Bussiness model compared to EA

[slatts 1978]

Words words words.

I get were you're coming from mate, but I wasn't making a direct comparision between features. More how EA used levolution as a key selling point of BF4 while the new one's to Arma were "marketed" quite a bit but as a whole Arma was used to sell the game.

[chortles 263]

Anyway, I think the Steam thing was quite bold and deliberate. They knew that it would be unpopular with sections of the community at the time, but I imagine they worked out how many customers would be shed vs new ones drawn in and went with the numbers.

arma3development.txt

You make an interesting point about DayZ.

I hadn't thought of it like that but yes, where else can the game go? I know it's still being developed but it's stagnating and the general view of most people I've talked to is that they can't stay excited for 3+ years about a zombie game. Here's what one of my friends thought. It's pretty harsh but he's got a good point:

I have long since lost faith in this game. It will never be good, because by the time they finish it or even add any interesting content, it will be outdated.

... gives you a whole new perspective on "delay the game/DLC/Expansion until I get what I want", doesn't it? :D

Sure, modders can look positively on how much more leeway DayZ's devs have to make radical overhauls to the engine backend... but from a player's end apparently none of that has visibly translated into much (over both the mod and Arma 3) has it? I've suspected that DayZ may look a lot different to Maruk as a publisher's product instead of Arma 3 modders looking at DayZ as a tech testbed, and it may be that (avoiding/forestalling for Arma 3) what your friend described is why Arma 3 was both developed and promoted so differently...

1) No-one on the development team has any idea what to do about the 3rd person peek-a-boo gameplay.

2) There's no zombies. No effective AI antagonist means humans are the antagonist and the game becomes a really slow paced PVP game like COD, but with bad respawn.

's where their WIP 3rd-person view is at. On the other hand, I also remember one fundamental problem being that many players showed up for and stayed for the PVP (as one player characterized it, the "Road Warrior MMO") with survivalism treated as an overly onerous obstacle in the way of the fighting...

I get were you're coming from mate, but I wasn't making a direct comparision between features. More how EA used levolution as a key selling point of BF4 while the new one's to Arma were "marketed" quite a bit but as a whole Arma was used to sell the game.

This -- considering that the OP and topic of discussion wasn't exactly about the artistic/gameplay merits of the games to begin with... ;)

[EDcase 87]

Reading this thread made me think of the history of BIS and ARMA so this may be interesting for the newer players.

The

of ARMA

Marek do you remember ;)

Edited March 24, 2015 by EDcase

[nodunit 397]

2) There's no zombies. No effective AI antagonist means humans are the antagonist and the game becomes a really slow paced PVP game like COD, but with bad respawn.

But that is what made DayZ so popular, it wasn't the zombies and it never was...oh sure it attracted zombie fans but ultimately it was the social aspect, the random encounters and what could happen. The zombies themselves aren't interesting, they aren't varied or bring differing mechanics like something such as left 4 dead, and if zombies were the reason it became popular then that would have fallen out, the undead become less threatening after a while not to mention hilarious when they glitch into everything.

It's the same reason why all of the life servers are so popular, its the social aspect, not the zombie aspect.

[das attorney 857]

Maybe we see it differently.

I'm referring to the first iteration of zombies that would chase you forever (before lineIntersects addition meant you could lose them in a tree).

Stupid as they were, they posed a threat through their doggedness and made players interact more as they had more of a common foe.

As soon as they changed the zombies, and you could lose them in a bush, there was no need for cooperation and KOS became the defacto playstyle.

That's just how I remember it anyway.

Now there's barely any zombies at all in SA. I played if for an hour the other day, ran through a couple of towns and saw none.

[CaptainAzimuth 714]

While were on the point of DayZ, Z as in Zero is the amount of zombies I've seen in any live stream EVER... Heh.

DayZ is a fantasy. It was better as a mod, it's proper time for birth, rushed, and possibly done on the wrong Engine. However, DayZ is the cause many survival games have now been tried. WarZ, H1Z1, name other zombie based survival game here. And guess what? None of them are as good as the DayZ mod, which is still better than the Standalone.

Now, let's take a look at core Survival. Survival is the main selling point of the game, on a vast-ish terrain. The problem is, Survival is short lived, the zombies are no longer a threat, as mentioned by Das, and players seek action, therefore killing other players, turning into Wasteland with a side of Zombies, and medical opportunities.

