instagoat

Don´t play the Arma 2 tutorials, they´re utterly broken. Instead play the Operation Arrowhead ones (further down the list)

It seems what´s being discussed here is the merits of OFPs Mission design versus that of Arma2, not so much wether or not the game tries too hard on the realism side. I think it does, but the bigger drawback in the default Missions in Arma 2 seems to be that they´re trying overly hard to be large and complex. Arrowhead feels terribly disjointed because you have too few, too large and complex missions that completely prevent you from forming attachments to the characters you´re playing. All you really get from Drake is an uber-manly shout at the start of the first mission, and then nothing anymore. The total exposition of the other characters is all of one mission, each. 7 Missions would barely be enough to focus on one character, let alone four. On the SP side, Arma 2 and Arrowhead have been disappointing to me, and slowly I feel like I´m being a bit let down by BI. BAF was good, save for some unfair mission design choices here and there, but in general I´d like more of this kind of the focused gameplay it offered, over the bumble that´s Arrowhead, for example.

If Codies learned their lesson from DR, maybe they´ll at least make an adequate "game". It won´t live up to the Operation Flashpoint name, because Arma 2 already does that... Codies know this, and the reaction of the hardcore realism crowd to DR would´ve certainly put me off from trying to cater to them. Less realism, more game should equal more fun. Who knows, if it gets good reviews and my friends like it, I might even get it too. In the meantime, I hope that BI stops making mediocre quality missions and steps up to the plate with more stuff like Eagle Wing, or some of the excellent BAF Missions. More story, more immersion, less trying to look at the big picture, and more people stories. The Operation Flashpoint devs have removed their game from trying to compete with Arma 2, that´s obvious by now. Maybe BI should try and tap into their market with some more game and less sim.

I keep hoping for BI to stop trying too hard on the realism side of things... it brakes the game, where it could be really amazing. Just look at Eagle Wing. Realism isn´t everything. Eagle Wing didn´t try to be realistic at all, and so far, it´s the very best Arma 2 experience I´ve had so far in SP. I hope BI go for strong narratives and less realism in the future. I´ll say it. I´m a Gamer first, and a Sim fan second. OFP was great because it wasn´t trying to be realistic, but because it tried to tell a story in its own kind of way, and succeeded very well at it.

I jumped a little when I saw this. Oh Arma 2... so silly!

After playing this, I have two small suggestions. 1: Add a Shoothouse á la MW2 that scores players accuracy and speed when passing trough it. This would be a great addition, hopefully it´s not a completely unfeasible suggestion. 2: Add a tool to scale weather/daytime. So we can also fiddle around at night with the cool new Laserpointers and stuff. Otherwise, after looking around in this on my own, I´m quite impressed. I´ll try it tomorrow together with my friends to see if we can break the hell out of it. :> Good work, BI, this will be fun!

How can you call this: http://img243.imageshack.us/i/arma2oa2010102319231160.jpg/ Low Quality...? BAF adds 25 x 3 new Units, a Warrior APC in two variations, two types of Jackal and Landrovers in also two variations, as well as four Helicopters of which two are unique to BAF. Then it adds nine new SP Missions, and a whole new campaign. For 10 bucks, that´s probably the best value for money you get with ANY game. And still, BIS is so nice to provide you with all BAF content apart from the missions for free in a low quality variant. I don´t know what you´re complaining about.

It´ll only cost ten bucks. And it´ll bring a new campaign, a new map and new models to play with. I think that much new content warrants a small pricetag put on to it? I will buy the pack, I´m sure it´ll be good. PMCs allow for some creative and unorthodox style of mission design, so I´m looking forward to seeing what BI have come up with this time. If Eagle Wing and the BAF campaign are anything to go by, it´ll be great.

