Marshal

Cos I've played it before. Anyway, I'll step out of the argument so other people can write about their experiences. I hope your game gets fixed - but somehow I doubt it. Toodle pip

And that my friend is why game developers release products that are not finished. Because they know that there are always gullible people like you who are willing to wait around for months in the hope that a patch will make the game run in a way that any normal games player would think it should have worked when they handed over their hard earned cash for the product in the first place. This runaround tactic of 'cut the costs and release it now - ready or not' is simply wrong. What other product do you know that suffers from an early release? Do car manufacturers release cars that have faulty breaks? So that they can recall them several months later? No my friend, you should be voting with your voice and your money. Games that are rushed to release are simply not worth buying, and as the guy said above, why should I have to fork out several hundreds of pounds to justify playing a game that, according to the game developers, should run on a system far below the standard of the one which I own? How long are you prepared to wait for BIS to fix ARMA? They never fully fixed OFP and thats a 6 year old game. You also got the wrong end of the stick. The soldiers running around comment was aimed at the shoddy ai, not online players. I have been a part of the OFP community since 2001 and have seen the countless threads aimed at BIS by hardcore players (which I used to be incidentally) who wanted to see changes in this latest title. There are still many things that are still there which should have been fixed and werent. You can slap a new coat of paint on an old cracked wall, but after a while the cracks reappear!

Geforce 6 (Which one BTW, 6600GT, 6600, 6800)? Is pretty old now. You can't run ArmA on high settings with that. Of course it runs Bioshock fine, the most you ever see is a single room Anyway, you don't even have ArmA now. So enjoy your arcade shooter games. And if you're such a console fan, why buy the PC version of Bioshock on a PC with a Geforce 6? Well what is the point of posting on a forum if you don't want people to reply to you? Do you like telling people stuff and having them ignore you? It's a FORUM! Anyway, enough wasting my time with this thread. I have better things to do than talk to people who want to be ignored and who are full of crap Who said I bought Bioshock? Just cos I got it doesnt mean I bought it and for your information, I completed it for the 360 too. Hmm, full of crap? or is it that the truth hurts? You can keep your boring wide open spaces, soldiers who run around not knowing what to do and your wait for endless months whilst BIS releases a patch to fix all these faults (and from experience, most of the stuff wont be fixed anyway). You can also keep all the cheaters who like to play this game and who spoilt OFP with their God modes and dropping tanks onto multiplayer maps. There are far better army simulations than this that absolutely wipes ARMA's ass - Americas Army for one, which I am downloading right now and which is FREE.

The case I made about being sniped while using a rocket launcher proved that the game is unrealistic because there is no way that a trained sniper could spot you on a hill, in total darkness within 2 seconds and make a kill shot. Especially when that sniper was just walking around the base camp at the time and not even looking through his sights. Fair enough, the rocket launcher would have made a light flash as it left the launcher, but that would have been a split second and the human eye does not have the capability to exactly pinpoint a person who is lying down in undergrowth on a hill that is perhaps a quarter of a mile away, within 2 seconds flat. I'm wondering why a Geforce 6 would be a minimum requirement when it runs games such as Bioshock absolutely fine? There are lots of little graphical errors in this game. Like trees changing shape as you approach them or other features coming and going, all depending what position they are on the screen as you pan across it. Even one of the little intro videos at the start of the first missions has errors in it and shows green blocks that eventually turn into trees as the camera pans across a small town. This stupid radio chatter with broken up pigeon english was one of the first things I noticed in the XBox version of OFP. And it still hasnt been fixed. It surprises me that there are still so many faults with this game when the engine is 6 years old. You can say whatever you want about the COD series, at least it has moved forward in leaps and bounds, and whether the enemy is scripted or not, at least the fire back rather than run around with guns pointed in the air.

Call of Duty 3 had big maps and enemies that were intelligent and acted realistically. You reckon that COD4 graphics are outdated? What would you call ARMA's graphics then? I have more than adequate specs to run ARMA thanks very much - a 3.2g processor, 2 gigs of memory and a Geforce 6 video card. The same thing happened with OFP too, apparently it was supposed to run on a Pentium 500mhz. The way ARMA is programmed just eats up memory. Freedom of movement? Oh you mean the part where you can be a sniper and shoot randomly at 20 enemies who wont even fire a single shot back, but will run around in circles pointing their guns into the air? Or are you talking about the part where its a night mission and you have to blow up tanks. 2 seconds after you fire your rocket launcher you get sniped - despite being up in cover on a hill sitting on your stomach? Realistic? not. Maybe the reason you like ARMA so much is because you can just snipe from miles away? Maybe your not good enough in a fire fight at close quarters? I always thought PC stood for 'pretty crap'? Why should gaming be that much of a pain in the ass? But each to their own. You guys carry on waiting for your unfinished game to be patched up and Ill continue to play games that are finished with many thousands of other happy XBox 360 players who have made the switch from the PC because the PC is not a games machine, but a word processor which people decided to modify.

