MengJiao

Good Point. I sometimes wonder if people who claim there's something substandard about ARMA VR x.x have looked very much at the real world away from urban environments.

Extremely funny!

I agree that as an enemy the AI can be impressive. I'm fooling around in the editor and have set up some moderately complex battles. Between the friendly AI doing very odd things that accidently turn out well and the enemy AI being moderately sneaky and moderately aggressive I've had some good battles lately.

I don't think they are really grown men in any sense, they are just entertaining aspects of a game. I think they do okay. I've been playing in the editor a lot and after a confusing battle it is interesting to walk around and reconstruct what happened in some AI vs. AI encounters.

I love this mod. I've been running it around in the Editor for days on the basis of a campaign where the Iraqis set out to eradicate a Takistani-style tribe on the Takistan Map. The mod works perfectly for that sort of thing.

Here's what I did and it worked fine. I installed the DvD for ARMA2 and then installed the DvD for OA. OA just updates ARMA2. You can still play in Chenarus or in the OA realm and/or mix and match as much as you want. Installing OA first doesn't work since OA automatically updates ARMA2, but ARMA2 (being in the past) has no knowledge of OA.

I'm a smorgasbordian too. I had a blast over the last few weeks in MP Warfare but this week I'm playing in the editor for some reason.

I can imagine my experience in a Domination-style game if that was the scenario: After a tremendous cinematic opening -- Music giant titles etc. -- the heart-wrenching image of a giant flat tire appears and then there I am on a huge empty base full of stuff. Smaller titles appear and tell me "You must be on Speak-easy to change a flat tire. Join us on 87164-988764-98764." Then it turns out the flat tire is 20 km away and I have to load a tire in a special assault helicopter. I head for a pile of tires, but some player tells you this is coop team work which means I can't touch the tires because in coop everbody else has something to do and you have to wait while they wander around loading up everything just right to fix that flat like a real army would.

I play Warfare so I'm usually surrounded by fear-crazed AI characters screaming "Ru-ru poo poo neam!"...plus I've always hated the AI "Where are you?" and "Injured"....IT's much better to have no idea what the AI is complaining about. When a French Bluefor DLC comes out, I'll be French Bluefor all the time just for the AI language.

The Domination thing gets me down too. I came back to multiplayer when OA came out and most of the time the majority of games out there are Domination with no more people in them than any other game mode. I tried to enjoy domination, but it seems to lack focus. ---------- Post added at 06:50 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:40 PM ---------- Well, I don't get the attraction of Domination. First off all you land (after an annoying cinematic intro) in the dullest imaginable base. then you're supposed to go many kilometers to harass somebody. Evidently the coop players are some gang and the AI is the police. Very dull. Why go far from a big base to play cops and robbers? Why not just do it all in a small town? What's the point of the whole base thing? Why pretend to be in an army of some kind when you're just doing some crimes?

I guess I would say two things (which may or may not make sense to you): 1) with OA, this is now the best state the whole game series from the original Opflash on has ever been in. There are aspects of OA that make Aram2/CO/OA an instant classic and with the mod community and the multiplayer game modes already out there...its only going to get better...so get in and see all the fun 2) I've had more fun in this Multiplayer environment than in any game since Red Orchestra as it was in 2006-2008.

I have a machine very close to what you are considering. I turned down or shut off a lot of the graphics options in the game and keep my view distance at around 2km. The game looks fine, beautiful even and runs without a hitch.

I've noticed some improvement. I thought I was just getting better at driving, but maybe the controls are a little smoother.

This sounds like a zen koan to me. What do I really know about the quality of AI suffering?

I'd like some jungle islands and some PT boats and some floatplanes or amphibious planes like the Catalina. Sharks, crocodiles, tides and dugout canoes would be fun too in that environment.

But imagine the agony of somebody who plays as a Takistani and he just has to shoot all those highly trained US Army AI guys. Sometimes after wiping out the elite AI US Army I have to go eat a whole bag of fritos just to get my head back around the air conditioner. ---------- Post added at 03:48 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:47 PM ---------- Not if I don't get the processing cycles I need to form a thought.

