I am a player of BI games from OFP CWC. Heres what I think.

[I am a player of BI games from OFP CWC. Heres what I think.]

Disagree. I use it to show that I've been around for all the bugged releases in the past 10 years and thus knew what to expect. The fact that I got even less than the little I was expecting based on my prior experience goes to show that this is the worst release yet (in my opinion). That being said I assume that there are good reasons for it turning out the way that it did. I only express my disappointment in the hopes that they will go "maybe in the future we shouldn't do things this way."

I don't know. I think it's pretty decent, actually, and my main interest is single player. Give me a good SP mission any day, and I will happily play for hours. The content doesn't worry me that much, because this problem is solvable with a little time.

I couldn't enjoy Armed Assault, or Arma 2 on release for a long time as I just did not have the hardware, so with each one, I stuck with the previous game until I had money to upgrade. The upside to this was that I tended to end up playing a mature version.

To be specific about earlier versions:

Operation Flashpoint & Resistance:

Still the greatest for single player. I go back to it regularly, even today. I suspect you agree, given what you've done since.

Armed Assault & Queens Gambit:

I had to wait a while to enjoy these two. I loved Sahrani; it is a great island to just potter about on in missions. The scoped weapons and player models were terrific (a major change from OFP, for those that remember) but the actual game mechanics felt little different to OFP, and the terrain graphics had the feel of being OFP in a pretty skirt and lipstick. APC's & Tanks that had progressive damage from RPG's is nice, too. Still a shock to be blown to bits by a single RPG while riding in a BMP during the Flashpoint scenarios.

The single player was a disjointed disappointment, but I wonder if that was familiarity with the predecessor; the missions themselves aren't actually that bad. If anything, dare I say Armed Assault's biggest problem was that it was very much more of the same? It is still a great thing to go back to because it looks good on modern hardware, and runs like lightning. It's still on my hard drive.

QG was a neat little campaign. Given the success of Resistance I was surprised BI didn't try something similar. It would have shifted copies, for sure.

Armed Assault was the last game that didn't suffer from the truly irritating foliage problem that plagues Arma 2 & 3; that is to say the abstracted LOS model that the AI uses was relatively close to what the human player actually sees. OA alleviated this a little bit, because, er, desert.

Armed Assault is the least loved game, and I think that's sad, because in a way it gave people everything they wanted at that time. Mod and mission support a mere fraction of what followed for A2. Just check Armaholic - there's no comparison.

Arma 2/OA

Messy on release. Chernarus was a triumph; it (still) looks fantastic. Plodding performance, not hugely alleviated even now. Situational awareness is made much harder because of the more cluttered environment Playability suffered a little bit and being shot at by units you can't see is not much fun. I go back to A2 a lot as well, and this still gets on my nerves more than anything else. It is not uncommon for AI units to gain LOS through a actual forest, which is rather dreary. AI movement improvents very welcome, but they still saunter about in formation and only with later patches did they start to really improve.

The campaign promised much, but didn't deliver. What happened? It started out as the best thing since OFP. Then, 2/3rds the way through, BI appeared to just give up and turn it into a series of warfare missions, which was - in my opinion - very poor form.

I loved OA. It still looks great, manages to be contemporary, and the mod support is off the charts. The single player missions were fun and well-designed for the most part.

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Against such a backdrop, it's easy to be mad at the lack of content for A3, but I don't think it's that simple. Clearly a lot of man hours went into stuff outside of player toys, because BI know that is what they do best -the community will always do a better job with models and objects. We have a working set at the moment - it's not fantastic but it is completely usable. Certainly, in A3 you have a game that for the infantry user feels far better than anything before; the OFP-era clunk is completely gone.

I'm pissed about the lack of scenarios, and I do think that is inexcusable on release. It is important to have a good campaign that puts the player in the game and the environment; otherwise you have all this freedom and no idea what to do with it. It is the only way to really showcase things.

I will wait and see what happens with the first release.

[I am a player of BI games from OFP CWC. Heres what I think.]

Some folk think that they will be taken seriously if they mention Flashpoint, that game is the definition of "rose tinted glasses". Amazing game 14+ years ago, but now it's rubbish. The op at the very least makes his points in a fun manner, he's not crying and whining about it, so fair play.

Actually, I have the GOG version running (perfectly!) in Wine on Linux and Mac, and you know what? It's still very, very good indeed. I would go as far as to say, for the solo player, it's competitive with anything around nowadays.

