Pxtl , 1 year ago

Agree that the mecha feel a bit more samey, but I played the heck out of the first AC games and I don’t miss the long and winding maps. I still remember maps I had to play Descent-style constantly switching to the 3D map (like the biological missions with the mouse-monsters in the first game). It was boring and tedious. And I don’t miss superlong missions where I had to ammo-ration.

A fundamental problem with AC is they don’t give you enough info to make informed decisions about config unless you want to try->die->redesign. Like if they had a preview of the terrain and some rough guesstimates about mission length and ammo needs, you could tailor your mech without the “oops I didn’t know this was going to be a marathon I’m out of ammo” which is just the most miserable way to lose. AC6 makes this explicit in that you probably won’t run out of ammo if you’ve 4 weapons and you use all of them. Given the alternative, I’ll take it.

And as for the “why isn’t stagger a function of knockback” that was terrible gameplay you could stunlock people in the early AC games.

I like the cooldown-based weapons, like the motion model (fighting while doing the flanking boost is hella fun)… But yes, the energy model is weird and imho does a lot to make the ACs feel samey. It used to be picking an energy weapon meant a tradeoff that you were draining your boost power when firing.

But yes I miss the radar. I think the expectation is that players will lock-on and then forget it, but I hate lock-on so I switched to mouse and keyboard and I find I’m often losing fast-moving targets in my periphery.

I miss the limited rotation rate of the early games, where boosting backwards to put a target in front of you was often better than turning to face them. Rotation rates was another way different layouts felt different. This also led to considerations with FCS shapes - short-ranged weapons with wider targeting-boxes that didn’t require aiming.

But on the other other hand, the spreadsheet of numbers is always dumb. I can’t think of any genre other than turn-based RPGs that are better for including “this weapon does different damage to target X vs target Y”. That’s always annoying trivia - let the Pokemon players keep that nonsense.