Armored Core 6's biggest mech is so stupidly massive that it covers half of Elden Ring's map

A few areas of Armored Core 6 feature regular, normal-sized cars that come up to approximately toe-height on your average Armored Core mech, showing just how massive these machines can be. In an even more dramatic comparison, it turns out the largest mech in FromSoftware's latest game is approximately half the size of the studio's biggest game, Elden Ring.

FromSoftware sleuth Zullie the Witch recently dug into the absurd size of the Strider rig that comes up in an early mission of Armored Core 6. In the story, this retrofitted mining machine has been outfitted by the Rubicon Liberation Front, and it certainly feels big in the mission where you rip it apart piece by piece. But how big is it, really?

With no suitable bananas available for scale, Zullie ported the whole Strider into Elden Ring, which was a relatively simple task since both games use the same engine. The in-engine data indicates the Strider is approximately 4,953 meters long, with the longest of its three segments coming in at around 1,700 meters alone. 

Overlaid with Elden Ring's Lands Between, the Strider can cover almost the entirety of Caelid to Liurnia, as well as most of Limgrave barring the southern island. Just one Strider blankets about half of the open-world RPG's playable area, and two Striders end-to-end would be longer than all of the Lands Between, including its central ocean. 

Here's the rough representation of the Strider's total length. Along with showing how big the Strider is, it also gives an impression of the size of Armored Core 6's maps. pic.twitter.com/rf9flC79leOctober 2, 2023

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I reached out to Zullie to talk a bit more about this massive mech and how Armored Core 6 compares to Elden Ring under the hood. They affirmed that "everything in Armored Core 6 is modeled accurately to scale" since it and Elden Ring use meters by default. 

"The Tarnished in Elden Ring is 1.7 units, the default AC in AC6 is 10 units tall, etc. and that just translates 1:1 with metric," they explain. In a tweet, they note that "the map in an open-world game should usually be proportionally smaller, just so it's not a chore to walk around it. Armored Core 6 maps are more like the size you'd expect from actual locations, because you don't have to travel them on foot."

As big as the Strider is, the truly mind-boggling part here is that it's just a set piece in an even more massive level, yet the whole Strider mission blows by in only a few minutes when you're in a jet-boosted Armored Core. Remembering that humans are technically the same size in both game worlds, just think of how long it would take to walk an equivalent distance in Elden Ring with your tiny, Tarnished legs. More than anything I've seen, this comparison illustrates just how fast and powerful Armored Cores really are. 

"I haven't measured it, but the levels have to be tens of thousands of meters long, maybe even hundreds for some," Zullie says of Armored Core 6 environments, adding that "size doesn't actually matter much for performance costs or disk space though, it's mostly polygon counts and textures, so having these giant models doesn't impact much on a technical level." 

I reckon the Strider pilot is gonna need this guide: Armored Core 6 weight and overencumbered explained.