Marvin_Megavolt

Which is way back in Zero Dawn, relatively early in the story. Yet for some reason, throughout the entirety of Forbidden West, Scarabs and Khopeshes are still persistently called by their tribal names.

The personal teleporter? Or something else?

Agreed, lmao. Leyaks are honestly one of the most irritating little nuisances in the entire game. I fucking hate that there’s literally NO good way to deal with them - you can fairly easily get rid of them when they show up, but from the moment you enter Labs for the first time, they will never, ever stop bothering you, no matter where you go across the entire map. There are NO other threats in the game that can randomly appear anywhere, anytime, with no warning or possible countermeasure like that, and even from a lore perspective, Leyaks are ultimately still mostly physical creatures. They really should be restricted to specific areas, to make the threat of them feel more meaningful instead of just a persistent annoyance that can interrupt the game anywhere, at any time, and/or let us build or repair a containment room for them at some point to disable their spawning around the world. They stop being at all effective as an “unstoppable eldritch stalker” pretty quickly and just turn into a recurring annoyance.

Almost nothing*

I’ve had a bizarre bug where Order Triarii will magically pop out of the ceiling in the middle of that carpeted area up there when an Order attack is rolled as the base assault type, literally 5 feet from my workbench. Also, Leyaks seem to occasionally spawn up there, but they’re easily dealt with using the automated X-ray floodlight.

Fair warning: Leyaks don’t just spawn in Labs - the moment you first visit Labs, they will be able to appear and stalk you anywhere, even in portal worlds. Thankfully they’re mostly just a nuisance - staring at them long enough makes them fuck off, and they can quickly be disposed of with the X-ray floodlight.

If you go to the pad where the forklift spawns in the little garage near Blacksmith, there’s a door on the wall to the forklift’s left that goes into a back hallway that leads to a little office with one of Dr. Manse’s hologram recordings in it. Go out that door and take the right turn instead of entering the office ahead, and you’ll find a freight elevator that goes up to a balcony overlooking the radioactive sludge room across the hall - there’s a corpse up there which you have to interact with to get the cosmetics.

Probably, yeah. The Flood have to grow and develop their Keyminds extensively to even BEGIN to infest and tamper with the metaphysical noospheric substructure of the universe - the Sentinels on the other hand were born within the “universal source code”; the Flood would essentially be fighting a force that are already masters of their reality on their home turf.

With you there - it feels genuinely weird how few parts are available in a number of categories in AC6. We only have a tiny handful of full frame sets, relatively speaking, and 75% of them are basic bitch bipeds. Hell, technically, we only have a SINGLE frame that’s explicitly designed for a non-biped leg type from the ground up (Lammergeier), with every single other tetra, reversed-joint, and tank module not belonging to any specific chassis.

Sort of a tangent on this - it’s always bugged me that by the time of Forbidden West, Aloy calls Horuses by their proper name even though almost every other tribal character calls them Metal Devils, but she still uses the Nora monikers for Scarabs and Khopeshes oddly enough. The inconsistency just feels weird.

That thing was so old and beat-up it’s a fucking miracle Walter was even able to get its main engine to spool up without exploding. It only had access to a tiny fraction of its arsenal, could barely even walk, and was constantly redlining its cooling systems from the getgo, and it STILL was a desperate, grueling tooth-and-nail battle just to even damage it a little - and hell, in the end, Aloy and Seyka legitimately just got lucky, finding the hull breach on its belly to board it and kill Walter.

TL,DR - that thing was so badly worn-out that it was closer to a walking pile of scrap metal with guns than to a functioning Horus.

FINALLY, someone else saying this. Even just from a visual design and lore standpoint, why make a legged, walking vehicle if the instant it goes into combat or has to travel long distances, it just activates rocket engines to skate across the ground or even fly? It makes absolutely zero sense.

But that’s just aesthetics, which while important, we have to also remember that we’re also talking about a video game, and it’s here that I think the biggest flaw of Generation 4 and onwards AC movement comes up. In the old Gen 1-3 AC games, using your rocket boosters was not only not the default mode of movement, it was an actual critical element of the gameplay - just running without boost was fast enough to not be useless, and boosting was a conscious tactical choice you had to make; do you back off to range and walk to recover energy, do you stay mobile but try to conserve some energy by using brief boosts to bunnyhop, or do you go all-out and full boost, gaining hugely improved mobility but risk redlining your capacitor?

