dedicated team constantly throughout one project, so it's not constantly at full pace. So we try to have a bit of flexibility and it depends on the peak periods and the needs of that project as to how many staff and resources are allocated there. We have multiple games in concurrent development, and we try to allocate staff as necessary throughout. I think it's just keeping that flexibility to keep these projects on the go simultaneously and get them out the door at a decent pace."

Our good friends at MovieZine were also present at the interview, and asked the following questions.

Q: Why did you decide to make a new Armored Core game at this moment?

A: Ogura - "As you may know, it's been about ten years since Armored Core: Verdict Day, the last entry in the series, but during this long period of hiatus we've always wanted to make another AC. It was always a question of when, not if, for FromSoftware. Miyazaki and a number of staff members have had a fondness for this series and have wanted to bring it back to modern players. In about 2018 Miyazaki and a small core group of staff set about on the prototyping and initial direction for the game. Setting out what a modern Armored Core would look like, figuring out the core competence of Armored Core, and what we wanted to bring forward for the series. Then, once Sekiro released, Yamamoto stepped up as the lead director on the project and full production kicked off from there. AC6 has been in development for about 5 years if you include pre-production and planning."

Q: How would you describe the storytelling in this game?

A: Yamamura - "For the narrative style of AC6, we've adopted more of a traditional, linear mission structure. The player will have briefing movies, complete the objective, and carry on in that format. We have these chapter-defining cutscenes, and these briefing sections, and the way we wanted to do this was to introduce the narrative in a more straightforward way, so the player can immerse themselves in that mercenary role, and understand what they're fighting for and the motivations of these various corporations and characters. On top of that, we did want to introduce some fragmentary elements as well. In the more open-ended missions, where you're traversing a large megastructure or something, you'll be able to go off the beaten path, and find these AC wrecks, and you'll download the data from these wrecks and pick up the last transmission from a pilot or something like that, and that'll be stored in your data archive, and you can read about the events that took place behind the scenes, and pick up some more of the worldbuilding and flavour in that sense."

Q: How challenging is Armored Core VI?

A: Yamamura - "We've never considered Armored Core a game that has to be consistently challenging, and in Armored Core 6 we've tried to introduce waves of difficulty throughout the campaign. So in some missions you'll be expected to wipe out a number of vastly inferior MT mechs, and you'll just lay waste to these machines, and you'll feel very powerful and cathartic, and these missions are supposed to be just fun. However, we've been known for our challenging boss fights and encounters so we wanted to incorporate that in AC6, and so you will find some formidable bosses and duels with ACs of like performance and agility as you. As well as that, for the challenging aspects, we have the ranking system, where you can replay missions as an endgame feature, and aim for the highest rank on every mission for additional rewards. We also have a more emergent challenge run, which is something like the target assist, which we've introduced for new players to get to grips with the frenetic battle system and the sheer mobility of the ACs. The target assist will help them with that camera lock on effect, but our more hardcore players may enjoy disabling target assist, and trying to play the game with full manual camera control, full manual aim."

Q: Outside Armored Core, what types of mecha have influenced Armored Core VI?

A: Yamamura - "Of course, we have a lot of staff members who are fond of the mech genre, we have people who enjoy things ranging from Gundam to Votoms, and things like that. Instead of having any direct inspiration from that in Armored Core 6, what we focused on was this general fondness in the company for the old science fiction style. So there's kind of a nostalgic, and old approach to SF, traditional approach to SF where we're thinking about humanity in the far future, and what impact time and our resources and engineering have an on these spaces and these environments. So we picture these grand mega structures and how they will have been constructed and what that space looks like. So it's really a question of timescale and time and space on that scale, basically. So that's where a lot of our inspiration came from."

Q: How many hours would you say it takes to beat the game?

A: Yamamura - "If we're talking just purely for the first time through the main campaign, and that's it, we'd estimate about 20 hours. However, if you're someone who likes to really tinker a lot with assembly, do the arena missions, do the online modes as well, you may end up spending 50 hours or more in your first playthrough."

Q: The title has the number 6, aren't you scared that could scare away newcomers?

A: Ogura - "Of course, there was a concern as to whether having 6 would make it approachable to brand-new players, and this was something we discussed with Bandai Namco for some time. Through user research and user testing, we decided on what sounded good and felt good, as well as the game and its branding. Eventually, we landed on the idea that this should be a continuation of the series, a new game in an existing franchise and so we wanted to keep the 6 to keep that intact, and that was deemed okay by our user testing and the Bandai Namco side so, we ended up opting for the 6 in the title. Of course, this is a point that we hope is brought forward by the media. Outlets such as yourselves can demonstrate the appeal of Armored Core 6 not only as a new title in an existing franchise but as a nice, fresh starting point for players that might be interested. There's a brand-new setting, a brand-new story in this world of Rubicon, and we feel like it's a great entry point for brand-new players. Experiencing that assembly aspect, doing impossible feats in their Armored Cores, we feel like this is a great place to start and we look forward to players getting their hands on it."