[Is the game dumbed down?]

still lots of pages, and nothing constructive, one fraction keeps saying: FAK iz BAAD, arma 3 sux just because of that! Second fraction is asying: NOO! Arma 3 rules, it can't suck just because of FAKs, which can be removed from the mission! Serisolly, i think the arma 3 haters, holding on "faks", like on latest fortress, since most of other stuff they were complaining, is not a big deal at all.

Can enyone tell me, whats to point in talking about FAKs any further? It's not like the devs are trying here to defent the current system, but it's just community vs community, what should this bring at the end?

It's finding a feature you don't like and declaring that the game is flawed because of it. It is rather dreary.

[Is the game dumbed down?]

Have to agree. Half of it feels like "Hey, COD makes money, lets copy it", and the other half feels like they just ran out of time and money. There were a few good fixes that were years in coming, but the rest is just bleh. I think at this point, the best we can hope for is the community modders make some good mods and scenarios to fill in the MASS AMOUNT that was left out.

I think that's terribly unfair.

Firstly, out of the box, Arma 3 is arguably more difficult than any other BIS game, with the possible exception of Armed Assault; it is not forgiving in the slightest. Secondly, the devil is in the details, and the huge amount of effort that has gone into the movement system and AI improvements (particularly pathfinding and animations) are certainly noticeable if you compare them to Arma 2, which seems rather crude in comparison.

Urban combat is so much better in Arma 3 there's no contest. Go back to Arma2:OA and play some scenarios to compare. Pay particular attention to how the AI interacts with the environment. It's night and day.

As for focusing on the healing module; really all that gave you is the incapacitation mechanic; there was nothing remotely realistic about the rest of it.

[All this buzz about the performence issue]

I hope you are right. How quick were the developers at fixing the game back then?

There would usually be a breakthrough patch that fixes the majority of issues. I don't think it is one single thing, rather a large number of small changes that are beta'd first. Forgive me for not remembering version numbers, but it's normally inside the first year.

Continuous improvement is a definite trait of BI releases.

[All this buzz about the performence issue]

As some have hinted, we've been through this with every single BI game. They're extremely demanding; any comparison with any other game is redundant, because no other game does anything close to what Arma achieves in scope and modelling.

For the record, as someone that has struggled with performance on every release going back to OFP, Arma 3 by that metric has been the best release BI have ever made. Considering what they've achieved, it's remarkable.

For newcomers, it improves over time. Both Armed Assault and Arma II throughout their support life improved dramatically.

[Still no Manhattan artillery bug fix!!!]

I appreciate what BI wanted to do with certain parts of the campaign, but both 'Razor Two' and 'Manhattan' are best brushed over in their present state. The following missions are a lot more enjoyable and feel like the OFP of old.

I've played Manhattan to death and still break it frequently; recently (1.04) I've experienced the Shaftoe death bug for the first time.

I'd say for SP enthusiasts, don't flog yourself to death trying these missions. There's more interesting stuff later; BI will very likely fix these issues in later patches.

J

[Poor mission scripting]

I think the complexity of some of the units involved causes problems. There's one mission in the campaign I've only managed to finish once (with the strykers at the airbase, and repelling the beach assault) because there's been trigger problems in the last bit - no enemy armour appears.

Arma does seem to suffer from units 'wandering off' and buggering up the triggers.

[Should I Get OFP?]

I like Arma, but I don't really have a meaty enough PC for it. Put it this way, the only real advantage it has over flashpoint is it looks nicer, and some of the destructible objects are far more convincing. The gameplay - for me - is virtually identical. So until I can afford a nice beefy machine to play it with all the bells and whistles, then I'll keep playing OFP.

[OFP Vs Arma SP Campaign]

I think anyone coming from OFP wouldn't really dislike the Arma campaign that much - it's got plenty of action and the story really isn't that bad.

I do sympathise for someone new to it all though; it's not a great showcase for the game. I'm playing Perpetua at the moment, and this is like Flashpoint of old - long intros and cutscenes, deliberate showcasing of the island's prettier features using long transportation sequences; it's fantastic.

In terms of poor mission structure (insurmountable odds etc) I don't like it when this happens, but OFP and Resistance were hardly immune to this either; OFP had plenty of very tough 'sneaky beaky' missions as Gastovsky, and some of the command missions in the latter part of CWC were bloody hard going. The airfield attack in Resistance stands out in my memory as being phenominally hard. Anybody remember 'Return To Eden' in CWC? It is meant to be hard going, but boy had I forgotten exactly how hard!!

Attacking fixed defences with a squad of 10-12 men, usually unsupported (no APC or armour) is extremely hard going. OFP, Resistance, and ARMA all require you to do this sometimes several times in one mission - so I don't think Arma is unique in this respect.