The Subtle Horror of Armored Core 6
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- Опубліковано 13 жов 2023
- The last thing you expect to feel in an action game about giant robots is a feeling of creeping dread, yet the more you analyze the world of Armored Core 6, the more terrifying the implications of its reality become. In this short video essay, I explore and elaborate on the subtle ways in which Armored Core 6's world is absolutely terrifying.
Mecha Video: • Driving An Actual Bipe...
Songs used:
Detroit Become Human OST - Kamski
Escape from Midwich Valley - Carpenter Brut
Detroit Become Human OST - Hostage
Lo-fi songs used were taken from this video: • you put your pen down ...
Integral Inotations - Nycto, Isaak Wolf
Cascading Window - Isaak Wolf
Seclusion - Isaak Wolf, Nycto
Sorry for taking so long to upload. Just got done with my midterms :/ - Ігри
As per lore, before the Fires of Ibis, Rubicon was the CENTER of an interplanetary human civilization at it's peak, housing the top factories, foundries and R&D institutions. What WE see in the game are the remnants, after being the epicenter of basically space Chornobyl, after being abandoned for 50 years. Space Pripyat, sort of.
At least there's no Monolith, right?
@@teslashark There is, it's Ayre :P
@@teslashark The PCA satellite rings are the monolith. They shoot anything trying to get in. An invisible wall.
Have you met the RLF?
The Cave worms are actually massive compared to a human.
The Rubicons raise them as cattle and feed them coral to make them grow faster.
Walter: „Now youre up close and personal“
The target marker: 1400m distance
Weapon ricochets at anything above 80 meters
@@jamesmortimer4016no it doesn't unless if you are using Sweat Sxteens
@@jamesmortimer4016 Laser dissipates at around 500 meters (in this game)
@@STRIDER_503 yeah. Even battletech has higher ranges
Lightweight mechs' assault boost speed is close to 600km/h so 1400m can be covered in less than 10 seconds with these bad boys.
The reveal trailer really emphasises how terrifying giant mechs are. Then when you revisit the trailer after beating the game you realise you forgot the fear because you were playing as the terror.
But also you find out you're not the terror. You're just a slave who does the whim of your master. The systems that built continent sized mining vessels and moon sized space stations are far larger and more destructive than anything you in your AC will ever achieve.
Imagine the infantry squads sweeping through the battlefields after the Armored Cores and MT's duel, to secure buildings and control centers.
@@daefaron Great now we need a first person survival horror game about that, where the monsters are the few remaining unmanned weapons that stomp around outside and much smaller killbots that flood small spaces
@@Mae_Dastardly There's a japan only game called City Shrouded in Shadow where you are just a random civilian getting wrapped up in Kaiju battles, not the same but it's about the horror of being tiny and powerless.
@@Mae_DastardlyGeneration Zero (I think it’s named something like that) is pretty much what you just asked for. Survival *Horror* with big ads stompy mech robots that try to kill you. Pretty cool game if a little rough around the edges
All you need for horror with Mechs is to remember you’re essentially piloting a giant body
To steal a famous quote, “We could have made them look like anything, but we made them look like us”
Your horror is probably a sales pitch by Skobel Mechworks. To quote Tex, "By combining all the technologies necessary to meld man and machine into a singular weapon system, you amplify a combatant's strenght in the deadliest contest of all, war."
Cue Counter/weight theme
@@hang_kentang6709 its not horrifying to have a second, bigger body that you identify with and then have its arm torn off? with you in it?
@@RedOfFlames No. I'd take losing an arm of my metal avatar over getting a hypersonic ferrous slug through the cockpit.
@@RedOfFlames Just weld it back on and give me another gun.
At 4:20 I remembered when i too felt this dread, but in Armored Core 4. In that game, the speed is clearly shown as km/h, with of the same Quick Boost switching, and in the *THOUSANDS.*
And I had a thought.
"If something was heavy, this weaponized, this *radioactive* (AC4's sheilds were radiation), this INDEPENDENT, and there was *this many of them* , how TF does humanity survive?"
And the sequel to 4, fittingly named "For Answer", give me my answer.
*_They didnt._*
To my knowledge, that's because you don't pilot ACs in 4 and for answer. You pilot NEXTs. ACs are like MTs to a NEXT.
They barely survived. NEXT technology singlehandedly allows Rayleonard and other companies to rule the world, they only cease the war cause fighting other company will cut into their profits. The devastation from Lynx War in AC4 sent the elites living in flying cities and the peasants suffering from radioactive diseases.
They were- or rather still are next-gen.
It's kind of amusing that people think 6's speeds are ludicrous; what would that make the speeds in FA?
"Haha radioactive permanently contaminating shields and power supplies go Fwoosh"
@@mohammadsaleem5990there are two types of AC in 4th gen.
the NORMALs and NEXTs.
NORMALs are basically the AC from 3rd gen and below while NEXTs are the latest generations of AC
And this is up to scale. Zullie the Witch with help from Dropdown imported some AC6 assets into Elden Ring and you'd be mind blown to how terrifyingly large everything is. To put in perspective:
1. The Standard Armored Core is 6 person high
2. Gransax whole body is as large the Ice Worm the first segment.
3. The Strider's full length can reach half of Elden Rings map.
4. The Lands Between is as large as a small Mission Area to AC6
5. The Watchman (The megastructure looming overhead in the last mission area where you'll fight Walter, Ayre, or ALLMIND) is as large as the Elden Ring MAP.
You'd think monstrosities from beyond space is scary? Compared to humanity in AC6, they're nothing but worms and insects.
insane learning that everything in AC6 is modeled o scale
@@zedc6072 Turns out they use the same engine so they just kept everything to scale. I'd imagine the devs had a fun time using a little Tarnished as a reference when building a level.
The wide shot of the coral tower thing that they’re trying to crash the ship into is the part that really made me understand how insane the scale is, that thing is just a massive cylinder and it looks like someone drove a railroad spike into the side of the planet
Honestly her estimates seem on the low side. There's a mission where you have to go into a old Coral mine. Littered around the aera are ground vehicles tall enough that there is a ladder to reach the human-sized building-type door they use as an entry. based on the size of that door those vehicles are probably at least 20ft (~6m) tall. And they barely come up to the top of an AC's foot.
