Arma 3 first impressions

[Iroquois Pliskin 0]

Played thru the Infantry showcase mission:

1) Our squad got their ass handed to them, enemy AI engage at reasonable ranges and use what I would call "suppressive fire" even on Regular difficulty.

2) Love the inventory system

3) Radio chatter is very believable, if a bit muffled in terms of quality <- I know it's intentional, but could be clearer. :)

4) Still getting used to the 2-key/3-stance config, Z to go prone, X to cycle between Stand & Crouch <- X will become my most used key from now on.

5) Dedicated Grenade key? YES PLEASE! <-- Haven't used 'em much in this mission, tho. :p

[maturin 12]

The cracks from bullets flying by aren't as imposing as they were in Arma 2. They need to be brought back into the front of the sound mix instead of seeming to be in the background.

Agreed, but that is very easily modded. What is more serious and can't be fixed by modders is the lack of sound delay. Muzzle blasts are still playing instantly, even for single shots. We missed the boat on this one with the A2 release, and I think the community should raise a stink about it early.

[CombatComm 10]

Agreed, but that is very easily modded. What is more serious and can't be fixed by modders is the lack of sound delay. Muzzle blasts are still playing instantly, even for single shots. We missed the boat on this one with the A2 release, and I think the community should raise a stink about it early.

Agreed! WTF BIS? New sound engine? With reverb? another confirmed feature you set aside through laziness? Let's get with the 21st century please.

[ProfTournesol 956]

Agreed! WTF BIS? New sound engine? With reverb? another confirmed feature you set aside through laziness? Let's get with the 21st century please.

You should drop that way of speaking until you understand what Alpha means.

[antoineflemming 14]

Only problem for me is the grass lags up my game alot, and all MP servers have the grass clutter pretty much maxed. Other than the lack of a way that I know to access all the gear options, game is definitely better (and the shooting mechanics harder due to sway) than ArmA 2.

[griffz 1]

PRO: stances. smoother and nicer animation (kickback etc) feel like BF3, seriously . FX. framerate smoothness. better navigation through structure , indoor too .

Bohemia , great job .

[drakedaeron 13]

The good :

-Good optimisation

-Good performance on Mobile PC

The bad :

-The game need a very very very powerfull PC for a great quality.

[Iroquois Pliskin 0]

On controls:

1) I pretty much prefer ArmA II layout, except for G for Grenade & the stance modifier key - CTRL.

2) Temporary walk and Walk toggle have been remapped to Shift & 2xShift respectively.

3) V key for Optics, Y for Step Over & new action "Get out" gets migrated to U key.

4) Got used to 2-key stance system, Z/X is a great default layout.

No other changes were necessary to make it playable again. :)

[naizarak 4]

You should drop that way of speaking until you understand what Alpha means.

To be generous, let's assume BIS started working on arma 3 in 2010. That's 3 years of work. The game is set to release in a about half a year. That's roughly 20% development time left until launch.

The entire point of the alpha/beta is to fix bugs, not add new features. If something isn't already included then odds are it won't be in the final release, either. That said, Arma games have always been a rolling beta build, and BIS is constantly working on the game post-launch.

[el0375 10]

on my laptop, N56V the game does so well, seems the most honour goes to the combo of fast processor, memory and fast storage drive.

Graphically even on medium settings i had the impression it was in overall superior to OA , and anyways, i find it sublime almost with the details at close range. The only bad that i dont like is because of the look of the 'empty' hills etc ( when low vegetation stops being rendered) ( its my only thing that looks bad, but cant think of much as otherwise, there would be a big performance hit) and the look of the rocky coast , which shold need a small change in colour and maybe polygons to make it less roundy and give a wet colour to the lowest part of them.

Love the infantry animation and changes , it gets much more fluid ( perhaps there might be some more stances combined with the extra leaning ) and the vehicle detail is very well done and the weapons available. Love the sounds so far, the vehicles, the glasses of the window that break and also the more animate feeling of the person you control with its subtle movements when inactive generally)

love the summer sounds they put that really remind of greece :)

its all so good that i want someone in future to make a mod with greek tavernas , and music and just dance :)

Edited March 5, 2013 by el0375

[griffz 1]

PRO: stances. smoother and nicer animation (kickback etc) feel like BF3, seriously . FX. framerate smoothness. better navigation through structure , indoor too .