Now, get this. A couple of games that DO SURVIVAL RIGHT, are The Forest, and Stranded Deep. Take inspiration from the building mechanics of any of those games, make it more intuitive, but still very interactive, and now combine that with a bigger map, more players, More fluent animations than Arma 3, better environmental threats and dangerous zombies, and what you have is the Alpha of a Zombie Survival game that might actually be worth some money. Oh, and probably a new Engine designed for such a game, as RV4 doesn't... Well, actually... Nvm, It can pull off that kind of building system. But you get the point. DayZ has hit a wall, it's not survival, it's DeathMatch.

Ok, I went waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay, off topic, back on topic, I wonder if BIS would use that model on DayZ.

[chortles 263]

DayZ is a fantasy. It was better as a mod, it's proper time for birth, rushed, and possibly done on the wrong Engine. However, DayZ is the cause many survival games have now been tried. WarZ, H1Z1, name other zombie based survival game here. And guess what? None of them are as good as the DayZ mod, which is still better than the Standalone.

And that's a fundamental problem with DayZ standalone: Rocket admitted that the intended scope of the standalone grew to me simply the mod plus anticheat without specifying what that actually meant, and I don't believe that the new dev leadership has either... so what are players supposed to be getting in return for the lack of content/modding compared to both the mod and to even Arma 3? (I specify Arma 3 since Breaking Point, Zoombies, etc. were a thing.) And if the answer to that was supposed to be greater emphasis on survival, then then runs into a player base that seems to treat the PVP as more central than Rocket/the devs' seeming survival primacy...

DayZ has hit a wall, it's not survival, it's DeathMatch.

And I don't know of a way to overcome it that can't already be done in Arma 3...

EDIT: To follow up on the business side of things, albeit by quoting again what Das Attorney quoted of their friend:

You make an interesting point about DayZ.

I hadn't thought of it like that but yes, where else can the game go? I know it's still being developed but it's stagnating and the general view of most people I've talked to is that they can't stay excited for 3+ years about a zombie game. Here's what one of my friends thought. It's pretty harsh but he's got a good point:

I have long since lost faith in this game. It will never be good, because by the time they finish it or even add any interesting content, it will be outdated.

Let's not forget that Arma 3 development was announced back on 19 May 2011 -- though of course there was its time as Futura before that -- then it got rebooted in the winter of 2012, made public alpha on 5 March 2013, made beta on 25 June 2013, made launch on 12 September 2013, the SP campaign was concluded by 20 March 2014, Zeus (announced 13 February 2014) was released on 10 April 2014, Helicopters was released on 4 November 2014, Marksmen is on 8 April 2015, the Expansion is still slated for late 2015-early 2016...

In contrast, DayZ standalone development was announced 7 August 2012, it seems to have gotten its own winter of 2012 reboot, but then it didn't make public alpha until 16 December 2013, the first vehicle was made publicly available in 2014, and then...?

It seems to me that the combination of DLCs (yes readers, laugh all you want at me referring to the SP campaign and Zeus as DLCs, but BI promoted them that way :rolleyes: ) has helped keep Arma 3's name in the spotlight in a way that DayZ can't because DayZ doesn't have any product releases except the base game, and it's "big announcements" (i.e. product releases) that drive press releases which drive "people remembering that your game actually exists in the first place"...

I think the only things they can do is release a new map, open it up to mods or change the server arrangements, but I can't see them doing that for a good long while given it is not even at 1.0. There would be outrage if they moved the goalposts before kick-off so to speak.

Hicks_206 also stated they're not giving out the server files (Hicks was replying to a now-protected-tweets user whose originating question was "would it be possible in the future to have the server files publicly available so anyone can create a private shard server?") so that would appear to be out, while Namalsk is WIP at best. Edited March 24, 2015 by Chortles

[maffa 29]

... nothing worth saying, wont change a thing

Edited March 24, 2015 by Maffa
nothing worth saying, wont change a thing

[Imperator[TFD] 444]

... nothing worth saying, wont change a thing

Well you deleted your post before I had a chance to reply to it so now I won't bother going point by point. All I can say is thank christ Arma 3 is not just a prettier A2+ACE because ACE shit me to tears and a lot of it just isn't neccessary to good game play for the regular player.

