If we count only the actual Strider model itself, it ends up being a bit shorter, around 4,787m, as the objects attached to it extend out by a decent amount. This puts it just barely under three miles long by itself, and just barely over with the objects. When I first loaded the Strider in Elden Ring, I was surprised to see the deck was completely missing on each segment, which led to the realization they used objects for most of its surfaces.
These comparisons are just so good to muse on. 621 is the protagonist on Rubicon but in the Lands Between would be an incomprehensible horror to it's denizens, as would the rest of the Mechs and AC units.
So what happens if you let the Strider walk without destroying it? Does it actually move, or just have the illusion of moving? Does it eventually stop? Where's the edge of the map?
Makes me wonder what mold FromSoft is going to break next! ER's map is HUGE! I wouldn't be surprised if they found a way to include a 1:1 scale map of Japan or something.
The atmosphere of this level is so crazy. The way you fly in through the duststorm and see the moving shadows and the eye’s laser charging up through the dust, only to take in the full scale of the thing as you close in
@@aryabratsahoo7474well… there’s also that one NG++ mission. „Escort the Weaponized Mining Ship“ or something like that. But I guess that one doesn’t *really* count, because it’s literally just an alternative version of this mission
@@KeDe1606 yeah tbh because it's just this exact setpiece but with a different mission objective, the place and the object in question are the same so 😶
@@Bolt2049 I wish we could‘ve played through more of these extremely large-scale scenarios. I feel like the only other mission which‘s sense of scope even somewhat rivals this one‘s is [Spoilers for the Fires of Raven ending] When the Raven and Carla destroy that fleet of Warships with the infinite boost. Other than that there’s like the Iceworm fight, Operation Wallclimber and I guess some of the endgame missions, mainly the Liberator of Rubicon variant of the aforementioned FoR mission, and some other missions like the one where you take out V.I Freud or that short segment right before you fight Handler Walter in the LoR ending. But even those feel incredibly boxed-in/linear at times. If this game gets some sort of expansion in the future, I hope we get at least one more „open“ mission like the mining ship ones. Like maybe a mission where you have to directly take down the Xymex? Idk, I‘m grasping at straws here
@@KeDe1606i wouldn't be suprised if they do more with it in the next part of this gen. That was fromsofts MO with AC, the Numbered title tended to have quite a few good ideas and a few glarinflg issues but then the expansion games would go bigger
If the Strider is almost 5km long, then the Xylem might very well be in the ballpark of Star Wars' _Executor_ (19km long), which itself is roughly the size of the island of Manhattan. So, yeah, pretty big.
It makes perfect sense to me why the Strider was used. Giant scaling like this helps set the tone that if you’re fighting a boss of this magnitude early on, it sets the course for just how vicious the rest of the bosses will be later on - even the much smaller ACs. Furthermore, this goes with From Software’s tradition of making enemies bigger than the player to make the former more intimidating in appearance.
it holds to a similar position as the spirit of Motherwill was, a huge boss to make you really work for your first moment of real progress. though the strider feels sort of like a dumbed down and kinda wimpy boss hen compared to Motherwill.
@@ianbrown9189 I mean, Motherwill was a moving FORTRESS, With airstrips battleship cannons, and enough missiles to level Belgorod like it was the 90s again. Compared to the strider which all it had offensively was the eye, turret defenses strap to the side. And Maybe MT forces that should of been up top to repel borders or somethin. Basically comparing a technical to a Nimits class carrier
@@ianbrown9189 Tbf, The motherwill is basically a Tank, while the strider is The KillDozer. Of course the Killdozer is wimpy compared to the tank, thats why no one fields hastily modifed construction equipment vs actually Vehicles of war.
It is amazing how huge that mining ship really is when you compare it to other things. I just wish there is a mission it would survive instead of being destroyed.
You could make a very interesting game out of being the captain of a gigantic, lumbering landship like the Strider, having to manage moving slowly towards your main objective while juggling hundreds of smaller enemies swarming and taking bites out of you
@@chazaqiel2319 Not quite combat, but Wandering Village has a similar concept. The original Guns of Icarus (now renamed to Flight of The Icarus to avoid confusion with GoI: Online) also worked something like that.
@@chazaqiel2319 While not exactly the same there is Highfleet where you need to manage multiple ships rather than a single large one but is fits the rough concept of slowly advancing on an objective while managing enemies, supplies, your ship designs ina balance to not get ground down by attrition.
It's crazy to me that all of Armor Core's models are actually to the scale in the engine that they're described as, instead of being downscaled to save on resources.
@@davidburke4101 true, it's not like a large model necessarily requires more polys or whatever. but it is surprising, i think, that the engine can handle such vast differences in scale without, like, integer overflow bugs, or weird physics glitches or something. i would have thought they'd have to keep the engine's tolerances pretty tight for the sake of optimisation.
@@somniloquous0 Eh. It's a misconception that scale affects anything in rendering. The only reason super large and super small objects have effects on performance is because the numbers/decimals grow so large that there starts to become errors. This is because the math games use is only precise to a certain point, and then the results become approximations instead of true results. It's also why going super far from the center of the world causes glitches, because the position number grows too large. When an engine is made they don't "optimize for scale" because there's not really much optimization to make. Technically speaking; optimizing for scale would actually make the engine slow as shit, because each calculation now needs to be super precise instead of using shorter calculations that only become inaccurate at insane scales.
Not entirely true. Vertex data needs to contain more digits, and thus needs to tale up more space with larger models, but its a mater of a couple kilobytes of data. Irrelevant with todays computers.
@@davidburke4101 eh I don't know. I mean, it's not just the scale but the fidelity of detail you can pack into every single frame? I'd say Armored Core devs did a good job of knowing where their priorities should be and where it shouldn't. Don't get me wrong, it's not a "graphically stunning" game but it doesn't have to be. They've been doing this since 1998 and I'm glad they took all the lessons learned from previous entries.
Honestly the thing that surprises me the most about this is how not surprising it is. When you showed the human size comparison at 2:00 my immediate thought was, "Yeah, that seems about what I would have expected it to be." Which is both a testament to From's industrial design but also how deceptively small the Lands Between are.
The strider once again proves a point From loves to make: No matter how big and intimidating the opponents get , nothing will ever be as terrifying as around ten wheel-based enemies rushing towards you. Heh...
Word to the wise When Loghunt, er, Hunting at the end of Chapter 4 and S ranking the alternate strider mission Use the 4-shot hand missiles. They fucking destroy the wheels
I'm on my 3rd run and chose the "escort" mission so I can do the Alea Iacta Est ending and just get access to all the new missions in NG++. I figured it wasn't going to be so straightforward. I did not expect buzzsaws from hell. I got stuck on it last night. I did Liberator of Rubicon as my 2nd ending and was heartbroken over it, so I continued into NG++ just to hear Walter again (that ending was harder for me emotionally than the Fires of Raven ending even if the boss fight was a ton easier). I was doing all kinds of swearing and I'm still working on what weapons to use. I prefer lots of energy weapons, but those Helianthus wheels are weaker against explosive stuff based on the damage my Soup missiles were doing.
Btw, now that I realize, The Last Between wouldn't be as large as a continent in Real Life scale(about 20 km), so should we count It as a continent, or just a island instead?
@@JoseViktor4099 For various reasons open world maps are better at a “scale” than full realistic proportions. Just think that in the real world walking 1km it’s normal and a matter of minutes, but walking a km in a game and it’s boring. I’m not saying open worlds should be small, nor the meme comment of “wide as an ocean deep as a puddle”. I’m saying that depending on the gameplay and travel options a “continent” in a game could be much smaller than in real life
@@1r0zz I see. Its still fun to compare nonetheless to real Life standards. Makes you think if TLB may be much bigger IRL and thus the Tarnished Odyssey would be much larger. Maybe took him a real decade to do so. Btw, they did made huge maps at the time, the biggest one (that was actually designed and did not relied on RNG) has the size of England. Thats huge and insane.
@@JoseViktor4099 It's called compressed scale. Lorewise, Lands between is an entire continent with an appropriate scale, but it's been compressed in the game due to both technical and gameplay reasons. Rather than a trip from Leyndell to Stormwind taking less than half an hour on horseback as it's in the game, lore-wise it would take days.
The problem with *AC6* is that it's very easy to forget the scale. All the enemies you face are equal or larger in size compared to you. There are no people walking about or cars driving around. In the underground mission I stopped in a small cargo room and noticed a staircase that lead up to a walkway and realised how small it was to my AC. I spent the next ten minutes moving around the room and realised that this cargo bay was in fact an Enormous space that would take 20 to 30 mins to walk from one end to another, yet my AC could do it in three seconds.
I always liked those little environmental details because it shows just how much humanity has transformed the landscape in Armored Core's vision of the future. Pilots are practically one with their AC, and technological advancements through ALLMIND are analyzing how to best adapt a mechanical frame to act as an extension of the human nervous system. There are still vehicles, walkways, and staircases here and there, but heavy duty combative machinery has become the predominent species. It's a deeply hostile world built for giants.