Then you are the kind of person who likes simple console games (you made that pretty obvious). Not everyone is going to enjoy the same stuff as you. I have R6Vegas, and I wish I never wasted the money on it. Don't bother discussing ArmA's campaign missions, they are crap and most of us realise that. I'll admit that did disappoint me. Anyway I still haven't seen you attempt to sort out your problems with patches. So you seem to prefer to whine about a problem and leave it instead of getting it sorted out. I'm sorry but that's just being lazy. No amount of ranting here is going to help you. You don't like the game, then fine. There are plenty of less complicated console games that you can enjoy. Well then you must be blind. Unless your PC is a piece of crap the difference is very obvious. hehe -you just don't read do you? I ran OFP's biggest league until I got bored with all the cheating that came with the game. I also devised the OFP World Cup which saw players from all over the World join together with their fellow countrymen to play in OFPs biggest tournament. It was so popular that even clans from other leagues joined in. So, far from knowing what I'm talking about, I am one of the few people who actually bothered to run a league to keep OFP alive. And, in case you didn't read it the other two times I mentioned it in this thread - I HAVE RETURNED THE GAME TO THE SHOP AND GOT A REFUND. Maybe there are still a few players who like ARMA, for all its quirkyness and stuff. But, sales figures speak for themselves, in the same way that publishers do. Lets face it, if ARMA was any good, Codemasters would never have dropped it. And I bet the number of people playing R6V right now outnumber those playing ARMA by a very considerable amount.

a) The technical improvements of Arma over OPF were greater than what you will find betwean COD and COD4. The technology certainly evolved (although not on all levels). b) I want to play good games being them considered next gen or not. Arma's sheer scale and open endness plus the relation betwean graphical quality and the previously mentioned scale gives it a next gen stamp in my book. c) I have a really good setup. d) Im not into arcade shooters (COD) and ravenshield was the last true R6, i'd rather play Arma . Lets go back on topic before Major Fubar passes out!! There are disapointing things in Arma, for example the damage model and strange vehicle bugs (i can disable a M113 with a 9mm MP5 clip), there are some technical flaws and not so good design decisions but my point is that Arma is still a unique game in its own genre. To all: If you are going to criticise atleast try to be objective and constructive, im tired of reading mindless rants.. You obviously haven't seen anything of COD4 then. I suggest you go and load up COD and then compare it to COD4 when it comes out next month - the two titles are completely different, both in quality of graphics/gameplay and also where they are set. I don't see this big jump in graphical quality that you say happened between OFP and ARMA. I don't see an advancement in ai either. Lets give you a good example. I played the mission where you have to get up a water tower and snipe soldiers as they run away from a convoy of trucks that was just blown up. Those soldiers just ran around in circles, or led on the floor pointing their guns up to the sky. They didn't even respond to where I was. Now compare that to the intelligence of the soldiers in any of the COD titles. Also, a large scale map does not make up for bad programming. I would rather play with better graphics on a smaller map than in a game that loads the complete map and the graphics have to suffer as a consequence because your processor is having to process the whole map rather than what is in your immediate vicinity. I'm interested in your comment regarding realism. Why do you think OFP/ARMA is any more realistic than COD? I don't think enemy soldiers running around in circles looking like headless chickens is very realistic - do you? And then theres the terrible radio chatter and bad voice acting. Realistic? I don't think so. I will get constructive now. Here is a screenshot from the original COD http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/06/CODscreen4.jpg and here is one from the upcoming COD4 http://media.monstersandcritics.com/article....p31.jpg both are ingame shots. Are you still going to say that there hasnt been an advancement from COD to COD 4? Arma is a unique game in its own genre - so I'm going to compare it to the only other game that I think is similar - Hidden and Dangerous - another game that had too many bugs. For me, ARMA is a game that if you didnt know any better, could have come out in the late 90's. It looks no different than the technology available then. We don't all want huge empty maps that are only there in case a MOD team wants to make a new town or campaign there - we want a game which has action all across the map.

