ARMA's Future?

DayZ - Why I don't like it.

DayZ (As you know) is a ARMA 2/3 modification that adds zombies and survival elements. This mod has proven successful to the ARMA series bringing ARMA 3:CO to the steam store page for quite some time. This was good for Bohemia since they now have more money to fiddle with on the game. But, because of this there has been hundreds of thousands of new players. However, a large fraction of these new players are little kids, I mean even under the age of 15 which we could all say that there has been more than a few run in's on grieving caused by little kids in ARMA 2 servers. I'm not saying before DayZ there was no hackers or anything of the sort because there were, but not as much as there is right now. On top of this, have you read any of the posts on the forum with questions of DayZ? They are just screaming premature grammar. It has been following the history of Minecraft. I'm not saying DayZ is a bad thing to happen to ARMA but I know that milsim unit's are getting tired of this small detail. Also, its not impossible to see that Bohemia is paying a great deal of attention towards DayZ, but I would not say more than ARMA. But it's coming close.

ARMA 3 is not a milsim, its a sandbox modding contest extravaganza.

ARMA is pushing it's series on towards the third release, but ARMA 3 seems to be more or less different than it's previous releases, sure there are lots of new added features which add a great aspect of the game. But, there are still lots of features that are missing from the game. Even in Beta, and there is no hint that this will ever be added.

• ACE added a great deal of realism to ARMA 2, with features such as actual grenade fragmentation (realistic shrapnel) and a more diverse and realistic medical / wounding system than the Vanilla ARMA 2. Both of which could be easily implemented as its been done a thousand times before. I understand that ARMA is known for modding but these details which should be in every military simulator game. Ropes from ACE added a whole new way of deploying into missions since players could rappel from helicopters with ease which gave a new reason for helicopter insertion. Ropes should be used in a milsim game, why aren't they?
  
• ACRE also added a new dimension to the game with added radio functionality with it being integrated into Teamspeak 3. I know if this was truly a military simulator game and not a Sandbox game, a more advanced radio would be added than just pressing caps lock to voip. Surely that would mean putting ACRE unneeded but it's about time Bohemia realized these aspects of a military simulator is what we all use for the simulation instead of using just ARMA's Vanilla system. I could guarantee every Arma 2 Unit worth the time of day uses a combination of the same mods (ACE, ACRE, STMODS) and that should be preety obvious that their functionality should be at least integrated into ARMA 3 especially with ACE developers saying that they have disbanded and ACRE being already ported but keyword, "PORTED".
  

If you think about it, there are very little features in ARMA 3 to say this is a military simulator.

Is ARMA Finished?

There is another thread with a link to a ARMA 3 developer hinting the end of the ARMA series with bohemia stating that they will be focusing on Take on Mars and DayZ. If that's the case, I hope bohemia interactive realizes that the ARMA series has been proven quite successful and it coming to an end will cause global disasters such as earthquakes, volcano's erupting, and massive firestorms.:cool:

ALPHA - Adding features that were not considered during the development of the game.

BETA - Fixing the added features, still implementing features but not taking it much more features to be added.

RELEASE PATCHES - Very small changes in the game that patch glitches or changes content within the game.

Edited July 3, 2013 by ThRyCkz

What Arma seriously lacks is competition on milsim market.

What Arma seriously lacks is competition on milsim market.

A modern operation flashpoint game with modding support would be a devastating battle between ARMA and Operation flashpoint lol

What Arma seriously lacks is competition on milsim market.

Agreed.

173rd respect from 509th.

Ontopic

I doubt arma is done for in the future. We simply must have a Israeli based campaign. Also South American and Polynesian.

I have a mixed feeling about Arma 3 and here is why:

* Arma 3 alpha & beta content

- missing pvp gameplay modes aswell driveable units. All in all multiplayer pvp so far not a big part of the version testings and I wonder why.

* Arma 3 alpha & beta servers

- most of the filled servers are "roleplaying" servers i.e. Life/Wasteland/Dayz comming probably.

