The trouble with getting people into Arma

[[evo] dan 79]

a lot of the trouble is that people seem to give up because they cannot find a role that they enjoy, much more noticable in vanilla, with ACE you have much mroe distinct and involved roles for each person, so if you can get a person to try most of the roles out, they are more likely to stay from previous experience because they find something that they actually enjoy, and actually stay.

[NoRailgunner 0]

If some people like to be pushed into a unit/role system - ask the mission maker to create such limits and restrictions. No need to force all others to like + play with such predefined units. ;)

[[evo] dan 79]

when i mean role, i dont mean a rank, but an actual comabt role, i.e. medic, sniper, pilot, tanker and so on

[NoRailgunner 0]

Yep thats what I meant. Whats "ok" for a certain mission isn't automatically "ok" for another. Let the mission maker decide whats important and what should be allowed/restricted. :)

[onlyrazor 11]

I believe that BIS should keep any and all gameplay restrictions to a minimum - it's up to the mission maker. If the mission maker wants a heavy MG + AT player in the squad, he can have it. We already have enough class-based games.

[sith1144 10]

my 2 cents:

on tutorials

I think the tutorials should be improved, because currently they teach you how some controls work, but not how to survive/win and they don't explain what formations to use in which situations or how you should use the terrain (just a few examples of what they should include).

on commanding AI:

I think being able to use the arrow keys in addition to the number keys to use the command menu, for example: up/down opens the "backspace" menu, after that you can use up/down to switch your choice, right to expand a menu and left to go back a menu and then something like enter/right again to confirm your choice. when you assign squadmates to a team (like red, white or blue) you should be able to command those squadmates with one button (as if they are a single unit).

[Cyper 18]

Regarding the accessibility in arma I think It's good as it is. Sure, tuturials and such could be implemented into the game, and the game do feel like a mess in some cases.. just by comparing it to the old OFP - especially in the campaign area. But at the same time I wouldn't like less complex gameplay. If more gamers would enjoy arma it's formula would fade out into the sand..

[goof 10]

There should be no problem with getting people into ArmA... :rolleyes:

It has all what the ordinary (male) gamer likes:

• Great 3D graphics !
  
• Its a shooter !
  
• You can drive, fly, build, command ! (pretty basic & easy to learn)
  
• It has a Editor !
  
• It has a fun MP !
  
• It has tons of Mods and user created missions
  

So whats the problem ?

It starts with the antiquated controls, all feels clumsy and indirect.

Commanding your squad feels like playing a game from 1995.

Then there is no fast paced MP action, mostly due to the clumsy and indirect controls. And, last but not least, the official missions try to much to focus on the "simulation" aspect (and fail pathetic) instead of focus on a campaign with more cool action.

So if ArmA3 does have:

• Much better controls and a commanding system like the one from DR
  
• Fast paced, easy to fire up and fun MP action (Team-Deathmatch, CTF) like BF
  
• Much better missions which are more action packed and dont try so hard to simulate the "real thing"
  

Thats all i think, most new players would (at the beginning) not care about a better AI or all the Mods and User made missions. So BIS, please help them (and me) to have fun with this game !

i totally agree

[Lorca 10]

Let's face it. From day one BI knew that their game was catering to a certain type of player and thus they knew the fan base was going to be limited from the mainstream. BI can easily make a game that everyone likes but, as always, it will lose some of its original direction and fan base in order to accommodate the consolized, trigger-happy mainstream. I doubt that fixing the controls, making better textures and flashy Hollywood fx particle effects, etc., will bring a lot of players to Arma because the very essence of Arma; what makes Arma great, is what the CoD-like player hates. In other words, the patience, the measured strategy, the heart pumping caution, for example, is what these Rambo console players just can't handle or even understand.( and that's no exaggeration, since those players are often kids)

Edited December 10, 2011 by Lorca

[sgt_hawkins 9]

I think the Arma series caters to many types of gamers. Our server plays non re-spawn tactical co-op missions. Others servers play pvp, Most servers have re-spawn missions for run and gunners. I think that the learning curve puts alot of gamers off. You can be the best Battlefield 3,mw3 player.Then try to tackle any Arma game and you will fail. You have to learn how to play this game. I'm sure it gets discouraging to gamers when they feel noobish so they naturally blame the game.We all have seen these same people join a mission and try to fly choppers or planes only to have them crash minutes sometimes seconds after. Naturally they blame the controls. We are a different type of gamer. We have very few games that appeal to us. I love graphics and content as much as anyone but I would sacrifice it for Arma's unique nature. I think we all would. Somebody will always cry about something in Arma. I say let them cry. I love the series... Carry on Bi....Carry on..