The best thing about Arma 3 is that it can be whatever the content creator (modder/mission maker etc) wants it to be.

Additionally; not everyone wants to play in a clan.

[slatts 1978]

I seen what you said Maffa and to be honest, you're pointing blame against the developer for the wrong reason. Before you yell fanboi hear me out.

You had issues with the game not being Arma 3 + ACRE and ACE. They were your expectations and anyone who even has a good knowledge of what BIS' vision of Arma knows that that's a false expectation. You had an issue that the game wasn't to your liking, which is fine, that's your own opinion. But not realizing that that liking isn't going to flourish by default isn't reason enough to blame BIS in my book.

As for the whole MANW thing. Regardless of what you or anyone thinks of the monetary rewards. From my POV it's contributed to MORE content coming out than before. Anyone with a hint of what it takes to make a good decent to high quality mod knows it takes a lot of effort. The money has steered people to making more of an effort to making good quality addons for all of us to play. Hopefully, they'll keep at it after the compo is over.

I don't see how it's BIS covering up for the lack of content in Arma 3. Modding has always made up for "lack" of content or gameplay features since the very beginning.

Edited March 24, 2015 by Slatts

[maffa 29]

I erased my comment also because i realized it was largerly off topic (and i apologize with the OP, when i started writing didnt look like that :confused:). I wish there were some stats as to how and where the players play. I dont want to get the topic astray so i wont push the matter further.

@slatts: im not going to call you or anyone "fanboi" because i AM a fanboy, or well i enjoy the game very much and i play it 4 nights a week and -probably by my limited vision of it- i cannot help but think there are just a few ways you can play the game, one main way and a few "fun" mods. I am also glad of the MANW, because it was about time: something had to be done about the gap ACE left, and fast.

@imperator_pete: what are the alternatives?

[das attorney 857]

I erased my comment also because i realized it was largerly off topic

You were also unnecessarily insulting to the ACE team imo. Just because they didn't release ACE for Arma 3, it isn't "sticking up a middle finger to the community" as you put it.

If you read up on their reason not to release, you would know they didn't have permission for some of the ACE pack and also some of the team left to go and do other things, which you cannot begrudge them for.

Also, you shouldn't have bought Arma 3 on the expectation that it would be Arma 2 plus ACE and ACRE as it was never marketed as that.

However, I agree with some of your points (public play being a mess and also MANW not fostering a spirit of creation on community). Seems a lot of entries have been abandoned after entry and their authors seem to have moved on when they weren't selected to be in finals.

Plus it doesn't help that development of Arma has moved on, so to play some of the entries you need to backdate Arma to something like 1.36 - no thanks. Maybe the competition would have worked a bit better if Arma was more mature.

[maffa 29]

no no wait not to the community, but to BIS

crap i havent made a copy of the post. Believe me, I have the utmost respect for the ACE group. For one, i just want that vanilla arma had more "advanced" stuff so that we dont have to colect a thousand different mods around.

[das attorney 857]

Ah okay, that's what I thought you said last night but I couldn't re-read today as you deleted it.

[dav 22]

EA traditionally make games for skate boarders. Each of the new Battlefield titles from 3 onwards being a great example of how to water down what was once "pin point' accurate shooting model from BF2. Hence why Arma has done so well. There is no cheesy characters in a cheesy campaign with cheesy qte's. They release nice looking games but each game 'feels" the exact same as the last. Fifa, Nhl, Nfl, Nfs, the list goes on. Must be a drag making commercial games.

[Sub-Human 10]

Hence why Arma has done so well. There is no cheesy characters in a cheesy campaign

Come on, man... ArmA's campaigns are a joke, especially the voice acting and the 'macho' soldiers (except maybe Operation Arrowhead, but that had its faults too).

[chortles 263]

I dunno, I thought that The East Wind was refreshing in that respect, both in voice acting and in confounding some of the old cliches, and even had some humor to boot.

I'm not going to say that Sgt. Adams had it coming... but I wouldn't be surprised if the AAF in Drawdown went out of their way to make sure that he got got, hence the start of the second mission in SURVIVE.