What really hit me was That "Destroy the PCA fuel tank" or whatever. I was standing near the car saying smt like: "uuu! Look at you! You pathetic little vehicle" then I turn around and see an ENORMOUS TUBE. Like one and a half as big as my AC. The screws that hold the thing together is probably as big as a house
Love these comparisons and seeing these huge Bosses from ACVI in the Lands Between. Armored Core has an amazing way of visualizing and letting you feel the insane scale of everything already, but this makes it so much more interesting!
the Strider was the point in the game that sold me, with how the level was crafted. Starting a ways out with the eye barely visible in the duststorm and acting as a sort of 'set piece' in the background - only to realise no, it's *actually* all there and you have to take it down directly. That was such a mindblowing moment
It's always fun drawing comparisons in scale between universes. Even in other Sci-Fi universes this walker would be considered asinine. Compared to something from Star Wars for example, the Imperial class star destroyers are 1,600 meters (1.6 km) in length. Given the estimates here, this means bow to stern you could line up 3 of those sizable vessels over the Strider and still have room to spare. Ultimately, this land locked machine has a comparable size to a small star dreadnought from the Star Wars universe. This means the walkers in Star Wars aren't even worth mention in the presence of this hulking mass, as even the largest are only measured in dozens of meters, not thousands.
I always liked Warhammer 40k scale, it feels right to me. Your average heavy cruiser spaceship will be around 4-7km, very comparable to the strider. Then you can take Gloriana class battleship, one of the largest navy units of Imperium, they are around 20km! Big, but not big enough to dwarf the Strider. And then you can look at continental-sized spaceships of Eldar, or the planet-sized World Engine of Necrons. Truly unfathomable dimensions (don't get me started on the Chaos Fortress the size of a solar system: "The fortress spanned a system. The wall was tens of millions of miles high. It was billions of miles long. And though the proximity was lethal, it was still millions of miles away").
@@aesthetic-ds2mt 40k is definitely my favorite Sci-Fi setting, especially when it comes to sheer absurdity in scale. Everything is absolutely ridiculous in that universe, perfectly so. I also really like the general feeling of the setting in which there is really no good guy faction, per say. That said, even regarding 40k, Imperator titans are dwarfed by the Strider, which is pretty silly in itself.
@@aesthetic-ds2mt you can make gigantic scifi ships but its rare for writers to actually think about why they would need to be that big other than the cool factor. What does a 20km ship do that 40 5km ones cant? Also remember that irl the biggest ships are cargo ships, not military ones. with this one, a desperate force of the people repurposing a mining machine they have available makes a lot more sense that purposefully building a thing that large for combat
@@swordofthereal In 40k nearly all ships are generational ships, you don't replace dead crew with new trained recruits from a station or planet, if you want more crew you tell people to get to breeding more than previously required and then train the children into what you need. The bigger the ship the more wiggle room you got incase of a population collapse in the crew. Most ships are to a degree self-sufficient with internal food growth/supply and can sometimes get 'lost' for a century or two, bigger the ship the lower the chance is suffers catastrophic damage and is lost for practically forever, and bigger the ship the more shield and armor you can shove onto it to ensure it can take a pounding from either enemies or enviroment. The biggest space ships are like in real life the cargo ships, Gloriana class battle ships were notable for being the same size as massive cargo freighters but packed with so much armor and guns they're basically armed asteroids with engines strapped on.
Honestly, I do wish Strider had been given the superweapon treatment like in Ace Combat, where the entire encounter is usually multi-layered, either with support mini-bosses or step by step disabling of the behemoth, like say the Aigaion in AC6 (no, the other AC6) where you not only have to deal with support gunships and ecm platforms, when you try to bite into the main boss you have to strip it's defences layer by layer, first the guns, then engines, finally the cockpit, all while dealing with defending fighters at the same time. Imagine how epic the mission could've been if first phase you had to destroy underbelly weaponry before you can actually try to break one of the legs, would've made a great mid/late game boss
It certainly could have, but unlike the Spirit of Motherwill I believe the ease of which the Strider can be taken down serves a narrative function, showing just how out of their depth the RLF is that their crowning glory is still just a modified mining vessel that can be taken out by a single, relatively green independent mercenary. I'll also argue that it may serve a gameplay function too, as I have a friend who struggled navigating around this mission until it was pointed out that they didn't upgrade their generator and boosters. It made me wonder if part of this mission was to teach new players not to ignore internal part upgrades knowing many will focus solely on new weapons and frame parts. I have nothing to back this up though, just speculation. That said, I do still agree and hope we get another, tougher encounter like this in future content.
@@ArmoredGriffonthere would be an army of mt on the strider but you destroyed them on the destroy the helicopter mission, all of them is the backup for the strider
@KABLAMMATS And it takes what, 3 minutes to clear all of them even with their tetrapod buddy? They could throw two or three times as many MTs and all of the Liberation Front ACs in and the Strider would still be easy.
@@Mare_Manto be fair you're in an ac, that shit is a death machine, those mt is no match for an ac, even the ac jailbreak can climb the wall, well depends on the pilot. But you're right they should put one ac on strider since the RLF is so proud of it or maybe because of their hubris?
@@KABLAMMATSThe thing is that the STRIDER is not really meant to be defended by an AC, it should be able to do it on its own. The most likely reason to use the STRIDER as a weapons platform is to project force without the need for the RLF to use one of their precious few ACs. So sending an AC to defend it would defeat the purpose of the STRIDER I think.
The older model of the strider could very well be the ‘[6060] IA-05: DESERT WEEVIL’ which is in the game text files in the part that displays the names under the bosses’ health bars. The way the old model looks makes it seem like much more advanced tech, like an institute weapon, which would fit the IA letters that are present in the data and in the name of every non ibis series institute craft. The red eyes look like they’re powered by coral, so it might’ve also been a c-weapon
given its original function of coral mining before the RLF added additional weaponry, it even moreso seems like this was an institute relic. even if not a C-weapon, how did the survivors of a planet-wide firestorm get something like that built and running in just a few decades from scratch? seems more logical that it was acquired, though that raises the question of whether there is more of them somewhere?
I don’t think the eye is a mining laser, isn’t it one of the space defence stations turrets that they’ve attached to the strider and that’s why it’s now a force to be reckoned with?
Correct. I think the confusion is that the Strider itself is a mining platform (hence the big drills), but the RLF bolted a bunch of guns to it (including the big laser) to use it as a weapon against the corps and the PCA
@@yotube155 This. The Strider is a killdozer, more or less. The big saw and the drill are originally mining equipment, and the platform itself was used to haul them, and possibly other stuff, some of the turrets may have been on it standard to shoot at birds or protesters or something, but most of the turrets and the eye are guns that were welded to it to make it more Orky, with probably unintended synergy between systems in the form of the shield.
@@aprinnyonbreak1290 Ironically, despite its huge size, Strider remains a fragile and vulnerable working machine. He is trying to RUN AWAY from small ten-meter AC.
@@HindrancUS And instead it's a long range siege platform designed to fire a Coral powered superlaser at extreme distances and create a massive zone of denial that anything short of PCA satellite weapons cannot reach. The eye used to channel the power grid is its weakness as the miner is not built to withstand excess power production that is used to power the turret.
@@HindrancUSThis. The Strider seems virtually incapable of defending itself against smaller craft. The legs aren't properly armored (which is weird considering there are things with legs on Rubicon that can take volley after volley of missile fire and not topple). The laser has too slow of a wind-up time and the aiming system practically begs the enemy to dodge with its vertical-only -sweep. Considering the load bearing capability, the Strider seems tragically undergunned. Remove the drill, install large batteries of flak cannons to deny the enemy maneuverability near the hull and they could keep the sub generators safer. Last: where are the screens? Scavenged MTs, RaD mechs, anything. Something to tie the approaching craft down while the Eye and/or the weapons platforms nuke the enemy. In short: ... something built to fail. In hindsight, maybe the RLF design philosophy was perfectly mirrored by how the Ship Captain continually dismisses the XO's warnings about the Eye taking damage, and then Surprised Pikachu Faces when the rig actually implodes
I meant, they dealt with half a km giants before seemingly, the Strider isn't that much bigger, but is probably much slower. Surely everlasting dragons would destroy it, they're rather agile and can cast lightning.
@@yollnahkriin6604 you forgot about the long range missiles and active laser targeting by the eye would take any dragon down in a couple of shots and from long range. yes its slow but it has a long range targeting array for its missiles and laser. also it's shielded. your ac has to take out all the generators first to take out the eye's shields. it would be a tactical fight for any one of er's dragons.
1:54 The Strider here feels oddly not too out of place. Seeing Raya Lucaria with the Strider in the background and the fog in-between makes me wish for FromSoft to make a game with the 40k aesthetic but with a heavier gothic theme.
Good fucking lord I need this so bad. The PVP is so barebones in AC6. Objective based pvp missions would be so much more fun, having AC battles atop the Strider, PCA warships, etc.
When the game was first announced I thought it would have a mix of both. Like a mix of solo and group missions with a possibility for being "invaded". Like you take too long blowing up a fuel depot so the corp deploys a raven to stop you. There's a lot of cool stuff they can do here hopefully
@@xXFuzzeeXx As much as people hate on 5th gen, those games had peak AC multiplayer features Maybe they'll make an expansion that more or less gives us Verdict Day-esque PvP modes
that would be pretty unbalanced, defending team has to just worry about kills while attacking team has to worry about kills + getting to the generators + a giant eye shooting at them
I love how Elden Ring is a constant measurement system for Armored Core. But besides all of that, this NPC is really huge though, imagine you're just chilling around with the stormveil homies, then you saw this.
While of course it's gargantuan by the standard of something like Elden Ring, it's also enormous even by the standards set in Armored Core and mecha at large. The Spirit of Motherwill, which was the previous high mark for huge enemies in AC is also dwarfed by this thing, and the SDF-1 Macross, the enormous warship that gives the Macross series its name is shorter in length than even the shortest Strider segment. All of this and it's a relatively easy enemy to kill, and I think it's intentional to drive home the point of the player character's fearsome skills and reputation - it's notable that Motherwill served in much the same role in For Answer.