[Bee8190 10]

Well, while I haven't really posted here on these forums, I've been playing BIS games for almost a decade. And I've also noticed in LAN parties that it's hard to get people into Arma.

Why? We're not a bunch of people playing generic FPS's like CoD and stuff like that. Some time ago we played some OFP in LAN and it was awesome -- pretty much everyone from us 10 participants agreed that it was the best game ever for playing in LAN. Then we moved into Arma 2, and everyone switched to something else within 30 minutes.

Firstly, some people had problems trying to get the game running smoothly (the requirements are way too high -- even with a Radeon HD 4850 (which is only a bit more than half a year older than the game!) and a Phenom II X4 I get about 45 FPS on average on low-to-medium settings). The hardware requirements are simply too high - most people (including me) don't want to buy a new GPU just for ARMA when the current GPU can run everything else on almost maximum graphics without a problem.

After playing a bit, we noticed that, unlike OFP which comes with dozens of multiplayer missions, of which there are multiple Co-op aswell as multiple deathmatch, sector control etc. missions, Arma 2 comes with 5 different missions, only one for each gamemode. Sure, we can edit them with the wizard, but that's not the same thing as including a lot of entirely different missions for all game modes. Also, the wizard is included in OFP aswell, so practically OFP came with many, many times more multiplayer missions than Arma 2.

Just think about it - the OFP campaign had something like 30+ missions, and the Arma 2 has like 10 (which were so massive in their scale that they were mostly just moving around -- if I wanted a driving simulator there's better products for that). Arma 2's amount of multiplayer missions is so little that it feels like I'm buying a game engine, some weapons and models and must make the actual game myself. While we have an excellent mission editor, it is no excuse for not having many multiplayer missions; making missions requires time that I'd rather use for something else, and you don't start making missions during a LAN party. With OFP we could just go ingame and spend hours and hours on all the different missions included with the game.

In addition to that very basic fault of not having anything to actually play (yeah, you might have a LOT of vehicles and stuff but who cares when there's zero missions to use them in?), there are some very annoying, low-quality things in the game. Firstly the lighting. Everything doesn't suddenly turn black in my eyes if I have my head pointing to the sun, nor does everything turn white when I'm looking away from the sun. It's a nice HDR effect, but it's way overdone and often makes aiming impossible unless I mess with the in-game brightness settings (after which the game doesn't look realistic anymore).

Then there's the random crashes and other kinds of bugs in the game. For example, saving/loading in multiplayer is a pain and often crashed half of us. After we finished a round of Seize the Area, two of us crashed and for one guy the game froze on "receicing data" until he ended the process arma2.exe. For other bugs, at one point when I was the squad leader and I died, no one inherited the squad leader status and so we were a group without a leader -> no one could command the AIs on our squad and they didn't follow anyone. After seeing multiple issues like these within an hour of gameplay we really didn't want to continue -- instead we enjoyed the much more stable and finished multiplayer of OFP in the same evening.

With all these issues, I wouldn't be wondering at all why people don't want to play ARMA. I do make some missions with the editor every once in a while, but when we try to play them in MP we find it hard to enjoy even those custom missions because of bugs. And after we've completed those custom-made missions, there's nothing else left to play because there's practically nothing included with the release. If someone doesn't enjoy Arma 2, it doesn't mean that he's an average gamer who only likes bunnyhopping around in CoD. More than often it just means that Arma 2 should be much better than it really is.