I would still count FEAR´s AI as one of the best, if not the best FPS-bound AI so far, at least as far as Tunnel shooters go. Sure, it wasn´t physically "thinking" about flanking you, but the AI together with their environment achieved flanking and other tactical finesses as a positive byproduct. But this is also why I´d rate Arma 2s AI very very highly, because here the AI has to physically notice cover to move into it, they have to notice things like killzones and flanking opportunities (which I´ve tested both, and they do notice killzones and try to flank them.), and they have to do that in any environment presented to them and using a wide range of vehicles and weapons. Good AI in most games is really mostly about cheating and using tricks a lot, and do it so subtlely that the player doesn´t notice. I´d really love to get some technical insight into how Arma 2s AI is built, though, out of curiosity.

I find DLC to be a fabolous businessmodel, in principle. The problem is that people buy things offered without checking them, hence things like the Stimulus Pack or the Oblivion Horse Armour get sold despite being shameless ripoffs. That´s not the company´s fault, though. There is enough information out there today to see what a DLC contains and if it is worth its money, so if somebody buy a ripoff-dlc and whine later, it´s their own fault. As for the BIS DLC, the first one was fantastic, and I don´t regret buying it.

Word. BIS stuff has great value. I don´t like the Operation Arrowhead campaign, but the SP missions and the maps are great, and there´s tons of cool stuff to use in missions. For example, the useable UAV has made Manhattan tons more fun. This DLC, like the first one, will provide very good value for the money... at least, that´s very likely. Plus, ever since MGS4, I´m a sucker for PMCs. So much stuff you can do, way outside the constraints put on regular militaries. You can go to places you couldn´t with a regular army when using PMCs.

This will only work if they don´t implement the team-death penalties of Arrowhead or (worse) Harvest Red. The AI being beyond your control shouldn´t be a punishment to the player: if they get shot up, and the AI commands the squad, the player can do nilch to prevent them from dying. This was one of the major reasons why I didn´t play beyond the second mission of harvest red for a long time, because Miles would keep running in front of everybody´s mom and their machine gun. How CWC did it was unrealistic, but much better a solution, gameplay-fairness wise.

I´m sort of being between psyched and sceptical about this. I wouldn´t mind something story driven and not caring too much about realism, such as EW, over the cluttered gameplay-mess Operation Arrowhead´s Campaign was. I´ve not finished the BAF campaign yet, but I have to say as far as DLC mileage goes, it´s been a fantastic deal. Consider the heavily sold Stimulus Pack for MW2 (5 maps, only one of which was rated "good" by the gamesmag we get every month. Two or three of the maps were recycled MW1 maps.), which was sold for 15 bucks. Compared to that, BAF has: Nine Singleplayer Missions A new Campaign with all humps and ba-doo-daddle you could want. British Soldiers in three camo variations with gear to boot, as well as new vehicles and helos. For five bucks less than the silly MW2 mappack. And you even get those for FREE as BAF lite (okay, they look a bit mushy, but hey, deal with it.) As far as business models go, DLC are a viable way for a company to generate lots of revenue, with much less effort than releasing a packaged game. And BIS put much more effort into it than your average gaming company seems to do nowadays (anyone remember the horse-armour DLC for Oblivion? That´s a ripoff, but not this.). I also don´t know why people bash Queen´s Gambit so much... then again, maybe I´ve just not payed enough attention when playing it? If the PMC pack goes along the way of Eagle Wing, I will buy it twice, once for me, and once for my brother, so we can Coop the hell out of it. Will wait until I´ve seen some reviews, though. But even if it´s not as good as EW, I´ll still buy it once for me, so I can get the delicious new content. The features will be added by patch anyway, as the new features of BAF also have been. My two cents anyway Cheers

Hello guys, I´ve been searching for a working link to the DKM Comanche, but nothing has turned up. The only valid one I found was the ofpr.info one here -> http://ofp.gamepark.cz/index.php?showthis=5687 However, the download link seems to be dead. Does anybody have any pointers? I searched this thread but the only other link leads to the same page I have linked above. Thanks in advance for the help Insta

http://dev-heaven.net/issues/13933 Made a ticket on this issue. I hope it´s correct, can somebody check it over and correct/detail the issue further? This should be resolved pretty quickly if it indeed is an issue, if we can get some votes on this. Cheerio Insta

