Shouldn't the easiest difficulty setting make the game easy to win?

[Axe22 10]

I've been playing this game for about a week now. I'm in the Adapt branch after completing two or three of them so I have not seen the entire campaign yet. I don't think I'm even at the halfway point yet. It is an awesome game. The engine is truly beautiful and the story line is engaging and fun. I had some performance issues initially, but managed to find a few load options and .cfg file tweaks to get it running smooth as silk now. But I do have a couple of complaints/suggestions to lodge. I will endeavor not to be too ranty about it and stick to identifying specific examples I've encountered so far and simply explain why they caused me so much irritation.

The first is that there are no missions or tutorial modes or examples or videos or walkthroughs or cutscenes or anything like that which teach you how to work the controls or operate the equipment. The field manual has some of it, a lot of it, perhaps even most of it...but it nonetheless remains incomplete (e.g. my comments on the UAV below are not in there). It tends to be focused on keystroke sequences rather than instructions. Here is a perfect example of what I mean. Where is the description of the screen you are looking at? In virtually every game I've played in the last 15 years, one of the very first things you get walked through is what every box on the screen is all about. Where on the screen things are located. Where menus pop up and how to navigate them. Where you find things. Where important cues and messages appear. A basic walkthrough of the UI layout and its functionality. In Arma 3 this is absent entirely. The challenges are fine once you learn how to operate things to train yourself to be better at it, but they do not instruct you at all on how things work. There is an expectation in them always that you must already know how, and the objective is to get you proficient at doing them. It is a pain to learn by experimentation and makes the whole campaign longer and more tedious than it ought to be. Still, I can live with that because at least I can eventually get it sorted out in the end...usually by watching people play it on youtubes. This is not the standard way of learning a game these days and I am disappointed because of it. I spent fifty bucks on it and am not keen on throwing my dollars away. Not that I feel I have in this case, but I was definitely worried about it for the first four or five hours of playtime. Somebody less patient than I am will likely give up and look for a refund. Especially kids.

I also love the sounds of gunfire and explosions and smoke/fog all that stuff, night and dusk and night vision, and the voice dialog. But occasionally the sound system is a problem for me. The most glaring example I can give is at the very outset of the campaign when you show up and the guy tells you to hop into the helicopter in a nice loud and clear voice coming over the radio. I started by running around the camp to get used to movement and to explore the camp. To look the game environment over a little before getting underway, so to speak. I was itching to shoot off my gun a few times before I tried to play heheh. It's cool that my itch got scratched immediately in the first mission, by the way. Anyway, there is a helicopter sitting there running and the noise from it was so loud that I wasn't able to hear the men speaking right next to me. I thought, being a first time player, that what they were saying was critical to the campaign. In most games you play the first voice acting you hear is extraordinarily crucial to pay close attention to. I expected some direction from it. If their dialog wasn't shown on the screen so I could read it, I wouldn't have any clue what they were saying. It frustrated me. I didn't want to be forced to read it. I wanted to be lazy, kick back, and hear it spoken. There is no adjustment for turning down the machine noise without also turning down the voices of the men. The radio chatter is fine. It has its own adjustment. But I wish the camp banter and other voice dialog in the game had its own separate slider as well. That's all it would take to resolve it. Later I learned this wasn't the big issue it seemed to be right off the bat since most of the camps past those first two are very quiet places, and the camp banter, although important for immersion, is not, for the most part, a pivotal part of the storyline. Again, I can live with it. But it does appear to be a waste of perfectly good content. You must have paid those people to record all that banter, why let it go to waste over some helicopter engine sound, which is wonderful yet nearly free in comparison to create?

The biggest complaint I have so far is that the campaign is way too difficult. There are like 5 or 6 different difficulty settings to choose from. Maybe even 7, I didn't count. More than I am used to seeing in a game. Logic dictates that the easiest mode ought to be...well very easy! My aim is to learn the story and the absolute basics of controlling my toon, not to be challenged straight away. I want it to be a cake walk so I can follow the story as a player who is crap at controlling my guy effectively. I want that false sense of accomplishment you get from winning all the time because it is too easy. That to me is the best most enjoyable way to be indoctrinated into a great game. It is how I get hooked on playing. Nothing beats a confidence builder like "too easy" for getting me hooked. Later, when I want to do it again at a harder setting, the mechanics are there for that. I put it on the easiest mode, recruit I think it's called, and have been really struggling just to finish the majority of the missions. In particular, the uav mission in chapter 1, the final mission in chapter 1, the first mission in chapter 2, and the supply truck one in chapter 2.

