I joined the Gaf PS3 team, PSN and AC name are both mAcOdIn.
I dunno if I'll stick around though, this game is sorta "meh."
As far as the giant robots fighting each other it works well enough but shit, this is the most shoddily put together game I think I've ever bought. Right from the start when I popped in the disc after setting up my name and controls and skipping the intro it just tossed me into a mission. No Title screen or anything. And I wasn't happy with the controls so I exited and then could not go back into that mission! Who fucking made this shit? After exiting the single player mission I had no choice but to either create a team or join a team? I guess there went the idea of playing through singe player first to get the hang of stuff before going on-line.
So then the on-line UI, ugh, took me a while to find the settings under the workshop to tweak my controls but I found it. Ok. Now I wanted to catch up on that mission so it must be Chapter 00 or Chapter 01 of the story, right? Well, no. Anyways, so fuck that mission that the game starts you at, I'll just skip it except these shitty cut scenes make no sense, who the hell are these people. I don't know who's talking, if me, the AC pilot, is even talking or if I'm just some silent protagonist in these things. Anyways, trudging through the story missions and it's all just so poorly done I don't even know why they bothered. Why hire people to do VA and do CG work for this stuff when it's so bare-boned and at times incoherent? What's this Order/Story shit anyways?
I also decided to customize my mech's parts just to have the damn game do a hard freeze in the AC Data screen. Come on guys.
So I'd like to play online except, well, I don't know what the stakes are, if I lose a battle playing by myself at 5am do I lose the team points? The game says I earned Team Points when I complete story missions however the team's points never changed. Why would I buy a workshop if I can already switch and buy parts?
I'd read the manual but it's like 4 pages and doesn't say shit. It's the worst manual I have ever got with a game. It also begs the question "why bother" just like the story.
But whatever, I'm just a tad disappointed because the game's not awesome, I'll try and play some more later after I catch some sleep and see if I can figure out what the hell's going on on-line and see if that's any better.
Welcome to the Armored Core series. This is been pretty much the way it's been done throughout all of them. Mission 00 is the first mission, and that is actually towards the end of the story. They then take you back to the beginning in mission 01 and you work through it.
Your character is (and always will be) a silent protaginest throughout the Armored Core series. A good chunk of the story is filled in through the sidequests that open up as you beat the story missions.
As far as online goes and team stuff, the only time you'd hurt the team is if you participated in a conquest match and lost territory or if you went on a conquest match by yourself and lost.
The team points you're earning on story/order missions go towards leveling the team itself up. The other set of points are basically our currency for taking territory. You might earn 100 - 500 of those in a mission. The way to farm them is to do missions on the territory that looks like a golden shield in each area, as if you max the difficulty to 10 you'll get 17,500 or so points each time.
This game, much like From's other titles, doesn't hold your hand. There's a learning curve and you need to figure things out. Once you've gotten the hang of it, though, the online is very rewarding and the gameplay requires a lot of strategy when fighting other players.
So as someone who has flirted with this series but absolutely raged at "For Answer" and it's bullshit sub 5 fps, can buy this and know I'll get more than a slide show?
The FPS has been solid on the PS3 version for me, even in 5 vs 5 matches. There's only been a couple times I've seen it drop, and these were during a couple of story missions where it was raining on the maps, plus there were a bunhc of enemies on the screen and explosions. This only lasted for a couple of seconds, and then it was over, on each.
To someone whose played Chromehounds Neroimus War mode and the equivalent here, how do they compare?
I'm thinking of getting the game based on this mode alone, but I'm not sure about the gameplay. Seems too chaotic and too stupidly fast to me.
The only gameplay that is fast in this game is if you play a light weight mech. Even that is nerfed from what it was in AC4 and AC4A, and is much better now. Even if you're fast, you're not godlike, and need to play extremely carefully otherwise you'll be dead within seconds.
Heavier mechs are very stompy. and you can make sure yourself a tank that is an absolute beast. Every time we play against a team that has a good tank, where its team members actually protect it, it's usually a really hard battle for us to win. The tank is slow, but it dishes out a bullet storm that will destroy me in no time if I get caught in it.
There's a lot of elements from Chromehounds incorporated into this game, and while the gameplay is a bit faster thanks to the boosting, it's not overly so or arcadey like the last two games in the series. They took player feedback and really improved it.
Also, the war system is fantastic and adds a lot of extra fun to an already fun online system.