The new BAF DLC is excellent, content wise, and I´m thrilled about the sneaky Black Element mission. Now I was thinking, maybe the next DLC could focus on BE, with new PMC Units, and more dramatic and possibly even over the top mission Ideas. Personally, I would love to learn about the ways that PMCs operate in the Armaverse. What is the most honourable community´s and developers opinion on this? Cheers Instagoat

This is the issue that´s giving me most grief with the AI comrades, next to their headlessly charging around corners and clipping trough walls and obstacles. In every mission I play, where there is a Wall to stand next to, there will be an AI comrade shooting his buddy in the back. I´ve just played a small mission I built on Spritz Island, where I lost no AI to enemy fire, but took three casualties trough friendly fire. This isn´t even realistic friendly fire, this is AI buddies recklessly shooting the guy in front of them to score a kill on an enemy on a hillside five hundred meters away. I am in the process of building a sample mission, as the CIT ticket on this issue is timed out for lack of feedback, so this can be resolved. I think improving the AI in this respect will also help them in the other critical areas. Let´s collect examples, and find out in which situations Friendly Fire happens, and how the issue could be resolved. Cheers Insta

I am all for DLCs. THe only problem for me is how to pay for them, even though that´s probably only a marginal problem. Content wise, I trust Bohemia to not do rip-offs á la stimulus pack, or Oblivion horse armour. DLCs are a perfect means to generate funds for the company, because they can have relatively large profit margins on them, which then can be used to make even better new content, or fund other game productions. So I´d even just buy DLCs to support BI in their efforts to remain as good a company as they have been to me as a gamer in the past. I´m already looking forward to what this´ll bring. Cheers Insta

Screenshots using Arrowhead (Beta), WarFX, Villa Afghana.

I liked it, and I´m up to mission 7 now. Replayabillity is there, and it´s a nice proof of concept with all the stuff that is going on, but I think it´s way too short for all its features to really shine. Good things: Nice performance (given size of the missions in terms of how many Units are operating at any time), no bugs, sometimes I experienced script-lag but that´s a known bug, but no gamebreakers at all even when commanding the AI. Mission diversity is good, even if its only six missions in total (the first one really just is a cutscene), but its not quite up to Resistance standards. The other SP missions are cool, but seem to be extraordinarily easy. For the campaign, again, its a nice concept, it´s got a cool precept and lots of meta-stuff going on (why are the allied forces there, officially and unofficially), and there´s a lot of things that can happen or not happen depending on how you play the missions. But overall, despite replayabillity I maintain that it´s too short. Cheers Insta

Fantastic work with Arrowhead, BI. Keep it up!

The Mission can be pretty challenging because the Cobra is slow to arrive, and your team doesn´t have any AT weapons. There´s an RPG7 and some Ammo near the wrecked UAZ on the main road (where the camouflage netting is). You could try getting there and killing the BRDM yourself (that´s what I usually do.). Don´t let one mission dishearten you, the game as a whole is pretty amazing. You could try some of the player made missions (such as the excellent Cipher) instead. The essence of Arma 2 is user made content anyway. Hope this helps Insta

Actually, I think it´s a simple oversight. The first screenshots of the OA US Army soldiers had the 82nd Airborne patches and ISAF patch too, so it´s quite feasible that they simply forgot to change the IR texture to the new TF Knight patch among all the other amazing things they implemented. Granted, I expected much more in the AI and Interface departements, but what we have now is fine too. Hopefully they´ll work on the AI with the beta patches. FEAR-esque levels of AI action would be cool to have. One can dream. Good game, BIS, keep your game up this way, and things will become pretty amazing once you begin to unleash the DLCs.

Uploaded with ImageShack.us Hidden messages in the IR are revealed up close inspection of the US Units. :> whodathunkit? Super Game, BIS, this time it went right it seems!

Hey, hey, am I the only one noticing similarities here? Would be awesome if this really DOES mean that the Queen´s Gambit characters were sent by Black Element (The name of their Company is never mentioned in the Arma campaign, is it?), because it´d strengthen the continuity of the Armaverse. Go B+E