It sucks that the hardware limitations of PS3 & XBox 360 prevented the Motherwill to be rendered to its actual canonical size. Imagine a 4th gen. Remake... definitely a lot more bigger now
Honestly though, with both Strider and Motherwill, I would prefer longer missions involving taking out multiple weak and central points as well as defending troops, make it an ordeal worthy of the scale. I THINK Motherwill is better in that regard (it's been ages since I witnessed it and I'm several games away now from it in my AC series playthrough), but I recall back then a feeling of "wait that's it?"
Yeah, I was also thinking that AC4A is a good comparison with its emphasis on these incredibly large installation-type enemies. I think it also serves as a good demonstration of how flexible and powerful ACs are, in spite of their size.
@@InternetHydra I think it works lore-wise for the Strider to not be that tough. It's big, but it's still a retrofitted mining platform rather than a bespoke weapon system. Still, it would be cool to have a big boss fight play out how you're describing it and I wish there was something like that in the late game
@@yotube155 Yeah you get it, in spite of the size difference, the reason as to why Spirit of Motherwill is supposed to be tougher is due to the fact that Arms Forts are actual dedicated weapons platforms which were designed with the near exclusive intent of supressing the power of NEXTs (AC4/4A ACs). While the STRIDER is just a lumbering and aged mining patform with a couple point defense weapons and a huge orbital laser strapped on top, the energy strain on the vehicule is such that the generatos need to be placed outside in order for the machine to be propery cooled.
The level also does a good job of showcasing why the Strider is a bad idea. It's massive size actively works against it; its slow as shit and while the Eye is an impressive weapons system, it has trouble tracking small, fast moving targets, and the insane bulk of the strider means its covered in blindspots where the Eye cannot acquire targets, at which it has to rely entirely on its aneamic array of point defense weapons, since it has no escort of any kind. Despite being the 'flagship' of the liberation front, its clear even the corps understood how meaningless it was, hence letting some no name merc handle it when freud or rusty could have made quick work of it. It didnt even warrant the attention of a vesper.
To be fair, the RLF didn't really have that many options, and the Strider is still an imposing presence that works well as a command center and mobile staging point for the RLF's operations. In the end though, it's still just a modified mining ship and not a purpose-build battlefield weapon.
@@Freekymoho A moving, super powerful laser mounted on a platform that can move under its own power wasn't that bad of an idea tbh, it's just trying to make a thing that's not at all designed for fighting purposes (the strider itself) for battle would obviously come with a shitton of practical problems that gives it too many issues to be practical
Man this just makes me wish for a mod where we can explore the strider as tarnished, it could literally be a whole dlc it is crazy how huge it is. Imagine witnessing this destruction in the perspective of a tarnished... it was already impressive as an armored core xD but this would like the meteorite killing all the dinosaurs...
A crossover DLC would be funny and awesome as hell. Tarnished gets issekaid into Rubicon 3. But yeah you could easily make a 20 or 30 hour DLC that takes place on the Strider. I mean the Ishimura from Dead Space is "only" 1600 meter long and the game is like 12 hours.
With the help of powerful magic manage to destroy a leg of the strider, traverse the upper deck of the the strider, destroy the generators to disable the eye. Once you reach the eye in up close, 621 lands as the final boss fight. Upon defeating 621 you are given a miniature version of 621's gun as a boss drop which allows you to destroy the eye, causing the strider to self destruct.
Like Rubicon was at one point the center for human civilization and advancement till they torched it. Who's to say someone in some geology department didn't pick up some old ground from the world of Elden Ring post Ranni Ending and freeing humanity to the stars a million years later. But there is still one active summon sign left, just for the moon consort to be summoned somehow to witness that wasteland, and the towering metal beasts in front of him. Not that it matters much, powerscaling wise, the Tarnished post Elden Lord would be powerful enough to take down an AC if he catches one before they fly away. Depending on the skills one says their Tarnished learned, it could be a huge spectacle too. Like all of a sudden, some strength mage gets on the field spewing Azur Comet into the side of the Strider, or a dragon cult member starts smacking down ACs with bolt and claw, or some pure Quality Builds with the Tarnished going full Godfrey and using his Godly armaments and muscle to charge anything in sight.
I rlly liked the concept of climbing a huge metalic monster and destroying components to in the end put down the beast and i hope FS does more of it in the future cuz damn theyre good at it
Such a cool, technical video breaking down some of my favorite games, you honestly add to the FS lore by giving it away in a sense, always love you’re insight. Have a good one!
I know that the scale of Armored Core 6 is simply massive compared to previous games, but even aside from the sheer size, having such a huge, moving, climbable NPC with so many "riders" is astounding. Didn't From try and fail to do mounted NPCs before? It makes me wonder what sort of technical feats we'll see from From in the next few releases!
@@lordanonimmo7699 Yes, you are absolutely right, but if I recall correctly, Elden Ring was the first game in which they got it working after we've found evidence of them having tried and failed in previous games. IIRC there's only ever pairs of rider/mount in Elden Ring, but AC6 has a gargantuan mount with tons of riders. Apologies for not being clear :)
It’s crazy that it’s actually that big… I assumed the ACs were scaled to roughly the size of a large person and they used tiny vehicles and visual tricks to make us feel big.
My only gripe is how tf the Xylem is buried underground when we see that its so massive. The Institute city cavern must be so massive that gravitational survey would detect such a massive cavity. Also how tf they raised it from so deep underground all the way to the top
@@blodmourne What? In the Survey Drone mission, one of the logs involves a massive area of the Alean Ocean being unable to be scanned. That and with Xylem being called the Floating City and the map itself being in an ocean, means that Xylem was on the surface floating on the ocean and not inside Watchpoint Alpha like Institute City.
@@blodmourne Xylem was the floating city, it was just mostly submerged so only the top of it poked out above the water, think atlantis from stargate. The vascular plant and it's nearby institute city were burried in that cavern under the watchpoint. It never came up to the surface or such though, they "repaired" and built up the part that went into space. I do find major fault with that, the idea they could build such a massive megastructure in such a short period of time. If they had that level of resources and materials on and production capability on hand, no way would the companies be a fraction as weak or troubled as they were, they should have been able to take over the planet in like a day or two if they put that same effort into building a drone army, simply because it would be so massive and OP to swamp everything else surface side. The story there and at other parts pretty badly failed to explain things or match up what happened in one time to another. For the xylem though, it at least wasn't burried so that wasn't an issue. just sitting mostly submerged and with some stuff that interferes with scanners somehow.
I will never not be in awe at the sheer scale of Armored Core 6. This thing could cross the entire Lands Between in a couple steps and yet it is STILL dwarfed by the Grid structures dotting the surface of Rubicon like a steel canopy. Also, the Zullie AC is absolutely majestic.
I wish they did more with the Strider or any other Arms Fort-type enemies/entities in the game. I was legit excited for the NG+2 'Escort the Strider' mission because it would've been cool to have to defend different parts of it from various enemy waves, but then the mission was... not that. A really cool design and concept spent in a single mission
The strider is so slow and massive it'd be less of an "escort" mission but more of a defensive mission in which they're far more of... Come on man, how dope would it have been to have the strider's eye on YOUR side for a change? There could have been a bonus objective if you kept the strider's leg in tact, otherwise the strider crashes like in the original mission and you're force to fend off the enemy forces as they climb the enemy's back.
Im still kinda sad that you can’t actually prevent the strider from getting destroyed, I was so happy that we got hired to defend the strider only to get the sudden shock of the strider getting absolutely obliterated, it was a great mission to introduce how dangerous it will get, but there is still that hope that we could’ve maybe saved it under different circumstances
Perhaps the most impressive part of all this- is how well the game handles it, like I never noticed any fps or performance drop due to the immense size of the strider.
Armored Core VI is probably the best optimized game of FromFoftware in recent years. Might even run better than Sekiro, which also run pretty well. I can't tell the same about the Souls series or bloodborne; running well enought but overall having some technical issues.
@@Koeras16 Yeah FS is notorious for poor optimization esp on PC- DS1 on PC was an utter disaster, surprisingly DS2 would run on nearly anything, DS3 ran rather poorly until a few patches, and ER was stuttering like hell everytime you had to load in a new area thanks to shaders (and after every patch) Not so with AC6. Also kinda funny was BB- dropping below 20~30 fps during intense fights and co-op/pvp and having 5~10m long loading screens on the PS4.
They knew damn well people would be taking ac assets and putting them in elden ring, so the absolute Chads built everything to scale. My god has gaming come far
Elden Ring: The Erdtrees stand tall and proud over the Lands Betwe- WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT Armored Core: this place looks like a good area to mine resources
Part of the reason it has so many objects attached to it may also be for performance. I habe no idea if the game actually does this, but loading only the nearby segments would be help performance when loading such a large model
I think it was just in there for the AC fans, From Softs boss design philosophy is definitely made for Dark Souls fans. So im glad that we had this one big throwback, just as a little present.
I've killed this thing to farm money so many times that I didn't even realize how utterly gargantuan it is. No wonder it's called the flagship of the resistance!
The scale in AC6 is what makes every mission so amazing. Even though the levels are so small, the views, environment and machines are insanely huge and it creates this feeling of grand scale. It's an illusion of course but it makes wonders because you never feel like you are in a tiny tight space, and instead you can see all the world beyond your mission goal. It also makes you see that you are just a little spec of dust in this world and how even smaller humans are in these fights of mechanical titans. The myth and magic in the world may be gone, but these machines create their own myths with their size and power. Flying cities, six legged colossi, rocket launcher angels... arms race gone so insane it created it's own monsters.
