Never underestimate the insatiable appetite gamers have for giant robot battles. That appetite has propelled Armored Core 6 to the top spot on Steam’s global sales charts more than a decade after the last numbered entry in the series was released, knocking Baldur’s Gate 3 off the top spot.
In a summer filled with huge releases, few could have predicted that Armored Core 6 would be able to find such a large audience. The phenomenal success of last year’s Elden Ring certainly didn’t hurt. Speaking to GameIndustry.biz, Bandai Namco Europe CEO Arnaud Muller explained that Elden Ring has given FromSoftware a “guarantee of quality” among fans.
DS3 literally starts with a boss that is quite challenging if you’re not used to DS already. Just “here is a sword, here is how to swing it, here is a bear of a man with an oozing snake hand - kill him”. A lot of players bounced off him.
Fromsoft isn’t in the business of making easy games, it’s just different variations of challenging. For people that like that it’s great. For a lot of people that very understandably is a turn off.
Gundyr on purpose acts as an early check for the player if they would enjoy the rest of the game or not. If you can’t beat him and don’t like the trial-and-error learning process required to do so, then you most likely wouldn’t enjoy or get much further in the game anyway.
I’ve beaten several games that I’d generally consider hard by their endings, but I honestly think FromSoft is just really bad at doing difficulty curves and player teaching - they just defend it all through the theme of being “difficulty edgelords” that don’t follow mainstream design.
Yea there’s nothing wrong with making a game that’s not for everyone. Not everything needs to be easy, those that crave a challenge obviously love from soft for the pain. I’ve played a few of the games and won’t say I’m an uber fan of them like some but I enjoyed them. I’m looking forward to ac6 but will have to wait til I’m tired of bg3 and that will be a bit