* Arma 3 alpha & beta server filter features

- In Arma 2 the upcomming of "roleplaying" mods did cut out TvT pvp servers a lot. They did more or less push away such servers including bigger mods like Project Reality, because Dayz/Wasteland/Lifexx did use the same filter type (Team). This did lead to a shockingly chaos, you could not find servers anymore and got spammed with all these roleplaying servers, especially if you are a casual user like most and looking for servers. Already in the Arma 3 alpha & beta there is a big part of such type of servers. What will happen after the game release when the game gets more popular and the amount of servers will raise. It will get more popular alone due to Dayz. I dont want see the same chaos like in Arma 2 again and to see that server and actually a part of the community gets cut out with a result of low pop. This is a sign that the Arma 2 game was not prepared for this and there were missing features for the ingame server list.

* Iam afraid that Arma 3 could be more make up than actually improvements

The forum is filled with discussions about multiplayer improvements for example. About the realism, damage models, automatic mod download which is very important, weight restrictions of weapons for each soldier, TAB targeting, Space Bar scanning, Vehicle Radar and so on....you will find loads of threads about it. There are also very well known reasons why multiplayer pvp servers got less populated since the Arma 2 release.

There are changes and I appreciate it which I did find ot so far i.e. Infantry movement, but hopefully the gameplay gets improved in comparison to Arma 2 with the aim to be a military sim with combined arms and not just infantry gameplay. Combined arms with more realism and a huge game world is the strenght of the game series and thats why I always did come back and bought the new releases.

The strong community since Operation Flashpoint which was released in 2001 did always deliver superbe modifications for the game and brought ideas on the table to improve the core game. Hopefully there will be features implemented.

We all did see the issues with such an amount of community mods, without a feature like an automatically ingame mod download when you enter such servers. Often, new players got overwhelmed and awesome mods were not much used on public servers because so many servers had so much different mods. Sixt updater, another community development was a nice idea but the core game needs here improvements.

It is still important content missing in the beta version and therefore hard to judge how the gameplay will look like at release.....

Edited July 4, 2013 by oxmox

It's not looking good, most of the people that worked on Arma 2 seem to be doing other things? IMO it needs the CEO to say, "Get Arma3 finished, make it a success, DEVS make all the things!, then you can move on, NOT before." It doesn't seem to have the resources it needs, serious problems aren't being solved and it's looking like it's going to be a disappointment. My hope is that some things are being held back for a future content release. With every day that passes I miss Arma2 more. I will wait for the realease and I hope I'm wrong but at this point I can't see how I will port some of my missions from A2 - A3. With the problems and things not working it doesn't seem possible at present. Too few people working on too many things? BIS is starting to look over stretched?

It's not looking good, most of the people that worked on Arma 2 seem to be doing other things? IMO it needs the CEO to say, "Get Arma3 finished, make it a success, DEVS make all the things!, then you can move on, NOT before."

Actually, and I'm still basing this on the old Steamworks announcement, it sounds like the CEO's saying "Get Arma 3 finished ON TIME, devs DON'T make all the things"...

Too few people working on too many things? BIS is starting to look over stretched?

Actually, according to DM as many as a three-fifths to two-thirds of BI's personnel are working on Arma 3, the DayZ and Take On Mars teams are a lot smaller and essentially centered around their project leads' personal mods/pet-projects. As for resourcing beyond that... you can expect basically no one (except Rocket) to talk about that.

It is however pretty obvious that their project leads prioritize things differently, i.e. Rocket saying that DayZ won't even have vehicles at initial release, period. He did however say that most of the Arma 3 devs "are actually diehard arma fans who joined the company to work on the product, and would love this stuff too. The reality is that you can't do everything, and things not done generally have a good reason" re: stuff not implemented into Arma 3 like the ol' "shooting from vehicles"... though in that particular case:

I specifically looked into shooting from cars when I was working on ArmA3. Often the solution used in VBS suits an actual military simulator very well - but is next to useless in an FPS. Meaning it needs to be redone from scratch, meaning it needs to be prioritized against other kinds of work.

He didn't specify anything re: how said prioritizing is decided, but I tend to believe that it's regarding the above implication from the Steamworks announcement: "get this game out ON TIME."

The funny thing is, Rocket is actually a source of some of the most interesting insights into Arma development... for example, entity-based/object-oriented weapons? According to Rocket, it actually came up multiple times over the years in Arma development but was always dropped "because it was estimated that, at best, it would take years, and at worst it would never work". In DayZ's case, it took about two months for Jirka ("one of the three people who made the original engine") to get that "basically working" in the standalone -- and he claims that it only taking two months left Ubisoft devs "dumbfounded".