Good stuff as usual Zullie. I'm a little curious though how the size of the eye itself compares to Elden Ring as it already feels very large in AC. Looking forward to more.
it's probably already been mentioned already, but you can also see the wreckage of a Strider in one of the grid missions. i believe it's Infiltrate Grid 086 but i'd need to double check that
WHERE? Well, given the Strider's size, its easy to not recognize him, especially if youre not looking for him specifically. Please keep us informed of your checking.
@@HindrancUS found it. sortie on Inflitrate Grid 086 and then turn around and scooch on back to the rear boundary of the starting area to see it on the ground floor to the left. i'll post a pic link separately in case links get filtered
I'm morbidly curious just how large NPCs slash objects the AC6 engine could actually handle. Like... almost five kilometers? That's almost absurd, and yet From made it look so easy.
Size doesn't matter in the engine. You can do small sizes and huge sizes, all the essentials to build the whole game on the same dimensions they did that to detail the tiny parts like houses stairs etc in edlen ring you don't need to details the rock and the eninvorment it is easy to generate
If vertex ppsition data is stored as 64bit integers, for milimeter precision you can have a maximum vertex offset of over 20 km. These are not numbers the engine actually usues, but they make for sensible baselines.
For any of you nerds who are trying to understand and rationalise how the fuck this would even work I've got a theory. Considering this is a mining vessel, in the same way that people have work uniforms you probably navigated all of this in an MT or AC. There probably were living quarters hidden away somewhere but I imagine most of your interactions with this would have been meched up, hence the unfathomably large scale. It's cool to think about how this was built and repaired. It's likely all considerations of this were designed with MTs and ACs in mind and humanity as an afterthought.
I don't know whether I'm more shocked by the scale of this thing, or the fact that from Castle Morne to the Erdtree is only ~5km. I can't believe this huge adventure that took me like a month to get through on horseback would be a casual day hike.
The Strider as a level is such a weird yet ambitious play, I should go back an explore the bounds of what makes this level. Because you obviously start off on the ground, and the first objective is to destroy on leg in order to create a foothold to climb it. In a few moments, the Strider will try to escape and move away from its fallen segment. From then onward, it's possible to fall off the Strider completely and fail the mission. But once you deal with the eye, you're expected to fly off the Strider completely to avoid it's explosion.
Falling off doesn't fail the mission, just puts you back on a ledge with some AP missing. This is true of all missions with falling hazards except for the laser grid one, which just kills you. :p I found that out because I've had some combat log enemies fall down there but not die to the laser grid, prompting me to go down there and try to finish them off only to die to the lasers. >.>
I would have been neat if in the NG+'s of AC6, the strider maybe could have been the beefier version with 3 eyes on it! Maybe that could be modded in eventually?
While that'll be cool, if we're talking lore sense, the Strider having 3 eyes definitely won't be able to move, due to the amount of power needed(unless in NG++ RLF manage to snag institue stuff). While the laser could be "up-to-date", the Strider itself is like HALF a century or more years old. Just retrofitted with guns. Even if there was a "beefier" version(like more armor, generators, etc), it's less likely it'll be on "par" with something like Mother Will. Plus all that power to shoot(at least try) 3 eyes prob make a "nuke" of an explosion if anything when fired. It'll be more of a walking bomb
I know it's part of the armored core vibe, not seeing any humans, so you feel more alienated but fuck me how I wish there were some, just to be able to fully fathom the scale of it all. I know there are always handrails, doors, steps and vehicles to get an idea but it will never come close to the impact of seeing those teeny tiny ants. Completely unrelated but could you imagine a Death Stranding style game in an armored core like setting? The Blame! Vibes would be absolutely incredible, you would feel so dwarfed by the world, I can only dream
We only see that in cutscenes and skyboxes, at a guess since we can fly around the xylum, and that is about 1/10th the surface section of the plant, and we descend 10s of thousands of meters below sea level to institute city and even then it might go to the planets core
Hey Zullie, big fan of your work! I was wondering if you've ever pondered how the Elden Ring lesser giants(trolls) might've had their mid-sectional face amputated to be replaced with the tombstone? Perhaps the oath they swore to Caria involved their reluctance to house the Flame of Frenzy within them any longer, and so their midsection was removed and the tombstone inserted, as a way to keep the trolls from wilting/drying up/perishing without the FoF's 'spark of life'? And as a way to make sure their oath to fight for the Carians was honoured. Since the tombstone is, oddly enough, coded as a mount-anchor, perhaps it's a nod to how it's keeping them alive and anchored to this world? I know it's a bit of a stretch, but the proboscis/node at the base of their ribcage does rather resemble a vestigial nose. All the best, and keep up the amazing work!
The Giants have nothing to do with the Flame of Frenzy. Their deity, the Fell God, just happens to be fire-based. You can even tell visually: Frenzied Flame is more yellow and Giant's Flame is more red.
If we count only the actual Strider model itself, it ends up being a bit shorter, around 4,787m, as the objects attached to it extend out by a decent amount. This puts it just barely under three miles long by itself, and just barely over with the objects. When I first loaded the Strider in Elden Ring, I was surprised to see the deck was completely missing on each segment, which led to the realization they used objects for most of its surfaces.
I hope we will see walkable NPCs in Elden Ring DLC! They need to give us something good 😊 there as well.
@@cipherstormwolf14 There technically already are, you can stand on the Walking Mausoleums.
These comparisons are just so good to muse on. 621 is the protagonist on Rubicon but in the Lands Between would be an incomprehensible horror to it's denizens, as would the rest of the Mechs and AC units.
@@TOUGHEYES Sure would be cathartic to load up my AC and blast Malenia to kingdom come
So what happens if you let the Strider walk without destroying it? Does it actually move, or just have the illusion of moving? Does it eventually stop? Where's the edge of the map?
The perspective swap between Armored Core and Elden Ring is insane
Imagine getting looks combining no man sky with elden.
"Man, that dragon's real big"
...
"No, it's not"
It's an amazing thing to be able to see! Such a unique connection in this way between the two games
@@Poldovico In the end, the real monsters were the machines that humanity made...
Makes me wonder what mold FromSoft is going to break next! ER's map is HUGE! I wouldn't be surprised if they found a way to include a 1:1 scale map of Japan or something.
The atmosphere of this level is so crazy. The way you fly in through the duststorm and see the moving shadows and the eye’s laser charging up through the dust, only to take in the full scale of the thing as you close in
It's probably also the only level that's set in a desert as opposed to 95%, there's also the arena and PvP maps but they are simulations.
@@aryabratsahoo7474well… there’s also that one NG++ mission. „Escort the Weaponized Mining Ship“ or something like that. But I guess that one doesn’t *really* count, because it’s literally just an alternative version of this mission
@@KeDe1606 yeah tbh because it's just this exact setpiece but with a different mission objective, the place and the object in question are the same so 😶
@@Bolt2049 I wish we could‘ve played through more of these extremely large-scale scenarios. I feel like the only other mission which‘s sense of scope even somewhat rivals this one‘s is [Spoilers for the Fires of Raven ending]
When the Raven and Carla destroy that fleet of Warships with the infinite boost. Other than that there’s like the Iceworm fight, Operation Wallclimber and I guess some of the endgame missions, mainly the Liberator of Rubicon variant of the aforementioned FoR mission, and some other missions like the one where you take out V.I Freud or that short segment right before you fight Handler Walter in the LoR ending. But even those feel incredibly boxed-in/linear at times. If this game gets some sort of expansion in the future, I hope we get at least one more „open“ mission like the mining ship ones. Like maybe a mission where you have to directly take down the Xymex? Idk, I‘m grasping at straws here
@@KeDe1606i wouldn't be suprised if they do more with it in the next part of this gen.
That was fromsofts MO with AC, the Numbered title tended to have quite a few good ideas and a few glarinflg issues but then the expansion games would go bigger
At this point, I expect the Xylem to be bigger than some real-world countries
Oh god the xylem will just straight up dwarf the lands between.
There will never be a bigger boss than mr Wyzen from Azura's Wrath
@@secretname2670 There's bigger bosses even inside Asura's Wrath, chakravartin is far far bigger than even galaxies at one point
I mean the strider is already bigger than some countries
If the Strider is almost 5km long, then the Xylem might very well be in the ballpark of Star Wars' _Executor_ (19km long), which itself is roughly the size of the island of Manhattan. So, yeah, pretty big.
Seeing the scale of those bosses really makes me want to play the game more and more
It's absolutely worth it!
It's a really good game, I enjoyed every minute I played it
I mean, it's a FANTASTIC game, sooooooo
banger game!
They should be paying Zullie for these videos cause for people like me they're more effective marketing than anything an ad team could come up with
It makes perfect sense to me why the Strider was used. Giant scaling like this helps set the tone that if you’re fighting a boss of this magnitude early on, it sets the course for just how vicious the rest of the bosses will be later on - even the much smaller ACs. Furthermore, this goes with From Software’s tradition of making enemies bigger than the player to make the former more intimidating in appearance.
Yes.
As for me, Strider show how strong he, player, is. This mission clearly demonstrates why AC is so important.
The Feeling when the captain calls for the abandonment of the back legs and the progressive tenseness he feels as you get farther. It hits well
it holds to a similar position as the spirit of Motherwill was, a huge boss to make you really work for your first moment of real progress. though the strider feels sort of like a dumbed down and kinda wimpy boss hen compared to Motherwill.
@@ianbrown9189 I mean, Motherwill was a moving FORTRESS, With airstrips battleship cannons, and enough missiles to level Belgorod like it was the 90s again. Compared to the strider which all it had offensively was the eye, turret defenses strap to the side. And Maybe MT forces that should of been up top to repel borders or somethin. Basically comparing a technical to a Nimits class carrier
@@ianbrown9189 Tbf, The motherwill is basically a Tank, while the strider is The KillDozer. Of course the Killdozer is wimpy compared to the tank, thats why no one fields hastily modifed construction equipment vs actually Vehicles of war.
"one of the largest NPCs"
my stister in Marika this thing is the size of the Bloodborne map
Is also a bigger than Monaco
It is amazing how huge that mining ship really is when you compare it to other things. I just wish there is a mission it would survive instead of being destroyed.
You could make a very interesting game out of being the captain of a gigantic, lumbering landship like the Strider, having to manage moving slowly towards your main objective while juggling hundreds of smaller enemies swarming and taking bites out of you
@@chazaqiel2319 Not quite combat, but Wandering Village has a similar concept. The original Guns of Icarus (now renamed to Flight of The Icarus to avoid confusion with GoI: Online) also worked something like that.
@@chazaqiel2319 While not exactly the same there is Highfleet where you need to manage multiple ships rather than a single large one but is fits the rough concept of slowly advancing on an objective while managing enemies, supplies, your ship designs ina balance to not get ground down by attrition.
Its a canon event
You could say It's something built to fail...
It's crazy to me that all of Armor Core's models are actually to the scale in the engine that they're described as, instead of being downscaled to save on resources.
Size has no impact on performance until you get to astronomical proportions big or small. Density is.
@@davidburke4101 true, it's not like a large model necessarily requires more polys or whatever. but it is surprising, i think, that the engine can handle such vast differences in scale without, like, integer overflow bugs, or weird physics glitches or something. i would have thought they'd have to keep the engine's tolerances pretty tight for the sake of optimisation.
@@somniloquous0 Eh. It's a misconception that scale affects anything in rendering. The only reason super large and super small objects have effects on performance is because the numbers/decimals grow so large that there starts to become errors. This is because the math games use is only precise to a certain point, and then the results become approximations instead of true results. It's also why going super far from the center of the world causes glitches, because the position number grows too large.
When an engine is made they don't "optimize for scale" because there's not really much optimization to make. Technically speaking; optimizing for scale would actually make the engine slow as shit, because each calculation now needs to be super precise instead of using shorter calculations that only become inaccurate at insane scales.
Not entirely true. Vertex data needs to contain more digits, and thus needs to tale up more space with larger models, but its a mater of a couple kilobytes of data. Irrelevant with todays computers.
@@davidburke4101 eh I don't know. I mean, it's not just the scale but the fidelity of detail you can pack into every single frame? I'd say Armored Core devs did a good job of knowing where their priorities should be and where it shouldn't.
Don't get me wrong, it's not a "graphically stunning" game but it doesn't have to be. They've been doing this since 1998 and I'm glad they took all the lessons learned from previous entries.
Honestly the thing that surprises me the most about this is how not surprising it is. When you showed the human size comparison at 2:00 my immediate thought was, "Yeah, that seems about what I would have expected it to be." Which is both a testament to From's industrial design but also how deceptively small the Lands Between are.
Guys when they say it’s only walking distance.
@@ReRoute25 I walk about that far to get to work every day so, honestly, yeah LMAO
The Lands Between are a very small island. You can traverse it on horseback in a matter of minutes.
@@cerberusthethird Legit my commute to work is only a little shorter lol
I'm assuming the lands between are shrunken down for gameplay purposes, or it could actually be that small lol
The strider once again proves a point From loves to make:
No matter how big and intimidating the opponents get , nothing will ever be as terrifying as around ten wheel-based enemies rushing towards you.
Heh...
One of the things in DS3 that shocked me is that the wheel enemies in that game isn't dangerous
Please no.
My PTSD.
NO.
Word to the wise
When Loghunt, er, Hunting at the end of Chapter 4 and S ranking the alternate strider mission
Use the 4-shot hand missiles. They fucking destroy the wheels
I'm on my 3rd run and chose the "escort" mission so I can do the Alea Iacta Est ending and just get access to all the new missions in NG++. I figured it wasn't going to be so straightforward. I did not expect buzzsaws from hell. I got stuck on it last night. I did Liberator of Rubicon as my 2nd ending and was heartbroken over it, so I continued into NG++ just to hear Walter again (that ending was harder for me emotionally than the Fires of Raven ending even if the boss fight was a ton easier). I was doing all kinds of swearing and I'm still working on what weapons to use. I prefer lots of energy weapons, but those Helianthus wheels are weaker against explosive stuff based on the damage my Soup missiles were doing.
the alternative mission of the third run.
I have to say that it was a pleasant surprise that my beloved cannon platform helped me get the S there
Seeing armored core models alongside the world of Elden Ring is very surreal. Another interesting watch, Zullie!
Btw, now that I realize, The Last Between wouldn't be as large as a continent in Real Life scale(about 20 km), so should we count It as a continent, or just a island instead?
@@JoseViktor4099
For various reasons open world maps are better at a “scale” than full realistic proportions. Just think that in the real world walking 1km it’s normal and a matter of minutes, but walking a km in a game and it’s boring.
I’m not saying open worlds should be small, nor the meme comment of “wide as an ocean deep as a puddle”.
I’m saying that depending on the gameplay and travel options a “continent” in a game could be much smaller than in real life
It makes me want a armored core where you can exit and play on foot, like a 3d version of front mission gun hazard on the snes
@@1r0zz I see. Its still fun to compare nonetheless to real Life standards. Makes you think if TLB may be much bigger IRL and thus the Tarnished Odyssey would be much larger. Maybe took him a real decade to do so.
Btw, they did made huge maps at the time, the biggest one (that was actually designed and did not relied on RNG) has the size of England. Thats huge and insane.
@@JoseViktor4099 It's called compressed scale. Lorewise, Lands between is an entire continent with an appropriate scale, but it's been compressed in the game due to both technical and gameplay reasons.
Rather than a trip from Leyndell to Stormwind taking less than half an hour on horseback as it's in the game, lore-wise it would take days.
The problem with *AC6* is that it's very easy to forget the scale.
All the enemies you face are equal or larger in size compared to you.
There are no people walking about or cars driving around.
In the underground mission I stopped in a small cargo room and noticed a staircase that lead up to a walkway and realised how small it was to my AC.
I spent the next ten minutes moving around the room and realised that this cargo bay was in fact an Enormous space that would take 20 to 30 mins to walk from one end to another, yet my AC could do it in three seconds.
I always liked those little environmental details because it shows just how much humanity has transformed the landscape in Armored Core's vision of the future. Pilots are practically one with their AC, and technological advancements through ALLMIND are analyzing how to best adapt a mechanical frame to act as an extension of the human nervous system. There are still vehicles, walkways, and staircases here and there, but heavy duty combative machinery has become the predominent species. It's a deeply hostile world built for giants.
The Distance says certain hallways are 500m, which is…INSANE to think about.
I really appreciated my AC size when i encountered crab.
Repair crab made me realize i big
i realized when looking at the buildings and windows
What really hit me was That "Destroy the PCA fuel tank" or whatever. I was standing near the car saying smt like: "uuu! Look at you! You pathetic little vehicle" then I turn around and see an ENORMOUS TUBE. Like one and a half as big as my AC. The screws that hold the thing together is probably as big as a house
I love these "let's use ER for scale" videos. It really hammers home how BIG everything in AC6 is. Please continue as long as you want to do so.
"Tarnished for scale"
Love these comparisons and seeing these huge Bosses from ACVI in the Lands Between. Armored Core has an amazing way of visualizing and letting you feel the insane scale of everything already, but this makes it so much more interesting!
the Strider was the point in the game that sold me, with how the level was crafted. Starting a ways out with the eye barely visible in the duststorm and acting as a sort of 'set piece' in the background - only to realise no, it's *actually* all there and you have to take it down directly. That was such a mindblowing moment
It's always fun drawing comparisons in scale between universes. Even in other Sci-Fi universes this walker would be considered asinine. Compared to something from Star Wars for example, the Imperial class star destroyers are 1,600 meters (1.6 km) in length. Given the estimates here, this means bow to stern you could line up 3 of those sizable vessels over the Strider and still have room to spare. Ultimately, this land locked machine has a comparable size to a small star dreadnought from the Star Wars universe. This means the walkers in Star Wars aren't even worth mention in the presence of this hulking mass, as even the largest are only measured in dozens of meters, not thousands.
I always liked Warhammer 40k scale, it feels right to me. Your average heavy cruiser spaceship will be around 4-7km, very comparable to the strider. Then you can take Gloriana class battleship, one of the largest navy units of Imperium, they are around 20km! Big, but not big enough to dwarf the Strider. And then you can look at continental-sized spaceships of Eldar, or the planet-sized World Engine of Necrons. Truly unfathomable dimensions (don't get me started on the Chaos Fortress the size of a solar system: "The fortress spanned a system. The wall was tens of millions of miles high. It was billions of miles long. And though the proximity was lethal, it was still millions of miles away").
@@aesthetic-ds2mt 40k is definitely my favorite Sci-Fi setting, especially when it comes to sheer absurdity in scale. Everything is absolutely ridiculous in that universe, perfectly so. I also really like the general feeling of the setting in which there is really no good guy faction, per say. That said, even regarding 40k, Imperator titans are dwarfed by the Strider, which is pretty silly in itself.
Eh. I mean, Amarr Avatars clock in around 13-14 km, and even old GSVs are like, 9 km. (Sleeper Service is like, 50?)
