Drathar Warrior

I wish I hadn't sold it to get 5... oh 5... what a disappointment.

I disagree with the second part of this post. If you had an energy focused offense design, and I brought an energy weak defensive design ( or vice versa with kinetic), I stood a much better chance of out-piloting you and winning in FA than I would in 5. ACV leans much more heavily on the paper/rock/scissors mechanic. Some people find that a good thing, but I really don't. I'm really hoping that they smooth out the extremes in defenses in ACVD. I would rather not go into a fight guaranteed to lose simply because your AC is my exact foil as far as stats are concerned, regardless of piloting skill. Anyway, so far ACVD looks promising, though I really wish they would just bring back actual back weapons.

Good point. There was definitely tactics and strategy involved beyond just the bunny-hop, but the same is true with the movement in FA. Anybody who would just spam QB would get owned by the top level players (not gonna name names, because everybody is going to argue with the list). Of course it's not about blindly simplifying games for simpletons. The AC franchise has always stood out a difficult game, but you can always complicate a game more (My ACs oil is leaking! I'm blacking out from the g-force! My pilot didn't eat a healthy breakfast!); I get it. So the question is how do you get a baseline to determine what is too much and what is too simple? There's a lot of possible answers, but what I decided (for myself) is "If the technology existed, would it make sense?" Who would create a war machine that constantly overheats? Why would a humanoid robot be a better choice than a jet or tank? Just as an example, in ACV you have that new mechanic where you have to toggle you boosters on and off. Sure it makes the game harder, but does it really add to the game? In a real world scenario, that's akin to you having to toggle your car's accelerator on and off for city driving. You can make a game harder and add to it, or you can make a game harder and take away from it and right now ACV has made the series harder (mechanic-wise), but it hasn't really added anything to the gameplay. The mechanics in AC4 were probably more solid than FA, but FA didn't suffer from some of the weird limitations. That's a double lol. If you have a difference of opinion and your immediate instinct is to tell people to "f-off" and "middle finger to you" and posts about gay butt-sex, then there is definitely a bit of an old-guard mentality at work. People just looked at my post number and assumed I just bought the game yesterday, but that number means very little. I rarely post in any of the AC forums and the only reason I'm posting now is cause I have high hopes for ACVD.

Would do if I still had the game.

lol, elitism much? Listen, I definitely agree that ACFA was too fast for it's own good, but that's not actually the games fault. That issue actually lays with U.S. networks that are painfully slow compared to most of Asia and Europe. Another thing is that FA was the first game out of the series to suffer the least from FROM's typical bait and switch feature tactic. If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's when FROM would partially include some potentially awesome feature (Co-Op, AI, Online Play, Team Play without forcing stupid "Leader" categories), making it seem (only logically) that it would be included in the next game only to see the feature stripped out; never to resurface until 2-3 iterations later. Hey, I love the older games as much as the next guy, but thank God AC4 finally stepped away from the bunny-hop tactic. AC - Last Raven should have been renamed "Jump-and-shot-robots" or "Bunny-Hop Robots". It only makes sense that the only real way for an AC (or Next etc.) to survive the combat that Armored Core portrays is to be able to out maneuver missiles, or intercept them, and out maneuver supersonic munitions; hence a faster game makes more sense. If ACFA retained the pacing and speed of AC4, it would have been near perfect. As far as the older games; thank God for x-link Kai. Also, this may be my first post on this forum ("actually I don't think it is, I just had to re-register") but I've been around for a while. And what's wrong with booty-sex so long as that ass is clean?

I'm surprised that no one ever mentions what I consider one of the biggest flaws in ACV. Specifically speaking, Each leg category specializes in only one type of defense, such as Heavy Bi-ped being primarily TE resistant, Heavy RJs being primarily CE resistant, etc. The problem arises when someone who likes to pilot a specific AC style being forced to take a hit on defense. Why shouldn't I be able to pilot a Heavy Leg AC that is primarily KE resistant or CE resistant instead of TE? Yes, you can make up some of the difference with core, arms and legs, but it seems like an unnecessary part limitation that hurts the number of competitive builds. By the way, FA was probably the best game in the series, and just being fast was not enough to beat even the mid-tier players in that game. If you didn't recognize the tactics and strategies at play, you were toast. Hopefully VD addresses ACVs numerous flaws because ACV is just one of those games that had ridiculous amounts of potential and fell flat on it's face because of dumb developer and publisher decisions. Believe me, I work with plenty of software developers, and while intelligent, sometimes common sense eludes them.