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ARMA 3

Skdursh

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Any of you nerds wanna get together sometime and play through the new Prairie Fire DLC? No one I know plays ARMA, but I used to play a ton of it and have the itch to get back into the game and Prairie Fire is looking pretty tasty.
 

Beowulf

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Why not. Also haven't played in quite a while, could play some coop missions, especially to the sound of Fortunate Son playing in the background.
 

Suchy

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Any of you nerds wanna get together sometime and play through the new Prairie Fire DLC? No one I know plays ARMA, but I used to play a ton of it and have the itch to get back into the game and Prairie Fire is looking pretty tasty.
Sure, same here and I'd like to give it a try
 

Skdursh

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Why not. Also haven't played in quite a while, could play some coop missions, especially to the sound of Fortunate Son playing in the background.
Any of you nerds wanna get together sometime and play through the new Prairie Fire DLC? No one I know plays ARMA, but I used to play a ton of it and have the itch to get back into the game and Prairie Fire is looking pretty tasty.
Sure, same here and I'd like to give it a try

Sounds good to me. Maybe we can find one or two more people and we'd have a squad. Are either of you on the RPGCodex Discord? I think meeting up over Discord would probably be the easiest way to communicate while playing or we could use something like Teamspeak.
 

Beowulf

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Why not. Also haven't played in quite a while, could play some coop missions, especially to the sound of Fortunate Son playing in the background.
Any of you nerds wanna get together sometime and play through the new Prairie Fire DLC? No one I know plays ARMA, but I used to play a ton of it and have the itch to get back into the game and Prairie Fire is looking pretty tasty.
Sure, same here and I'd like to give it a try

Sounds good to me. Maybe we can find one or two more people and we'd have a squad. Are either of you on the RPGCodex Discord? I think meeting up over Discord would probably be the easiest way to communicate while playing or we could use something like Teamspeak.

I used to play Arma via teamspeak because of all those radio comms plugins, but show me this codex discord thing of which you speak. With small team the chatter should be manageable.
 

Suchy

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I'm not recording anything. That Vietnam DLC is a total FPS killer, and my PC could handle Cyberpunk maxed.
 

Skdursh

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Why not. Also haven't played in quite a while, could play some coop missions, especially to the sound of Fortunate Son playing in the background.
Any of you nerds wanna get together sometime and play through the new Prairie Fire DLC? No one I know plays ARMA, but I used to play a ton of it and have the itch to get back into the game and Prairie Fire is looking pretty tasty.
Sure, same here and I'd like to give it a try

Sounds good to me. Maybe we can find one or two more people and we'd have a squad. Are either of you on the RPGCodex Discord? I think meeting up over Discord would probably be the easiest way to communicate while playing or we could use something like Teamspeak.

I used to play Arma via teamspeak because of all those radio comms plugins, but show me this codex discord thing of which you speak. With small team the chatter should be manageable.

I have no idea how to get the invite code, but I know I found the Discord through here at Codex, so I'm sure it's on the site somewhere. Regardless, it would probably be better for one of us to just set up a small Discord server to use so that no one else stumbles into the chat while we're playing. I'll send you guys a message in a bit with my Discord ID and depending on our schedules we could either play some day this week or next weekend.
 

Konjad

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Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Shared it in Stalker 2 thread, but I'll leave it here as some of you might not have seen it and find it interesting:

QFDEFaD.jpg

bc2QaeShxnFd3dJBsFDtGivB6rJ8hrpQsMV-R5i8AGs.png
 

ADL

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That looks great. When the fuck is ARMA Reforger going to be announced? I thought it was supposed to release back in Q1 2021 and we still don't even have an announcement.
 

Hace El Oso

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Be careful what you wish for. ‘Enfusion’ in DayZ is terrible and absolutely incapable of the kind of scale and simulation that Real Virtuality has been in ArmA 1 , 2 and 3. It was even designed to run on consoles.

I’ve heard Reforger is going to be multiplayer only, PvP only. So basically like every other multiplayer FPS out there. Unmitigated decline.
 

Burning Bridges

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We proudly present: Arma 3 finally on Consoles

176703031.jpg


Look at teh graphix

rrMI8PZ.jpg


UbDD80O.jpg


P.S. I'm obviously kidding, on the PC it will have LOD slider 400 like they introduced on Microsoft Flight Simulator. But the "optimization" on the console with the need to have state of the art "insane"-type graphix can only lead to disaster.
 

Alienman

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Damn, that first pic posted by Konjad looked great.

Shame the FPS will go to single digit as soon as you add any kind of AI.
 

Burning Bridges

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Bohemia Interactive has and always had a big problem.

Arma 3 had originally been supposed to come to consoles, but later was announced that the console version had been cancelled. It's quite obvious that Arma's main strenghts (like almost limitless visibility range and synchronous simulation of real world size battlefields) would all play really badly with consoles. And I think they know this is the main reason they miss out on being a true AAA company while at the same time they cannot risk losing their core audience. They somehow need to get console players who are not popamole to buy PCs, and so they need some sort of "Arma Lite"

Most console players may buy, but will never comprehend Arma anyway. I once had an appointment with a friend who wanted to play Arma for the first time, and I spectated him. He was running around the houses and waiting for players to shoot. Somehow he never saw anything but got killed anyway. At some point he indignantly typed in the chat "wtf IS this game?!?". I later wrote him that he needs to use his binoculars because enemies are at 500 meter and more, but I think he never fired her up again.
 

ADL

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I'd totally be down for an Arma-lite spinoff debuting Enfusion ahead of a proper sequel. I'd imagine the scripting overhead would be significantly lowered similar to DayZ SA which runs great and it'd be a dream to mod.
 
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In a ship with cooked grenade
Most console players may buy, but will never comprehend Arma anyway.

