CSAT Based Official Campaign

[SenorTactician 28]

Through both official campaigns we have only been able to look through the eyes of NATO personnel, be it with Ben Kerry or the CTRG team in Apex. Perhaps being able to play from a different perspective could bring some new life into Arma 3 single-player, and create for a more interesting story when combined with the knowledge gained from the two NATO campaigns.

 

A perfect solution for this would be to introduce a CSAT campaign in which the player could act as one of the elite Viper Teams recently introduced in Apex, secretly deployed during the process of the Adapt campaign to counter the FIA insurgency or alternatively covertly operating in Tanoa. An element that's been missing from Arma 2 would be the greater freedom in terms of Open-World movement, so perhaps reviving elements from Arma 2's "Harvest Red" campaign would make for an interesting style of play.  The Independent and OPFOR factions have really been under-represented in terms of single player content, and this would undoubtedly bring some more attention to them, and would fill the void for those who were disappointed with the Apex campaigns solo-gameplay. 

 

Of course, this may not be the best idea considering the devs workloads with respect to the DLC releases, but just something to consider.

[AveryTheKitty 2626]

I completely agree, a campaign from CSAT's POV would be awesome!

[drebin052 324]

Eh...rather not.

 

Very few games have succeeded in making good campaigns for the "bad guys" (I could probably count them all with one hand). They're either full of ridiculous stereotypes or are completely illogical due to being made from a Western point of view.

[BroBeans. 279]

It would be great to see, but I can't see it realistically happening due to the surprising amount of time and effort that devs would go through.

 

However I'm sure there a few 3rd party campaigns/lengthy scenarios that take place playing as 'OPFOR' 

[SenorTactician 28]

10 hours ago, drebin052 said:

Eh...rather not.

 

Very few games have succeeded in making good campaigns for the "bad guys" (I could probably count them all with one hand). They're either full of ridiculous stereotypes or are completely illogical due to being made from a Western point of view.

You might be right, but perhaps the game could be approached from an objective perspective in which the only culture acknowledged in character interaction would be those of the current Iranian military, as has been done from the NATO perspective (did you hear too many cultural references during the East Wind campaign?), and as such, cultural insensitivity could be avoided.

 

Arma has also been known not to conform to traditional gaming industry standards, so this could be yet another innovation they'd add.

 

10 hours ago, BroBeans. said:

It would be great to see, but I can't see it realistically happening due to the surprising amount of time and effort that devs would go through.

 

However I'm sure there a few 3rd party campaigns/lengthy scenarios that take place playing as 'OPFOR' 

You're probably right, but I only made this thread to draw attention to a gap that the devs or modders could potentially explore in the future. 

As much as I am happy with the Arma 3 modding community, the scenarios they make are, more often than not, not comparable to those of BI.

[BroBeans. 279]

5 hours ago, SenorTactician said:

 

You're probably right, but I only made this thread to draw attention to a gap that the devs or modders could potentially explore in the future. 

As much as I am happy with the Arma 3 modding community, the scenarios they make are, more often than not, not comparable to those of BI.

 

I feel your pain

[bars91 956]

18 hours ago, SenorTactician said:

 

Arma has also been known not to conform to traditional gaming industry standards, so this could be yet another innovation they'd add.

 

 

Ughm... A1 and A2 campaigns were TOTALLY (not) unbiased towards OpFor and (did not) avoid all possible Hollywood cliches EVER...  (Red Hammer does not count as it was done by CM not BI)

[SenorTactician 28]

9 hours ago, bars91 said:

 

Ughm... A1 and A2 campaigns were TOTALLY (not) unbiased towards OpFor and (did not) avoid all possible Hollywood cliches EVER...  (Red Hammer does not count as it was done by CM not BI)

Well then this could be a positive first for it.

[bars91 956]

1 hour ago, SenorTactician said:

Well then this could be a positive first for it.

 

If they replace their scriptwriter - after (mediocre and pale at best) East Wind story and (despite really good cutscene cinematography and voice acting) structural disaster that was Apex Protocol, I wonder, whomever wrote those scripts and got actually paid for it... I bet it feels good to get paid for straight up ripping off movies and other games, and besides that doing pretty much fuck-all 

[inlesco 233]

10 hours ago, bars91 said:

 

If they replace their scriptwriter - after (mediocre and pale at best) East Wind story and (despite really good cutscene cinematography and voice acting) structural disaster that was Apex Protocol, I wonder, whomever wrote those scripts and got actually paid for it... I bet it feels good to get paid for straight up ripping off movies and other games, and besides that doing pretty much fuck-all 

I don't think BIS has any dedicated scriptwriters... It's just that someone, while consulting the military personnel, volunteers or is assigned to write a script that satisfies the bare minimum of dialogue and chronological quality, other aspects, like character depth and so on, are not that important in such a game as Arma.