[Dxze 10]

Good:

Movement

visuals

weapon attachments

Bad:

I'm getting very bad FPS on large multiplayer servers, all other circumstances I get good FPS

I can hear other people shooting 200m away louder than I can hear myself shooting

Recoil is ridiculous, I can only shoot one single bullet in semi auto and my muzzle rizes about 10 feet about the target at 100m

Inventory is confusing

Everything seems much larger, like more zoomed in? Hopefully changing FOV will help this

Stratis is pretty boring

[krazikilla 5]

first impression:

Tryed out the alpha with a few mateys and we are all quite amazed how fluid and nice its already running. Looks like you gents (BIS) really did some outstanding work there.

This ALPHA looks by far smoother then your ArmA2 full release :P

[Scoggs 1]

First impression is I LOVE IT! Everything except the rock formations are amazing, you get hung up on rocks that are smooth

[kavoriken 1]

Good:

- Stances

- Animations

- Overall look of the game, especially the lighting system. Seriously, i think the game looks better at night with all the lights.

- Although the feeling for speed in the cars is kind of weird, but i just love how the vehicles are not locked at 100/120 now, driving through the hills at 150kmh is really fun and kind of scary :)

- Attention to Detail on Stratis, great stuff.

- The new Inventory/Gear Menu. Oh god yes... just yes.

Bad:

- The cars, especially the civilian truck, feels like driving a piece of soap. It slides around on the ground like crazy.

- Picture in Picture requires WAY too much performance. Even on low it kills 33% of my FPS.

- The terrain textures. They look SO blurry and ugly even on Max settings. Everything in the game looks so good, but when you fly in the heli and there are no trees...

- Interiors of the houses. They just feel so empty and some of the textures make it feel like you switch from a 2013 game to a 2005 game when you walk into a building.

- Performance in the towns... Its the old story, towns are the bottleneck for performance and its pretty much as bad as in A2.

[pathetic_berserker 4]

Pros.

Generally looks great.

Anims feel quite fluid

Feels like an ArmA game.

Ragdoll is good

Driving with PhysX is awsome (with some conditions)

From an Inf Sim stand point , its the ducks nuts.

Cons

Death behind the wheel is too easy. Died crashing the offroad into a cyclone fence.

Vehicle crashes are too explosive (secondary explosions on quad bikes is rediculous)

Some sounds seem out of place, ie skidding on dirt sounds like skidding on road

Why can I place a backpack on the ground in editor if I cant pick it up and put it on my back, don't like the disconect.

When swimming under boat there appears the choice to enter any crew position, yet demolitions diver cannot apply explosive charges unless standing on land

And the one that for some reason really pissed me off, probably because its obviously NOT a bug.

Auto vehicle flip is an imersion breaker!.Try this little experiment, drive the Galkin as fast as you can in a straight line then pull the tightest turn possible. I've found that even if I can get it to roll on its side it eases itself back onto 4 wheels. The Hunter does the same thing but is more stable so I used the mounds at the airbase for assistance. I understand this is just a quick path to the flip vehicle function but it interupts and breaks a well functioning simulation, I mean why incorporate PhysX if your going to remove the realism? And removes the choice. If its included it should be at the very least a yes/no in the difficulty settings. In fact with the way driving is I'd prefer not to see it at all. Driving to me feels good, if I'm fooling about enough to roll my vehicle I should be reminded there are consequences. Dumbing down vehicle simulation doesn't make infantry simulation better.

Edited March 5, 2013 by Pathetic_Berserker

[-dead- 1]

My first impressions of ArmA3:

*sigh* I knew it was going to be like that the moment I saw the Jack Bauer countdown graphic. :)

Let's hope next time they do it like sensible people: give us a couple of weeks before the download to sign up and pay, then feed us our codes, then finally put out the data on steam for the Jack Bauer moment.

Finally got a download code, so we shall see. 1/10 for the poorly thought-out release faff. But you can't have everything, can you? Where would you put it?

[Bee8190 10]

My impressions so far;

Graphics strike me little cartoony but still, it looks stunning

Performance is just great even at this stage of the game

Animations feel snappy and really smooth but perhaps little too fast? ( I may have to get used to it coming from arma 2 :rolleyes: ) :)

Island is beautiful and even though I didn't care as much for the diving ability, it showed as great fun and definitely adds a lot to the game

Sounds are brilliant (well mostly for now) some have been probably cut down little from the originals I've heard from E3 videos

_______________________________________________________________________

Vehicles physx feels really basic (The focus is on infantry, however, I am aware)

As P. berserker mentioned, tires squeeking on dirt as well in on water ;)

Engine RPM are not synchronised and sounds really gamey

Wheels should spin when going up ridiculously steep slopes

Soldier unable to stay afloat in water and drawns (non diver unit) while in idle animation with no gear

Placing the armed (HMG) speedboat good 30m off of shore in the editor, the speed boat still spawns on rocks or the beach

Occasionally character still gets killed or glitches trough / on rocks

Couldn't reproduce but got stock in animation loop

Vehicles are nearly impossible to flip over

[sproyd 2]

First Impressions: This sh*t is incredible.