The UAV mission took me far too many attempts to complete only because of the lack of instructions and the mission timer duration. I simply did not realize that the thing was a tiny machine located in a backpack. I expected it to be some Predator sized plane sitting on a runway somewhere. I was never presented with a picture of it or any explanation of what it is, thus how could I be expected to think otherwise? So I spent hours and hours running all over the map looking for it. I probably failed 20 or 30 times before I gave up and went out to youtube looking for answers. The mission did not give me the time I needed to complete it either. Once I understood how the UAV worked, it took some time for me to get used to flying it without crashing. I never did figure out how to look down while flying it, nor did I ever see the mortar spotters. There simply was not enough time for learning any of that and I completely lost interest in learning how anyway. I got frustrated beyond belief. All I wanted to do was end the mission and continue with the story. That was my primary aim all along. And the mission occurred at night time for me which did not simplify the matter any. I ended up hovering it around very low spinning in circles and just clicking the mouse randomly at every light-green dot I saw. Eventually I simply got lucky and marked them somehow. But I don't have any idea how I did it. This is unfortunate in my opinion because it wasn't a poorly designed mission. The mechanics just were never explained is all. I liked the premise and still do. Mechanically it was implemented poorly I think. The final Survive mission just had too many enemy units and I kept getting killed from who knows where. I am not adept at spotting them yet or at flanking their positions. I am still coping with getting my fingers untangled trying to crouch and go prone and lean out and the like. But I'm not interested in that so much yet either. I want to learn the storyline. 30-40 tries to beat it was too many for me. The first mission of part 2 was really interesting, but again...simply too many enemies to avoid. Once I learned you could just run run run instead of crawl hide crawl to win it...I was ok. But it took another 40 or so tries to learn it, and that's too damn many on the easiest mode. I spent 10 tries or so trying to swim around the town. And when I finally made it to the island with the water falls all around it, I either got picked off from the mainland somewhere unknown, or I was auto killed trying to take cover on the other side of it because I got outside the play zone (i.e. my guy saying "This isn't right I'm lost" or some such, which I did not understand, then boom dead). I should have been informed at the beginning that there is a limited area to carry out each mission in, and that leaving it meant instant death. I assumed the whole map was fair game. It happened in UAV mission to me as well as I searched for a non-existent predator. The hardest one I've encountered so far was the supply truck. This one nearly caused me to give up on the entire campaign altogether. The problem with this one is that there is not enough time allotted to scout out a good spot for the ambush and get my men into position because the menu system is so unorganized and not at all intuitive, and I think there appears to be an assumption that you have the whole map memorized already. The support told me to command my men to get down. I understand that to be what the game calls a stance. There is no option in the menus called Stance. It is found under Combat Mode which is not intuitive at all to me. I spent most of my time trying to locate things in the bizarre menu system. Aside from the difficulty of working the menus by having to jump my hands all over the keyboard, the menu texts themselves are just not well organized or properly worded. The Move menu has an option called Find Cover which doesn't seem like a movement to me. The Engage menu has an option called Engage for cryin out loud, and another called Engage At Will. And another called Scan Horizon and another called Watch Direction both of which have very little to do with engaging in my opinion. The Combat Mode menu has both Combat Modes and Stances mixed together. Sit Down is a stance which is found in the Action menu, but Stand Up is a stance listed under Combat Mode. It takes way too long to find what you want mostly because it isn't obvious what menu will have what options. It is a menu organization and vocabulary problem. Adding to that the keyboard jumping you have to perform to issue them made the whole system too convoluted to operate effectively in the time allotted. Given more time it would be acceptable. To select your individual team members you use the function keys. But to select them all you use a two key combination that does not include any function keys. Nor is it particularly fast and easy to press CTRL-~ with one hand to begin with. Which means either dropping the mouse and using both hands or moving your left hand off the home keys and tangling up your fingers to do it. It ought to be F1 or F12 or, if there is absolutely no way around a two key combo, then SHIFT-F1, CTRL-F1, ALT-F1, SHIFT-F12, CTRL-F12, or ALT-F12 to highlight them all would be far easier to learn, remember, and operate. One menu gets opened with tilde another with backspace way over on the other side of the keyboard and a third using the mouse wheel. I was right on the verge of quitting when I got lucky and was presented the opportunity to quickly jump in and drive off while leaving my team behind to deal with the consequences. I had to abandon my team to win. When I was given my first command assignment, I abandoned my men just to continue the story. That's lame. I do not feel like a leader after doing that. I did not want to be a leader anymore after 40 tries. I actually started counting how many times I had to restart it after I had failed some 40 times...my count reached 82 before I finally won. That means well over 100 attempts to get it done. One tiny mistake driving the truck and boom, gotta reload and try again. I literally burst out laughing when at the end it said I had done only 8 reverts. You can imagine how angry I became when I learned what happened next after all those failed attempts to get that fuckin truck. Not enough time was the only problem. Yeah my guys had some problems following orders occasionally, maybe even often, but not every time. It was possible to get them to do what I wanted...eventually. That wasn't the big problem for me that I see everybody else whining about. Not compared to the limited mission duration.