Actually, online playing is where the 360 really comes into its own. I have played Rainbow Six Vegas since its release, I played Call Of Duty 2 online for exactly a year - almost every night, until its sequel was released, and having been involved with the COD4 beta testing, there is no doubt that I will be playing that till at least this time next year. I buy a game to play straight away personally. I don't see the point why a game community should have to come onto the game makers site to ask for them to fix it. My copy of ARMA went back to the shop today and I got a refund. Companies who rush games and give false promises do not deserve my hard earned cash when I can spend it on games that I can load up instantly and play for several months online with no hassles. But your right, I didn't come here to compare the PC to console gaming because its a no contest. PCs are word processors converted to play games. Consoles are built solely for the purpose of playing games. And in most cases, consoles are of a lower spec to a PC and yet can run games much better, so its really in the architecture of how the game is built. Think of the many video cards and system specs that pc game manufacturers have to adapt their games to play on and its no wonder why so many problems arise. As a games buyer, it shouldn't be up to me to write to BIS asking why their game doesn't work - especially when the fault arises because their supposedly 'official' patches are not compatible with the original game code on the retail version of ARMA. When installing the 1.4 to 1.5 patch I received at least 5 errors on files which were supposedly corrupt from the original install (which had been installed just 5 minutes earlier). Anyway, I have said my piece. ARMA was exactly how I expected it to be - an unfinished product which I very much doubt will be fixed, no matter how many patches are released. I mean, just look at OFP as a good example. A 6 year old game that still has more bugs than any other game I have ever played despite all the patches.

That might be true and there are many things in Arma that could have been done better or atleast improved over OPF, i also feel a level of disappointment about a few things but wont overlook the things they have done well. So i'll tell you this: You can show me a big pile of your high quality, highly polished and expensive xbox 360 games and i doubt there is one game i'd pick over Arma, just like that. And... if no games existed other than your high quality and super polished, generic 360 games i would most likely quit gaming out of boredom. So in my view releasing Arma and supporting (patching up) it was definetly worth it and for me Arma beats all those self proclaimed AAA titles out there . Hmmm, so what your saying is that you don't want your computer games to progress? You don't want to play next-generation games? Is that just because you have a low spec computer or that your biased against console gaming without even giving it a try? Maybe go and have a game of COD4 or Rainbow Six Vegas? You might just change your mind. 360 games are no more expensive than PC games in most cases and remember that a 360 costs a lot cheaper than the price of an equivalent PC machine. So for the difference you would spend on your equivalent PC machine, I could go and buy 5 games and play them straight out of the box with no compatibility issues. Also remember that every game that comes out on the 360 is the finished product - not some 70% finished game that has come out early to please the publisher. We don't have all these stupid hassles of having to keep buying and upgrading graphic cards, memory and soundcards because our machines run everything that is out for the format. We are all enjoying the same game, with the same experience and paid about half the money what a PC player would have to pay out these days to get a half decent PC. You are entitled to your viewpoint of course, and I wouldnt want to take you away from the game that you love - but having done the same myself with OFP and having had to endure the crap with what comes with it (some of the community and the broken game engine) I would take the 360 over an PC any day, and I'm a person who has played PC games since the mid 80's! But, if you dont buy any of what I just said above - here is the biggest plus of all. NO CHEATERS!!!!

Yes I did have the correct patch. The European version - it would have told me right from the start anyway if it were the US version right? You don't have to make excuses for sloppy programming.

ehem! naive? at least XBox patches work, and are only a few megabytes to download which take seconds to install. And games that need patches for the 360 only need one patch and not several like OFP needed and no doubt which ARMA will need too. And they work with the original game disc too. Can you please explain (because obviously your not naive right?) why the ARMA patches are incompatible with my original ARMA disc? And Dwarden, can I ask why your being so sarcastic towards me? Lets just say this - ARMA wouldn't even get released on the XBox 360 because Microsoft has a quality control which means that incomplete games and crappy games simply don't get released. The same wasn't the case for the original XBox console, which OFP was released on, and at the time I wrote an honest review of it which was heavily slated by people here. But, in the end it looks like the vast majority are pointing out the same faults in ARMA as I pointed out in the XBox version of OFP. And finally, somebody wrote a little while ago about BIS claiming they will release an 'anti cheat' patch. Well, sorry to disappoint everybody, but you wont stop the cheating. BIS NEVER supported or released any patch to combat cheating in the original OFP and didn't listen to the concerns of people like myself (who ran OFP's biggest league at the time), so why does anyone think they are going to change their ways now when they have a buggy game distributed by a 3rd rate publisher?