@@tomnope540 probably because they arent that big some props like vehicles and cranes have inconsistent scale some are realistic size others are too small to iven be used
That mission where you fight the student pilot is one of darkest parts of the game.
If he does some damage to you, he gets really excited and says something along the lines of “I can hang in a fight with the a real mech” only to be ultimately gunned down in the prime of his life. His final words are “I just wanted a callsign if my own”
It’s haunting.
He's basically you if you failed. Rip
Yeah but I got new legs
He did get a callsign of his own, we call him Tombstone.
I still remember that last line
It's Gundam, he's the Protagonist, and _you_ are the Reality that Ensues.
don't forget that AC(armored cores) and MT(muscle tracers) were first made for construction of larger scale object and the coral is living gasoline
*Sentient* living gasoline, at that!
so this AC is just final fantasy 7 in the far far future? lol
Pretty much, but without the Jenovah weirdnesss
Sentient spice melange
@@jackmesrel4933???
Remember; modern aircraft fire telephone-pole sized missiles at you from ranges where sight no longer remains a feasible option, from altitudes that you'd never survive.
Their are multiple space missions in ac6, can the average jet go that high?
@leighpellicci443 Average? No, that's silly. But the "average" ac isn't reaching space under it's own power to begin with, so don't try that.
Truck-sized guns require point-blank shooting for damaging AC, because at a distance of a kilometer shells already ricochet off its armor.
@@HindrancUS A JDAM doesn't care about ricochette.
@@theneef174
A JDAM has no chance of hit AC unless it is launched from another AC from a distance of several hundred meters.
Modern missiles capable of intercepting and hitting AC is anti-aircraft ammunition that can only spoil AC's paint.
Throughout armored core (every game) it sends this message. "These mechs are big as hell, expensive as hell, and deadly as hell."
That message is dampened a little bit in AC6 only because it is far more forgiving with its costs.
If it were an older generation game, both ammunition and repair cost would be multiplied by 10, and every time you died mid-mission, you would take a 50,000 Coam fine.
The older games made you feel like a goddamn rockstar who is in constant and crippling debt. "You are a Raven, the best of the best, and you will never retire because you will spend more on upkeep then you earn completing missions, and even if you do make a lucky break, you will inevitably spend it all on a shiny new part."
@@BlitzkriegOmegathat's because in AC6 we are already human+, if it was any ordinary Armored Core game, we start out with a low budget and the possibility of going bankrupt.
@@LimitPro1That and i imagine Walter is covering for a lot of the costs.
If they are so big and expensive...they BETTER be deadly too... otherwise, what's the point?
@@BlitzkriegOmega I didn't play the previous AC, but I came into ac6 with that mindset.
I was confused until I realized: I was already fell in dept. Now as a vegetable I must get out of it.
In NG+++ the soldiers in the MTs kind of put it into perspective how scary you are. After you rip through like 20 of there friends in MTs (in max like 20-30 seconds) they start screaming they're in hell.
No less you're also flying through fire in linear hallways to kill them.
That was a small part where human emotions were presented as they were
what mission does this happen?
@@prysmer7923Mission name is “MIA.” Only unlocked in NG++
@@prysmer7923 In english it's called MIA (missing in action), one of the latter missions of NG++
Did you mean NG++? From what I've read, there's no new content past NG++, is this incorrect?
I remember being impressed by the absolute scale and size of the Strider.
Then I was even more impressed by the absolute disregard Handler Walter had for the Strider’s utter obliteration.
For Walt to just imply it’s creation was a waste of time and resources really helped frame the insane technological advancement humanity had made on Rubicon 3 as a whole.
It means that out there is something *even bigger.*
Hm, I never considered Walter's remarks about the Strider in a tech sense. That could be the case, but I thought it was a dismissal of the idea itself. The Strider was slow, poorly armored, and poorly armed (excluding the Eye) while being very large, and very expensive. In short, it was hyper inefficient and was defeated by a single AC. Hence why it was built to fail.
@@TonyRedgrave, Also consider that it was built by RAD, Karla may well have literally designed it to fail.
@@TonyRedgraveiirc it was also not actually built for combat - just retrofitted for it
For me, my first realization of the scale of these mechs was on Operation Wallclimber. When I hopped on the wall to knock out the turrets, I noticed these tiny doors and I was like "Oh my gawd! There are teeny weeny cute doors!" then I immediately forgot and destroyed the tetrapod
One thing to note that jet fighter g forces are exerted vertically where it affects blood flow to the brain, so lateral g forces wouldn't affect our blood flow that much. I would imagine whenever an AC quick boosts it would be like experiencing a car crash which is in the range of 100+Gs
Hm yes, car crashes every five seconds or so.
The centrifuge that fighter pilots train with produce horizontal Gs too. And that didn´t impede pilots from fainting. The direction of the acceleration goes opposite of the course change (EDIT: this is wrong I mean inertia goes the other way!!). If limbs are not strapped, they will be flapping to the opposite side of movement followed by your blood, which will be leaving your brain eventually. It not a matter where the G vector is pointing to, a pilot will still suffer it´s effects. I´m always imagining a scifi setup, where a coffin with some sort of fluid can buffer the effects of G to the human pilot, but a remote operation is waaay more simple solution! lol
Is this in terms of AC FA or AC6?
You know what CTE is, right lmao?
@@nerobernardino88you might mean every 0.5 seconds-- even 0.35 seconds with the Gills 😢
the answer to how to make something so huge standing is "Active support structures" these are structures that maintain structural integrity by consuming energy.
a good channel that explores this concept is Isaac arthur
to give a rundown, you can utilize an accelerated fluid in a tube to counteract forces attempting to compress the tube, think how stiff a hose becomes when water runs through it. but instead of water its either a gas, or a loop of magnetic cable.
you can build SUPER HUGE structures using that and funny thing is once you build one it gets easier to build more.
on a side note
the whole mechs forcing the world and everyone to build their civil engineering to accommodate the mechs... is basically the American Car infrastructure, the cities and all such are designed to accommodate for cars. so funnily enough it has a real world analogue
hypothetically you could apply active support to something like a mech. but it would drastically influence their shape design to have more cylinders and rings. so sadly they wouldn't look anything like an AC. that is unless we discover material that can be actively supported through means other than material acceleration in a tube.
yeah, the USA is a prime example of infrastructure being centered around something it really shouldn't be. cars.
the in a world where mechas have become commonplace, be it for work or combat, you would start building your infrastructure around those things as well.
