With these games, you typically spend 75% of your time customizing, swapping parts, testing your load out, etc. The missions are short honestly. Maybe 10 to 20 mins. It's always been this way with this series and they seem to continue that approach with AC6 from my experience thus far.Yeah, good, I want to know exactly what this game is like and judge accordingly instead of getting people trying to cover up big parts of what the game is. Basically every video I've seen on it exclusively shows footage of flying around and fighting bosses and crap which makes it look awesome and then they sort of mention in passing about customization and everything like it's something you spend as much time on as the character gear page in your average RPG. And some prominent Souls guy (Vaati maybe?) who had never played an AC game has contentiously released a video saying "it's like a souls game!!!! Check out the boss fights and the way you can poise break" which had everyone saying DON'T LISTEN TO HIM!!
So I really didn't think that was the case based on what I'd heard about older games!! I'll have to hear more about it. It's possible I could get into it, but I think I might just keep waiting some more and hear reactions from people who AREN'T familiar with the genre. What this brings to mind is that godawful minigame from Yakuza 0/1 with "pocket racer" where you had to unlock components and then basically every course you had to just trial and error parts until you could beat it. It was like 50% part experimentation, 49% going looking for parts in the overworld, and 1% actual racing gameplay. I HATED it. I suspect this is nothing like that, but that's still what comes to mind immediately when I hear "lots of parts, lots of experimentation!!!"
A lot of the souls fans overhyped the game BECAUSE it's a fromsoft game. So your skepticism is within good reason, because it's not a souls game and lingo is getting tossed around. It has some difficulty and storytelling aspects to it, but at it's core [pun intended] it does not play like a soulsgame. AC came out before all the Souls.
The combat is pretty damn fluid compared to the other games, and it's really Armored Core at its' finest.