FromSoftware aren't aiming for “Soulsborne type gameplay” in Armored Core VI

You might have missed it in the Games Awards news-glut, but FromSoftware announced a new game last week. Armored Core VI: Fires Of Rubicon marks the return of the mechs they used to make before Demon’s Souls set them on a different, swordier path, and IGN have just published a big interview that pokes into what bearing the Soulsbourne lineage might have on a game about flying mechs with guns and missiles.

Armored Core director (and Sekiro lead designer) Masaru Yamamura welcomed Sekiro comparisons, while FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki was keen to stress they’re treating it as an Armored Core game rather than a Soulsborne game.

The interview kicks off with Miyazaki rebuffing IGN’s suggestion that this Core might be closer to Soulsborne games than the series has been in the past, stressing that they’ve “not been making a conscious effort to try to direct it towards more Soulsborne type gameplay”. They’re instead aiming for a return to “the core concept of Armored Core”, he insisted, which for him means having “a high level of control” over both choosing which bits to stick into your mech and then actually using them on the ground, or indeed the air.

Yamamura, meanwhile, did agree that both series “share the same essence of battle such as aggressive, speed change and action-oriented fighting”. Combat does start sounding a bit like Sekiro’s when he talks specifically about a posture-breaking system designed to keep players on the offensive, especially given what he says about the optional “emphasis on melee” as well as gunplay. “We do have some nice melee options” for people who “want to dive in there and get into close-quarters combat”, he said.

That said, later on in the interview Yamamura also loops back to how customising your mech defines combat, as opposed to the “very stoic, one-track approach to battle with just the one weapon” that you see in Sekiro.

It’s worth reading the interview in full, where the devs also talk about the game’s mission-based structure, concentrating on single-player, aiming for accessibility, and why FromSoftware loves apocalypses so much.

Armored Core VI: Fires Of Rubicon is due out sometime in 2023.