Looking at Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon and The Outer Worlds 2, it can be hard to imagine how they compare. While one is a high-octane mech action game with desolated settings being constantly destroyed, the other is a story-focused RPG emphasizing its characters. However, the underlying premise of each is closer than one might think.
What brings Armored Core 6 and The Outer Worlds 2 together is that both games come from franchises with themes concerning the extremes of capitalist greed. Both are also using their sequels as opportunities to explore beyond the solar systems of their predecessors. They will likely take radically different directions with how they handle this premise, which makes it all the more worthwhile to see where their similarities lie.
An Opportunity to See Something Truly Alien in Armored Core 6, The Outer Worlds 2
Similar to the lead from the first game, the backstory for the protagonist in The Outer Worlds 2 is likely a person immigrating to the new solar system for new opportunities thanks to a corporation. Moving away from The Outer Worlds' Halcyon star system, there is potential to go in a wildly different direction regarding the new setting's culture and how it looks from an artistic standpoint.
The first game already did a fine job capturing how several alien-looking worlds appeared, but more can be done with the concept. This means the sequel has an opportunity to have the new planets go farther out visually, containing more flora and fauna beyond what life on Earth is like while exploring how people have impacted the new environments, for better and worse. It also means more opportunities to explore societies that might be radically different from Halcyon's.
Likewise, Armored Core 6 can artistically go in a radically different direction from its predecessors due to being set in an alien world. It might take some cues from other games by FromSoftware such as Dark Souls and Elden Ring, but blend it with an apocalyptic sci-fi setting as Rubicon 3 had been largely obliterated by an ecological disaster before corporations returned to fight over scraps.
All that has been seen so far of Armored Core 6 are cores fighting in ruins, but there will no doubt be several types of environments that give glimpses into what the planet was like before corporate greed ruined it. It can have the setting completely alien, but instead of showing how people coexist with the environment, it can take a more blunt approach by showing the end result of uninhibited human greed affecting worlds beyond Earth.
Armored Core 6, The Outer Worlds 2: Exploitation Beyond the Stars
Despite Armored Core being typically set on Earth, the sixth mainline installment reboots the story and sees players sent to the distant planet of Rubicon 3, a place several corporations have taken notice of due to a powerful resource named Coral and have been waging war over said resources. Although not much is known about the state of Earth in this iteration, a safe guess would be to assume it will be similar to the rest of the series, corporate wars have reduced the planet to the point there is hardly anything left worth fighting over.
Humans leaving Earth to exploit and inhabit other worlds is a premise not unique to Armored Core 6 and The Outer Worlds 2, but considering how both tackle this premise with a corporate edge, it is worth examining what statements both titles will make. The predecessors to both games handle themes of capitalism devaluing human life to an extraordinary degree, something The Outer Worlds does with hints of cynical humor and humanizing individuals. Armored Core goes in the opposite direction by making its narrative feel cold and distant, with little sign of human life outside knowing people are inside the cores players destroy. It is almost guaranteed this tonal clash will transfer to each franchise's respective sequels, but that makes it all the more interesting to see where they intersect.
Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon will come out on August 25, 2023, for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.