Edited July 4, 2013 by Chortles

Arma went from "Tactical Military Simulation" to "Massive Military Sandbox".

From the Wiki:

"ARMA 2 (stylized as ArmA II) is a military simulation video game."

"ARMA 3 (stylized as ArmA III) is an open world tactical shooter video game."

:butbut:

I still trust on BIS,my favorite company of all time.But as said above,its not looking good,and it worries me alot.

P.S: Not basing my arguments on the Wiki,that was just a reference.;)

Arma 2 was never a simulator anyway, they just cut that out to prevent future reference from raging users.

I just don't know..

At first i was happy DayZ brought so much people-and bringing more money/strength to BI

After that i was really glad seeing even some of our 'high-grade' community members being absorbed by BI

Then instead of seeing a bazillion people working on the "Dream" game..i again seeing BI divided to other -for me- irrelevant projects-and guess what??

We are feature begging again..

Sorry..it's my opinion along with the belief that BI CEO never really loved ArmA.(I don't like him btw..)

Maybe always ArmA cause him trouble with BIA to be careful in the amount of features he lets be implemented-in case the ARMA will be better choice then (the o' mighty) VBS in ridiculously lower price in comparison.

Day by day i become more sick thinking on this...

Edited July 4, 2013 by GiorgyGR

Two things:

#1: According to Rocket the VBS2/Arma relationship is nothing like what you just described, and according to DM there's already around two-thirds of BI's people working on Arma 3. (That means about 60 to 70 people, give or take, with both DayZ and TOM's dev teams being much smaller.)

#2: BI's CEO as of Operation Flashpoint: Marek Spanel. BI's CEO as of Arma 3/DayZ/Take On Mars: Marek Spanel. If "BI CEO never really loved ArmA", then he's been "never loving ArmA" for over a decade and closing in on 15 years now.

Arma 2 was never a simulator anyway, they just cut that out to prevent future reference from raging users.

May I sig this? Edited July 5, 2013 by Chortles

Arma went from "Tactical Military Simulation" to "Massive Military Sandbox".

From the Wiki:

"ARMA 2 (stylized as ArmA II) is a military simulation video game."

"ARMA 3 (stylized as ArmA III) is an open world tactical shooter video game."

:butbut:

I still trust on BIS,my favorite company of all time.But as said above,its not looking good,and it worries me alot.

P.S: Not basing my arguments on the Wiki,that was just a reference.;)

So then, since it's your only real reference, that implies that you are basing the majority of your argument on a quote from the wiki.

I think a big reason we aren't seeing the gamemodes previously enjoyed such as Domination, Evolution, CTI is partly because those three gamemodes are stale because of their implementations since OFP/ArmA (CTI is more OFP, other two are ArmA 1) have barely changed. They are more or less the same as they originally were. Wasteland and DayZ are still only about a year old (maybe even less), so people haven't been worn out on them. If people want these modes to come back, they need to do a re-work of them so they feel new again.

Also the lack of content in the game still (I'm sure this will be rectified by release) is restricting what kind of missions you can make. We don't have any support units yet (helicopter medivac, fuel truck, ammo truck, etc), we don't have any fixed wing, we don't have many armored units, no tanks, etc. Stratis is also not big enough to really facilitate those gamemodes previously mentioned (though Altis might be too BIG, imo).

I'm not playing ArmA 3 that much until closer to release because there still are a lot of bugs that are annoying (primarily dealing with the inventory system), compounded by the lack of content and the classname changes that we seem to experience quite a bit.

I think a big reason we aren't seeing the gamemodes previously enjoyed such as Domination, Evolution, CTI is partly because those three gamemodes are stale because of their implementations since OFP/ArmA (CTI is more OFP, other two are ArmA 1) have barely changed.

Can't agree. Conquest\AAS type still is the king in many games, main case BF and remained the same thing over the years. Should I mention the never dying Counter Strike with its 2 game modes?

Evo\Domi depend on the AI, which isn't great, and may become boring over time because players can get overpowered loadouts, it don't require any organization and it needs a great server performace.

(Public) PvP doesn't seems to work with Arma, I pointed some problems here, but you can add decrease of performace over time if the mission isn't well made. On top of it all you have the mods confusion and lack of standards (from controls to interface).

There is no plug'n'play in Arma.

