Yeah, I'm rather bored with the wide-but-shallow approach Bethesda games take. Tons of geography with maybe 20% filled with things of consequence. I am uninterested in collecting 42,000 wheels of cheese or finding some random space hobo on a planet.
Wireless. While players should be unpairing any controllers prior to their matches, sometimes they don't and a third party can wirelessly interfere (intentionally or not) with a match.
I can't think of any wireless sticks off the top of my head other than 8Bitdo's offering. They're generally not legal at tournaments.
Personally, I like just about anything from Hori. I like their Fighting Edge stick a great deal. It doesn't seem to be in production anymore, unfortunately. I've since modified mine pretty extensively but I liked it a lot right out of the box.
I have a Qanba Obsidian that I use whenever I play games on my computer. Again, it's out of production but Qanba now offers the Obsidian 2.
They're two of my favorite sticks and I own a lot.
Seems like you’re ultimately annoyed that you can’t faceroll the game with simply bigger numbers in certain stats.
That's not it at all. What I want is the freedom to approach the game using the mechanics of the stats, the way the game had worked for decades before. If that means "faceroll[ing] the game", then so be it. I thought the final boss of Verdict Day (among many others across the series) was incredibly difficult but I didn't have a problem with it because the game let me respond to that difficulty with building my mech rather than requiring me to be dexterous and having intimate knowledge of action game mechanics. AC6 just doesn't play like the mech sim I expect the series to be. It plays like an action game and demands I master the action. It feels less MechWarrior, more Titanfall. I know that's a reductive analogy and all three games are fairly different but hopefully my point gets across.
And you also seemingly have a hate boner for Dark Souls.
Then you've misread. I adore the Souls series. That doesn't mean I want my From games to be homogenized in to it.
You’re also gonna have a pretty unsuccessful time chasing the gameplay of your childhood too. I firmly think if you got the AC you think you wanted, it wouldn’t reach those expectations at all.
I disagree. For what it's worth, I wasn't a child when Armored Core first released on the PSX; so, I'm not really chasing childhood nostalgia. Regardless, I thought Verdict Day was brilliant. Granted, it was ten years ago but it was nearly fifteen years after the original AC.
AC4 was more super robot than real robot. AC5 was real robot but half-sized. AC5 also had a global multiplayer war. So, they've experimented with the series over the years.
That said, if you haven't liked AC in any form it has taken, I can't imagine you're going to like AC6.