Arma 3: Confirmed features | info & discussion

[Tonci87 163]

No,Take on Tanks please :-)

[paecmaker 23]

Or take on cars.

[gossamersolid 155]

Damu has confirmed that Arma3 will include the flight model from Take on Helicopters. :)

Won't be using it myself, but that's good for people that want it.

[purepassion 22]

i noticed that you can clearly see the Passenger in this

breathing and how its thorax is expanding.

[lsp 10]

Who cares about the single player campaign in arma anyways?

[purepassion 22]

BIS does.

and as you see from the feedback here, a lot of other guys!

Edited July 13, 2011 by PurePassion

[krazikilla 5]

I am just lookin forward for that what ArmA is made for: Big organised PvP Battles :D

[zukov 490]

Who cares about the single player campaign in arma anyways?

+ 54000

the SP campaign is only wasted time

[maddogx 13]

+ 54000

the SP campaign is only wasted time

- 54001

The SP campaign is not wasted time.

BOOM! Countered!

[pettka 694]

Stop the off-topic here, please, banhammer is on its way :icon_twisted:

Obvious troll is obvious.

[Maio 293]

Who cares about the single player campaign in arma anyways?

I do. The Arma 2 campaign was interesting for me .

+ 54000

the SP campaign is only wasted time

How do you think new game features get created :) ?

A lot of features simply get implemented because it would make the campaign more interesting .

[Steakslim 1]

i noticed that you can clearly see the Passenger in this

breathing and how its thorax is expanding.

lol, a small detail but yeah that is interesting.

[sparks50 0]

Damu has confirmed that Arma3 will include the flight model from Take on Helicopters. :)

Nice! I guess Im gonna have to preorder TOH if Im not gonna suck with the new optional helly physics :D

Edited July 14, 2011 by sparks50

[purepassion 22]

Might the volumetric clouds stand for an massive particle limit elevation?

[CriminalMinds 10]

@PurePassion That's a good question!

[Maio 293]

List updated :

You can find all these in the PC gamer US august edition .

The swimmer delivery vehicle is called the MK8 and it will have a periscope .

Players will be able to place charges on enemy boats while underwater .

Players will be able to place booby traps.

Laser guided mortar shells confirmed .

Drones confirmed .

Remotely operated mortars confirmed .

The ability to chose enemy clothes and gear is a SP only feature ( for now )

IFF transponders added to the Dev wish list .

I have 2 questions for BIS :

Will we be able to place actual booby traps ( tripwire/motion sensors) or just the old satchel or the new AP mine ?

The XM 25 was mentioned at the beginning of the article. Can I get a :icon_twisted: on the matter ?

And once again , Ivan B , said there will be no l4Z0rZ and other SF stuff :)

Edited July 15, 2011 by Maio

[maddogx 13]

Thanks for the info, Mayo! Much appreciated. :D

[pettka 694]

I have 2 questions for BIS :

Will we be able to place actual booby traps ( tripwire/motion sensors) or just the old satchel or the new AP mine ?

The XM 25 was mentioned at the beginning of the article. Can I get a :icon_twisted: on the matter ?

:icon_twisted:, anything more You would like to ask for?

But I may just say, that lord Ivan was right as ever, there are going to be some bobby traps (but I cannot say anything more) and there is going to be some XM-25 (the same cause here).

[maddogx 13]

I like pettka. He gives us infos and doesn't afraid of anything!

[PuFu 4600]

here is the article in question:

Reports of new and experimental military weaponry and vehicles are torture for modern warfare simulation enthusiasts. High-tech toys, such as the XM25 semi-automatic grenade launcher (capable of detonating explosives mid-air to hit enemies behind cover) have just come into service, and even more potent weaponry like the terrifyingly powerful GM6 anti-tank rifle are so close, and yet so far. In Arma 3, the next super-realistic war-sim sandbox from Czech developer Bohemia Interactive, those guns, plus some awesome weaponry of its own design, will be placed in our eager, trigger-happy hands.

The context is new and bleak: in the near future, the US and its allies are underdogs in World War III against a powerful, Iran-led military that has occupied Europe and Northern Africa. The nuclear gloves have come off, but there’s still a world left to fight over with our new fictional conventional warfare toys—in particular, a large Mediterranean island called Limnos.

“It’s not lasers or science-fiction stuff,†Creative Director Ivan Buchta assures me during our hours-long interrogation session. The intel I’ve extracted suggests that while A3 will continue to carry the banner of realism, freedom, and fidelity that’s defined the series (and Bohemia’s Operation Flashpoint before it), the development team is taking some liberties with reality to ensure that its next game won’t be the by-the-book sequel we expected.

Turning the tables

Bohemia’s mission statement is to put the player into a different situation from what modern militaries face. That means taking a step away from present-day realism, where the US always has the most resources. “The Allies are not as good as the bad guys in terms of technology. The bad guys have more resources, more clever stuff. The Allies have to cope with it, and naturally they adopt guerrilla tactics,†says Buchta.