@@aesthetic-ds2mt you can make gigantic scifi ships but its rare for writers to actually think about why they would need to be that big other than the cool factor. What does a 20km ship do that 40 5km ones cant? Also remember that irl the biggest ships are cargo ships, not military ones. with this one, a desperate force of the people repurposing a mining machine they have available makes a lot more sense that purposefully building a thing that large for combat
@@swordofthereal In 40k nearly all ships are generational ships, you don't replace dead crew with new trained recruits from a station or planet, if you want more crew you tell people to get to breeding more than previously required and then train the children into what you need. The bigger the ship the more wiggle room you got incase of a population collapse in the crew.
Most ships are to a degree self-sufficient with internal food growth/supply and can sometimes get 'lost' for a century or two, bigger the ship the lower the chance is suffers catastrophic damage and is lost for practically forever, and bigger the ship the more shield and armor you can shove onto it to ensure it can take a pounding from either enemies or enviroment.
The biggest space ships are like in real life the cargo ships, Gloriana class battle ships were notable for being the same size as massive cargo freighters but packed with so much armor and guns they're basically armed asteroids with engines strapped on.
Honestly, I do wish Strider had been given the superweapon treatment like in Ace Combat, where the entire encounter is usually multi-layered, either with support mini-bosses or step by step disabling of the behemoth, like say the Aigaion in AC6 (no, the other AC6) where you not only have to deal with support gunships and ecm platforms, when you try to bite into the main boss you have to strip it's defences layer by layer, first the guns, then engines, finally the cockpit, all while dealing with defending fighters at the same time. Imagine how epic the mission could've been if first phase you had to destroy underbelly weaponry before you can actually try to break one of the legs, would've made a great mid/late game boss
It certainly could have, but unlike the Spirit of Motherwill I believe the ease of which the Strider can be taken down serves a narrative function, showing just how out of their depth the RLF is that their crowning glory is still just a modified mining vessel that can be taken out by a single, relatively green independent mercenary.
I'll also argue that it may serve a gameplay function too, as I have a friend who struggled navigating around this mission until it was pointed out that they didn't upgrade their generator and boosters. It made me wonder if part of this mission was to teach new players not to ignore internal part upgrades knowing many will focus solely on new weapons and frame parts. I have nothing to back this up though, just speculation.
That said, I do still agree and hope we get another, tougher encounter like this in future content.
@@ArmoredGriffonthere would be an army of mt on the strider but you destroyed them on the destroy the helicopter mission, all of them is the backup for the strider
@KABLAMMATS And it takes what, 3 minutes to clear all of them even with their tetrapod buddy?
They could throw two or three times as many MTs and all of the Liberation Front ACs in and the Strider would still be easy.
@@Mare_Manto be fair you're in an ac, that shit is a death machine, those mt is no match for an ac, even the ac jailbreak can climb the wall, well depends on the pilot. But you're right they should put one ac on strider since the RLF is so proud of it or maybe because of their hubris?
@@KABLAMMATSThe thing is that the STRIDER is not really meant to be defended by an AC, it should be able to do it on its own. The most likely reason to use the STRIDER as a weapons platform is to project force without the need for the RLF to use one of their precious few ACs. So sending an AC to defend it would defeat the purpose of the STRIDER I think.
The older model of the strider could very well be the ‘[6060] IA-05: DESERT WEEVIL’ which is in the game text files in the part that displays the names under the bosses’ health bars.
The way the old model looks makes it seem like much more advanced tech, like an institute weapon, which would fit the IA letters that are present in the data and in the name of every non ibis series institute craft.
The red eyes look like they’re powered by coral, so it might’ve also been a c-weapon
Ac 6 still a covided game. I guess from have some cards in the sleeve.
That could very well be the case, and it's entirely possible that if this game gets DLC, this will be one of the bosses.
given its original function of coral mining before the RLF added additional weaponry, it even moreso seems like this was an institute relic. even if not a C-weapon, how did the survivors of a planet-wide firestorm get something like that built and running in just a few decades from scratch? seems more logical that it was acquired, though that raises the question of whether there is more of them somewhere?
電車オフィシャルガイドブックによると
「ストライダー護衛」の最初と最後に出現した
ミサイル攻撃するC兵器がIA-05:WEEVILという名前になっているのでおそらく名前を再利用したと思われます
I don’t think the eye is a mining laser, isn’t it one of the space defence stations turrets that they’ve attached to the strider and that’s why it’s now a force to be reckoned with?
Correct. I think the confusion is that the Strider itself is a mining platform (hence the big drills), but the RLF bolted a bunch of guns to it (including the big laser) to use it as a weapon against the corps and the PCA
@@yotube155
This.
The Strider is a killdozer, more or less.
The big saw and the drill are originally mining equipment, and the platform itself was used to haul them, and possibly other stuff, some of the turrets may have been on it standard to shoot at birds or protesters or something, but most of the turrets and the eye are guns that were welded to it to make it more Orky, with probably unintended synergy between systems in the form of the shield.
@@aprinnyonbreak1290
Ironically, despite its huge size, Strider remains a fragile and vulnerable working machine. He is trying to RUN AWAY from small ten-meter AC.
@@HindrancUS
And instead it's a long range siege platform designed to fire a Coral powered superlaser at extreme distances and create a massive zone of denial that anything short of PCA satellite weapons cannot reach.
The eye used to channel the power grid is its weakness as the miner is not built to withstand excess power production that is used to power the turret.
@@HindrancUSThis. The Strider seems virtually incapable of defending itself against smaller craft. The legs aren't properly armored (which is weird considering there are things with legs on Rubicon that can take volley after volley of missile fire and not topple).
The laser has too slow of a wind-up time and the aiming system practically begs the enemy to dodge with its vertical-only -sweep.
Considering the load bearing capability, the Strider seems tragically undergunned. Remove the drill, install large batteries of flak cannons to deny the enemy maneuverability near the hull and they could keep the sub generators safer.
Last: where are the screens? Scavenged MTs, RaD mechs, anything. Something to tie the approaching craft down while the Eye and/or the weapons platforms nuke the enemy.
In short: ... something built to fail. In hindsight, maybe the RLF design philosophy was perfectly mirrored by how the Ship Captain continually dismisses the XO's warnings about the Eye taking damage, and then Surprised Pikachu Faces when the rig actually implodes
That would be a terrifying moment to see that emerge from the fog as it approached the land in between. I wonder how the inhabitants would react.
Just throw Godfrey at it, should be fine.
I meant, they dealt with half a km giants before seemingly, the Strider isn't that much bigger, but is probably much slower. Surely everlasting dragons would destroy it, they're rather agile and can cast lightning.
@@yollnahkriin6604 The Strider is 5km which is 10x that...not really 'not that much' larger. However it should be very slow and nonmanuverable
@@yollnahkriin6604 you forgot about the long range missiles and active laser targeting by the eye would take any dragon down in a couple of shots and from long range. yes its slow but it has a long range targeting array for its missiles and laser. also it's shielded. your ac has to take out all the generators first to take out the eye's shields. it would be a tactical fight for any one of er's dragons.
They'd start praying at it for one thing....
1:54 The Strider here feels oddly not too out of place. Seeing Raya Lucaria with the Strider in the background and the fog in-between makes me wish for FromSoft to make a game with the 40k aesthetic but with a heavier gothic theme.
An entire level masquaradeibg as a boss
3:19 The moment you realize Zullie's AC is a proper cosplay, equipped with moonlight sword, even the coax plasma launchers emulating a witches hat :O
and quad legs for a "dress". mad cute detail
I don't know who said it but I agree, "Tarnished for scale" is my favorite unit of measurement.
I loved that mission. Needs a multiplayer version where 1 team attacks and the other defends.
Good fucking lord I need this so bad. The PVP is so barebones in AC6. Objective based pvp missions would be so much more fun, having AC battles atop the Strider, PCA warships, etc.
I'd love just having co-op missions in general, with or without PvP
When the game was first announced I thought it would have a mix of both. Like a mix of solo and group missions with a possibility for being "invaded". Like you take too long blowing up a fuel depot so the corp deploys a raven to stop you. There's a lot of cool stuff they can do here hopefully
@@xXFuzzeeXx
As much as people hate on 5th gen, those games had peak AC multiplayer features
Maybe they'll make an expansion that more or less gives us Verdict Day-esque PvP modes
that would be pretty unbalanced, defending team has to just worry about kills while attacking team has to worry about kills + getting to the generators + a giant eye shooting at them
I love how Elden Ring is a constant measurement system for Armored Core.
But besides all of that, this NPC is really huge though, imagine you're just chilling around with the stormveil homies, then you saw this.
Armored Core 6: Fires of Megalophobia
While of course it's gargantuan by the standard of something like Elden Ring, it's also enormous even by the standards set in Armored Core and mecha at large. The Spirit of Motherwill, which was the previous high mark for huge enemies in AC is also dwarfed by this thing, and the SDF-1 Macross, the enormous warship that gives the Macross series its name is shorter in length than even the shortest Strider segment. All of this and it's a relatively easy enemy to kill, and I think it's intentional to drive home the point of the player character's fearsome skills and reputation - it's notable that Motherwill served in much the same role in For Answer.
It sucks that the hardware limitations of PS3 & XBox 360 prevented the Motherwill to be rendered to its actual canonical size.
Imagine a 4th gen. Remake... definitely a lot more bigger now
Honestly though, with both Strider and Motherwill, I would prefer longer missions involving taking out multiple weak and central points as well as defending troops, make it an ordeal worthy of the scale. I THINK Motherwill is better in that regard (it's been ages since I witnessed it and I'm several games away now from it in my AC series playthrough), but I recall back then a feeling of "wait that's it?"
