After showing off how puny Tarnished are in comparison to Armored Core 6’s maps, dataminer Dropoff has now gone in the opposite direction, demonstrating some beastly-huge mechs thrashing about in comparatively tiny Elden Ring environments.
This isn’t my personal holy grail of a mech one-shotting Malenia with the Red Shift, mind. Dropoff brought the Elden Ring map data into AC6 for a helpful size comparison, a process aided by the two games sharing the same engine and scale—a meter in Elden Ring is a meter in Armored Core 6.
When the video loaded with a cheeky GTA CJ-shaped modded mech in Godrick’s boss room, I immediately thought, “There’s no way CJ’s gonna fit through those gateways.” He didn’t have to though: the AC just boost jumped onto the castle ramparts, and was capable of zooming from Godrick all the way to the site of Margit the Fell’s boss fight in seconds flat.
The section of the video in Crumbling Farum Azula might be my favorite. This sprawling late-game dungeon in the sky could maybe make for a fun, if very cramped and unbalanced, PvP map for two ACs. Dropoff also switched to my least favorite kind of AC: still using CJ’s torso, but with tank treads instead of legs so he looks like a weird centaur with a car for his lower body. The video also demoed mecha-CJ boosting around Volcano Manor, Leyndell, and even Demons’ Souls Boletaria Palace world 1-2.
This all serves to underline one of my most deeply-felt gaming beliefs: an Armored Core could absolutely wipe the floor with anything in Elden Ring, or any other Soulsborne game for that matter. I’m definitely more of a Soulsborne guy than an Armored Core guy, and I’m sorry if this harsh truth goes against your blinkered worldview, but even the default booboo LOADER 4 mech from AC6 could speedrun Elden Ring and have the Elden Beast in a headlock in time for lunch. It wouldn’t be able to make it inside any of the Lands Between’s many caves, though.
For more on Elden Ring scale shenanigans, dataminer Zullie the Witch has some illuminating videos about Armored Core objects ported into Elden Ring. These map shenanigans also reminded me of one of the coolest videogame discoveries I’d ever seen: an early version of Bloodborne’s Upper Cathedral Ward hidden in Dark Souls Remastered’s files.
Wouldn’t you know it, that was also a Dropoff joint—this modder’s been dishing some of the hottest FromSoft map mashups for quite awhile. You can keep up to date with Dropoff’s projects and discoveries via the modder’s YouTube channel.