 

In fact, I wonder how what % of Arma 3 players even played at least through the first chapter of East Wind campaign... I suppose the numbers may directly impacted BIS' decision to move onto less content for SP and more content with a MP/Coop focus. This is no news, actually. 

[Wiki 1558]

I made an AAF campaign connected to East Wind some time ago.

[almanzo 144]

On 21.4.2017 at 6:35 AM, SenorTactician said:

A perfect solution for this would be to introduce a CSAT campaign in which the player could act as one of the elite Viper Teams recently introduced in Apex, secretly deployed during the process of the Adapt campaign to counter the FIA insurgency or alternatively covertly operating in Tanoa.

For the love of god no, if there is one thing Bohemia needs to learn when it comes to their compaigns, is to make them coherent with their gameplay. The entire game is tailored against super soldiers who covertly runs their own little war, but it is perfect for conveying the feeling of being a cog in the machine, as that's basicly what you are. Your vounerable, and that's the best strength ARMA has. BIS hasn't understood the story potential in their engine yet, and are trying to mimmic Hollywood and games that are designed towards making you feel like the hero from the ground up. ARMA isn't, and they haven't understood this since OFP. Special forces missions can be done well in ARMA, but not this fantasy of a single team single handedly solving a conflict. Let COD and Battlefield keep their action heroes, and have ARMA focus on conveying war stories.

(not that there is something wrong with action heroes, but ARMA is a terrible plattform for such an experience)

[SenorTactician 28]

On 4/25/2017 at 7:24 PM, almanzo said:

For the love of god no, if there is one thing Bohemia needs to learn when it comes to their compaigns, is to make them coherent with their gameplay. The entire game is tailored against super soldiers who covertly runs their own little war, but it is perfect for conveying the feeling of being a cog in the machine, as that's basicly what you are. Your vounerable, and that's the best strength ARMA has. BIS hasn't understood the story potential in their engine yet, and are trying to mimmic Hollywood and games that are designed towards making you feel like the hero from the ground up. ARMA isn't, and they haven't understood this since OFP. Special forces missions can be done well in ARMA, but not this fantasy of a single team single handedly solving a conflict. Let COD and Battlefield keep their action heroes, and have ARMA focus on conveying war stories.

(not that there is something wrong with action heroes, but ARMA is a terrible plattform for such an experience)

That's a fine opinion as well, although the APEX campaign runs against your statement in some forms.

 

It could always be an organic reconnaissance element with the 24th Regiment on Altis, sort of like the FORECON team in Arma 2.

[almanzo 144]

11 hours ago, SenorTactician said:

That's a fine opinion as well, although the APEX campaign runs against your statement in some forms.

 

It could always be an organic reconnaissance element with the 24th Regiment on Altis, sort of like the FORECON team in Arma 2.

But the APEX campaign wasn't very good to be honest. I can't say that I remember the names of any of the characters, or that the story was in any way coherent. Not a single conversation is memorable, so the motivation for actually doing the missions is just the gameplay. Now, if you take into the account the fact that the missions are designed around respawn, this even furthers the mismatch between how the characters and the campaign is portrayed and the gameplay that is actually on show here. ARMA doesn't care if your player character is a special forces operator or not, you'll die just as easily to a grunt as a regular soldier would (with some exceptions regarding gear, though). So your portrayed as this four man team killing a lot of enemies without even getting a scratch, while the reality is most likely that several of you have either respawned or been downed several times. In addition, with unlimited (or even limited respawn) all of the tension is gone. The entire APEX experience was bland, unimaginative and booring. With a map like Tanoa and a game like ARMA, the potential for story telling isn't even scratched in the APEX campaign.

The potential to convey the horrors of jungle warfare, the confusion and the lack of awareness is just begging to be explored. Imagine yourself in the shoes of one of the local rebels, fighting for your life in the cover of the jungle, relying on your superiour knowlege of the rainforest to get the jump on the enemy. Or in the shoes of a regular soldier who is faced with hostile and foreign terrain, who has to fight for every inch of land and that has to live through the loss of his comrades. 