Wasteland just joined the survivor thing which is the trend after the zombies.

Edited July 5, 2013 by Smurf

I think a big reason we aren't seeing the gamemodes previously enjoyed such as Domination, Evolution, CTI is partly because those three gamemodes are stale because of their implementations since OFP/ArmA (CTI is more OFP, other two are ArmA 1) have barely changed. They are more or less the same as they originally were. Wasteland and DayZ are still only about a year old (maybe even less), so people haven't been worn out on them. If people want these modes to come back, they need to do a re-work of them so they feel new again.

I like your willingness to speak Arma heresy. :D

Also the lack of content in the game still (I'm sure this will be rectified by release) is restricting what kind of missions you can make. We don't have any support units yet (helicopter medivac, fuel truck, ammo truck, etc), we don't have any fixed wing, we don't have many armored units, no tanks, etc. Stratis is also not big enough to really facilitate those gamemodes previously mentioned (though Altis might be too BIG, imo).

Right now a Zamak or HEMTT can fill in for the aforementioned trucks, and I'm really not seeing what you mean by helicopter medivac here? I'll agree that the lack of fixed wing and tanks is more an issue.

How do you explain The "life" servers then?

Domination, Evolution, CTI, Warfare - will ArmA3 at least have one similar official game-mode?

Or just only Sector-control? :butbut:

If they don't have even warfare then hope is lost.

Hmmm:

You got it a bit wrong - Arma 3 is a sandbox platform. We provide the core and features we are able to finish in certain quality. I believe that our improved radio protocol is more than enough for most of players, why would we even bother to spend our resources on something if we could just say "Hey, use ACRE for that"? If the community is able to provide anything better, we would like to promote the content and make it as accessible as possible within our resources (missions on Steam Workshop anyone?) :icon_twisted:

***This thread I would say has alot of controversial topics but I would say they are valid points to consider***

Also, these are my opinions. Opinions are meant to be judged, so don't hold back on the commenting.

DayZ - Why I don't like it.

DayZ (As you know) is a ARMA 2/3 modification that adds zombies and survival elements. This mod has proven successful to the ARMA series bringing ARMA 3:CO to the steam store page for quite some time. This was good for Bohemia since they now have more money to fiddle with on the game. But, because of this there has been hundreds of thousands of new players. However, a large fraction of these new players are little kids, I mean even under the age of 15 which we could all say that there has been more than a few run in's on grieving caused by little kids in ARMA 2 servers. I'm not saying before DayZ there was no hackers or anything of the sort because there were, but not as much as there is right now. On top of this, have you read any of the posts on the forum with questions of DayZ? They are just screaming premature grammar. It has been following the history of Minecraft. I'm not saying DayZ is a bad thing to happen to ARMA but I know that milsim unit's are getting tired of this small detail. Also, its not impossible to see that Bohemia is paying a great deal of attention towards DayZ, but I would not say more than ARMA. But it's coming close.

ARMA 3 is not a milsim, its a sandbox modding contest extravaganza.

ARMA is pushing it's series on towards the third release, but ARMA 3 seems to be more or less different than it's previous releases, sure there are lots of new added features which add a great aspect of the game. But, there are still lots of features that are missing from the game. Even in Beta, and there is no hint that this will ever be added.

• ACE added a great deal of realism to ARMA 2, with features such as actual grenade fragmentation (realistic shrapnel) and a more diverse and realistic medical / wounding system than the Vanilla ARMA 2. Both of which could be easily implemented as its been done a thousand times before. I understand that ARMA is known for modding but these details which should be in every military simulator game. Ropes from ACE added a whole new way of deploying into missions since players could rappel from helicopters with ease which gave a new reason for helicopter insertion. Ropes should be used in a milsim game, why aren't they?
  
• ACRE also added a new dimension to the game with added radio functionality with it being integrated into Teamspeak 3. I know if this was truly a military simulator game and not a Sandbox game, a more advanced radio would be added than just pressing caps lock to voip. Surely that would mean putting ACRE unneeded but it's about time Bohemia realized these aspects of a military simulator is what we all use for the simulation instead of using just ARMA's Vanilla system. I could guarantee every Arma 2 Unit worth the time of day uses a combination of the same mods (ACE, ACRE, STMODS) and that should be preety obvious that their functionality should be at least integrated into ARMA 3 especially with ACE developers saying that they have disbanded and ACRE being already ported but keyword, "PORTED".
  

