Shigsy

LOL a clear example of a guy who didn't read my post. I never once said i was a Battlefield player. I said Flashpoint was the 1st game to let you drive/fly every vehicle you saw, and that didn't show up in anopther game again until the BF series (thats a compliment to Flashpoint/ArmA for the less intelligent such as yourself). And as for being a graphics whore, again your completely wrong. My point about the graphics was that they had improved, and that i didn't mind them not being up to modern standard (in my opinion) because gameplay is more important to me. Honestly, you need to read my original thread again instead of copying and pasting some generic 'flame the whiner' crap you must have saved on in a txt file on your desktop. Thanks to the people who bothered to read my post and come up with relevant and constructive replies, people such as; Espectro Col. Faulkner deanosbeano Mr Reality Bunks This post is intended to act as constructive critism for the developers, so they can learn from this and produce a quality game in the future. If this was a whine, i would simply havecome along and said 'ArmA is crap...' but i didn't. I think you'll find i made valid points, all facts which can't be denied. Too many people read a few key words (like Marcus), realise this isn't a thread saying how fantastic and flawless ArmA is then jump right into defensive mode. Try reading, thinking, then posting.

Don't let the thread title cause you to miss the points being made here. If it helps you, pretend its titled 'ArmA (2007) Vs Flashpoint (2001)'.

Finally, a sensible and worthy reply Thank you.

Your missing the point, im not saying the game has no modern graphics improvements, im saying it is still dated. Plently of games pre-HRD were better to look at than ArmA is. HDR does not magically convert an ugly game to a work of art.

I posted this to see how many other people are in the same situation as me. I just want to know how many others out there loved Flashpoint and are disappointed with ArmA. And im glad you mentioned the sudden halting issue, your M1A1 will plough through a forrest with ease but will be suddenly halted by a bus shelter! These are all MAJOR flaws that are 100% not acceptable in gaming anymore.

Just to clear things up, i added some system spec and graphics info to the end of my original post. And as for your comment about me not liking the game, your dead right. Read my post again, i go into very specific details and facts about why that is. Remeber, i was as big a Flashpoint fan as most, im just not a blind follower of ArmA. It can't live off Flashpoints name, it has to stand on its own and it simply doesn't.

Please don't gloss over the points i made in my original post by simply saying that im wrong, and ArmA has improved on everything in Flashpoint. I made some very valid points, and none of the flaws i have pointed out can be denied.