Now, maybe some of you will think that why I'm not searching for mods and community-made missions. From my experience the missions made by the community are varying in their quality and finding a surely good mission might sometakes take almost as long as playing it. I found some mod which fixes the ridiculous HDR-sunlight-darkness effect, and have it installed, but even that required a bit of messing around with the Community Base Addons and all that (and more importantly, I feel all the CBA credits included everywhere are just bloating the game).

Great post.Completely agree on thisone

Let's face it. From day one BI knew that their game was catering to a certain type of player and thus they knew the fan base was going to be limited from the mainstream. BI can easily make a game that everyone likes but, as always, it will lose some of its original direction and fan base in order to accommodate the consolized, trigger-happy mainstream. I doubt that fixing the controls, making better textures and flashy Hollywood fx particle effects, etc., will bring a lot of players to Arma because the very essence of Arma; what makes Arma great, is what the CoD-like player hates. In other words, the patience, the measured strategy, the heart pumping caution, for example, is what these Rambo console players just can't handle or even understand.( and that's no exaggeration, since those players are often kids)

Uhm... No

One of the best thing this game has to offer is in my opinion the diversity it can be played with.In the end that is why the editor was included in-game.Just becouse I dont have the mood to play without respawn doesn't neccesarily mean I'm ''not good enough'' for this game.

I have only one game installed on my rig, and that is Arma and arma mod, project reality.When i feel like i wanna play BF3 like experience i join domino MP or ACE insurgency and other time i play reality mod.Just becouse I wanna play less serious mission doesn''t mean its childish :rolleyes:

[Flogger23m 2]

The real issues are in the design, presentation and optimization. There are a lot of nice features, but they are done very poorly and tend to be unintuitive.

The mission editor has many nice features, but to do anything useful you must constantly minimize the game, have a bunch of scripts and lines of code, and copy/paste them in a data line where everything else also goes. Things such as a simple measurement tool and a loadout editor are missing in ArmA 2's mission editor making simple tasks that much more difficult.

Then there are the lack of weapon animations. This makes the game ugly and decreases the realism. My M240 should take longer to reload than my M4. I show people gameplay of ArmA 2 and when they see this, they say the weapons all act similar with no major differences and reminds them of a CoD type game in this aspect.

There is also the AI, which has extreme difficulty doing even the most basic tasks, like following a waypoint that stays on a road. They will constantly drive off course, crash into buildings, and eventually get stuck.

Then there is the horrible control layout. The fire mode selector is still the same as the weapon and grenade selector. Sometimes I accidentally find myself switch weapons or throwing a grenade rather than switching back to semi auto. The squad control system takes too long. I could navigate long lists in SWAT 4 with extreme ease.

Performance wise the game just runs poorly. Trees kill performance far too much. My PC isn't very fast, but if I can only play at low-medium settings and expect to get a constant frame rates above 30, something is probably wrong with the engine. Occasionally performance just drops for a few seconds. I can go from 45 frame rates to 25 for no apparent reason. I can even get a constant stable frame rate in Rise of Flight at medium settings on my old GTX 260.

If ArmA 3 can address issues like those listed above, ArmA's player base will sky rocket.

System specs:

GTX 560ti 2GB

AMD 965

8GB DDR2 RAM

Win 7 64bit

Edited December 10, 2011 by Flogger23m

[Lorca 10]

The real issues are in the design, presentation and optimization. There are a lot of nice features, but they are done very poorly and tend to be unintuitive.

I agree specially with this part. When I first played Arma 2 the very first thing I was put off was with the interface design. Very archaic if you ask me. For the high learning curve Arma 2 has the interface and controls are really unintuitive in many instances. Luckily, I manage to have patience and got over all that. You know, one of the hardest thing to do and for which many folks take for granted, is the game's interface. In other game forums that I've been, many players complain about how bad or good is the interface of their game. Getting it just right for the masses can be a pain in the ass for devs.

[katipo66 94]

The thing is is it's not simply and end user game so to speak, it's a software package... Like Photoshop or dreamweaver etc, any program requires time to learn, some people really want to use Photoshop but cannot be bothered to learn it so they happily stick with paint.