Well, after being away from PC gaming for about 18 months, I decided to buy ARMA as it was only £14.99 to see what it was like. Many of you may know me from the old OFP days when I ran the TNT league. Anyway, to cut a long story short, my XBox 360 recently went up in smoke so I was looking for something to play while my 360 was away being repaired. I installed ARMA and soon realised why I abandoned playing PC games a while back. First of all I decided to install the game to the latest patch. The game in the box was 1.4 so I patched from 1.4 to 1.5. That was where the problems began. Although these were official patches, it couldn't find certain files which were supposed to have been there from the original install - same happened when I installed the 1.5 to 1.8 patch, it crashed half way through and told me to re-download the patch again. So, I decided to just play the damned game and see what it looked like. It wouldnt run on my 3.2ghz system with a Gforce 6 and over 1gb of ram on high settings. It was even laggy set on normal. So I play for 5 minutes, and eventually get out of the jeep and run up for the first encounter. Aiming was like trying to shoot in a jar of treacle. the graphics were very old school compared to anything Im presently playing on the XBox. So summing up, OFP was brilliant for its time, but is no competition for FPS which are coming out now. Graphics are old and frame rate is ridiculous. Thank God my 360 is only away for a few more days because PC gaming is nothing compared to the ease of using a console. There is no hassle with compatibility or patching. We can all talk to our opponents easily and the community is awesome. I will be returning ARMA back to the shop for a refund as I don't expect to continually keep patching (as was the case with OFP) when I can buy games for the 360 that play straight out of the box with no hassle at all.

ArmA in the UK will be released on February 16th - dunno if you guys already knew, but I couldnt be bothered to trawl through the whole forum to see if they had confirmed an official release date. How do I know? The UK publishers contacted me because I used to run the TNT League for OFP and wondered if I wanted to add the press release to the site. Unfortunately I have nothing to do with TNT anymore as I dont hold the same interest that I once had for OFP. Needless to say though that I will be checking out ArmA on its release. Marshal Law The guy who started TNT League

ArmA in the UK will be released on February 16th - dunno if you guys already knew, but I couldnt be bothered to trawl through the whole forum to see if they had confirmed an official release date. How do I know? The UK publishers contacted me because I used to run the TNT League for OFP and wondered if I wanted to add the press release to the site. Unfortunately I have nothing to do with TNT anymore as I dont hold the same interest that I once had for OFP. Needless to say though that I will be checking out ArmA on its release. Marshal Law

I still dont understand why BIS didnt just release AA in a multi-language format like most other universal games? Surely it would have been simpler and cheaper to just release the game where you could select your country in the menu options? If I'm correct, all versions have English language speech anyway, so all they had to do was include the language defaults for the menu's? Not only would it have meant that all players could have purchased just one game, it would also cut down the costs of productions because you wouldnt have to make country specific versions. Is that too simple an idea to comprehend?

When all is said and done, what seems odd is that there isnt a complete English version available from release? I cannot think of any other major PC game that was not first released in English. After all, English is the second largest spoken language in the World. So what were BIS thinking? If they want good sales then surely you produce a product that will appeal to the majority before releasing versions for small countries like the Czech republic and Germany. The clans I was in during OFP's popularity included many foreign players, from Czech, Germany, Poland, Holland, Sweden, Bulgaria, Belgium and many other small European countries. All of those players could speak fluent English and read English too. I know for a fact that if Codemasters were still publishing the game then the version that was first released would have been an English one.

Does anyone know what the exact PC spec will be to run the game? I just watched the newly released video and noticed that there was a little slow down in some sequences. I wonder whats the spec of the computer they ran the demo on?