@@DatAsianGuy you can't get to your mall and buy groceries unless you own an AC or an MT
Mechs would probably be pretty practical if we make a breakthrough in synthetic muscles, like in battletech with myomers. Myomers are orders of magnitude stronger than conventional vehicles and vehicle design, and when you have synthetic muscles that strong beeg robot is a natural choice
@@mysteriousstranger5873 honestly odds are pretty likely that mechs would just be biomachines in the future.
biotech is already improving rapidly in the last decade
dinosaurs prove that you can have something that big move. we can atleast make an elephant sized mech.
and with steel for the bone it would stand pretty well.
give it a more advanced pumping system for blood and it wouldn't have the size limits that dinosaurs had.
all thats left is to give it jet thrusters and a compact engine that allows it to perform dashes
or maybe ALIEN TECH
The acceleration issue could be the reason why augmented human are necessary for ACs and why V.I Freud is unusual.
I just imagine that Freuds physical body is the natural evolution and peak example of a fighter pilots body. Insane blood flow and superbly strong lungs combined with lean dense muscle around the body that helps facilitate his performance and staying conscious.
In other words, V.1 Freud is shredded.
He's literally built different.
Yes. In 4th gen AC this was expanded upon. Next-gen ACs broke the sound barrier. Pilots needed to be augmented to survive the G force and whiplash. Remarkably, some non-augmented humans were able to keep up, with the aid of slower, more heavily armored ACs.
The most prominent subtle horror in AC6 for me is the inclusion of augmented humans. The fact that we’re not given many details about the procedures or given many glimpses of what they look like makes my mind go into dark speculation.
Well we have two glimpses into what that could possibly look like, one in the reveal trailer where they "show" the body of 621 and in the arquebus data logs on what they do for "reeducation"
the really horrifying thing is how people end up with augmentation.
like sure you have people like snail who undergo the tried and true procedures willingly, but then you have ones that fell into debt so hard their bodies were essentially sold to mad scientists to experiment on, only for them to then be stuffed into the cockpit of a giant death machine so they can start working themselves into debt once again.
Technically three we learn end results life from O'keefe
I remember seeing somewhere that early augmetations had a 1 in 10 survival rate. Imagine what happened to those that failed. Imagine what early testing must have looked like. Its horrifying.
Worth a shot, when you can pilot a demigod-like mech with unknown energy powereder weapons and just smash your opponents, you would kill a lot of people to get one. @@reflectingdoggo278
I will never shut up about how much I appreciate how accurate to scale everything is in armored core. The fact that you can shoot down a squad of MTs, stop for a moment and look down and see a car, a door, a guard rail or a street that is to scale for a human is just so refreshing. And whats more is everything is actual size. You can import any of AC6's assets into Elden Ring and they would be 1:1 as massive there as they are here, this isn't a trick of perception.
There are inertial dampeners installed in the cockpits. From armored core 2 we learned that modified humans performed better because they put damperners directly into them freeing up the cockpit for more advanced equipment.
Also all those pilots chug iodine because them generators put out rads
Also in one of the spinoff games for armored core. Last Raven. There's a mission where your opponents are just regular humans with normal machine guns and Rpgs. That was truly an eye opener for me.
what mission?
There is a regular human pilot on AC6 too
@@KABLAMMATSi think he means unmechanised normal soldiers without ac's
@@KABLAMMATS regular pilots have more safety features installed which lowers the ACs ability. That's why in some games you could not fire shoulder weapons while jumping or in the air without being modified or having an OS that took 90% of your space
@@andrewprice773 I think it was like the 3rd of 4th mission on the zaniada path
Zullie the witch has some great videos showing off the scale of some of these machines. She imported many of the Ac6 models into elden ring and how much space they took up on the map really makes you realize how huge they are.
Didn’t the ice worm stretch from one end of the map to the other?
@@curtishamilton5342 It was pretty close if I remember. But the satellite took up the whole map easily.
It's less that AC is SO huge, and more that Elden Ring's map is actually really small in terms of real sizes.
Yes, stuff in AC is big, but Elden Ring's map is like, smaller than most cities.
Yeah but your riding around on a horse and walking
I've always enjoyed exploring mecha as a branch of human evolution. We build bigger and badder for each war we wage, fine-tuning these machines until they become commonplace. In their wake, like with much tech, we take what we learn creating destruction and turn that inward to create and enhance our more mundane aspects of life as well as creating the responses to this destruction. To build the Strider, the people of Rubicon simply looked down at the hands of their MTs, while perched in their piolts chair, and said "These are my hands to create with now", and naturally the scale came to match.
It also means the RLF has those resources to use. Which means that they too have extracted billions of shit
My favorite part of the announcement trailer was Raven slowly pulling out its pile bunker from a fallen foe and the zoom-in on its “eyes” just staring down at said foe. Such human emotion and sentiment projected via the mech, you could feel the numbed sorrow projecting through this unemotive device.
@InternetHydra Oh god, the raw emotion coming from the announcement trailer and the story trailer are on their own levels. In my experience mecha having more of human face seems to be much more of a Japanese/Eastern design trope and while AC doesn't make them as blatantly human as say, Gundam, they know how to project emotion with body language and subtle movements. Watching Nightfall's eyes in the reveal trailer and 617's raw, desperate body language lend such humanity to these sheer weapons
Play through all three endings.
I didn't really pay attention to the size and scale of things until the Coral resonator tower thing. The thing is so large that the city you are flying into it looks like nothing. It so tall that the top is in space and large probably the size of a small continent. It's large beyond measure, absolutely insane
No, no, it gets worse. That thing was purely underground when you first discovered it. It was after that, in the time span of a handful of missions, that Arquebus built it to extend into space.