To start off, i was a huge fan of Flashpoint and to this day i still rate it as one of my favourite games of all time, and one of the best games ever released on any platform. I remember getting the 1st Flashpoint demo a couple of months before its release and playing that mission over and over, never getting bored of it. Like many others, i bought Flashpoint the day of its release and for a couple of years it was pretty much the only game i played (when i wasn't playing CS online ). I expecially loved the editor, and i still don't think there has been an editor anywhere near as good to this day, despite it being 6 years since the release of Flashpoint. And its this 6 year gap that brings me onto my main point, the reason i will not be buying ArmA. Flashpoint was, in its day, a fantastic game. Head and shoulders above anything else, unmatched freedom with a huge environment that nothing else could compete with. It felt lke a true war simulation as opposed to the typical arcade shooters of the time. In many ways, Flashpoint was revolutionary. Any vehicle was useable, weather it was land based, air or sea, civilian or millitary. If you could see it, you could drive/fly it. This alone made Flashpoint a huge leap forward in gaming. Think about it, the next big game to offer this was Battlefield 1942 which didnt arrive for another year and half, and even then it didn't offer as big an environment as Flashpoint, as many vehicles or the simulation feel. Not to mention the outstanding editor and 1-player campaigns. Its now 2007 and we are on the verge of the long anticipated release (europe/usa) of the sequel to one the greatest games of all time, Armed Assault. Like everyone here i could not wait for the demo, which i downloaded as soon as it was released. I've been playing it since and have held off making a final judgement, that is until now. First off, ArmA has clearly improved on the graphics of Flashpoint. The world is more detailed, with fancier textures and lighting etc. Having said that, ArmA is still a long way off the modern competition when it comes to eye candy, looking more like a game from 2004 as opposed to 2007. But that was never going to be an issue for me, ArmA (like Flashpoint) was going to be all about gameplay. However, amazingly this is where ArmA falls over. It seems very clear that the vast majority of this game is nothing more than a slightly sugar coated version of Flashpoint. We all knew ArmA was not going to be a whole new game, built from the ground-up to take advantage off the modern bells and whistles, but we all expected at least a small update to some core features such as AI, collision detection, physics etc. The fact is, these very things have not moved on an inch since Flashpoint. While they were good for their day in 2001, they look nothing short of antique in 2007. Gaming advances very quickly, and 6 years is a lifetime in terms of gaming technology. To bring this article to a conclusion, ill just list a few of my biggest disappointments with ArmA: 1 ~ The AI is exactly the same as Flashpoint, with soldiers zig-zagging aimlessly across the terrain. If you approach a group of enemy soldiers in your M1A1 you will see just how dated the AI is, as the soldiers attempt to deal with this extreme threat by lying down and waiting to be run over. Or better yet, stand still while the tank attempts to run them over, pushing them along until they accumilate enough damage points to drop dead. Its just as lame to see a soldier take 10 - 20 rounds from your M1A1 MG while he is in the middle of lying down (or standing up), only to see it have no affect. That is until he reaches his lying down or standing up state, when all the hits are registered at once and he drops dead. 2 ~ Its this very damage points system, which was mildly acceptable in Flashpoint 6 years ago, that frustrates more than most other flaws. Stand beside a Hummer and continue to empty your M16 into one of the doors. For a while, it looks like its having no effect, but don't worry, the vehicle is accumilating damage points and before you know it, it has reached enough points to magically change into damage stage 1. This transition is nothing short of comical, as the vehicle now instantly appears to have major damage to every panel (thats right, not just the door you were shooting at), and looks more like it has just tumbled end-over-end down a hill. Continue to shoot and along comes damage stage two (fully wrecked), with a transition that is just about as smooth as stepping on a mine. Apparently now there is some better detection of damage to certain vehicle parts, such as being able to disable tail rotors on a heli, but in my opinion tacking on a few extras to a fundamentally flawed damage system is nowhere near acceptable. 3 ~ Collisions are handled in a Flashpoint-esk way. Drive your tank through a field and all looks fine, continue on through a forest and watch as your amazing tank glides through the dense forest with the same ease it did through the empty field. While tanks are powerfull, a dense forest is more than a major obsticle for any tank, and to see your M1A1 part the forest like the red sea with not so much as a slight flinch is unsettling at best. And the way in which trees and other objects fall has 2001 written all over it. Once a tree gets knocked into by a vehicle (this goes for poles and fences too, to mention just a few), it goes into 'fall-mode' and falls in a random direction. While in this mystical 'fall-mode' the the object becomes a hollogram and so any other object (such as the vehicle that just hit it) can freely drive right through it as if it wasn't there. Fences are worse, and always seem to fall towards the vehicle that drove into them as opposed to away like they should. Unless of course you drive into the fence length ways (hitting the narrow edge on the end as opposed to straight on), which results in the fense still falling down flat to the left or right. Again, the hologram effect ensures your Hummer will happily cruise right through the imaginary fence with no damage at all. To be honest, i have only highlighted 3 features because these are so fundimental to any game these days (6 years on from Flashpoint) that if they are so hurrendously implemented then there really is no point picking out any other flaws. There are probably 10 or 12 more major flaws such as the 3 above, some of which are just as big. So to sum up, ArmA would have been a nice game to get in 2002 or 2003 as an expansion/patch to Flashpoint, but in 2007, it is nothing short of an epic disappointment. Overall: 4/10 Â My System: I thought it might be worth posting my system spec incase people are wondering why i feel the graphics are dated. Without bragging, i strongly doubt many here can claim system spec close to this. . Pentium 2.67GHZ Core 2 Duo . 2GB Corair twin-matched RAM . geForce x8800GTS 640mb Graphics card . 640GB HD (RAID 0 setup) With this spec, i have ArmA running with every setting to the absolute max and it runs 100% smoothly with ease, no problems at all.