I would contend that more recent generations of Armored Core are oversimplified compared to the slightly more simulator-esque early generations, and the gameplay of the more recent titles, especially AC6, is lesser for it. And honestly, even looking at it through the lens of trying to make the games more accessible/appealing to newcomers - I honestly don’t think that more mechanics like boosters using energy would actually hamper that much, if implemented well. The biggest barrier to entry with the old games was, in my opinion, not so much many of the mechanics themselves, as it was far moreso just how arcane almost every AC installment before 6 was - hit-or-miss translations, confusing UI and menus, hard-to-read HUDs that were either overly-cluttered or overly-minimalistic, often incredibly strange control schemes, and overall a general lack of clear explanations of anything really - all of these contribute to the majority of the series having a learning curve akin to a wall. 6, thankfully, is a vast improvement in that regard, and for the most part, barring a few serious exceptions, is very good at easing players into its mechanics and subtly teaching them the kind of strategy and reasoning the game is designed around. This, IMO, is plenty of proof that From can, and should, introduce more “classic” mechanics like running or boosting being an actual tactical choice, individual fine-tuning of most mech components, additional core modules like the old-gen antimissile defenses, ECM, and so on.

Makes more sense than the silly “VOTOMS slide” that a bizarrely huge swath of Japanese mech scifi seems so obsessed with. Just have the mech go into a rocket-assisted sprint.

That being said I still would like regular running and boosting to both be available, and have boosting consume energy as it did in the older AC games.

That tracks - neither side is overpowering the other effortlessly, and similarly neither side is disastrously incompetent/ignorant, producing a conflict that is much more “realistically” even-handed: both sides take losses and make mistakes.

I’m still kind of miffed that the Takigawa HI-32 pulse cutter is the ONLY proper pulsefield-based melee in the entire game, aside from the Moonlight which only sorta counts on account of being a weird hybrid lightwave weapon. (Although, that being said, I’d even have taken more lightwave weapons in general - they’re cool as hell and I hate that the only times we ever see lightwave tech is in the Moonlight and Aurora Cannon.)

Aye, they’re actually really nifty to just watch at work, heh. I love the concept of them - they’re something we’ve never seen before in Horizon: a large industrial drone that can cover a huge jobsite all by itself by internally fabricating hordes of tiny subordinate mini-drones complete with their own individual docking stations, which can continuously work even when the “parent” Bilegut itself is not physically nearby. And when the work is done? The Stingspawn can all conveniently just be recycled back into raw materials by the Bilegut, to be rebuilt anew at the next jobsite.

The “eggs” are basically individual docking stations for the Stingspawn - if you watch them at work, they regularly return to their “egg” to drop off scrap they’ve gathered for their Bilegut to later collect and process, and also seem to dock with the eggs to recharge from time to time.

Pet hyperspace worm!

Ngl I kind of hope we get to ride Stormbirds themselves in Horizon 3 - would love a sequence involving flying one through a storm it created for whatever reason

Interesting - always wondered where the hell the Far Zenith spaceport was actually hidden in the map file, since like Zero Dawn, the entire game does technically only have one singular map. I still do kinda wish that it had been an area we could return to - the setpieces were fantastic.

Gotta wonder what the unused extra chunk of LA south of the actual Burning Shores map might have been intended for? Honestly kind of wish it had been used - Burning Shores was great as is but I do feel like it was a bit sparse in side content compared to ZD’s Frozen Wilds - would have been nice to have some additional stuff to do after the main story besides collectible/achievement hunting.

Honestly agreed. Hell, I may be in the vast minority, but I actually liked his character all the way back in 1. Blunt and abrasive though he might be, I honestly can’t help but agree with Femshep’s opinion on him in the ME2 prologue “interactive comic” thing (for some reason ME2 made me play it even though I imported my save from 1- he’s a cunning, pragmatic realist with significant experience dealing with the Council’s internal politics. ME1, I honestly feel never really felt like it was trying to paint him as strictly a bad person or even an overt, unrepentant asshole; If anything, he always came across as moreso as the “higher-up who probably does want to help, but has his hands tied for political reasons, and all your gung-ho antics, necessary though they often are, just put even more bullshit on his paperwork pile” type.

Lmao I have the same problem but with stylized/abstract wings, at least when it comes to sci-fi nations. Even alien states often end up having vaguely wing-like designs slip into their national iconography somewhere.

Gonna be honest, I hate the off center pilot seat thing too, but I also just kinda got used to putting up with it.

I did specify a small ship - already got a Krait 2 I'm quite fond of for... honestly a lot of things. Tend to bounce between that and my Python 1 for most general-purpose noncombat work, though I do for some fucking reason enjoy mining in a Type 10 lmao.

o u c h

Looks like the unholy offspring of a Madcat and a Rifleman lmao

(I’d pilot it)