metalcraze

I have never, not a single time had AI shoot me through the jungle hundreds of meters away. Now shooting me in the jungle because I ran into AI gunsights - that happened a lot. DUH!

The fact that achievement "better with friends" was unlocked by 0.2% of 2mln+ ArmA3 player base in 2 weeks post release (the hottest time) speaks a lot about this "campaign". 0.2% people completed a 4hrs long can't-fail "accessible" campaign designed for MP in MP in a predominantly MP game... Judging by a sitrep BIS thinks this is because people aren't trying to play it in coop. People aren't trying to play something in coop in ArmA. THE coop game. Clearly 99.8% ArmA players don't find apex protocol accessible enough. This campaign is clearly catered to that pesky vocal minority!

Full moon at Kolgujev

Upcoming CUP update (hopefully) deals with the overly bright white colors and some oversaturation on european maps. 1.2.0: Upcoming: Nights were also improved, being slightly brighter when moonlit than before as well as getting a more realistic, blue tone. Same night tweaks could've been already seen on deserts, except star brightness was slightly increased versus 1.2.0 for both environments. 1.2.0: Upcoming: 1.2.0: Upcoming:

BTW BIS should check the pathfinding issue with AI and torn fences at industrial area (in particular). Unlike their counterparts on all ArmA2/Altis/Stratis maps, on Tanoa those are considered to be obstacles by AI Plus the test mission there also shows the inability of AI to find an alternative route inside industrial area too. https://feedback.bistudio.com/T119194

People who are apologetic about Apex Protocol should remember that before we got this one - people were apologetic about East Wind (and PMC DLC before that). Seriously do you want next BIS campaign to be even worse? Every time you excuse BIS mistreatment of the official content - it gives them the greenlight to make things worse. They start believing everything is fine, they are on the right track. And the next thing you know - the only difference between sides is purely visual (and sometimes not even that). It's already happening, ArmA3 is the first game in the series where official sides are dull crap with some low quality assets and we need mods to make it actually fun. I mean... a bug-like army that is iranian... armed with israeli weapons - and they call that authentic. And "play it how you like" argument is silly, because Apex Protocol outright forces you to play it in a single way possible, the only other alternative being pretending that there's more to it than there is and wasting time doing it. Even disregarding the issues with respawn-spam - mission objectives in it are boring, mission design is simplistic as hell and you are basically just murdering groups of enemies here and there without much alternative, all while an immortal AI squad holds your hand. Even sillier is the argument that it's an accessible campaign to get new players into ArmA. Seriously - you need to own a base game for starters. You have to be an ArmA player to begin with to even touch this one.

By the way guys, do you remember this old, crappy game from 15 years ago called Operation Flashpoint? You know the winner of dozens of GOTY awards in a year of Halo and Max Payne. It had this campaign called Cold War Crisis, which had mandatory 1 save per mission and no respawns whatsoever. It even took more than one session to complete and you could've failed missions in it. Truly scary! But not as scary as a variety of missions inside it - anything but 4 men ELITE TIER1 OPERATOR. Things were even worse since it didn't have unkillable team leaders. Apparently it was so unaccessible that a puny million people bought the game. In 2001. In an age where multiplayer gaming was still mostly limited to LAN and internet with a good ping was a thing available to the chosen few. So unaccessible it even had an XBox version where people played it with a gamepad of all things! I mean the situation was so bad no wonder that game didn't help its devstudio make a couple sequels, buy a couple studios and even produce a military grade simulator out of it. Good thing Bohemia Interactive is keen on not repeating the clear failure of inaccessibility that was that crappy CWC campaign. Wonder how any of us even gotten into their games until Apex Protocol came and saved the day. Clearly ArmA can't be ArmA in the age of immense popularity of Dark Souls with its invasions, survival games and roguelikes getting their second life.

