Sandy*

If I got a dollar every time Jakerod tells you what "futuristic" means.

This game already exists and is called Operation Arrowhead. If the official campaign/scenarios aren't enough, there are tons of user made missions, assets and maps set in scenarios similar to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and so on.

Because they always claim they're doing it? I never demanded anything, only criticized the shallow corporate PR. What logic are you following here? Also, gaming has been relevant enough for Microsoft to tie new DX into new Windows releases in hopes of driving sales. And today, PC gaming is stronger than ever - even Japanese console developers are churning out PC ports in haste. If there's something positive in the Win10 event, it's that they demoed playing a game through Steam. Meaning hopefully they'll leave the existing digital distribution and DRM systems to do their thing instead trying to reinvent something like GFWL.

No, as TPP or Arma 3 aren't like that either. I didn't suggest that games are entirely composed of vehicles or weapons like that, only that most near-future games always have something borrowed from real life and turned into a fictious future variant. And as such, Arma 3 shares with TPP just as much as the two games share with many others.

How is this any different from pretty much every near-future shooter/action game?

Not only is The Phantom Pain set in the past, the entire Metal Gear saga is alternative reality from at least as far as WW2. Huge mechas with nuclear launch capability had been designed by the 60s, some people have supernatural/magic abilities, some were cloned, the most advanced and flexible piece of stealth technology is a cardboard box, a radar system can sense people by "detecting electromagnetic waves resulting from biological reactions", nanomachines, artificial intelligence, ninjas with high-frequency blades, telepathy & telekinesis, the Illuminati and a million other things. It's so filled with science fiction, fantasy and general silliness that I don't know where you draw the parrallels with Arma 3. Or am I unaware that Metal Gears are amalgams of existing real world designs?

The game is set in a futuristic geopolitical climate though :p

Well I guess you're right.

In this regard, the game's approach to future is completely upside-down in my opinion. As advanced optics become more prominent in the future, it doesn't mean you have to replace all materiel since you can just upgrade the old ones' optics as a budget-friendly solution. Rifles for example have seen little development during the past decades. Even now, my country is refurbishing and upgrading the APCs and IFVs it acquired in the 80's, to run up till the 2030s. Our standard issue assault rifle is a 60's design with no solid plans made public to replace it even as the current ones are starting to wear off. Everything is too fresh in Arma 3, especially for the poor little island nation's armed forces. Bohemia, instead of just making futuristic variants of what are fresh standard issue gear/vehicles today, picked many weird and random things like prototypes that never made it into production, or gear that is mainly used by special forces today. It would not be a problem if these weapons or vehicles were accompanied by upgraded variants of what is common and mass produced in the countries the factions vaguely represent (to add some familiarity and realism), but they aren't. What happened to all the American and British weapons (or anything NATO, really)? Why create this whole fictional MX rifle? It's like the militaries in question recently replaced their entire catalogue of materiel. This is why I called A3 "theme-driven" earlier, as the choices in assets are very one-dimensional (to make the game look fresh and exotic compared to A2) instead displaying any realistic hints to a history of military acquisitions. If we go down this road, you'll find that a surprisingly large number of assets in A3 have been refurbished from A2, especially from the OA DLCs.

I'd love it if Bohemia took some inspiration from Eugen's Wargame series, it's pure military porn for me. So many European weapons and vehicles rarely (or never) seen in videogames, while the whole "AirLand Battle" concept would be a nice backdrop to promote combined arms. Thanks for taking the last line of my post entirely out of context.

The thing with thermals and highly magnified scopes/cameras is that they make up some really questionable gameplay. This is all apples and oranges, I know, but there are a lot of groups both casual and milsperg who share the same mindset. You can have nice scripting and mods for the AI, but they really have no idea how to prevent their detection by these fancy gadgets while moving and fighting. Giving the AI the same toys might boost their detection and firing ranges, but they remain just as stupid as before. I've never played any TvT except conservative ones with iron sights, or reflex/ACOG at best, as anything else is frowned upon. It's much more fun trying to find and shoot the enemy with the good old stuff than having gadgets do 2/3 of the job for you. So even if A3's futuristic setting is realistic, do you guys actually find it any fun?

I always replaced SCARs with M16/M4, and being completely oblivious to any shortcomings in the Soviet/Russian vehicles, it was always authentic enough for me. Though I'm not sure if this is what sektor really means, as he clearly misunderstood what Lexx said.

This is something Microsoft says with each new Windows release, yet it has never materialised into anything good. A bunch of empty promises in the form of PR talk. They have never focused on PC gaming.

I have to agree with Eduzumaki, it doesn't fit the gameplay. Screaming at the top of your lungs and then being totally fine 10 seconds later would sound completely off and destroy any immersion. It'd be a different story if getting severely injured meant the player would get incapacitated for the rest of the mission.