I think Photoshop is up to CS5 and over 10 releases? lost count, Arma is up to 2

[BobcatBob 10]

The thing is is it's not simply and end user game so to speak, it's a software package... Like Photoshop or dreamweaver etc, any program requires time to learn, some people really want to use Photoshop but cannot be bothered to learn it so they happily stick with paint.

I think Photoshop is up to CS5 and over 10 releases? lost count, Arma is up to 2

*ahem* "3"

Y U FORGET FLASHPOINT CWC!?!?!??

[katipo66 94]

*ahem* "3"

Y U FORGET FLASHPOINT CWC!?!?!??

For ease of point:o but yep arma2 = flashpoint 3?

Still... third iteration, hope im still around for maybe the 6th, going by BIS timeline i should be still able to see but might struggle with hearing!!?

[BobcatBob 10]

For ease of point:o but yep arma2 = flashpoint 3?

Still... third iteration, hope im still around for maybe the 6th, going by BIS timeline i should be still able to see but might struggle with hearing!!?

Yeah me too man, I bet Arma 6 will look like crysis, (w/o overdone effects anyways) have smooth moving/ shooting and model an entire city with sewers and skyscrapers alike, along with cloth simulation....this makes me pity those of us who were grown men when Flashpoint came out...hopefully we all live to play Arma: PERFECTED:)

[nodunit 397]

What are you talking about, the world ends next year remember, there next will be an arma4+.

[BobcatBob 10]

What are you talking about, the world ends next year remember, there next will be an arma4+.

https://encrypted-tbn2.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR1HbfsZME7usCCvlh4LvzQkbKN_Hjvxc7q0-tyKifZKtZu2rj3

[Jokubas 1]

Accessibility is what's most important, and that's something I have to say I feel like the ArmA series has been lacking.

I've had a really hard time trying to get into it, and it's not because I'm too impatient to find the depth that I know is there, or I simply think it's too cerebral for me, it's just that a good chunk of the game is not intuitive and I don't even know how to begin learning it.

There's a really good video I watched before about this concept:

http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/easy-games

I think comparing this particular series to a hobby sounds very appropriate, but I think Bohemia can help to introduce more people to this hobby. The game already has a lot of depth. For ArmA 3, I hope they'll work on making that depth more accessible.

[nneo 10]

I'm from Asia and almost Arma 2 servers are from US, EU, ... they kick people with high ping.

Now, I have nowhere to play.

Please make a better multiplayer where people from anywhere can play together.

[rye1 21]

I'm from Asia and almost Arma 2 servers are from US, EU, ... they kick people with high ping.

Now, I have nowhere to play.

Please make a better multiplayer where people from anywhere can play together.

Get a group of mates to get it, rent a server. Or join a community.

[NoRailgunner 0]

Instead of this overused marketing buzzwords like "accessible" we should use more "userfriendly" or "approachable"... no need to compare apples with oranges. ;)

[Panda_pl 0]

it's just that a good chunk of the game is not intuitive and I don't even know how to begin learning it.

Usually you read manual, check controlls in game, boot the mission and see if controls really do what you thought they would and you are free to go.

I mean, it's not like OFP was simple.

On the subject: I think the market for realistic combat sim will be wider again once the console craze of high budget FPS is over. Which will probably be soon.

The arrival of multiple copycats usually precedes the death of game franchise.

After that the PC FPS genres will go back to being split between CS/R6 PC tactical shooter type and arena shooter type. Let's face it majority of people just play the game that seems to be popular at the moment...

[WarriorM4 10]

Whatever the case the Arma series still sells well.It doesn't need changes to make it "user friendly".If its hard then some should use their brains and learn it.I don't want to see it turn into COD,MOH,or BF."Accessable" to me is a bad word and that philosphy has destroyed the mechanics of several pieces of software out there.(Rainbow six and its removal of the planning system comes to mind)It isn't all about Multiplayer either.Another huge plus for Arma is the editor and the vast amount of very well made single player campaigns and missions.

Leave it alone.Take away whats made the series sucessful and you will lose the main base of customers.The reason people get into OFP/Arma is because they want something more immersive and realistic then the overload of hollywood style first person shooting games out there that I consider garbage.

Edited December 19, 2011 by WarriorM4