Uh huh, so when are we getting the campaign that is meant to be more like ArmA instead? You know just to keep things fair. Because the last BIS campaign that wasn't "meant to be accessible" was BAF DLC and that was 5 years ago

ArmA3 was a tough choice because it was the first game in the series to provide less value than a previous game. Tons of cut content, copy pasted armies that stay like that even 3 years later with zero difference between them, no campaign on release and what came later turned out to be mostly crap save for episode 2. The excuse was that "ugh we had to redesign the game a whole buncha times, understand us please". OK. But now Apex comes out and if not for Tanoa it would've been a total garbage for the price tag. Not only BIS has learned nothing from ArmA3 release, they went further and made some ridiculously looking vehicles based off real ones while keeping both NATO and CSAT still the same copy-pasted crap they are. Except now the campaign is absolute junk too. And that's the result of 3 years of work? What's the excuse now? With all that said I'm gonna wait for a ton of reviews for ArmA4 because the way things are going it may end up like a generic Ubisoft OpenWorld Game©® plus the ability (or rather need) for modders to bring in missing content as opposed to previous games in the series that felt 'finished' with a single save per mission that you could've spent a hour ago? Yeah that compares to respawn where enemies stay dead and you get all your gear back and just finish off remaining ones alone Why not just a step further and use the ultimately stupid argument then - "with infinite mission restarts you get all your stuff back and is one man army!".. ... in a mission where there's usually a whole squad not just you but let's not let such minor details bother you ok?

Tanoa is the real reason to pick this up. Other than that... New weapons are acceptable. New vehicles range from meh to ridiculously uncreative twists on modern technology. A single SP mission is good. Campaign is trash. That's it.

For all its faults - AI does not see through grass as has been proven million times through tests. Here's one from ArmA2 days on Chernarus. The primary thing of note here is not the guy laying in the grass losing a sight of targets, but a whole squad of enemies unable to spot him in it.

How about a system where everyone has no respawn, just a well designed and balanced mission? You know that silly stuff that launched whole BIS business and made their games stand out. Or do we need another generic 4 player coop junk that Steam is filled with? Seriously, these attempts at appeasing casual shooter crowd are not good. After 3 disasters that are PMC campaign, Survive episode and Apex Protocol BIS needs to seriously think about switching whoever is in charge of campaign design. There has not been a single good ArmA campaign since BAF DLC and Adapt episode was only barely reaching there. Best thing about ArmA campaigns up until late ArmA2 DLCs (even Harvest Red with its lategame going downhill due to CTI) was that they always felt extremely rewarding for all the effort you put into tactics, getting out of trouble using whatever tools you had around you (in OFP it could've went as far as breaking into a chopper and wrecking havoc simply because you were keen enough to spot it, or finding an AT launcher to get rid of tanks instead of risking a lot more by crawling under them to plant explosives) and just plain survival. Now all we get is "hey it's designed to be completed in one MP session and thrown into a trash bin!"

Which is what makes Apex Protocol even worse by comparison. Some people say "Apex Protocol playing bad in SP? But it's designed for COOP!". But if you add COOP ability to Showcase Endgame AS IT IS - it will become a superb coop mission because it already is well balanced and well designed. Just make those friendly teams slotable in MP screen and it will stay just as good, or even better. Apex Protocol is badly designed even for cooperative play. Because you are unkillable. You can't fail. You go against ridiculous enemy numbers. And there's also a magical invulnerable team of friendly AI that sometimes ruin the experience further by not letting you fail (like murdering the whole convoy on mission 2 ANYWAY if you don't blow it up). It is lazy. It is uninspired. It is anti-ArmA as hell. I swear some of the worst "CoD-wannabe" missions from community I've played are not as badly designed as this campaign, supposedly done by professionals. Not even PMC DLC was this bad. Oh right it even had consequences for some of your actions here and there too.