Now I understand that a game like this should be challenging, but not to first time players like me and with my philosophy. I've never played any game like this one before. Well not recently. I'm not a big gamer type person anyway like some here are. I'm more of a modder to be honest as software engineering has been my profession for 25 years now. Never played any Arma X or Counterstrike or Call of Duty or any of those. I think the last shooter I played was Ghost Recon back in the 90s. I am more into strategy games, preferably turn based. I like chess. It is only expected that when you have so many difficulty levels to choose from, the easiest one should be very easy to win. Honestly, in keeping with the banter between Kerry and Miller...with all due respect, what developer in this mature gaming industry is so idiotic and shortsighted not to understand this? I cannot imagine starting this game out on normal difficulty, or even notching it up one. I would have quit had I done that. No question about it. I may still if I run into another supply truck mission. I want to learn the story before I learn the intricacies of controlling my toon. I keep saying to myself in frustration "you gotta be an octopus to work these damn controls". Instead of "oooo what an interesting turn of events". And that's what I'm looking for at this stage. I can work out the eight-arm business later. Easy mode should allow me more time to be an octopus with six missing arms is what I'm saying. The enemies should have a harder time spotting me in my novice choices of weak cover and shooting me down from 3 klicks away using only a few bullets. In easiest mode there should be a visual indication of where shots are coming from. Once I learn how to spot them, then I can turn it off. I realize there is a red box identifying them, but you rarely get killed by the ones you are looking at. It's the hidden ones that get you. And so that box isn't entirely helpful in that sense.

I also think the right mouse button and the spacebar are backwards. Everything you do with RMB should be done with SPACE and vice versa. And I'm really not keen on the scroll wheel menu. I keep inadvertently changing my weapon out or setting explosive charges because of how it works. Often the menu opens up because I bumped the wheel and I don't even notice it. Then when I go to open a door with the spacebar...my weapon switches out or I set a mine on the ground. Especially the fact that you gotta use the backspace way over on the other side of the keyboard instead of escape to close the damn thing. That one has caught me too many times to count. The PAUSE key instead of ESC ought to be the one that pauses the game don't you think? When you have to move your hand away from the home position or drop your mouse, it makes the controls a bit unwieldy to get used to. Particularly when the action is hot and heavy. ESC is pretty much the industry standard for closing things up. Once again, with all due respect, doesn't every competent game dev understand this simple fundamental convention? I mean, who uses backspace to do that? Yes I know I can dig through the config menu and change everything all around but, candidly, I shouldn't have to go reassign 3/4 of the keys.

Overall the game is frankly too fun to give up on just yet however. So I plan to stick with it and try out some multiplayer eventually. If I ever get efficient enough for that... Who knows, maybe I will grow those other six arms someday.

My apologies for the long post.

Edited June 16, 2014 by Axe22

[NTGhost 0]

In fact the timer thing grinds my Gear at most. In the old OFP Days i have to stay with my binoculars an hour in bushes to figure out how to crawl with Amstrong througth the enemy line,

Now you have to RUN guns blazing to get in time to your target. This was not supposed to be CoD. pls devs put the friggn Timer off!!

Also the staged Arti fire. what the hell? if i friggn WANT to fight against them let me. don't put shells on me because i don't run fast enough in a certain direction.

If i dont do so as if it was supposed put Enemys at me. Even Tanks. but let ME decide what i want to do. If there no Chain of Command anymore so I can do what i want.

[Bamse 223]

holy necro batman. This post was added over two years ago .... :)

[NTGhost 0]

wut? oh holy...sry. i was searching for somthing and this was in my results. :unsure: