Arma 3 potential

[marez12 17]

Introduction:

Over the course of 12 years spent on this amazing franchise (Arma: Armed assault, Arma 2 and Arma 3) I've had time to enjoy the game in a lot of different settings, from pure milsim to roleplay and just fun. But I created this topic because something bothered me for the last years, growing up with this game I saw the amazing potential Arma 3 has and I began to wonder if we could do something more. From what I've seen on the MP side of thing, this game could be anything, a Battlefield, a squad a Hell let loose or a CoD,  but yet we do things without going far into it. In the following topic I'm going to explain my point of view over this matter, and maybe ideas that I've got to deal with it.

First of all I want to talk about the modding, the issue with the current state of mods in arma 3, 2nd I want to talk about what we can do about this issue, new game mods, or maybe new way to share mods.

 

 

 

 

I/ The issues with mods

When I play vanilla game, it's quite easy to go in a mission, because there is no need to install something new a mod, but when a player wants to have a different experience, he will have to download mods. But their are so many issues with the current states of the modding community that players are often discouraged or scared to download mods, even for mission editor it's quite a pain to make a mission with mods if you want to share it with the arma 3 community. In this part, I will go over the reasons of the issues with the modding community in my opinion.

 

a) Too many mods for the same thing.

When the modding tools first came out on arma 3, we were all like, it s going to be amazing it was amazing, but now it is too much. When you create a mission with russian or american forces, you have to think about what mod set you are going to put in it, RHS, CUP? Do I take the basic AK's or AR4 platform displayed by those mods or do I take Niarm's Weapons? Those issues are not a plague just for mission creator but for communities as well, when you want to plan a session with different communities you have to talk about wich mods you use and it's quite a pain sometime because a community will use a certain mod and the other community will use an other mod doing basically the same thing. It's a shame because when you think about it the aim of those mods are probably the same somehow, but yet we have to make a choice. This is a big issue and probably the main issue of why we can't bring a huge amount a player, because with so much dispersion we can't agree on everything. And this is how I'm going to my second point in the modding issue, the current way to share those mods is quite unattractive and even scary for new players. In the end you can end up with a  100Go of mods because you have to download 2 mods doing the same thing but you want to play 2 different missions.

 

b) Too many tools.

As I stated before the way we display, we share our mod, is not the best in my opinion, for new players they've got 4 different way to download mods or a mod set wich are not always easy to use. Communities are also scattered because of this issue, some use Steam, other use Play With Six some ask their player to download them manually or over a site. For a new player, if he wants an other experience over the one proposed by vanilla arma 3, he will have to choose a way to download his mods and install them. Bohemia did a great job with the Steam Workshop, but even there, we are faced with the lack of unity I talked about in point a.

 

In the end the modding community is so scattered that is difficult to do big things, I love the modding community though, they came up with amazing things, they brought us mods that are amazing to play with but it's a shame that the community is so scattered. (And I'm probably not the only one thinking that).

 

 

II/ What we could do about it

Yeah, we are there to many mods, but what could we do about it? I'm going to talk about things we could do in my opinion to correct this issue.

 

a) What to do first with the game itself and the mods

Arma 3 is a powerful sandbox game, where we can do almost whatever we want, as I said in my introduction, it could be a battlefield a xCom, or something entirely new, a good way to start things in my opinion would be to create game mods based on often played game mods, and easy to access for new players. Maybe we need to fing a way to reduce the amount of key needed to play those mods like we had in project Argo. Is there a need to have 4 speeds or 9 stances to play a TDM or a capture the flag? Is there a need to have a compass or a watch to play those game mods? Maybe a first step would be then to make things easier for new players, to reduce the difficulty of the game first.

This game as a learning curve very steep and for new players having access to game mod like this would be huge, we've got a lot of good things to work with in vanilla arma 3 to engage new players and to attract new communities. Reworking the backbone of the arma 3 multiplayer would be a good step to secure new players in my opinion.

 

b) Unite mods

Now that we managed to work on the vanilla game, we could extend those game mods to work with mods. But as I stated before, there are too many mods. What could we do about this? Maybe first of all create a base modset for each way to play the game (Casual, Milsim, Hardcore, Roleplay).  Maybe unite them by settings, and choose the best for each settings (Modern, WW2, Vietnam, HALO, Star Wars...) or mix them in order to have the best of each one in one mod set. We could (it's just an example) use RHS uniforms and vehicles, and use Niarm's . Deleting the RHS weapons from the modpack or use RHS weapons and add the RPK, and make it work with RHS. Add different faction currently dispayed in the modding community like the German or Swedish forces in this mod set. So the mission maker would know what to use and the players won't need to download 10 different modpack to play  a modern warfare setting in arma 3. (The same could be done for WW2 as well)

 

c) Communicate

This is the part that maybe would require the most work in my opinion.

1) To new players

Uniting those mods is just the beginning, for new players that would like to play on certain settings, we have to make it simple for them to no scare them off. Communication is very important on this part. Make a topic maybe on this forum or on the steam Forum with a link that tell them: Want to play hardcore WW2: Download: Hardcore settings, WW2

Want to play Vietnam casually:

Download: Casual Settings, Vietnam

Want to play in vocal download TS3 or discord Etc...