- The performance - excellent, far better than A2 on my i7/650M laptop. The most surprising.

- The graphics - excellent, the textures are great, and the graphics options implementation is great too. The auto-detect wasn't right though - I upped the settings but turned off post-processing and MSAA. FXAA and SMAA options are great.

- The AI - pretty good. Definitely an improvement on A2 and the spotting is much better - you can reliably flank them but they will spot you if you come straight on.

- The controls - still working out the stance adjustments but love how G is now grenade (rather than cycling with F) and I love the ctrl+RMB to swith between collimator and zoomed sight. Guns are way smoother.

- The view distance - this seems really great without much 'haze'. There is still low texture quality at long ranges (text on V High) but what can you do when you have so much in sight at one time.

- The voices - much more realistic although the US accent is extremely annoying and stereotypified.

- The missions - markers are almost invisible at times which is difficult. Hard to comment further at this early stage. Best missions are the vehicle one (for the infiltration part) and the diving one.

- The sound - similar to JSRS but not as echo-ey which is probably good given that most of the time you aren't in a valley. The dynamic range is much improved over A2 stock and with my 7.1 virtual sound card (asus xonar u3) I could pinpoint incoming helis and footsteps.

- Veh physics - not great. I tried to barge through a roadblock by hitting the nose of a pick-up truck at full speed and the pick-up truck got dragged perpendicular to my direction of travel. Also vehicles unrollable - is the PhysX applied to veh yet?

- Diving - Pretty good. As a qualified PADI diver there is a lot missing like a dive computer and colour being altered as you go deeper but the underwater environment is realistic and its great looking up into the sunlight to see a heli flying overhead.

- Firefights/Infantry mechanics - This is very exciting - its incredible really. Hard to explain - you have to play to see.

OVERALL - FANGTASTICAL

[kdjac 19]

Just gonna go with WOW!!!!!

That my impressions of an Alpha game.........just WOW!!!!!

I think the best thing i could say is i would pay for this game right now as it is. Take from that what you want.

[Iroquois Pliskin 0]

Sound needs tweaking, can't tell the distance on any of the weps used: weapons firing at 300m sound like they're around the corner. Hope bullet cracks become more pronounced as well later on.

[manzilla 1]

This really is a lot of fun. Damn I can't wait to start making missions. The scuba showcase is fun. Nice to see another dimension to the game. I'll get to finding some bugs and other wrongs soon but in the mean time imma enjoy this some more. Bravo BIS so far you beat my expectations.

[Khangirey 1]

Pretty bad performance for me. I can't play without lagging badly past 1.5k meters. I'm running a GTX 670 FTW and a i5 3570k. It would seem I should be getting better fps. Alas, it's only Alpha. I'm sure it'll be better.

[m4inbrain 10]

Love the game so far. Of course there are alot of quirks (squeeking wheels on dust, stuff like that) - but it's on a good way. Performance is already way better than Arma II, at least for my machine (i2500k @4,4gh, 570 GTX 2,5gb).

I don't like the setting in general, the camouflage on vehicles looks stupid to me (what, is it now printed instead of painted? -.-) - but that's just my taste. What i really dislike so far, is first of all that you can't really flip vehicles (i'm not playing Need for speed - if i'm careless, i "want to be punished" - hard to explain what exactly i mean, something about being forced to play careful), and secondly, the tracers. Way to much tracers in the game, especially on the heli where every single round seems to be a tracer (especially because tracers cause "wildfire" in reality, we had to put out fires all day after shooting tracers when i was in service) - not realistic.

Stuff like weird animations, sound not really adding up to the speed of vehicles, the squeeking on dust, sounds disappearing (friend of mine could not hear me shoot anymore) - i blame that on alpha, i'm sure that this will get sorted out.

But, just to be very clear:

Let the goddamn vehicles flip if i overdo it!

That's important, and i mean, really important.

[cossack8559 10]

Had a lot of fun so far, was spoiled a bit by a few idiots online, but the admins finally took care of them allowing for a very enjoyable couple hours online.

I noticed that when viewing drivers from 3rd person they all have the dead animation whilst driving, not sure if that was just me or if everyone was seeing this.

Graphics look great, details of the characters and the landscape looks very nice. Sounds effects are okay, but i'm pretty sure i'll be checking all sound mods out again once created.

Missing my tank action though, looking forward to the addition of tanks very much.