I wasn’t fussed about Armored Core 6 and then they did this

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.

But according to the official website in the US – as noted in a recent Reddit thread – Armored Core 6 will support Ultrawide monitors at launch, a max resolution of 4K, and will run at up to 120fps. Raytracing will be supported but only in the garage, not during actual gameplay (hardly unprecedented – just look at Forza).

OK, so it leaves some things to be desired: some have already criticised what appears to be the lack of an unlocked framerate, others have questioned the point of raytracing that only shows up in a glorified menu. But compared to the state that a lot of From’s other games have launched in on the platform, it’s actually a massive relief.

And, given how ultrawide ratios are a great fit for a mech game, it’s got me intrigued. In fact, it could be the single most convincing use case for ultrawide gaming: the sheer scale of those environments, the extremely pulled-back camera, the acrobatic combat that’s all about dodging wildly from side to side. After years of trying and failing to *click* with Soulslikes, could Armored Core 6 finally be the FromSoftware game that draws me in?

I mean, probably not, I’ll definitely be mince at it. But still. Mechs and ultrawide support is such a match made in heaven that it seems rude not to try it out.

The full system requirements for Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon can be found on the game’s official website.