ARMORED CORE VI FIRES OF RUBICON — Reveal Trailer

Instead, Armored Core VI will focus on the series bread and butter: assembling mechs. Players can swap out everything from legs to rocket launchers, prioritizing one type of speed boost over another, to engineer their own personal death machine. In battle, meanwhile, players will be rewarded for aggressive play styles that try to keep enemies on the back foot. “Severe and intense battles is still very much a focus,” but customization and mech movement are still the foundation.

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Here’s what else we learned about Armored Core VI from IGN’s interview:

The interview acknowledges that some aspects of Soulsborne games are really just FromSoftware’s general house style, including stories told through mystery and lore and apocalyptic worlds filled with challenging foes. So while Armored Core VI is very much a mech fighter, the studio also isn’t pretending that its next incarnation will feel like a dramatic shift in direction from its more recent hits.

Part of the reason fans of the series are so excited for Armored Core to come back, beyond the nitty-gritty mech-head tinkering, is to see how FromSoftware, which has expanded and matured since Dark Souls effectively became its own genre, uses its new resources and experience to tackle a long-dormant series.

Debuting back in 1997 on the original PlayStation, releases in the Armored Core series slowed to a trickle in the PS3 era. 2006’s Armored Core IV was a mixed bag held back by sterile graphics, while 2012’s Armored Core V was better but still too esoteric for mainstream audiences at the time. In the years since, FromSoftware’s capabilities have grown, but so too has what’s possible on game consoles, with the series now having skipped an entire console generation. Player tastes have shifted too, possibly laying the groundwork for Armored Core’s return in a big, big way.