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It's no secret that I loved Operation Flashpoint for what it tried to do - it was a flawed first effort, but a great one nonetheless. Then Armed Assault came out and sucked fucking balls.

http://www.arma2.com/

However, looks pretty fucking awesome. I will now proceed to nitpick their Russian Federation faction choices:-

Their Long Live Mother Russia video

Weaponry:-

PM, Silenced PM:- Are you kidding me? Should be the PYa.

AK-107:- AK-100 variant with the "recoil balanced" operating system. Should be the AN-94, but they get points for trying to go with a new gun.

AK-74/ AKS-74U etc:- AKS-74U is acceptable as a special forces choice. I reckon the other "Chernaus" forces will have the actual rifles.

PKM:- Acceptable. Should have the plastic, rather than wooden buttstock though.

KSVK:- Nice.

SVD:- Acceptable. Should be the modernised black plastic version though.

PP-19 "Bizon":- Nice.

VSS:- Nice.

Saiga-12K:- Nice

Igla 9K38:- Acceptable. Should be Igla-S.

RPG-7V:- Acceptable. Can fire the modern grenades, including the PG-7VR. Should have optical sight.

RPG-18 Mukha:- WTF? Where's the damn RPG-26? The RPG-18 has been obsolete for over two decades.

AGS-30:- Fucking nice.

KORD (not Kord)[/i]:- Outfuckingstanding.

ZU-23:- Hell yeah.

Metis-M:- Hell yeah. Should be Metis-M1 though.

SPG-9:- Nicely done.

2B14 Podnos:- Nice.

D-30 howitzer:- Acceptable.

2S6M Tunguska:- Nice. Should be the Tunguska-M1.

BMP-2:- Acceptable.

BMP-3:- Nice. Lose points for being the original version though, not the much improved current production.

T-90:- Sweet. Loses points for being the original cast turret T-90 model, and for generally not looking as it should.

BTR-90:- Nice. Would be better if it had the Berzhok turret (4x Kornet ATGMs + AGS launcher)

Vodnik w/ HMG:- Nice

Ka-52:- Nice. Loses points for resembling an intermediate prototype variant (refer: sensor placement) and not the series production version (which admittedly was only first seen late last year)

Mi-24P:- Nice. Loses points for not being Mi-24PN.

Mi-8MTV-3:- Nice. Loses points for not being Mi-8MTV-5.

Pchela-1T UAV:- Nice.

Su-34:- Awesome.

Su-25:- Cool. Should've been the Su-25SM or Su-39, though.

As for the uniforms, they're cool except the helmets have been obsolete for a few years. The current Russian army helmets are much more modern.

I recently reinstalled ArmA and snagged the WGLesque mod for it. It was a lot better than I remembered...the A10s were just beautiful...especially at night when you can properly appreciate the new tracers. Also it seemed to run a bit better than I remembered, while ArmA has a tendency to run like ass if you dare look at the wrong bush (A noted bug, IIRC) too closely, viewdistance does not seem to have all that much effect on the matter as I can easily crank it up to 10000m and get decently playable framerates, I think I usually have it at 5000m though.

I've been watching the development videos and like what I see so far. Though no matter what, I won't be one of the first people to buy the game. I'll wait for what trustworthy friends have to say about its problems before I pay for it.

That being said, i'm very impressed by the terrain design. The pictures of rolling hillsides and huge forests look fucking cool.

Flashpoint 2 looks better.

That it does good sir, that it does.

According to fanhards however, Flashpoint 2 will suck because it has a targeting reticule that highlights enemies and friendlies. We all know Cold War Crisis never did things like that right?



Oops.

Does it surprise anyone that I think the string of acronyms and what the fucking ground looks like is the LAST thing anyone looking at ARMA2 should care about? The game wasn't terrible because the they had the T-80UM with OBVIOUS commanders cupola, it was terrible because it was unpolished, unfocused nonsense with mechanical problems. If the developers didn't learn anything from that, they can have all the block 20 and PIP-bis they can cut and paste out of the internet and the game will still suck shit.

I agree that FP2 looks better overall.

Oh trust me, my money is on Flashpoint 2. ArmA 2 looks like it has "improved" somewhat, but being a step up from ArmA honestly isn't saying much. Bohemia has pretty cleanly revealed itself to be the "obscure garage developer" that likes to make games for its own sake rather than the consumer's. The Bohemia nerds can cry and scream all they want that Codemasters is "zomg evul corporate dudzzz" but hey, they weren't the ones who released a turd and called it gold.