You know, its really funny this. I seem to be having a case of deja vu. Wasnt it last September that we were all in exactly the same boat? Wasnt BIS telling everyone that OFP2 would be coming out by Q3 2005 and basically ignored all the posts asking for a more specific answer. Hell, I even got banned for a few days because I stated the case for everyone here who didnt want to ask the questions for fear of being banned. This situation is crazy. How long does BIS seriously think that its community will be happy to be strung along with 'its coming soon' or 'were just putting the finishing touches to it'. I heard all these excuses over a year ago and the game still isnt out. You say that BIS should not be held responsible for the release of the game. Well, considering that they were dropped by Codemasters (who incidently I thought did a pretty good job of getting OFP into the shops and to the top of the charts at the time) they have nobody to blame but themselves. Why do you think Codemasters drop game companies? The answer is because those game companies cannot deliver. Theres not many PC games that wait over 5 years for a sequel. Usually by then the community that played the game has moved onto bigger and better things. I am seriously starting to have my doubts about AA now. I mean lets be honest, if it was a really good game then publishers would be falling over themselves to sell it. So why is a 2nd rate PS2 publisher doing the distribution for Europe? Your all saying you dont mind waiting another few months - well, I heard the same stories this time last year. And I'll guarantee you all this - within a couple of months you'll all be complaining about the cheats in the game and 'when is the patch coming out?'. It will be the same old story which ruined the original OFP. Many of you will know me as Marshal Law, the guy who started the TNT League. So, your reading the thoughts of one of the guys who backed this game and gave the community somewhere to battle for over 3 years. The way that OFP has been handled is a joke. There were never any steps to stop the cheating and there never will be. That is why I play on the XBox 360 now because Im sick of the people who think that using god mode is fun. People say that OFP is realistic - really? What like invisible walls or crappy bullet physics. So I'll go off and play Gears of War and Call of Duty 3 and save myself the bother. Ive given up on this game because I could be playing other games where the release date and distribution is set in concrete. At least on the XBox 360 I know that there wont be any cheaters either. Its time to wake up and smell the coffee methinks Perhaps they should change the name to Armed Insult?

I'd hate to think how BIS expect whole countries to have to try and compete in AA with other gamers who would have had the game for 2 months already. If the publishing dates are as published it will certainly put paid to many OFP leagues because the whole of Europe will not have the game at the same time. And lets remember that the UK and the US has the majority of players of the game.

Can we have a sticky post which shows just the release dates for each country? Most people cant be bothered to trawl through a post which is now 40 pages long looking for this info. Also any information about how they plan to let players download the game would also be appreciated. Theres one big problem that I can think of if there is a big difference between release dates in each country and that would be hackers. What if some countries have to wait a couple of months behind others, by which time (and from vast personal OFP experience) the game is full of cheat files within that time.

Surely BIS could just sell the game online to the countries who havent got a distributor? If I were BIS I would get a striking ad banner and send it to every OFP league currently running. Fans of the game would then click the banner which would go straight to an order form for each country. All the game magazine online reviews could also link to the BIS shop where interested gamers could buy it. If BIS cannot get a publisher then they should ship the game out straight from the factory to interested gamers - it would save them some money too because they wouldnt have to pay a publishers fee. The other way would be to sell it exclusively through online shops like Amazon or Play.com

Yep, now all we need is the actual game It was scheduled to be out this time last year remember!

Ive played OFP:E and I didnt like the grass at all. It was one of the first things that I thought was odd about the game. Anyone play Soldner and seen what that looked like? Well, its pretty similar. Fair enough, moving trees can add atmosphere and I would definitely add rustling sounds as you move through bushes (as in COD2), but why do we need moving grass? If you had wheat fields then that would be fine, but in all reality, how often do you see short grass blowing on a sunny day?

What are your PC system specs? (video, RAM, CPU) I had read that the PC and 360 versions of COD2 were very similar. Back on topic, happy to see an update on ArmA. It'll be worth the wait. Im running a Pentium 3.4 ghz CPU with 1 gig of ram, a Radeon X700 GFX card and an Audigy 2 soundcard. The differences are quite a lot if you look closely. The clothing on soldiers in the XBox 360 version are all textured and look to be bump mapped. All 360 games are HDTV compliant which makes a huge difference, even on a normal TV. Resolutions can run in 720 and 1080i. Remember that the XBox 360 uses 3 x 3.2ghz processors which are dual threaded and specially designed by IBM just for this machine. Also the ATI graphic cards runs at 500mhz. The XBox 360 is more powerful than any PC currently available on the market. It would be great to see ArmA on the 360. I think we are just stepping into the age where the line blurs between the capability of the PC and the console. No more will the PC rule the roost with the latest games. Take Oblivion for example. Apparently the developers are having a hard time getting everything to work on the PC version and yet they have no problems with the 360.

No its the XBox 360 version which is a lot better than the PC version (I have both). I agree with moving vegetation such as trees and also rustling bushes but moving grass will add problems. And Mr Admin, wheres your sense of Christmas spirit?