This is a Call of Duty storyline. Why would you fight inside skyscrapers when you have the tanks, bombs and missiles to level any enemy-infested buildings? As for the engine's capabilities and your PC's processing power for an urban map filled with huge enterable buildings, try having a fight in something as small as Kavala. :(

Despite my criticism, I've still enjoyed the vanilla content one way or the other. My biggest issue though is the lack of variation in certain asset categories. If you want an armored car with an MG, the only option is one with a remote system and an excellent camera. Same goes with static heavy machineguns. If you want powerful anti-air "emplacements", the only options are mobile AA that are also a total killer against infantry. Here lies the problem with mission-making. If you want to make missions that don't rely on electronic gizmos enabling you to detect and shoot enemies much easier and over much larger distances, you simply have to rule out several assets from what is already quite a small set. There are no alternatives. It would only make sense for the factions to have the good old reliable stuff in reserve (or for AAF, even in use, Altis having been ravaged by years of war). Arma 3 feels really theme-driven instead of having any sort of thoughtful insight into its own fictional setting. Of course we can just scrub this off by saying Bohemia didn't have the resources to create more weapons and vehicles, but in that case I would've personally preferred them making some of the lighter assets with manned turrets and iron/reflex sights instead of remote-MGs and hitech cameras.

It's not about A3's many assets not being real, it's about the fact that they are a very weird assortment of weaponry and a very unbelievable one even for the 2035 setting. The A2/OA settings were excellent, because on top of the generic US/Russia, the fictious eastern bloc factions drew huge parallels with real recent events and had completely believable weaponry. Many assets could be used as-is or retextured to create the standard issue gear and vehicles for so many modded factions, whether real or fictious-but-believable. Present day faction mods feel alien in Altis 2035, whereas in A2 many of them could seamlessly integrate into the Chernarus or Takistan lore without the need to mod opposing factions. Not saying I would've necessarily wanted another game of "M16s and AKs", but I feel that much more would have been achieved with Altis set closer to present day and an A2-style approach to fictious factions with assets similar to real life mediterranean militaries. Arma 3 is very hard to relate to, and while the complaints about "too futuristic" are misconceived, they stem from this.

And my counter-question is again: why should the server even allow players without such mods to join? What happens if you do it, I don't know - there might be an error that boots the player without them, or it allows them to join with unexpected results. Mod assets for example are likely invisible for players without the required mod.

Are the examples you gave actual mods at all? They sound like something achieved by mission scripting and hence easily executed on all clients without the need for external mods. If they are actual mods, then it is silly to have them on the server as optional instead of a requirement, and the results are probably very disorderly. It's also possible you have confused the issue with server-side mods that don't need to be loaded by any client.

Did I miss something because it's that vocal minority he appeared to speak of right from the beginning. And while they're a minority, they make a big deal out of it. Just take a look when Bohemia publishes something about A3's progress over at Steam/social media and there are lots of people automatically copy-pasting their same "fix the game" "blaa blaa performance" lines everytime. Here on the forums you can see the repeating phenomenon of a person getting annoyed about the game's state and then starting several threads over the course of a few days, always the same headers about bad performance like this, need a new engine like that, and eventually leading to the "arma is dying" and "is this how Bohemia treat their customer?" threads, until they collapse and make the most aggressive rant post in the manner of "I'll never play Arma again!".

The closer you get, the more there is to draw (LOD).

It has nothing to do with Zeus specifically. AI units outside your draw distance are fully simulated because anything can happen - combat against other AI, artillery, realistically traversing terrain. Any interaction, you name it. This is why some missions are badly made, because the designers insist on filling them with useless units instead of spawning/deleting/caching them when needed.

Here's the thing - all videogames utilize multiple cores poorly and still rely on the power of a single core a lot. It's just the simming genre where things choke up due to having much more things to calculate. Multicore programming is hard, and it is much easier to optimize a corridor shooter to run at 60 fps with size x map and y amount of AI by using sleigh of hand tricks than it is to make a simulator with varying map sizes, varying numbers of AI and an open environment without compromising the accuracy of whatever it tries to simulate.

I built a new machine a few months back and had a significant performance boost over my old 2010 rig, which already ran A3 with nice-enough graphics and acceptable framerates in most cases. Now I can turn everything to Ultra and enjoy a greater object view distance. PEBKAC. Arma will never utilize hardware like a regular average videogame because it's not such a closed system where they could easily optimize code due to an absolute max limit of assets on a small map with AI scripted specifically for that scene. Sure, some things could theoretically be improved - however, there are noone on the market doing the same stuff as Arma but better, so I really can't find justification to blame Bohemia not being magical geniuses and forerunners in such a niche engine technology.

Game runs fine for me. I don't play MMO gamemodes, badly designed missions, or on public servers with bad hardware.