Not true, as coop experience it sucks massively too

Clearly this image proves ArmA3 needs to go 64 bit since it ran out of numberspace for score

My point was not about the need for savegames. In fact the missions in the campaign thus far are much simpler and shorter (30-40 mins long) than some 2-3 hrs long I've played in non-respawn coop. Which means that even without respawn you can finish several of those missions in one session easily. Just with a proper balance (e.g. not the ridiculous 1 to 8 numbers) And then there's also the ability in the engine to save the COOP mission on exit if time is an issue for some reason. In fact because of respawn it's much easier and convenient to play this campaign carelessly, because it will get you through the mission much much faster. Basically it throws any tactics and teamwork out of the window because trying to avoid getting spotted or shot is a complete waste of time.

Except you have 1 savegame per mission (except for autosaves) and it's usually far off and enemies are alive too. With the respawn everyone you killed are staying dead, you are just cleaning the remaining guys up with infinite ammo and grenades. Loading a savegame is like rewinding to the state that was there 10 minutes ago or even more. Respawning is equal to getting resurrected 20 seconds later and there's absolutely no penalty for dying whatsoever. Only upsides like getting your ammo refilled.

And I thought it can't get any worse than PMC DLC campaign (and "survive" episode of ArmA3 campaign). But looks like BIS has achieved a new low. This "campaign" is a total surprise. In how it is just absolutely horrible. One thing is if It's completely unplayable in SP because it's designed for COOP, but another thing is that any fun is utterly destroyed by respawn-spamming until you kill all enemies. Hell, dying even lets you skip walking to an objective, you just skip any fight or walk in between and teleport straight to the target. And because of respawn there's absolutely zero balance, you are outnumbered 4 to 1 and sometimes 8 to 1. So basically instead of actually playing this "campaign" you just exploit it like take UGL, spam all its grenades at enemies, die, wait 20 secs, respawn (yes you respawn right near the objective, once I just respawned 10m behind enemies and just sprayed them all, killing a whole team in 2 seconds), spam ugl , repeat repeat. Seriously what the hell is this rock bottom of mission design? I mean think about it - isn't it more logical to just make a mission with those same objectives for 1-4 guys, giving an option to fill empty slots with AI teammates. Balance it for no respawn. You know, normal, fun COOP. Not a shooting gallery with zero ability to fail. How hard can it be to put some, you know, effort into those whopping 7 missions? Oh wait, right, effort.

Same for me

JSRS4 creates a reloading and reloadingAPEX-something dependency in an editor mission files. Gotta fix that? In fact today I've learned the hard way not to binarize editor mission files because JSRS3 was creating a Dragonfyre_P07 dependency which made mission unopenable and all JSRS3 download links are dead so only a fake dummy config creating that class helped to load my mission.

I find default ArmA AI difficulty settings to be very fitting for ASR AI. E.g. normal AI (0.7 skill, 0.5 precision) is indeed quite 'normal', less precise than a veteran player too. So that's why higher difficulties will fit people with more experience. F.e. with ASR AI and 'normal' AI setting (that is - precision 0.5) an editor AI with 0.2 skill can barely hit a thing 50m away wasting a ton of bullets while a 1.0 skill AI is on par with a good player e.g. fast to acquire and hits targets taking only a few shots. At anything lower than precision 0.5 I see 0.4-0.5 editor skill AIs sometimes literally wasting whole clips unable to kill each other while being only 15-20m apart (granted they do it from behind cover). With all that said - mostly it takes a properly designed encounter - e.g. if some mission throws a dozen of AIs at you alone all at once, their chances of hitting you increase tenfold even at 0.2

Reviving needs an animation? Because ugh - the dude looking down at the downed guy until he suddenly is well - is very reminiscent of the infamous ammo crate worshiping of ArmA2

Oh but it is

Is it possible (or in a scope of a mod) for placement radius when defined per squad to place all squad members in the same location (e.g. place the leader with it and all others next to him)? Same question about random patrol - is it possible to make all units patrol the same random spot? E.g. only leader gets the patrol order, the rest follow him

European (incl. Chernarus) lighting is next up for improvements