Yeah, I was also thinking that AC4A is a good comparison with its emphasis on these incredibly large installation-type enemies. I think it also serves as a good demonstration of how flexible and powerful ACs are, in spite of their size.
@@InternetHydra I think it works lore-wise for the Strider to not be that tough. It's big, but it's still a retrofitted mining platform rather than a bespoke weapon system. Still, it would be cool to have a big boss fight play out how you're describing it and I wish there was something like that in the late game
@@yotube155 Yeah you get it, in spite of the size difference, the reason as to why Spirit of Motherwill is supposed to be tougher is due to the fact that Arms Forts are actual dedicated weapons platforms which were designed with the near exclusive intent of supressing the power of NEXTs (AC4/4A ACs). While the STRIDER is just a lumbering and aged mining patform with a couple point defense weapons and a huge orbital laser strapped on top, the energy strain on the vehicule is such that the generatos need to be placed outside in order for the machine to be propery cooled.
The level also does a good job of showcasing why the Strider is a bad idea. It's massive size actively works against it; its slow as shit and while the Eye is an impressive weapons system, it has trouble tracking small, fast moving targets, and the insane bulk of the strider means its covered in blindspots where the Eye cannot acquire targets, at which it has to rely entirely on its aneamic array of point defense weapons, since it has no escort of any kind.
Despite being the 'flagship' of the liberation front, its clear even the corps understood how meaningless it was, hence letting some no name merc handle it when freud or rusty could have made quick work of it. It didnt even warrant the attention of a vesper.
To be fair, the RLF didn't really have that many options, and the Strider is still an imposing presence that works well as a command center and mobile staging point for the RLF's operations. In the end though, it's still just a modified mining ship and not a purpose-build battlefield weapon.
@@StrikeNoir105E part of my point is the eye would have been better used as a fixed defensive weapon somewhere like the wall
@@Freekymoho A moving, super powerful laser mounted on a platform that can move under its own power wasn't that bad of an idea tbh, it's just trying to make a thing that's not at all designed for fighting purposes (the strider itself) for battle would obviously come with a shitton of practical problems that gives it too many issues to be practical
The problem is that it's alone with no defenses. It's like an aircraft carrier without it's fleet. A tank without it's infantry, etc.
@@fatcat1250 That's definitely a huge issue, that exacerbates all of it's other flaws
That moment you load it into the ER map is just immaculate. It's both impressive and comical
These size comparisons are really fun to watch.
Thanks for the video!
Man this just makes me wish for a mod where we can explore the strider as tarnished, it could literally be a whole dlc it is crazy how huge it is. Imagine witnessing this destruction in the perspective of a tarnished... it was already impressive as an armored core xD but this would like the meteorite killing all the dinosaurs...
A crossover DLC would be funny and awesome as hell. Tarnished gets issekaid into Rubicon 3. But yeah you could easily make a 20 or 30 hour DLC that takes place on the Strider. I mean the Ishimura from Dead Space is "only" 1600 meter long and the game is like 12 hours.
With the help of powerful magic manage to destroy a leg of the strider, traverse the upper deck of the the strider, destroy the generators to disable the eye. Once you reach the eye in up close, 621 lands as the final boss fight. Upon defeating 621 you are given a miniature version of 621's gun as a boss drop which allows you to destroy the eye, causing the strider to self destruct.
Like Rubicon was at one point the center for human civilization and advancement till they torched it. Who's to say someone in some geology department didn't pick up some old ground from the world of Elden Ring post Ranni Ending and freeing humanity to the stars a million years later. But there is still one active summon sign left, just for the moon consort to be summoned somehow to witness that wasteland, and the towering metal beasts in front of him. Not that it matters much, powerscaling wise, the Tarnished post Elden Lord would be powerful enough to take down an AC if he catches one before they fly away. Depending on the skills one says their Tarnished learned, it could be a huge spectacle too. Like all of a sudden, some strength mage gets on the field spewing Azur Comet into the side of the Strider, or a dragon cult member starts smacking down ACs with bolt and claw, or some pure Quality Builds with the Tarnished going full Godfrey and using his Godly armaments and muscle to charge anything in sight.
And yet the Strider is but a fraction of the size of my brain when I blindly put in the USB the right way in first try.
These are awesome comparisons! You do some dope work showing us these designs. It really helps show the scale of these games.
I rlly liked the concept of climbing a huge metalic monster and destroying components to in the end put down the beast and i hope FS does more of it in the future cuz damn theyre good at it
I love how they utilized size in this game to create such a sense of awe.
Such a cool, technical video breaking down some of my favorite games, you honestly add to the FS lore by giving it away in a sense, always love you’re insight. Have a good one!
"It was this big bruv, larger than my land!"
"Oh, stop it mate, my strider isn't that huge."
_Godfrey crushed under the Strider's leg_
> Thy -strength- weight befits a crown
Someone really just said "Hey, let's make a boss that is half as big as the entire map from the last game we made."
If its possible I'm interested in seeing size comparisons between the ACFA arms forts, those things where insane
@@Vulture_5 Spirit of the Motherwill is apparently supposed to be ~600 Meters tall and ~2400 Meters long.
As you said, is crazy the Strider is one of the first bosses you encounter.
I know that the scale of Armored Core 6 is simply massive compared to previous games, but even aside from the sheer size, having such a huge, moving, climbable NPC with so many "riders" is astounding. Didn't From try and fail to do mounted NPCs before?
It makes me wonder what sort of technical feats we'll see from From in the next few releases!
Theres mounted enemies in Elden Ring.
@@lordanonimmo7699 Yes, you are absolutely right, but if I recall correctly, Elden Ring was the first game in which they got it working after we've found evidence of them having tried and failed in previous games.
IIRC there's only ever pairs of rider/mount in Elden Ring, but AC6 has a gargantuan mount with tons of riders.
Apologies for not being clear :)
Mmmm
I don't want to fight the Curse Rotted Greatwood again.
@@ultradude5410 Gargantuan mount with tons of riders? Are you talking about AC6 or your mom? /s
It actually would have been cool to have it in Elden Ring as a massive region size dungeon that you explore the same way a human would if it was real.
You know
When i heard unused design
I thought for an moment the spirit of motherwill would appear
I- my brain fails to comprehend the size of that thing. I can't. Me have headache now
Can't wait to fly around the world of Elden Ring in my AC someday.
I've been waiting for this, it's even bigger than I thought! I think it's safe to assume it even outsizes the Motherwill
It’s crazy that it’s actually that big… I assumed the ACs were scaled to roughly the size of a large person and they used tiny vehicles and visual tricks to make us feel big.
Rubicon is such a massive planet it’s crazy to think about
the image of the strider in elden ring, being so large that it just fades into the distance, is hilarious
Makes me wonder how big the Xylem is compared to other things, or the orbital defense platform.
My only gripe is how tf the Xylem is buried underground when we see that its so massive. The Institute city cavern must be so massive that gravitational survey would detect such a massive cavity. Also how tf they raised it from so deep underground all the way to the top
@@blodmourne What? In the Survey Drone mission, one of the logs involves a massive area of the Alean Ocean being unable to be scanned. That and with Xylem being called the Floating City and the map itself being in an ocean, means that Xylem was on the surface floating on the ocean and not inside Watchpoint Alpha like Institute City.
@@blodmourneI think you're confusing the Vascular plant with Xylem. Xylem was never at all buried, just "sunken" to have the name "floating city"
@@blodmourne Xylem was the floating city, it was just mostly submerged so only the top of it poked out above the water, think atlantis from stargate.
The vascular plant and it's nearby institute city were burried in that cavern under the watchpoint. It never came up to the surface or such though, they "repaired" and built up the part that went into space. I do find major fault with that, the idea they could build such a massive megastructure in such a short period of time. If they had that level of resources and materials on and production capability on hand, no way would the companies be a fraction as weak or troubled as they were, they should have been able to take over the planet in like a day or two if they put that same effort into building a drone army, simply because it would be so massive and OP to swamp everything else surface side. The story there and at other parts pretty badly failed to explain things or match up what happened in one time to another.
For the xylem though, it at least wasn't burried so that wasn't an issue. just sitting mostly submerged and with some stuff that interferes with scanners somehow.
oops yeah was talking about vascular plant. 2 AM brain
"We heard you have magical trees here, so we came to harvest them" XD
I'd love to see an Elden Ring character running the length of the strider, just as another way to put its size into perspective.
One foot is almost the size of the arena you face Ornstein and Smough in. Big boi!
I will never not be in awe at the sheer scale of Armored Core 6. This thing could cross the entire Lands Between in a couple steps and yet it is STILL dwarfed by the Grid structures dotting the surface of Rubicon like a steel canopy.
Also, the Zullie AC is absolutely majestic.
I wish they did more with the Strider or any other Arms Fort-type enemies/entities in the game. I was legit excited for the NG+2 'Escort the Strider' mission because it would've been cool to have to defend different parts of it from various enemy waves, but then the mission was... not that. A really cool design and concept spent in a single mission
Yeah, I can't deny that I was a bit let down by the escort mission too. Perhaps in the next game, or DLC.
Tbh thank god the mission was "not that", because protecting that massive thing would be very annoying.
One escort mission in the game is already too many. Glad the Strider was a bait-and-switch instead of having to slog through another.
@@Vulture_5So you're telling me that remaking Armored Core For Answer is not possible?