North Kareonarus would be perfect, but not with the player as the triumphant Americans. It seems to me that a better story-setting would be something like a coup in a Takistani-like state or other failed post-Stalinist regime. Both sides can have the same crappy equipement and the fight to get some better technology can be part of the story.

It's funny, but...I'm a righty, but I use the left on the mouse. I started doing it to avoid over-stressing my right, but I guess I'm developing some ambidexterity.

Even without consequences, it's pretty hard to work a major religious angle into a shoot-'em-up story. A really cool exception is the fine tale in Children of Men, but that sort of thing is rare. You might be able to make it work as some kind of sequential quest -- maybe the hero has to drink from a sequence of sacred springs to gain the power to mentally direct his infrared signature into innocent shrubs.

That's the irony and satire angle: the game comes out in the early 21st century and you have to mentally go back 30 years and look at really feeling hatred for commies. It's much easier to write a good story with that kind of irony and satire. It would be hard to get the same effect with religion, unless say the player was the 13th Messiah or the Mahdi (the expected one) or something.

Well you do have a choice of humorous modes. You can do a farce, as most games do, or you can do an ironic satire, as I think OpFlash Resistance seems to have done. Yes, I agree, some kind of humorously dark mode would be a good way to think of writing a campaign, but in any case, you'd want your player to get to build up his low tech evil empire crudely and savagely through treachery and assassination, not by arriving with a huge high tech army.

I think for a good campaign you want to have the player be part of anything at all except a modern army. The world of a mercenary or tribal innovator or 3rd world soldier or drug lord make much better settings for good stories and that would work for any time period from say 1900 til now, though with the current weapon set probably 1960 to now would work better.

Sometimes it works. OpFlashpoint had a lot going for it in that it had a definite local setting. It was modeled only in an ironic or even satirical way on the real world. That makes stories work better if the players are supposed to busy themselves blowing up parts of the imaginary world. Settings such as OA has are nearly impossible for good stories. The demand for the latest high tech gear combined with strong echoes of real world turmoil basically wrecks any chance at a good story since it leaves no room for irony or satire. You can either have high tech gear and go with a farce (the usual choice in games) or an intense local scene and go with irony and satire (as I think OpFlash Resistance did). If I had to write a good story in the OA world, I would make it very savage and very low tech, a tribal war with a horrified central government finally taking sides. Irony and satire would rule and high-tech-obsessed gamers would never buy it and BIS would go out of business since most gamers seem to prefer advanced weapons no matter what...ie even if they wreck the story. High tech weapons might make a good McGuffin in a Mercenary tale of savagery, but that's another story.

Sounds good. I've never played the campaigns though I've played all the versions of Opflash/ARMA since 2002. Writing stories is hard enough when you do it in the medium of a book or possibly a movie. It's undoubtedly much, much harder to write good stories for a game campaign and I don't play games for stories -- for that I read books or watch movies. A good game campaign should (in my opinion) not be about characters primarily but about interrelating the wins and gains from different steps and stages and aspects of the operational environment. For example choosing whether you want higher commands to do broad reconnaissance or a narrow but focused reconnaissance that possibly gives away where you are going next. Or whether you act on a peice of human or signal intel and give away ot the enemy that you have sources. Whether you move slowly with good supply or quickly to exploit even with poor supply. Those should be in campaigns and characters should be in books.

I think this is the only possible answer. ---------- Post added at 11:51 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:49 AM ---------- I'm not sure what weapons ARMA3 will be fought with but ARMA4 will be sticks and stones. ---------- Post added at 11:57 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:51 AM ---------- That's not critical! Everybody wants to love the good ole pre-2001 USA: 1) real money 2) GM cars 3) Toy Story (but not Toy Story II and III, which didn't happen in the ARMA) 4) No OpFlash point to suggest the split off of the ARMA universe and cause a certain indeterminacy to evolve 5) Fewer Fraudulent McMansions 6) Almost no toxic assets 7) this list is starting to sound like a nice biscuit box recipe