PixlBit

Hey, did you know there's a new Armored Core game out today? I bet you didn't realize it. We received an announcement months ago that Armored Core: Verdict Day would be coming out soon, and then heard nothing until today, the day the game launches. Sure there are some minor YouTube videos out there and other blurbs, but you'd have to know to look for them, and even then it ain't much.

Now that it's here, you can just hop over to the game's dedicated site and find out... how badly Namco is handling this series again here in the states. Try clicking on some links you find there, and you'll see what I mean. The forums link goes nowhere and links on the community page all lead to 404s. Keeping up a website isn't easy and neither is promoting a game, but I'm pretty sure that's a big part of the publisher's actual purpose.

This is only frustrating to me because I was such a huge fan of the last game. That game was plagued from the get-go with extremely slow patch and update support, very little response to vocal complaints from the community, and an unwillingness to merge servers once the online population dwindled to such a degree to make online play almost non-existent. So, even though I would love to get excited about this new installment that seems to have added some cool features, it's probably not going to be worth the frustration (much less, the money). Hopefully, I'm all wrong, and Namco is gathering its energy for one final explosion of promotion and community interaction, but I'm not optimistic.