Should we even mention the giant flying city that's *flown into orbit* to destroy it?!
When upscaled by Arquebus, the Plant became ~700 km in height. Thats taller than anything we can imagine. Its 140 times taller than the Elden Tree or the mount Everest (from the base). Its twice as tall than the border of space, 70 times taller than the throposphere (the atmosphere as we non-scientists understand it).
Techno-Eldritch Horror. You also should talk about the Rubiconian Science Institute and its creation of automated extermination machines.
Speaking of the Institute and Eldritch Horror, Coral is literally a sentient unfathomable hive mind and these people were using it as a super resource. Then when it started to mutate they nuked it and everything else. Of course they failed and the Coral while it was weakened it still continued on. That is some Eldritch Horror, they literally pulled an Exterminatus on their own solar system and it didn't do anything other than make the remaining inhabitants have miserable lives.
Play through AC Nexus sometime. The ending is quite moving.
@@taylordiclemente5163 What system is it on?
@@Foogi9000 PS2
@@taylordiclemente5163 Ah ok
I think I first really thought about the size of ACs when I noticed the size of the normal helicopters you fight. They are smaller than even MTs, and basically one shot from literally anything kills them. And they seem to be the size of a modern helicopter.
Also, the corporations are capable of resisting the GOVERNMENT with military force. Imagine Amazon or Walmart just deciding to steal a state from the US.
A banana company once staged a coup and Won. You had the British Royal Navy Vs the Indian Trading Company. All it takes is a megacorp in the billion/trillion dollar range with a PMC on it's payroll and someone to get in the way of it's supply line.
@@AlexBarton-oj1ko Well, Chiquita didn't really bankroll its own PMC so much as direct the CIA to do it for it. The form of capitalism we have IRL usually sees corporations and states collobaorating, with corporations more or less gaining indirect control of states through bribes and lobbying, removing the need for a direct confrontation. The PLA resisting the corporations came almost as a shock, but I don't know enough of the lore yet to understand what their actual motivations were. I suspect, given their own massive resource, that they're mostly just fighting off rivals for extraction and are operating on more or less the same logic as the corporations.
Pepsi briefly had a navy.
@@agentoranj5858 I know, but unless the USSR also gave them the crew and ammunition for those ships, they wouldn't have been beating anyone else with a navy.
@@agentoranj5858wasn't theyr whole navy just abunch of old military ships that they bought just so they can try to turn around and sell em for scrap at higher prices or am i thinking of something else?
A thing to mention about armored core is it heavy emphasis on transhumanism. The reason why your squishy human body can survive well above three Gs of pressure is because you barely constitute as a human, more as a biological brain for your robot, a part to be switched out when it inevitably dies.
A major plot point of the older generations of the games, one that is also mentioned in the Japanese script for this game, is a Human augmentation surgery called "Human PLUS", which involves replacing a lot of your biological mass with machinery that can be directly plugged into the AC. The benefit of this is that you functionally become your AC, and the giant robot is an extension of your body... the drawbacks are an extremely shortened lifespan, status as a non-human slave to the corporation that augmented you, and emotional instability due to the trauma of the surgery itself, and sometimes intentionally invoked by the corporation in order to attempt to make you a better, more obedient pilot.
I imagine that with enough augmentation, a human would be able to survive intense G forces... and if not, who cares, there's more of the likes of him where that came from. Human life has little monetary value after all.
"Human life has little monetary value after all", so why the fuck is sustaining it so expensive!?
My solution: Either boost the value of human life or stop charging so much to maintain it.
@@nullpoint3346 Consider for the moment that the hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of currency the corporations throw around to augment a human being is probably chump change and is barely comparable to the amount of cash needed to manufacture and outfit an AC.
@@Punishthefalse I know about "kill the meat to save the metal." I was there when it was written.
If there is one thing I've learned from manga and gacha, it's that war crimes are ok, if done by a hot kemonomimi.
We stan fox girl atrocities.
If real life and Gundam has taught me anything, most atrocities can be done and justified by anyone with a high enough Charisma stat
Isnt that almost true for basically all games with charisma stats?
@@trungthanh8586America
If I remember correctly RaD made the mining ship for the RLF, they seem to use AC’s build specially for labor.
ACs are actually originally designed for labor. Afaik they didn't see military use really until the Jupiter conflict.
Nah, they didn't build it, they just weaponized it.
MTs were initially construction equipment, and then some madlad decided to give it a gun.
@@BluelyreI'm not sure where you got that information from. Have a specific text log I could double check?
@@Mirage5892he's not completely right, MTs were invented for civil use, and later weaponised. ACs are just modular MTs designed for combat. And there are no mentions of this in AC6, you should check out the lore of AC1 or 2.
I absolutely love those little human size door and objects we saw throughout the different facilities in the game.
I think its the intended feeling. Forget at what point in the game, but there's a line where towards the end where Ayre comments something along the lines of cores being our next stage of evolution because we don't fit the mech and world designs to us anymore, we change ourselves to fit the mechs.
Also I really wish we knew how long we were in the sewers/knocked out by allmind while the collector tower gets finished.
I liked the parts where the stages are in the megastructures.
you can see the platforms and stairs made for humans in the background, and it made me kind of daydream about being on them and imagine the world where such structures are made possible
Recreating that famous photo of the skyscraper workers eating their lunches on a girder suspended in the air.
The moment i understood how massive the AC is was when a bunch of little enemies came flying at me, at first i thought they were regular drones, then i realized they were actually helicopters.
As an OG fan of the first Armored Core... They really scaled up the mechs. In the original till Last Raven your mech was alittle but taller than a telephone pole, big but not that massive and it made sense that you were able to move that fast. Armored Core 6 literally makes you 5 times taller armored core is massive. Also it seems that Rubicon is about 10 or more times bigger than the earth. And they also brought back rogue AI in this game which is a staple in the Armored Core series.