You won’t be leading a squad of rag-tag freedom fighters, but expect to make improvised decisions on the move. Buchta describes what were up against: “They’re in bases. They have artillery support. They have armor. They have helicopters. They have drones. So you might have to steal something first and learn to operate some very basic weapons platforms.â€

Harassment tactics—and making clever decisions with the resources you’re given—are the kind of thinking that Bohemia Interactive wants to stimulate. “Imagine you have a mortar,†Buchta says. “You have a crew to operate it on some safe spot, and you have something like 20 shells. But you also find a box with three shells which can be laser-guided or remotely operated. Suddenly you have some extra resources that you can use in a very creative way against the enemy.â€

Subterfuge

A3 needs new weapons to stimulate new combat experiences and set it apart, so it’s bringing in gear like the Mk8 Swimmer Delivery Vehicle—a miniature submarine designed to covertly insert small teams. Buchta talks me through a scenario: “The player can don a diving suit and a rebreather, man the SDV and move to a coastal enemy base from an unexpected direction. Using the SDV’s periscope, he can steer his way through the patrols while staying undetected, insert saboteurs to mine the roads near the base or to booby-trap the patrol routes, place charges on the bottoms of the enemy boats, raid the command compound, and exfiltrate while leaving a bloody mess behind.â€

Considering that in A2 water might as well be lava, impassible except for a few unimpressive motorized rafts, the amphibious options that A3 will open up make me giddy—especially given that A3’s battlefield is an island. Limnos is based closely on the real-world isle of Lemnos off the coast of Greece in the North Aegean Periphery. “It’s way more populated, compared to A2: Operation Arrowhead’s Takistan,†Buchta says. “It will be the biggest and most ambitious map we’ve done so far.†Buchta compares Limnos to Operation Flashpoint’s Eberron map in some ways—it’s dotted with cities, harbors, villages, mountains, plains, arid land, orchards, and even some industrial facilities, ensuring that players will have a wide variety of terrain to fight over—and thus many different battle experiences.

Undercover

In the spirit of guerilla warfare and dirty tricks, A3 throws in a feature I never thought I’d see in the series: wearing enemy uniforms. When fighting undercover in the single-player campaign (which is separate from the co-op scenarios), you’ll have the option of borrowing an enemy’s colors and equipment. While it’s primarily a single-player feature at this stage of development, the prospect of how it might function in PvP or online co-op is even more exciting to me—in A2’s 64-man multiplayer matches, a covert spy could relay key information to the other side.

Without promising anything, Buchta is willing to speculate on how uniforms might function in multiplayer. “If you change your uniform, it should be functional—it should not just confuse the players, but also AI. Imagine you see a guy 200 meters away in an enemy uniform. You’d immediately start shooting. But it may be your friend trying to play some dirty tricks on enemy soldiers. If he fails to let teammates know, then friendly players might fire on him. Such accidents would probably happen.†Buchta adds that Bohemia is exploring IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) technology—if you’re carrying an enemy’s IFF transponder, for instance, a hostile chopper on patrol would ignore you.

All of this isn’t just being tacked on to A2’s engine—Buchta promises “radical†graphical improvements. Weather, for example, will get a volumetric cloud system, which should make lighting more natural. Ragdoll effects—and a revamped animation system—will replace (hopefully all of) A2’s existing, rigid gestures, and Nvidia’s PhysX is being implemented. As a gift to the hugely active Arma modding community, the mission editor is being upgraded as well, allowing for 3D editing.

A3 will push hard on its visual fidelity, something not a lot of games are currently doing. Though welding these advanced systems to A2’s already-complex core won’t mean much if A3 isn’t an optimized, smoothly running game, and it’s nervous-making that Bohemia is currently estimating that a Core i5 processor and a GeForce GTX 260 or Radeon HD 5770 will be the minimum spec. But optimization has only just begun, and the visual payoff of this new tech could be big.

For now, I’m reassured that A3’s planned departures from realism seem in service to creating combat experiences that are new, but equally hardcore. Putting fictional weapons into gaming’s most hardcore military simulation may sound like blasphemy—like building a disco in the middle of Stonehenge—but I think it’s exactly what the Arma franchise needs: a license to free itself from some of the constraints of painstakingly crafting tanks with the right number of rivets stamped on their sides, or assuring that the shoelaces of its character models reflect real-world boots. It’s freedom to focus on the difficult and complex task of developing an incredible sandbox game

Edited July 15, 2011 by PuFu

[Maio 293]

Mersi Pufu , Ok list updated with the XM 25 .

[KC Grimes 79]

So if we will be able to place a charge on a boat while underwater, will we be able to place a charge on a tank while on land?

[purepassion 22]

you can add RCWS to the list ;)

[Maio 293]

you can add RCWS to the list ;)

Hehe , I could , but all the RCWS I've seen so far are part of vehicles so they fall under the vehicle category ... kinda ... sort off .

Unless a dev wants to come here and :icon_twisted:

[pettka 694]

you can add RCWS to the list ;)

Bear in mind that RCWS may not mean exactly this one kind of RCWS, it might be just any Remotely (Con)trolled Weapon System :icon_twisted: