ArmA2 1.03 Impressions - ALL Impressions/Videos/Screenies Here

[secondVISION 10]

Bought it yesterday and installed & patched it to 1.02. Epic game! I'm running everything on high and I'm getting a really good fps, even in cities :D If someone tells me how to check my fps then I can say what it is.

I'm running:

C2Q 6700 @ 2.67 Ghz

nVidia 9800GTX (182.50 drivers)

4GB Ram

Vista

Done a coop with my bro and it was epic! Hard but epic.

I tried flying but that it hard :(

Ah well, nice one bis! Epic game.

[Nemesis_wales 0]

Bought it yesterday and installed & patched it to 1.02. Epic game! I'm running everything on high and I'm getting a really good fps, even in cities :D If someone tells me how to check my fps then I can say what it is.

I'm running:

C2Q 6700 @ 2.67 Ghz

nVidia 9800GTX (182.50 drivers)

4GB Ram

Vista

Done a coop with my bro and it was epic! Hard but epic.

I tried flying but that it hard :(

Ah well, nice one bis! Epic game.

type in google... FRAPS.. download that m8. run it while playing game, remeber to go in fraps and change keys etc etc, cos as default the keys can conflict, ie i have my insert button to take screenings and my FPS showing top right

[dunedain 48]

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9Gg9IOExr4&hl=fr&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9Gg9IOExr4&hl=fr&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

Jump to 1:25 :D

[SaBrE_UK 0]

Haha, who needs tracker dogs when you have tracker men!?

[maddogx 13]

Here's a small video to debunk the claims that headshots in Arma2 aren't fatal on recruit difficulty.

rlVEFebqaWU

[funkee 0]

nice shot! hope it didnt hurt ;)

Edited July 1, 2009 by funkee

[Master gamawa 0]

So this is the ALL IMPRESSIONS topic.

First of all, as most of you, I am/was a dedicated Operation Flashpoint and Armed Assault fan. I played the crap out of these games since they came out. To be honest I bought the original Armed Assault (Queens Gambit Exp) game FOUR TIMES, in order to be able to play with my friends on my LAN without having FADE kick in. Well six times to be precise. I got the german version when it came out and the first international version too without the QG.

I loved Operation Flashpoint and I loved Armed Assault even though it didn't come without it's fair share of problems.

Then came ARMA 2. The answer to all my dreams and hopes. Better handling, better graphics, better AI, huge realistic map and let us not forget that you can actually lift your foot over a short fence and jump it! Amazing! You know what's funny? I am so used to not moving when reloading that I don't know if they fixed that on Arma 2. I seriously never tried it. My reflexes take control and when I hit reload my left hand is temporarily paralyzed!

I am usually all about custom missions. I create all sorts of crazy stories and play with some friends but I always liked the campaigns, especially the ones in Op Flash.

Since ARMA 2 is pretty demanding for an average PC, I bought it only once since I wasn't sure the other pcs on my LAN could handle it.

And played the campaign.

I am lucky to have encountered only a few game-breaking bugs. I couldn't arrest that woman, I couldn't talk to some villagers etc but it was nothing major. Oh yeah, I had to turn off grass and plants because the enemies killed me from miles away and I could even see them!

Then I got to the last mission where you have to conquer the whole map. I am only guessing it's the last mission because I didn't complete it. BECAUSE I DIDN'T KNOW HOW!

I made everything green and nice and destroyed the enemy base. I have no idea what to do next. There are no waypoints or tasks. Oh, and my last save game is fucked and I don't want to play again from the last autosave. Too much trouble!

So I left the game there and I decided I had enough.

Now I want to ask: Who the hell thought it was a good idea to implement WARFARE in the main campaign? My God I couldn't believe it!

All I wanted to do was to crawl behind enemy lines, search for enemies, sabotage stuff, fly planes and ride in tanks. I wanted to jump in the battle with a parachute in the middle of the night. I wanted to destroy convoys and steal enemy aircraft. I wanted massive assaults to enemy positions and planning attacks to enemy bases. I wanted to be there and be scared shitless as I was with OP F and Armed Assault!

All I got was the tedious task of sending a couple of T-72s around the whole map. I know I probably didn't play it right but if I wanted to organize troops and buy units I would probably play a strategy game! I couldn't leave my main camp area because I had to be on the look out to create new armor when the enemy destroyed my tanks.

That's all I did for hours and hours on end. I didn't even shoot ONE enemy with my gun. I played the whole mission through the map (which is impressive for the game engine I admit that), because it was impossible to control units all over Chernarus, while trying to survive magical enemy homing bullets that killed me by opening wormholes through mountains and headshooting me.

You can't have both! You're either a grunt doing the dirty work or an officer planning the dirtier work, logistics and support! No, I don't mean in real life. I mean in a game where the AI isn't famous for it's understanding of how things work in war. In real life you don't need to tell a soldier in the other side of the country to rearm because they would do that anyway! In real life, officers don't use imaginary dollars to summon tanks from the fifth dimension! In real life, everyone specializes in a certain field. When I am crawling in the dirt trying to evade an enemy tank, the last thing I want to deal with is a strongpoint that was lost 5km away.

It's all wrong.

This is not real life. It's a game. I want to be immersed in what I am doing. WARFARE killed my immersion, that's all I am saying. For god's sake I watched a flipping movie on tv while playing the last mission. I listened to music because I was bored!

That's it. I am done. I just have to wait until I buy three new pcs that are able to run this game and then buy three more copies of the game to enjoy it as I should.

I only need about 2500 euros to enjoy it. :)

Edited July 2, 2009 by Placebo

[Commando84 0]

@Master gamawa Warefare is a continued development of the much popuar mfcti mod from Ofp wich I remember was very popular and continued to be in Arma 1 as Warefare and its different modified variants :)

I've read somewhere even Bohemia liked it so much the whole office played it :D

Sure it might not be everyone's piece of cake but Imo Bohemia is all about not being mainstream :)

Of course capture the island or warefare is much more fun in multiplayer than sp but its a bit of a different type of gameplay, in multiplayer you can choose to be just a soldier doing the fighting or drive supply trucks or be a commander and take care of the base.

[mr_centipede 31]

@Master, as much as a fanboi as I am, I painfully agree. WARFARE should have no place in the campaign... I can accept if it was only high command, but warfare.. build base, buy units... that gameplay should only be left in single mission or MP... not the official campaign. If there will be and expansion pack, which I hope it will, I hope warfare mission wont make it in the official CAMPAIGN... really kill the immersion of the campaign

though i admit warfare is a fun game mode. still the best $40 ive spent...

Edited July 2, 2009 by Mr_Centipede

[Master gamawa 0]

Yeah as I said, I don't mind WARFARE as a concept. It works for MP and even though it's a bit gimmicky for my tastes, it deals with things that organization oriented players may enjoy.

It just feels alien to me man. You know those red bars that appear when you capture a base? Getting paid pixie dollars for killing people? Where did that come from? I got 25 dollars for killing a rifleman. And a BRDM costs 800. Well!!!

Summoning tanks out of thin air?

All I want is a choice that allows me to play the game how I see fit, which was what OpF and ARMA were all about.

Cause you see the problem with Arma 2 is ... spreading too little butter on a huge slice of bread.

You can't have it all. You can't pack driving/flight sim/armed fighting/commanding/resource management/multiple choices/dynamic campaign in one game.

You have to compromise all the time and that's evident in Arma 2. I know it's hard to program the arrival of armored units from the factory to your base. You have to make them pop out in twenty seconds and let your imagination fill the details! You have to compromise when building a base to avoid animating soldiers building machine gun nests. It takes one second to do so but the rest of the game flows in real time!

Spawning enemy units are a real disappointment. I reached the Chedaki Base and enemies kept popping out even though I killed everyone.

That was what I liked about ARMA and OFP. Everything was there already. You just had to kill it and be done with it!

I hated COD4 for the insane amount of generated enemies. I hated Battlefield with all that 'capturing the bases' to win the match.

I loved OpF and Arma because they were putting me in the shoes of a grunt that does his small part to help the war. I wasn't always aware of the big picture and that was a huge bonus. I was there with my trusted gun, preserving ammo, hiding from enemies. Trying to survive.

My only hope is to play this game over LAN with my friends. No warfare there! No mission crashes and elusive triggers!

Damn!

[cm 0]

Damn, I was seriously disapointed when I learnt that warfare was my next mission in the campaign. Warfare is great and all, but it has absolutely NO place in a campaign that is meant to be authentic.

Apart from the massive bugs in the campaign and the warefare, it is definately fun :).

[ericfr 0]

In the editor when i load Chernarus and after load Utes, a desert island appears North Utes where the AI have strange behavior with vehicles ?

Edited July 2, 2009 by EricFr
Insert Imgs

[Commando84 0]

In the editor when i load Chernarus and after load Utes, a desert island appears North Utes where the AI have strange behavior with vehicles ?

Nice find! Thats a Easteregg :D

[MBot 0]

@Master gamawa

Well said, completely agree about the campaign and warfare.

[Murphe 0]

In the editor when i load Chernarus and after load Utes, a desert island appears North Utes where the AI have strange behavior with vehicles ?

Ha, it works. How wierd, but wounldn't it be more of an easter egg if it was the same shape as the OFP desert Island?

[von_paulus 0]

I've just played four missions in the campaign. I knew there was a Warfare mission, but I thought that was optional.

No workaround? :(

[thr0tt 12]

Cool, you have just helped me not even bother going any further in the campaign as I can't stand the warfare mode.

[Zipper5 74]

Well, the many different endings to the campaign are worth viewing, and they come after the last Warfare mission.

[Mispunt 10]

Does nobody care about the single player campaign then?

Or even the training missions?

It's such a shame, the concept is great, the scripting, again, is poor.

Personally I kind of regret having paid money for this at the moment since there's no real excuse for poor scripting like this.

And before I am told to go back to Cod, I like sims. If you really want realism, try Black Shark (not without it's problems either but at least not a buggy mess)

[cartier90 0]

why not wait for further patches before getting your knickers in a twist.

[Scrub 0]

why not wait for further patches before getting your knickers in a twist.

+1 because you KNOW their coming.

I understand it's not the way it usually is in the industry, but honestly, why is that such a big deal? A common answer: Because people expect a grand unveiling of a finished product (that still have some bugs, I mean REALLY, very few of this complexity are flawless) that will not change much throughout it's life. No laws state that must be, and BIS have the flipside of the argument, release a product a bit early and therefore buggy for us to experience, fix and add to it through it's life. Not many other devs that I'm aware of ADD to their game without a for-pay addon.

Relax, it's a different kind of ride with the same outcome. BIS are honorable and will support like none other.

Cheers

[archsceptic. 10]

Depressing performance on my rig, I've tried everything I can think of, and the weird thing with this game is that it seems to react very badly to experimenting with different settings - performance seems to degrade when experimenting - I have to go back into Catalyst CC and return to "factory settings" and reset to "default" in ArmA2 settings.

The worst thing is the flickering or oscillating shadows and textures, shadows set to anything but "normal" have terrible artifacts, I am now resigned to playing without shadows at all just to be on the safe side - in case they trigger an epileptic fit.

Plants and clumps of grass teleport into existence 4 or 5 feet away from me, the edges of the two different shades of grass continually 'dance' with each other - simulating the moving Rorschach face mask pattern from Watchmen.

In a way I'm not surprised by this, because Ofp and ArmA1 where similar in the way that players with mediocre systems often got better performance than players with top-end systems - which is obviously lunacy.

This: http://www.armedassault.info/index.php?cat=news&id=2662&game=1

- is unrecognisable from the game I see on my system, it is more colourful, more fluid, with few or no flickering shadows and textures and no dodgy draw-distances present. AI and animal life also miss out parts of their animations at distance and warp in and out of existance.

I've got a shaman coming tonight to chant some incantations, and tomorrow a Priest to bless my pc - in the hope of better performance, I just hope it doesn't take as long to get a fix for ArmA2 on Vista64 as it did for ArmA1 - but having said that, I dual boot - and the game is no better on my xp32 hd. After ArmA1 and now this I am left wondering how they got Ofp so relatively bug free on release.

But for me, possibly the worst thing about the game is some of the behaviour of the AI. I approached the enemy camp stealthily behind the concealing trees, switched to my rpg, lined up the T-72 and fired - the next few seconds had me checking whether it was April the 1st - before I could lie down or re-equip with my gun, every single AI on the map instantaneously knew my exact position - to atomic precision, 'slotting' me every time, before I could do anything. I believe it was Vilas who called this "God knowledge" which sums it up perfectly. We have now had this since 2001 - but at least now we have bunny rabbits, so it's good to see the priorities being got right.

After giving up with the rpg I tried to pick off the infantry in the camp with my rifle, again, crept in behind the trees, found the perfect place to deliver death - pulled my trigger to see a mystifying lack of bullet impact or dust kicked up where I had missed, fired again - nothing! Then with head in hands I realised what was happening. The branches on the Fir trees were acting like force fields against my bullets. By this time I was checking what the year was, not whether it was April 1st.

Core i7 940 (not overclocked).

4870 X2 2gb. Catalyst 9.6

6gb DDR3 ram

MSI X58 platinum crossfire MB.

Vista64

Samsung 1TB SATA2 hd (700gb free). Defragged often.

[Dar_Vender 10]

Now before I start I'm a big fan of the Arma series from OPF onwards. so having said that I knew before I bought the game or read a review that there would be bugs. But arma 2 breaks new grounds in game bugs. don't get me wrong I love this game, simply there is nothing else like it and I can't stop playing it, which in a way makes things worse.

I was just thinking that I wish they just held the game back for longer and got some more of the bugs out. This was first apparent on the Manhattan mission which was so buggy that by the time I had got through it I was just happy to be off the level. Now I'm on badlands and trying out the command system for the first time and although I still keep playing its like pulling my hair out. Half the time you tell a squad to move to a location and whatever speed/combat stance you put them to they insist on moving so slowly to the next location they might as well be standing still, which they also do half that time.

I'm now taking the second town and I get bugs like, the medic just refusing to move from the spot with his pistol out for some reason. Then if I get hit and shout out I need help no one comes, ever it seems (even without the bug I said before). And you cant swap to another team m8 in this mission it seems (I assume that's not a bug) so ur screwed. Not to mention the AI seems to be able to spot u through enough foliage to hide a small house if they are close enough, or through a hill, building etc (which BIS have said they are working on).

Now I'm sure if you listed all the bugs it would take you all day to read but my point is it seems they mostly wanted this game out ahead of OPF2 if you ask me.

As the game is its on the verge of being unplayable to an extent. Yes you can force ur way past the bugs with reloads and patients but it just takes away the sim feel.

Now fast forward 6 months and they will probably sort out most these issues and the game will be great but for now I feel a little let down by BIS for releasing the game in this state.

Now my rant is over I shall go back to bashing my head against Arma 2 because I can't help it, damn you BIS y did you have to make the most buggy game I have ever played so good :D

[Guest]

Now before I start I'm a big fan of the Arma series from OPF onwards. so having said that I knew before I bought the game or read a review that there would be bugs. But arma 2 breaks new grounds in game bugs. don't get me wrong I love this game, simply there is nothing else like it and I can't stop playing it, which in a way makes things worse.

I was just thinking that I wish they just held the game back for longer and got some more of the bugs out. This was first apparent on the Manhattan mission which was so buggy that by the time I had got through it I was just happy to be off the level. Now I'm on badlands and trying out the command system for the first time and although I still keep playing its like pulling my hair out. Half the time you tell a squad to move to a location and whatever speed/combat stance you put them to they insist on moving so slowly to the next location they might as well be standing still, which they also do half that time.

I'm now taking the second town and I get bugs like, the medic just refusing to move from the spot with his pistol out for some reason. Then if I get hit and shout out I need help no one comes, ever it seems (even without the bug I said before). And you cant swap to another team m8 in this mission it seems (I assume that's not a bug) so ur screwed. Not to mention the AI seems to be able to spot u through enough foliage to hide a small house if they are close enough, or through a hill, building etc (which BIS have said they are working on).

Now I'm sure if you listed all the bugs it would take you all day to read but my point is it seems they mostly wanted this game out ahead of OPF2 if you ask me.

As the game is its on the verge of being unplayable to an extent. Yes you can force ur way past the bugs with reloads and patients but it just takes away the sim feel.

Now fast forward 6 months and they will probably sort out most these issues and the game will be great but for now I feel a little let down by BIS for releasing the game in this state.

Now my rant is over I shall go back to bashing my head against Arma 2 because I can't help it, damn you BIS y did you have to make the most buggy game I have ever played so good :D

I agree with what you said completely, and its nice to see you have put it nicely unlike alot of people. You will probably find this thread will get closed or moved to the opinions forum though :)

A very good game indeed, but some bugs are game breaking. All will be fixed though, i have faith in BIS!

[sparks50 0]

ArmA2 505 1.02.58134 Impressions - ALL Impressions/Videos/Screenies Here:

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=74926&page=80

Reported.