AC's is AC6 are about 10 meters tall
You’ve got the planets’ scale backwards, rubicon is 10% the size of Earth
I'll admit that I enjoyed seeing how everything was so unusual in the scale compared to normal combat zones and infrastructure, practically the whole way through I felt it while playing. But you did point out that a single AC that we can pilot is effectively able to solo every kind of other soulsborne foes with likely no issue whatsoever, if perhaps slight annoyance. And that is the true horror that has now clung onto me. There's not even a competition, no Chosen Undead or Good Hunter or Tarnished will ever have the strength to fight a single AC pilot.
You could maybe argue that the bigger bosses like the Divine Dragon or Rykard could pose a threat, but considering that ACs can one-tap vehichles that are equivalent to tanks in the real world, I doubt those two would pose much trouble
@@Haedal_VT please, by the time Rykard gets to swing his giant ass sword at me, I'd have already circled him 3 times and dumped a skyscrapers worth of steel inside of him.
@@Haedal_VT AC would just run circles around those enemies with its insane speed, blasting them to pieces in few seconds, absolutely impervious to any of their slow attacks...
@@Haedal_VT rykard ain't doing much against a barrage of anti-fucking-everything missiles
Even the Great Ones would get stomped out by an _average_ AC. Orphan of Kos would probably be considered too small and weak of a target for the AC's targeting systems to even lock on to him.
"Armored core tells a very human story on a scale of gods"
Man, that almost teared me up. Fantastic video Haedal, welcome to this previously forgotten and neglected fanbase, enjoy your stay.
Not even the large walkers or fortresses, but the cargo launch that shoots you across an ocean. How big the entire launcher hub is, and if you see the pipes and bars, moving parts, etc that make up the platform to launch those containers, the size of a whole building mind you, at mach jesus. Absolutely insane.
Now imagine the speeds NEXTs go up to
I don’t have Megalaphobia.
In this game, I have a megala-fetish.
I would love to see you cover Coral and the allot of the fridge horror associated with that. Like how for example coral weapons when you use it can sound like screams of pain. Or how Coral can cause growth mutations with oversized meal worms. And don't even get me started on the Alea esta est route least that leads into spoiler territory.
Coral is similar to Philosophers Stones from Full Metal Alchemist (Brotherhood). The consciousness of anyone sucked up into the Coral Flow feeds into a planetary energy source. After the Coral Release ending, it definitely has vibes of when Hohenheim woke up after the Xerxes event and realizing he's not exactly human anymore.
The third ending really opened up for an for answer/verdict day type sequel.
SPOILERS!
The three classic FromSoft endings: The one where you help perpetuate the status quo (Liberator of Rubicon), The one where you leave your mark on history (Fires of Raven), and the one that's mostly incomprehensible and leaves you with far more questions than answers (Alea Iacta Est).
@@Attaxalotl Or as I like to call it, Evangelion.
In fact, in the cut scenes you can see that the speed of the mechs is much higher than what is presented in the gameplay. For example, in the cut scene before the fight with Ayre, the protagonist’s mech overtakes a spaceship that is moving at an orbital speed of about 12 km/s and goes far away from it. The protagonist's mech is also capable of evading rail guns, whose shells instantly fly from one shore of the ocean to the other, covering hundreds of kilometers.
Also, I calculated, and even in the gameplay, speed of the jerk of Ayre's SOL-644 is 5-10 km/s.
If scale is the horror of the game, you haven't touched on the most important part.
This is just the _planetary_ scale. There is yet bigger things out there.
In a story I'm writing right now, I put a lot of thought into how and why mechs would be made in the first place and how they'd fit into battlefields. What I ended up deciding is that they're effectively an upgrade to infantry. They're essentially people, made really really big so they can carry way more scary weapons. I basically went from there.
Bingo, that's ultimately the appeal of mechs, the human individual is the single most versatile combat resource in our history. Now grab that versatility, give it a good couple hundred tons of alloys worth weaponry and armor and voila, a bespoke weapon system with the firepower to decimate entire groups of combatants and the flexbility to adapt to almost any situation.
I remember the sense of dread I felt when it dawned on me that I was destroying helicopters operated by actual humans.
That's when I started to really notice the scale of this game.
You can feel the same feelings just walking on main deck of a WWII Battleship. Its around 300meters, 50000 netric tones and it can blow up in a seconds
"Omnidirectional Bugatti" got me so good 🤣🤣🤣
So, there's this book called Hyperobjects, by Timothy Morton. It's philosophy. It deals with the concept of things that are too big, or extensive, etc., for humans to really understand. This video made me think about that...Particularly the part where you mentioned the scale at which the corporations in the game run.
I want to piggyback on this recommendation with a recommendation for BLAME!
It explores many of the themes introduced in this video but also incorporates time as a subtly more present plot device.
10:02
not very familiar with the lore but if i'm not wrong MT, Muscle tracers, were originally used as heavy machinery rather than military platforms, peraphs these wide halls were made for Mts (that are much more numerous than ACs)
Most likely because both MT and AC are used in construction and industry, most of the stuff made by RaD are modified heavy industrial equipment, large avenues throughout Rubicon would be needed to allow these large industrial equipment to pass through and larger avenues can allow for more throughputs by minimizing the affect of any potential disruption like accident.
usually MT came first as construction mechs, then some people got the idea of weaponizing them. Corporation took notice and builds combat focused MT for groups that want them, and then corps construct an MT with interchangeable parts give it better weapons and armors and then you finally get an AC.
AC is usually too expensive and warcrime-y to be used in construction.
I feel like the artists, writers, and creators would be really proud of the depths of your observations. Clearly, they’ve painstakingly created the world and experience for the gamer, and sometimes the scale does truly dawn on the casual gamer. But your analysis of the implications must make those creators feel proud that they got across the vision that has clearly taken years of thought to map out and convey.
The beauty of From Soft games in general is how well thought out every single detail is, but that they leave it up to how much you feel compelled to engage to truly appreciate it. Their games have a sort of confidence inherent in them that they never feel the need to force your eye or attention to things they’ve spent years building out. They make the world fully immersive to even the most casual gamer, and the challenges of completing the missions (and those challenges are hardly casual) is the only level they truly force you to experience. But the lore for Demon Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring, and Armored Core is available to those paying close attention, and is thoroughly thought out.
We are fortunate to live in a time when the most talented and creative minds are crafting worlds that we don’t just witness, but essentially get to live in.