If you think about it, there are very little features in ARMA 3 to say this is a military simulator.

Is ARMA Finished?

There is another thread with a link to a ARMA 3 developer hinting the end of the ARMA series with bohemia stating that they will be focusing on Take on Mars and DayZ. If that's the case, I hope bohemia interactive realizes that the ARMA series has been proven quite successful and it coming to an end will cause global disasters such as earthquakes, volcano's erupting, and massive firestorms.:cool:

But seriously, Bohemia, ARMA 3 is lacking what most would come close to comparing to a military simulator. For those who need to see this in action:

ALPHA - Adding features that were not considered during the development of the game.

BETA - Fixing the added features, still implementing features but not taking it much more features to be added.

RELEASE PATCHES - Very small changes in the game that patch glitches or changes content within the game.

I do not mean to offend Bohemia's decisions if I did, but these are some questionable points.

I can't find anything bad to say about DayZ, the ArmA 2 sales provided by DayZ was free money. Free money BI could throw after development of the DayZ standalone and help them make some of the decisions around ArmA 3 a little easier. I was 15 years old once too, I wasn't 15 when I started plating OFP, but I was 12 years younger than I am today. I've always thought that if you play on public servers, you have to suffer whatever teammates the internet throw at you and for me OFP and ArmA always offered the best experiences on well administrated servers.

ArmA 3 is as much a milsim as OFP was and ArmA 3 is also as much a sandbox as OFP. OFP was the original sandbox, it came with OFP/ArmA's most beloved feature: Wide open access for user content and an easy to use editor. ArmA 3 is not a hardcore milsim, nor was OFP or ArmA 2, but it made it easy for the community to push it's limits, whether they went for advanced realism or LEGO modifications.

OFP and ArmA come with no expiration dates, not because they're always released in a perfect state, but because BI allows and encourages it's community add years and years of extra content.

DayZ --who would've thunk, eh?

Yet, without the v.60 netcode, dayZ, or any PvP, would've died on the vine.

Persistent data base? Wow, some clever thought and work went into this.

Wasteland is racking up impressive play-hours, so is 'Life', on a limited alpha/beta A3.

Dean Hall and crew are talking 150 slot PvP for the stand-alone.

So many skilled and talented people are working on projects like I-44 and Multi-session-operations, MSO --to name just two i'm looking forward for.

This "Sandbox" Bis is working towards is yet to be discovered; Its limits are yet to be mapped, even defined.

Zombies, imagine that.

Its Casual alarm again

- Where is the source of the claim that Arma series is ending? Everything they said so far points to future support and content.

- Only 2/3 of BI is working on A3 - yes, don't forget previous side projects - TOH, CC, these people come from acquired companies who never worked on Arma

- DayZ weapons - they deleted everything that wasn't connected to zombies; they don't have to worry about compatibility or rewriting configs for 1500 items since they do all content from the scratch

- Release state - its common knowledge that Arma 3 is late so it obviously doesn't follow the perfect timeline, also almost no BI game came on time

- they prioritize stuff and do not have time for everything which is regrettable but understandable if you use logic

They never said the would implement ACE features.

As for public MP, that was always poor, I would like to see global reputation system that would prevent kids from ruining it, otherwise its FFA modes forever.

And lastly, I was under the impression that hardcore community never plays vanilla anyway.

Speaking in terms of the purely Vanilla game, its evolved, but moved toward mainstream.

I don’t play the Vanilla game, never have really, so for me and players like me, it’s the end of the series for the type of game I/we play. Proven to me by the fact I’m sticking with A2, just to be able to maintain realism in missions. A3 for me, is tourism, an oddity if you like, neither here nor there in terms of the genre, but I’m glad I bought it, helps support BI, which I like to do.

BIS created this particular genre on pc, its narrow (in player terms), in a perfect way, you either slot in as a player or you don’t.

A ‘simgame’ maybe !!

Anyway, they got it just right over the past decade, but its not been easy financially I would have thought, for this series at least. So BIS, move on if thats what it needs, you certainly have my blessings.

Behind you, for my game at least, you have left a perfect, well near perfect genre, helped heavily by some very talented mod/addons makers, of course.

Its been great, still is, but in a heavily modded A2 world for me, even with the imperfections.;).:)