The mistake done here is that all of the tension is at the global scale, and while that can be part of it, it is at the human scale the most engaging stories often are found, especially in a game like ARMA, whom by it's very nature will be bound to the individual perspective of a soldier. Maybe you just got a child back home that you haven't met yet? Or that you ended up in the military as a result of there not being any other options, and now you are stuck fighting a war you have no real investment in other than to live.

A very good example of this is how Cold War Rising approached the global scale. For the first quarter of the game or something, you don't even know who you are fighting and are caught by surprise. All this war is about to begin with is to survive and get home. When General Guba is introduced he doesn't have that much of an impact, but once you meet up with the ressistance you all of a sudden have a personal stake in the conflict, a motivation causing a conflict of interest with the brass.

ARMA III campaign has none of this, nor do APEX. 

And as to prove my point in regards to memorability:

"I spy with my little I, something beggining with "G""

[SenorTactician 28]

14 hours ago, almanzo said:

"I spy with my little I, something beggining with "G""

 

For those who didn't play that game, here's the transcript below.

Spoiler

Kozlowski: "War's boring. Anyone else bored?"
Fowley: "You should learn to appreciate any downtime, Kozlowski. Makes combat more exciting."
Kozlowski: "OK, I spy with my little eye, something beginning with... G."
Fowley: "Gun."
Kozlowski: "Er... No, it's not gun."
Fowley: "It's gun, isn't it, Kozlowski? I saw you looking at it. Jeez, you even cheat at I-Spy."
Kozlowski: "It's not gun, it's... jeep."
Fowley: "Jeep doesn't start with G, you meathead."
Kozlowski: "OK, OK, not jeep, I mean... grass."
Fowley: "Grass?"
Bormioli: "Heads up, guys. Here comes Berghof."

- Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis

 

[SenorTactician 28]

To be honest, I wouldn't mind seeing Kerry again either, though.

[silentghoust 132]

I actually been thinking about this pretty deeply before I even found this thread.

 

One thing that appealed to me about the original Altis campaign was it didn't just make CSAT to be the bad guy. More just a personal interest group, kinda how Russia was in Arma 2. I think it worked great simply because a lot of stuff is circumstantial but never proven. Did Miller start stuff, did the AAF know, ect. Apex kinda toned that down, the missions were fun, but I felt the overall potential on building off of the Altis story were kinda lost.

I think the biggest challenge is finding native speakers willing to voice act. Chinese, maybe Russia. I can't even think of a Iranian player I seen or even heard of though. I was lucky just to find one guy who could speak Mandarin and work with me. The next challenge is how would I spin a good CSAT story in the current settings? I think the only way to make a good Opfor story is having people relate to them. Taking out a bunch of NATO troops as just a regular day at work would be pretty bland. CTRG is definitely a easy target, hell they potentially caused a certain thing in Altis as a distraction. 

I think you would have to do a few things just to make it interesting.

1. Make CSAT redeem itself for APEX. Maybe have "rogue" elements or something.
2. Still have a reason to fight NATO here and there.
3. A chance to re-visit at least one of the vanilla maps maps. With a very different prospective. 
4. A new setting, in which both NATO and CSAT can be present. Possibly even a new map.

I would be happy to hear story ideas regardless that fall under the Arma 3 universe. 

[lysan 17]

Making campaigns that is well done, with a good story and voice acting is a huge undertaking. Even if you can "play" the editor like you made it.

 

I'm doing a small campaign, and even though I made a 100% storyboard, wrote all the dialogs, and got it all layed out. Getting it down as a good playable campaign is like swimming in molasses. I loved the old Arma stories, they are great stories and that is what drives them forward. However someone need to write the story, then materialize it into the game as a campaign, it takes time=money.

 

To be honest, if some of the very talented modders out there could sell their creations as DLC, I would pay good money for a good arma campaign with ofc a good story/plot behind it.

[OMAC 254]

http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=25685

 

???

[3uriah 0]

Really would like to see this. Some brilliant content creators like Lexx (Callsign Minotaur - in link) have great working examples of what could be done. Regarding BIS' work, I really enjoy the world of 2034/35 and would be thrilled to see more of this world unfold, in particular post Apex Protocol. CSAT as a coalition of nations fascinates me.

 

I didn't really see CSAT or NATO as good guys or bad guys. Just the world's powerful nations at play. With this in mind, i want to see how much more drama can unfold from their conflict. From playing in Kerry and McDade's shoes, CTRG have the antagonist characteristics, considering their clandestine operations and 'by any means necessary' approach and we never know who they really serve... so in some ways i'd like to be facing off against CTRG as they represent a mysterious group to challenge. That being said, they are also very cool.