Fromsoft plays with phobias in all of their games. Megalophobia, claustrophobia, arachnophobia, general fear of the unknown.
The fear you listed are combined in one mission in Armored Core 3.
I can relate to that feeling as I was always wondering the size of this AC gen not being an expert in the series. Everything in this game is dreadful and awe inspiring, and that is why AC 6 ends up being so beautiful!! Great video!
Zullie the witch has a video on AC size
@@Year_of_the_Dell Yes, I saw it, I should have use the past tense! thanks!
So glad you made a video about this, because throughout the whole game I was thinking the same thing about size snd scale. Everytime I walked past a door or ladder, I'd first chuckle then be amazed by the size difference.
This video is so good, touches so many topics, makes you think, and is well presented - I just had to subscribe! Congrats, mate!
I really like your style, how you do your content, the mood, your essays, everything. Thanks a lot ! ♥
The intro is actually pretty scary if you watch it. Pile Bunker covered in machine blood, an AC rests momentarily before an explosion gleams from its armor and it boosts away to the next victim.
Think about how the underground boss, the giant AC, dwarfs yours, which dwarfs people. Its like twice as tall as you. Imagine standing next to something that big, thay moves JUST AS FAST as your FOUR STORY MECH. A New York Apartment building with a gun the size of a small yacht and an energy sword 7 big rigs long.
I love that video, probably one of my favorites of the channel.
The subject is really interesting and I didn't see it elsewhere.
You sir have my subscription, I love compelling thought chaining like this
This is something interesting to look at along side some other analysis of the story and characters, particularly ones that point out the story is about the triumph of human willpower.
It was interesting to look at when comparing it to the megacorps and AIs trying to subvert that... but when you also pit the willpower of a single human against a world of this scale... yeah it is kinda horrifying, both in what that human faces... and the kind of person it would take to single-handed dominate everything they see through sheer force of will.
In a weird way, I think the real final boss is a tremendous statement for the power of the human spirit against a harsh and dehumanising world--but it's not the protagonist who demonstrates this with the power of love / friendship / courage, as is traditional. It's Iguazu, who overpowers a godlike combat AI made of pure, ruthless machine logic. And he does it with the power of sheer petty, vindictive hatred for you, which doesn't even have a very good reason behind it.
@@paulgibbon5991 there is something entirely relatable and even endearing to overcome the utterly impossible with nothing more than a middle finger of pure spite.
You want to know some even more scary? I was thinking about the sense of scale in armored core 6 and this video was recommended to me.
Also I believe anti gravity must exist in this series, especially since hover legs were more common in older games. Humans also had these jetpack things.
The pilots are probably brains in jars at this point.
Nah, the pilots, even our unfortunate sap, are pretty much intact. 621 manages to crawl into an AC, and Freud is a confirmed unmodified human. Michigan and Iguazu got into a fist fight at one point, plus we have STK's drawings of Redgun, Vesper, RLF, and some independent pilots, who all look like just people.
Well, there is a cinematic story trailer that shows 621 after augmentation surgery still wrapped up in medical equipment, so they definitely have a body of some kind at least. We don't really know what exactly those bodies look like after whatever it is that they do to augment themselves to pilot these machines though. No one wants to show that part.
Id be a brain in a jar if i could pilot an AC.
@@MidlifeCrisisJoeIguazu is the same gen 4 augmented human as 621 and he seemed pretty much fine. All the other sketches from STK/STV in-game showed augmented human to be about as mobile as normal humans and none are some kind of limbless bodies attached to ACs. Even in-lore in older games, Human+ are more like Cyberpunk mods/cyborgs.
@@MidlifeCrisisJoethe cinematic trailer was actually 621 being waken up after being cryogenically frozen his actual body isn’t that fucked up it mostly their mind that need fixing do to them struggling with emotions and even speaking. It why they agreed to go to Rubicon 621 hoped to make a fortune so he could afford surgery to fix themselves. This does raise another question how much do AC cost and is the surgery more expensive than every than AC
Amazing video dude
Neco Arc was unexpected but much appreciated rofl. Good video! I felt this way in AC as well, especially when you said going through tight hallways and realizing they're the size of avenues, hahaha. I came to that same realization while I was playing and felt this way
Spoiler. The more unfathomable cosmic sized horror of ac6 is Coral. That eldricht red stuff is far more terrifying than any nanoswarms or biomass hivemind. This can even break thermodynamic laws . I choose the fire of the raven ending because I was afraid of such fucked up off the scale material.
Absolutely love this open ended question. As someone who thoroughly enjoys studying "pre-history" - I always chuckle at the crazy concept of time. There were eras before the time of humans that spanned hundreds of millions of years that we know so little about, but we have libraries and institutions dedicated to studying the past 2,000 years only. I think of a "game trail" used by animals like deer or elk that exists now, but imagine what a "game trail" would have looked like at the peak of the Jurassic, spanning the width of your common two-lane road. It's interesting to think about how little time we've existed. We've only existed on this planet for a couple thousand or so years, but our history is so detailed that you can replicate what people wore in the time of Romans almost 1:1, but we are just now coming to terms with dinosaurs having fur or feathers. It's fascinating to know that we will never know what all of our highly detailed and recorded history remains or is even talked about in the next 200 million years. Maybe we'll be nothing but a footnote to whatever comes next.
I think being from the country makes me more indifferent about scale.
And until a few years ago, I never considered how physically traumatic it is to be tossed around in a giant mech or why special people are required to do it.
The only thing that scared me about Armored Core VI was going back & watching the story trailer.
621 was a deep-frozen comatose human wrapped in plastic & held together with pins. Might as well be the kid from Metallica's "One".
Human life is so meaningless in this world(galaxy?) that when you fall into debt, the corporations use you as a human augmentation guinea pig.
Some say 621 is just a disembodied brain or comatose patient in a mech, some say his "fried brain" was because Gen 4 can hear voices that drive them insane.
But in my mind.. it could easily be both in this messed up world. 621's suffering makes me reflect on humanity's cruelty in a very uncomfortable way.