Truth.

Arma 3 was basically a fluke. Underproduced, overhyped, slowly delivering. At first actually ignored and hated by hardcore fans, then slowly all of them turned to it once it got enough features. Engine is already at the peak, performance wise. Engine from 2001, revised to hell, can only do so much.

But it is there and there still is no other real alternative to it. It is a true sandbox and offers anything you want - LAN, dedicated servers, offline single-player, co-operative scenarios, dynamic scenarios. The amount of tweaks, possibilities and mods is insanely huge. Maybe in few years some game will match it but it most likely won't be Bohemia Inveractive's product.
 

Burning Bridges

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With games like Arma I'm not convinced that a new engine is always automatically better.

The key factor in Arma is the number of units simulated at the same time. A standard popamole game solves this by reducing this number to lets say 25 (by reducing the world size to 200 football fields and visibilty to 300 meter). In Arma it can be 1000s of units.

Therefore Arma has a crucial component that is the low level performance of basic AI (that runs in the background). That's one of the the reasons why Arma AI can never be made exceptionally smart and why AI strength drops by number of units, the AI at some point becoming unable to shoot back or even move.

And I think very old code with the most radical optimizations for 15 year old CPUs is probably always winning in that area. Of course, if you could squeeze out more through better algorithms you might gain something from new code, I just doubt it. But ultimately the only way to make Arma much better is throw much better hardware at it. And of course to finally go multicore, but thats also not easy if you sit on 25 years worth of legacy code. Imo in order to get the most out of Arma they need to get multicore and swap some calculatations to a server (if thats possible). All that takes time and money and also motivation, and it's not clear they have enough of all three. The fact that a major part of their staff ran off that to make popamole games (KCD) also didn't help I guess.

Maybe in few years some game will match it but it most likely won't be Bohemia Inveractive's product.

Why not BI? Imo only company contracting military simulations can achieve this, and at this point BI is the only company left that's doing both. The question is rather if it is economically feasible, a lot of similar companies in other genres died (like Sonalysts) or moved to Russia where wages are lower (Eagle Dynamics). Therefore my prediction that the company who would be doing this will be in a low wage country and will also do military simulation software both of which is not exactly a huge playing field.
 

Burning Bridges

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I'd totally be down for an Arma-lite spinoff debuting Enfusion ahead of a proper sequel. I'd imagine the scripting overhead would be significantly lowered similar to DayZ SA which runs great and it'd be a dream to mod.

Normally it would be no problem to make a game that looks like Arma and runs on a modern console.

But you would lose what makes Arma great, that you can move 10 kilometers, come back and see that the battle was continuing while you were away (with some reservations being that the AI and logic is often shit and your troops were annihilated).

Now what I could imagine is that you could reduce the overhead by statistical methods, basically results that appear realistic but are merely from templates. But it could result in player dissatidfaction if it is not very cleverly done, The other way would be to swap calculations to a server but that would be expensive and require an always online model, and this would result in a backlash because the core audience hates that. The third way to satisfy our friends from the popamole world and probably one that they will use, is to simply despawn everything around a certain radius and replace them with dead bodies because in a console game everone would be dead anyway.
 

DJOGamer PT

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ARMA isn't a "game", it's a simulator
They can never achieve AAA levels of comercial sucess, because the game is never going to appeal to such a large crowd
The only people that will ever be interested in this are military enthusiasts that also have the patience for hardcore videogames - i.e., a really small and specific group of people

They should just stick to making engine improvements to allow for more complex levels of simulation and also better performance (don't know the game's current state, since I don't play it, but at launch a friend of mine said it ran like ass)
 
Last edited:

Burning Bridges

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Yes, but the problem is the economics of it.

As a military simulator Arma would cost 1000s of dollars. But the players already moan when a new DLC comes out for 20$ that it should be offered for free.
 

DJOGamer PT

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Well those are issues I have no real knowledge to give good opinions on...


But anyway
Perhaps that is more a problem of marketing, as in they should try to make the DLC's seen important (which also depends on their content obviously)

Honestly given the dedication of their target audience, wouldn't a different approach to the prices and content delivered work better?

Instead of costing 30 euros the base game could cost 100 - but already including things they now have DLC's for
And then, when they make DLC's it would be only major content updates - maps, items, vehicles, factions, engine changes - and there they could charge 20-30 euros for each

I say this because again ARMA is not a standard modern military shooter or videogame for that matter
So shouldn't they adopt a "format" of sale that also isn't the standard one?
 

Hace El Oso

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Yes, but the problem is the economics of it.

As a military simulator Arma would cost 1000s of dollars. But the players already moan when a new DLC comes out for 20$ that it should be offered for free.

IL-2 and DCS manage with their prices. Since nobody else can or likely ever will offer what ArmA does(I believe you’re right that it requires a commercial product base to start with) and it clearly attracts a large following like many other 'niche' or 'performance' products, they should simply embrace it.
 

Burning Bridges

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Hm I dunno.

I would guess that BI still makes more money than Eagle Dynamics. But I do agree that it would make more sense if the price was increased by up to a factor of 10, if they use that money to increase staff and productivity.

Though DCS sort of adopted that model, the waiting is getting a bit ridiculous. I played LockOn for the first time in 2003 and while the airplanes have come a long way I'm still waiting for the complete sim (dynamic campaign). And meanwhile the terrain has become so outdated and limiting that I rather play civilian sims where you can create the same terrain that takes ED 3 years and 50$ in a single night and for free, just by using aerial photos and OSM.
 

Hace El Oso

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It’s true, I was going to include a caveat about the development lag of Eagle Dynamics. The IL-2 developers do not have that issue, and ArmA isn’t the place for a release catalogue of single vehicles in the DCS style.
 

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