:(
The strider is so slow and massive it'd be less of an "escort" mission but more of a defensive mission in which they're far more of... Come on man, how dope would it have been to have the strider's eye on YOUR side for a change? There could have been a bonus objective if you kept the strider's leg in tact, otherwise the strider crashes like in the original mission and you're force to fend off the enemy forces as they climb the enemy's back.
Elden Ring: Our once beautiful land is now beset by demigods and gods from all sides
random Armored Core megacorp: A Walmart would look great here
Im still kinda sad that you can’t actually prevent the strider from getting destroyed, I was so happy that we got hired to defend the strider only to get the sudden shock of the strider getting absolutely obliterated, it was a great mission to introduce how dangerous it will get, but there is still that hope that we could’ve maybe saved it under different circumstances
Perhaps the most impressive part of all this- is how well the game handles it, like I never noticed any fps or performance drop due to the immense size of the strider.
Armored Core VI is probably the best optimized game of FromFoftware in recent years. Might even run better than Sekiro, which also run pretty well. I can't tell the same about the Souls series or bloodborne; running well enought but overall having some technical issues.
@@Koeras16 Yeah FS is notorious for poor optimization esp on PC- DS1 on PC was an utter disaster, surprisingly DS2 would run on nearly anything, DS3 ran rather poorly until a few patches, and ER was stuttering like hell everytime you had to load in a new area thanks to shaders (and after every patch) Not so with AC6.
Also kinda funny was BB- dropping below 20~30 fps during intense fights and co-op/pvp and having 5~10m long loading screens on the PS4.
They knew damn well people would be taking ac assets and putting them in elden ring, so the absolute Chads built everything to scale.
My god has gaming come far
Elden Ring: The Erdtrees stand tall and proud over the Lands Betwe- WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT
Armored Core: this place looks like a good area to mine resources
AC6 - Yeah that thing is a pile of junk made to fail, one AC can take care of it.
Elden Ring - The fuck...
last time i seen this channel you were at about 20k subscribers the growth is insane. hoping for more success in the future 🙏
It's crazy how tiny The Lands Between is when you import AC models into it lol
If the strider is this big i want to see how the Xylem compares to the whole Elden Ring map.
Excelent music choice, as always. Finding zelda music that fits with the exact tone of the video every time can't be easy.
Part of the reason it has so many objects attached to it may also be for performance. I habe no idea if the game actually does this, but loading only the nearby segments would be help performance when loading such a large model
1:55 NGL this is an epic shot. Futuristic mining rig walking over the ruins of a fantasy kingdom.
Amazing work, Zullie, keep it up! :D
Wish we could see the Spirit of Motherwill or Great Wall or something on in there..
Having you uploading again really is a blessing. Thank you for your work.
I'm still sad there wasn't at least one more boss like this. It being so early on in the game sort of set a precedent.
I think it was just in there for the AC fans, From Softs boss design philosophy is definitely made for Dark Souls fans. So im glad that we had this one big throwback, just as a little present.
I've killed this thing to farm money so many times that I didn't even realize how utterly gargantuan it is. No wonder it's called the flagship of the resistance!
I love that a random desert with no lore is bigger than the entirety of elden ring
The STRIDER might as well be a DLC of its own in Elden Ring.
The scale in AC6 is what makes every mission so amazing.
Even though the levels are so small, the views, environment and machines are insanely huge and it creates this feeling of grand scale. It's an illusion of course but it makes wonders because you never feel like you are in a tiny tight space, and instead you can see all the world beyond your mission goal.
It also makes you see that you are just a little spec of dust in this world and how even smaller humans are in these fights of mechanical titans. The myth and magic in the world may be gone, but these machines create their own myths with their size and power. Flying cities, six legged colossi, rocket launcher angels... arms race gone so insane it created it's own monsters.
These videos just make me wonder so much, Thanks Zullie for amazing content. Please keep on the good work
Good stuff as usual Zullie. I'm a little curious though how the size of the eye itself compares to Elden Ring as it already feels very large in AC. Looking forward to more.
the size comparison of all time!
it's probably already been mentioned already, but you can also see the wreckage of a Strider in one of the grid missions. i believe it's Infiltrate Grid 086 but i'd need to double check that
WHERE?
Well, given the Strider's size, its easy to not recognize him, especially if youre not looking for him specifically.
Please keep us informed of your checking.
@@HindrancUS found it. sortie on Inflitrate Grid 086 and then turn around and scooch on back to the rear boundary of the starting area to see it on the ground floor to the left. i'll post a pic link separately in case links get filtered
@@attenboro_8371
Gratitude size of Strider to you, comrade!
This makes the world in Elden Ring looked like a small sandbox...
I wish they had more Strider type levels.
There needed to be bigger bosses in general, it's strange they showed their hand so early
They probably did it early to keep people engaged making you think you'd fight other collosal bosses. Not many even knew about AC before this game.
Armoured Core gives major megalophobia vibes. For a world built by people it sure doesn’t feel like humans belong on Rubicon
I'm morbidly curious just how large NPCs slash objects the AC6 engine could actually handle. Like... almost five kilometers? That's almost absurd, and yet From made it look so easy.
Size doesn't matter in the engine. You can do small sizes and huge sizes, all the essentials to build the whole game on the same dimensions they did that to detail the tiny parts like houses stairs etc in edlen ring you don't need to details the rock and the eninvorment it is easy to generate
The engine more so use the poly count as a basis of how heavy the object is and render distance rather than the size of the object itself.
If vertex ppsition data is stored as 64bit integers, for milimeter precision you can have a maximum vertex offset of over 20 km.
These are not numbers the engine actually usues, but they make for sensible baselines.
All of these show me just how fast ACs can move
For any of you nerds who are trying to understand and rationalise how the fuck this would even work I've got a theory. Considering this is a mining vessel, in the same way that people have work uniforms you probably navigated all of this in an MT or AC. There probably were living quarters hidden away somewhere but I imagine most of your interactions with this would have been meched up, hence the unfathomably large scale.
It's cool to think about how this was built and repaired. It's likely all considerations of this were designed with MTs and ACs in mind and humanity as an afterthought.
Im now picturing an elden ring/armored core crossover dlc where the strider crashes into the lands between and is basically a massive legacy dungeon
how do you even manufacture something like this
i really appreciate that your core is also purple with a moonlight sword, this was a nice video!
I wonder how far does it walk since the beginning of the mission until destroyed
I don't know whether I'm more shocked by the scale of this thing, or the fact that from Castle Morne to the Erdtree is only ~5km. I can't believe this huge adventure that took me like a month to get through on horseback would be a casual day hike.
The Strider as a level is such a weird yet ambitious play, I should go back an explore the bounds of what makes this level. Because you obviously start off on the ground, and the first objective is to destroy on leg in order to create a foothold to climb it. In a few moments, the Strider will try to escape and move away from its fallen segment. From then onward, it's possible to fall off the Strider completely and fail the mission. But once you deal with the eye, you're expected to fly off the Strider completely to avoid it's explosion.
Falling off doesn't fail the mission, just puts you back on a ledge with some AP missing. This is true of all missions with falling hazards except for the laser grid one, which just kills you. :p
I found that out because I've had some combat log enemies fall down there but not die to the laser grid, prompting me to go down there and try to finish them off only to die to the lasers. >.>
Tarnished tell me your thoughts your ambitions:
I’m going to climb a giant robot
I would have been neat if in the NG+'s of AC6, the strider maybe could have been the beefier version with 3 eyes on it! Maybe that could be modded in eventually?
While that'll be cool, if we're talking lore sense, the Strider having 3 eyes definitely won't be able to move, due to the amount of power needed(unless in NG++ RLF manage to snag institue stuff). While the laser could be "up-to-date", the Strider itself is like HALF a century or more years old. Just retrofitted with guns. Even if there was a "beefier" version(like more armor, generators, etc), it's less likely it'll be on "par" with something like Mother Will. Plus all that power to shoot(at least try) 3 eyes prob make a "nuke" of an explosion if anything when fired. It'll be more of a walking bomb
I know it's part of the armored core vibe, not seeing any humans, so you feel more alienated but fuck me how I wish there were some, just to be able to fully fathom the scale of it all.
I know there are always handrails, doors, steps and vehicles to get an idea but it will never come close to the impact of seeing those teeny tiny ants.
Completely unrelated but could you imagine a Death Stranding style game in an armored core like setting?
The Blame! Vibes would be absolutely incredible, you would feel so dwarfed by the world, I can only dream
Now do how big is the vascular plant
We only see that in cutscenes and skyboxes, at a guess since we can fly around the xylum, and that is about 1/10th the surface section of the plant, and we descend 10s of thousands of meters below sea level to institute city and even then it might go to the planets core
I love these size comparison videos, I love seeing the colossal differences!👏🤘
Hey Zullie, big fan of your work!
I was wondering if you've ever pondered how the Elden Ring lesser giants(trolls) might've had their mid-sectional face amputated to be replaced with the tombstone? Perhaps the oath they swore to Caria involved their reluctance to house the Flame of Frenzy within them any longer, and so their midsection was removed and the tombstone inserted, as a way to keep the trolls from wilting/drying up/perishing without the FoF's 'spark of life'? And as a way to make sure their oath to fight for the Carians was honoured. Since the tombstone is, oddly enough, coded as a mount-anchor, perhaps it's a nod to how it's keeping them alive and anchored to this world? I know it's a bit of a stretch, but the proboscis/node at the base of their ribcage does rather resemble a vestigial nose.
All the best, and keep up the amazing work!
The Giants have nothing to do with the Flame of Frenzy. Their deity, the Fell God, just happens to be fire-based. You can even tell visually: Frenzied Flame is more yellow and Giant's Flame is more red.