Love how in depth your analysis went. I’m glad i’m not the only one overwhelmed by the world in this game. in every mission i always walk my mech for a good chunk of the way towards the next objective while looking above and below to try and make sense of the scale of everything, and to make my AC feel even more massive, it is really mind boggling to say the least. Also the color palette and music, and the fact you never see a human face in the game also sets a very dark and grim tone. I really hope they double down on this aspect of the game in the next title.
I often find myself stopping to look at random buildings that cross my path and think to myself "humans built this." It seems unfathomable to me, the amount of intellectual and manual labour that goes into every single object that blends into our background.
Seeing the endless span of the grids, the coral worm, the city of ibis? That is not something a single architect can conceptualise. That is a level of segmentation of life and of organisation of death that very quickly escapes reason and lapses into fear. I think the most terrifying thing about AC6 is seeing the parallels (hyperbolic as they may be).
See, nothing about this bothers me so much because I like the idea of that level of speed beyond normal human capabilities. It might be horror for everyone else, but in AC you're not everyone else. The scale always stuck with me through the game but I found it more inspirational and interesting.
Imagine being just a normal human being with an assault rifle stumbling into a battlefield with MTs. That's already horrifying enough. Then imagine those MTs are getting slaughtered by a mere handful of Armored Cores. Or even just one. How small one must feel after witnessing all of that.
Beautiful video and concept
Excellent video. Keep up the good work
I'm pretty sure the internal name for Coral was "Melange" during development. As in the spice Melange that only appeared on the planet Arrakis in the book series Dune. This was a substance that was not only a potent drug but it allowed for FTL by feeding a human such massive amounts of spice they can now use their giant super psychic powers to fold the very fabric of space. Also, consuming spice makes one immortal. More or less.
If we think of Coral in a similar way that Dune treats Melange, then it implies that Coral isn't just an energy source to be exploited. It is a thing that has properties that even the gods that ravage Rubicon want to claim. It is above the structures and accomplishments of mankind. Rubicon was the center of civilization before the fires destroyed it. Coral was vital enough for the entire species to hinge everything on it. Coral is a resource that can be used to create things on a scale that we only get a taste of. Like the extractor gathering up the coral near the end.
And... I don't feel its much of a stretch to think of it this way.
It’s not just 621 who’s augmented. Every AC pilot is augmented to the point where they’re barely human anymore, both to process all the stimuli coming at them at once and to handle the Gs they no doubt have to deal with given how ACs move.
Earned a sub, high level pondering going on in here
Im only 5 minutes in and i gotta say this is top tier content. I hope you get the subs you deserve.
When I was little, I looked at an ant and was afraid of whatever else out there could be bigger than us.
Good thing this game gave us shotguns for them
In armored core For Answer, it tells you your speed. If you equip dual blades on a light frame, add 2 extra back boosters where you would put back mounted weapons and tune it for speed, you can get a instant 3000km and cover almost half the training map. Imagine going 3000km instantly and then hitting reverse boost in a instant. Pure liquid human.
After watching this video, amazing job. I like the seriousness and the humor, amd you have a great structure for this script. Subbed ans rang the bell B)
Super entertaining! Subbed up.
With the sheer scale and ridiculous power the ACs can output, I got the feeling that any entity that one might've struggled with in Elden Ring would be nothing more than a dirty dish rag. All the struggles from other more traditional fantasy RPGs suddenly feel miniscule in the face of these manmade deities.
Yeah, the thing that jumped into my mind about this setting was, "Who the hell is capable of building all this?" Especially after I had to use obviously non-reusable rocket engines strapped to a train car just to cross the sea.
I loved listening to this, thank you for making it
This video randomly came up for me. Although vaguely familiar with Armoured Core I've never actually played it. Your title made me curious and I really enjoyed it. Very philosophical and really well made.
Ive only just started the video. I remember early on there is a mission to check on a BAWS factory. Its a very quiet mission where you get ambushed by stealth mechs. In the down time between ambushes i noticed some cars and trucks laying around. Had to remind myself they were full sized cars and not toys. Only makes me fear how big the Catifact really was
And then you have Nexts (4th gen ACs) where in they go 0-2000+kmph at a quick boost+over boost combo essentially going from stand still to mach 2 a a drop of a hat especially the lighter weight ACs... where's your G forces now what scarier is the implications that it also depends on pilot's aptitude as 4th gen ACs are either "relatively safe" to work with or are walking/flying super critical demon cores
Even scarier when you consider during the story you are strapped to the VOB unit that amplified you speed EVEN MORE so you could approach the motherwill "safely". Odds are a normal pilot would be a fine mist going from standing to full thrust VOB....
@@SuperHexer123 depending on the build weight of your AC the fastest the VOB can boost you is some where in ballpark of 5000kmph to 12000 kmph
Awesome content keep it up!
Positive critique for your youtube channel. Keep sections like this as short as possible. 0:56-1:02. Think of every additional second of this as an exponential number of viewers that click off the video. Props for not putting it at the start, your first 50 seconds firmly grabbed my attention.
Edit after finishing. Love your take. awesome video
When you mentioned how it's so crazy something that big was built I remembered how me and my dad always wondered how the Empire in star wars was able to build all it did in like 10 years, like they built a small moon. And Starkiller Base is even more ridiculous, they cut a planet in half. The sheer amount of labor machines they must have is ridiculous.
At least in AC, we know that the world is build on an infrastructure of giant mechs. Theres nothing in starwars that even shows their capability in building something like the death star in meer years. Starkiller is just fantasy in fiction at that point.
When playing through NG++, I've started noticing the normal human-sized guard rails under my AC's feet. NEPENTHES has them, btw and when I looked at them in comparison to the thing I just sort of stopped. It's actually really hard to comprehend how MASSIVE everything in AC really is.
Having played these games since the PS2 days, this video is what I love so much about Armored Core's world building. It's not just science fiction with mechs. It's pure industrial dystopia. Just playing the games you can smell the gasoline and feel the dead emptiness of concrete. Add the macro scaled size of everything and you get the most exhilarating piece of dark and unsettlingly real feeling fiction.
incredible video my dude, many thx, subbed
Awesome video! I too thought a lot about the scale in this world. It reminds me of the scale in Warhammer 40K. Entire planets that are factories.
