Fluency

I picked up Armored Core VI recently because it’s a game about giant robots and I am a noted sucker for giant robots. It’s a game where you take your mech (or  Armored Core, AC, in the game’s parlance) and fight stuff. Sometimes other mechs, sometimes massive drilling platforms, sometimes a mobile artillery platform. It’s good stuff, gameplay’s tight and just the right amount of challenging, but that’s not what this post’s about.

You can customize your AC. You can pick its hand weapons, its shoulder weapons, whether it’s got normal legs, reverse-joint legs, four legs, or treads, and more. It’s a lot, and the parts interact with each other too. If you wanna use those legs, that head, and that gun, you’d better pick a generator that can support it, though doing so may mean you need to use a different torso than you had planned. There are so many interesting choices to be made and it’s fun to see your AC come together after trying out various combinations.

To get that, though, means learning to parse the game’s menus. Though not terribly obtuse, they have an intricacy befitting a game this detailed.

There’s a handy contextual help thing that gives you a brief summary of what each attribute means, but stats in a vacuum are difficult to grok. A lower weight means you’ll move faster, but exactly how much faster isn’t quite specified. Your EN load differential affects how fast your energy recharges, but you’ll have to play around to figure out what kind of recharge you need for your build. There are a lot of words and numbers and, a few hours into the game, I think I’m finally getting a handle on what they mean — and how to use them. 

In some ways, learning to read Armored Core VI’s stats pages is not dissimilar to learning a complex system in real life. I can kinda parse these menus now; they make much more sense to me than they would have a month ago.. But for someone who’s not played the game, it’s just a bunch of meaningless numbers. Compare that AC customization menu to this:

There are less giant robots, but it’s still a system with its own way of parsing it. I work in Adobe Premiere for my day job, and with it has come the ability to look at those numbers up there and make sense of the madness. Similarly, I’m told the string of numbers, letters, and symbols below makes sense to a coder.

I don’t speak code, but I’m learning to speak Armored Core. Maybe the idea of a video game where part of the learning curve is learning to read a bunch of menus sounds like work. But I find that having a system intricate enough for you to learn to parse a bunch of stats in order to become proficient in it to be enticing.

The game seems complex (and that’s because it sure is), but like any other specialized system, it becomes easier once you learn how to read it. I think I’m getting to the place where I can just about ‘read’ the game. With it comes a real sense of pride that my AC builds are actually working (and a recognition of why the ones that don’t work don’t). I’ve little doubt that as I progress and unlock more parts the capacity for more complexity will only grow. And I can’t wait.