It should be as simple as that for new players, no other action required and I think this is where the Steam Workshop shine in my opinion, because it is very easy to use and I think it would be the best way to share the mod packs.

 

2) To the general public

This is where youtube shine, we've got a lot of youtuber in the arma 3 community, and presenting things as simple as possible would be the best way to attract new players. The forums come 2nd in my mind, also a great way to present what has been done, and how easy it is to join the arma 3 community.

 

3) To the arma 3 community

Teams and communities beeing scattered would benefit a lot from something like this, as I said, playing together would be so much easier knowing that the other team plays with the exact mods, settings... The job here would be to convince them to move on those packs. (And it won't be easy).

 

 

This is in my opinion what could be done in order to improve the game stance, and maybe help new players to find their way in the game.

 

 

 

Fiew last words:

If you read all the way to here, I might have captured you attention about this. And personally I'd like to work on it, if you feel the same or maybe you want to share your opinion feel free to talk about it here or in private. Maybe something can be done after all!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Dedmen 2714]

4 minutes ago, marez12 said:

other use Play With Six

that doesn't exist anymore.

 

5 minutes ago, marez12 said:

they've got 4 different way to download mods or a mod set wich are not always easy to use.

Most of that problem already solved itself, play with six is gone, armaholic is unusably slow. Most people moved to workshop or self-hosted Arma3Sync.

Yes too many tools I know, I made my own which will load mods from workshop if possible, and load other mods in Arma3Sync fashion if they cannot be on the workshop for whatever reason.

 

7 minutes ago, marez12 said:

it's quite a pain sometime because a community will use a certain mod and the other community will use an other mod doing basically the same thing.

I don't know any mod like that, every mod has something different about them, otherwise people wouldn't make them.

 

8 minutes ago, marez12 said:

But as I stated before, there are too many mods.

Well, thats to be expected in a mod-centric sandbox game. There is something for everybody, and as everybody is so different, there are also many different mods.

 

8 minutes ago, marez12 said:

Maybe first of all create a base modset for each way to play the game

That is what most milsim communities already do.

 

9 minutes ago, marez12 said:

and choose the best

You mean you want to tell passionate modders that "Noone will ever use your mod because we already choose that other one as 'the best'"

 

10 minutes ago, marez12 said:

and the players won't need to download 10 different modpack

As far as I know thats mostly just a thing in the life scene, where everyone has to have their special unique single folder modpack.

In the milsim region its quite normal to just make collections of exiting mods.

For example in my unit we also use RHS and CUP, do people have to download a different modpack when they join our unit or want to play elsewhere? No!

We just use the latest versions of the mods, directly from the steam workshop, just like almost everyone else. If someone joins us, they don't need to download them because they already have them.

If they go to a different unit, they don't have to redownload them because they already have them, not to mention that repacking/modifying these mods isn't permitted anyway so there is no reason to have a "special" version that needs to be downloaded separately.

 

We are planning to play together with another unit, We have two different modpacks yes. We need to add one more mod, and remove another and tadaa, we are compatible with theirs.

Not much effort, not much to download for the players either.

 

14 minutes ago, marez12 said:

Make a topic maybe on this forum or on the steam Forum with a link that tell them: Want to play hardcore WW2: Download: Hardcore settings, WW2

Want to play Vietnam casually:

Download: Casual Settings, Vietnam

Want to play in vocal download TS3 or discord Etc...

That is what milsim units are already doing, and have been doing for years.

Want to play WW2 scenario with us? Here is the modpack with the best mods that we have chosen for it.

 

 

 

[drebin052 324]

7 hours ago, marez12 said:

Maybe first of all create a base modset for each way to play the game (Casual, Milsim, Hardcore, Roleplay).  Maybe unite them by settings, and choose the best for each settings (Modern, WW2, Vietnam, HALO, Star Wars...) or mix them in order to have the best of each one in one mod set. We could (it's just an example) use RHS uniforms and vehicles, and use Niarm's .

 

You can already do this. Steam Workshop supports collections after all.

 

If you want to combine specific assets then you can just create a custom config addon to mix-n'-match whatever you want.

 

7 hours ago, marez12 said:

Deleting the RHS weapons from the modpack or use RHS weapons and add the RPK, and make it work with RHS. Add different faction currently dispayed in the modding community like the German or Swedish forces in this mod set. So the mission maker would know what to use and the players won't need to download 10 different modpack to play  a modern warfare setting in arma 3. (The same could be done for WW2 as well)

 

It isn't as simple as that. You can't just pull one or two (or more) weapons out of larger mods like RHS because another mod has them too. Especially when it comes to stuff like CUP where a lot of weapons, vehicles and even units often share textures/materials, etc. but are spread out across multiple PBOs.

 

Unless it was built specifically with this in mind where every asset is "standalone" within its own PBO, this would never work out for the majority of mods.