I believe controlling these ACs would be more feasible if it were remotely controlled. I understand that this is all fiction but if there was a way to have an AC with all of these capabilities it would be almost unstoppable.
I think most AC are actually remotely controlled. But to get its best performance and avoid delays and interferences, its better to have a pilot in them.
@@RhazOfRheos that is cool!
I always had an idea about how to do this while piloting and is simple in concept but difficult in execution. Link the mind to the vessel.
Theirs animals that perceive time in much more precise detail. We cap out at seeing 60FPS but some animals see more than that. 2 examples are Dogs and Flies. Dogs see in more detail that during the age CRTV’s Dogs couldn’t perceive what was happening on TV, once we went Digital they started to notice what we were seeing. They have stronger reaction times because of this same thing and so can make more precise movements and adjustments. Flies see even more detail which helps them in running away from us as we try to kill them. They actually have such a detailed perception of time that you can actually catch a fly if you move slowly towards them. When you move slow they can’t see you move at all because it’d be like watching grass grow. You wouldn’t notice it growing at all even while having your eyes trained on it.
All this to say if we could plug our brains into the mechs we could get this same result on a grander scale, the computers and our minds working together and helping us see and react in greater detail than we could with normally
@@Broomer52 dude you just blew my mind 🤯
@@RhazOfRheosI think we had that with nine ball
Really enjoyed this thank you!
Dude this is a great video and you are hilarious!
The word "Grimdark" comes to mind.
I think Armored Core 6 is scarier than Dark Souls. In the Souls series, people still have hope and fight to push the dark back or bring it forth. In AC6, everyone is beyond the whole "Stop the evil corporations" thing. There aint no Avalanche like Final Fantasy. Theyre just a part of life. One thing i noticed earlier is how the wanton murder of pilots in lesser mechs is just glossed over. They arent refered to as people, theyre "MT's". Nothing more than the gear they use. Same thing with augmented humans. We're refered to as an "It" by Walter in one of the trailers. We dont have a name, and Raven doesnt count, we stole it from what we thought was a dead guy. Closest we get is "Buddy". Walter saw no issue with sending 621 men and women to their deaths on Rubicon and hes supposed to be a "good guy" in this world. Humans are sold into slavery as pilots, forced into suicide missions, and even with millions of credits, they wouldnt have enough to buy their own freedom back. The people of AC6 have stopped fighting. They have no hope, or at this point, even any _conception_ of a life where they habe rights, where a galaxy spanning mega corp doesnt have the power to stomp the government and commit war crimes care free.
I don't think it's grimdark at all. Grimdark implies a sort of nihilistic attitude about the state of the world. Nothing can change and there's not even any point in trying since the universe itself seems to be built around perpetual misery.
AC6 presents a world full of nihilistic people but the world itself is not. The final ending is an answer to the question Haedal poses at the end of the video, "Are we capable of wielding the power of gods? Yes. So long as we're willing to change some pretty fundamental things about ourselves."
A guy called Mark Fisher proposed a concept he called "capitalist realism". The idea is that people are so enured with the systems of capitalism that they can't even imagine an alternative. Even in the face of existential threats like climate change, people are so incapable of imagining any alternatives that they'll just keep on doing the things that will doom us to oblivion.
But the thing is, there are alternatives. We have the power to change our behavior. We just have to be willing to make the change. This is the final message of AC6. Overcome the fear of changing yourself, the familiar confines of your reality, and you can overcome the systems of the world.
That's quite a hopeful message in my view.
@@rainbowkrampus the fundamental parts of humanity have never and will never change. Millenials and zoomers like to think ourselves better and more civilized, more understanding of human nature than our forebears, but fall into every single trapping of the humam condition. There will never be a utopia where the general populace decides to be better for a better world. At best a man can hope to change himself as an individual. Humanity as a whole will never pick the "right" option.
@@rainbowkrampus the usual cycle in armored core is "we have destroyed the evil corporations, lets try capitalisms again" that's the grim darkness of Armored core.
@@lonewolf646 AC6 is not associated with those games. We're talking about AC6 here. Whole new universe, very different message at the end.
@@rainbowkrampus Armored core 6 is not associated with Armored core? That makes total sense.
While Coral release has made the setting tangibly better, it hasn´t changed the fundamental structures of human society that have made the world of armored core such a nightmare to begin with.
Oh goodness is this video precious, perfectly crafted imho.
And if you enjoyed the tinge of dread that AC6 has given you, then you'll be pleased to know that you will find more of it by playing the rest of the series too! Maybe on a smaller scale, but still :P
those texts are fire dude, awesome!
Excellent video!
the max sustained g's a human can take with support is roughly nine G's however in bursts you could probably take up to 14 G/s but not for a extended period of time without receiving lasting damage. F-16 pilots in combat relatively experience 9 G's most of the time. Basically as long as your blood can flow it would be fine. Though the f-22 could probably pull something closer to 16-18 G's although this would result in damage to the airframe and the pilot dying without support. What kills you isn't the G's themselves but the fact that blood stops flowing to your brain.
Edit: 5:45 conceptually bigger things have been built. Ignorance truly is something. Basically if there is a will there is a way. Nothing is impossible, however in order for large mechanical humanoid structures to exist, the material chemistry along with the tools need to exist in order for something of a large magnitude to exist.
In other words its the difference between Steel, Stainless Steel, titanium, and Gold. Due to their unique properties, each one has its use. Most things nowadays are made of composites, where the engineers try to get all of the perks out of certain elements while removing the downsides. It is like trying to min max in a video game or perfecting lines in art to your taste.
In not so many words, its possible but the technology isn't there yet. There is always more to discover. Also a reason the periodic table of elements is more of a sheet of all the different building blocks of composites.
I relate to this video *deeply*. Thank you for giving this thought voice.
Just imagine Cthulhu being chased around by the Red Guns. "Leave me alone!"" For Paychecks!"
When I first played the STRIDER mission, I thought that the footsteps that thing left behind were just trenches built on the sides of the road. But after a few times grinding that mission, I realized that they were footsteps and I was like "Damn, you could make a whole human sized underground facility in ONE footstep alone!"