I’m hardly the target market for Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon. I like mechs well enough, as a concept, but I’m crap at any video games that require a thinking time of less than eight minutes (this is due to a combination of the fact that I am middle-aged and also a moron).
So, as you can imagine, FromSoftware’s games have largely passed me by. And though Armored Core is a different proposition to the SoulsBorne games that the studio has become beloved and/or infamous for, it still looks intimidating. Best avoided. Probably not for the faint hearted, or the terminally fat-fingered. Definitely not for someone who considers Assassin’s Creed’s general level of piss-easy difficulty perfectly adequate, thank you. I’m just here to see the sights.
And the prospect of playing FromSoft’s games on PC? Forget about it. I’m more couch-inclined anyway, but a quick scan of the Steam forums for any given FromSoft release is enough to curdle the blood. Locked framerates, locked resolutions and aspect ratios, stubbornly uncustomisable controls – without that level of basic flexibility, the advantages of PC gaming are null and void. You might as well just play the thing on an actual games machine. Though things have improved considerably since the dark days of 2012, where Dark Souls on PC launched inexplicably locked at 720p and 30fps, it’s understandable that so many people feel affronted by FromSoft’s notorious lack of expertees when it comes to supporting the PC’s innate advantages.