I really don't see what basis there is for thinking OFP2 will be better. I'm more willing to try it out than ARMA2 (I'm waiting for reviews, I'm not putting up with shitty performance, obscure bugs, ridiculously over-the-top difficulty, moronic AI etc) though.

Honestly, ARMA's terrible pedigree (ie, made by a bunch of niche amateur idiots) is the biggest reason why I'll be trying FP2 first, but FP2 looks FUN. ARMA2 looks TECHNICALLY FLASH, but that's it, and ARMA was technically flash and EVERYTHING ELSE WAS SHIT.

Codemasters announced that they would be releasing a demo of OF2 for free download...will ARMA2 be doing the same? If not, chances are OF2 will be the only ones getting my money unless ARMA2 really offers something unique and replayable with their game.

ArmA's demo was released MONTHS after the game was out, making it hilariously useless. Bohemia hasn't said anything about a demo so far, so it looks like the people who buy the game will jumping headlong into the usual risk factor.

Codemasters says a demo is coming soon, i'm not sure what their definition of "soon" is but at least we can taste of the game before we buy it. Hopefully it won't be 2 min.... of...
....
....
....
....did I just see Stormrise in your vanity bar, Stark?

Oh hey, OFP2 now has actual screenshots and an ingame trailer...

Look you, it's part of my role as the anthropomorphic representation of cynicism to experience all the 'hyped' 'innovative' 'genre-changing' games, okay?

And it's just as horrible as 'RTS with camera fixed to units + comlpex, multi-level FPS-style levels' makes it sound, but the story/intro literally has to be seen to be believed.

The fact that BIS and CM are directly competing against each other should lead to something good for us, one way or the other. As it is, ArmA2 is going to get GRAD and MLRS (Wiki) which might mean that we won't have to resort to addon makers scripting artillery this time.

Commander 598 wrote:The fact that BIS and CM are directly competing against each other should lead to something good for us, one way or the other. As it is, ArmA2 is going to get GRAD and MLRS (Wiki) which might mean that we won't have to resort to addon makers scripting artillery this time.

Are you kidding? Of course it will still be scripted as shit, it's what they do.

Personally, I'd like to see:

Vista compatability. You know, when a game has a bug where it flatly won't work on Vista64 machines with 4gb of RAM in fullscreen (but works perfectly fine in windowed) you know there's an issue.

Actually fixing the 1 gunner per vehicle bug, rather than just dodgying it up with an irreplaceable AI.

Actually taking some effort to make a game that's fun, not just frustrating. And you shouldn't have to pare realism back too much to do that, just make missions where there isn't as much risk of an "hand-of-god" kill event for the player. Sure that's realistic in war that an arty shell or 500lb bomb drops into your foxhole sometimes, but in a game, having that happen is just plain annoying, especially when you get killed in the intro to a mission while you still don't have control of your character.

Are you kidding? Of course it will still be scripted as shit, it's what they do.

What I mean is that you won't have to wait X months for someone in the community to get around to doing it, at the very least.

Vista compatability.

Works fine in Vista32 with 2gb of RAM.

Actually fixing the 1 gunner per vehicle bug, rather than just dodgying it up with an irreplaceable AI.

I don't even know what you're talking about, there were multiple turrets on several vehicles in ArmA...?

Actually taking some effort to make a game that's fun, not just frustrating. And you shouldn't have to pare realism back too much to do that, just make missions where there isn't as much risk of an "hand-of-god" kill event for the player. Sure that's realistic in war that an arty shell or 500lb bomb drops into your foxhole sometimes, but in a game, having that happen is just plain annoying,

I don't even know what to say to this seeing as how "shit happens" is practically one of it's selling points. I'm not even sure how you would go about implementing it without granting the player near total immunity to everything except bullets or making everything except grenades not explode.

Commander 598 wrote:

Sure that's realistic in war that an arty shell or 500lb bomb drops into your foxhole sometimes, but in a game, having that happen is just plain annoying, especially when you get killed in the intro to a mission while you still don't have control of your character.

I don't even know what to say to this seeing as how "shit happens" is practically one of it's selling points. I'm not even sure how you would go about implementing it without granting the player near total immunity to everything except bullets or making everything except grenades not explode.

There yah go Commander598 I restored the part of the quote you stripped out that makes weemadando's example a demonstration of poor design not a selling point.

"Hey guys lets make it so you can randomly lose the mission when loading it!"
A basic frigging tenant is do not cause the player to lose the game when he is not playing it. For fuck sake they might as well have a 20% chance every time you load a mission that you automatically lose it before even playing it. Maybe a little message could come up explaining you died on the way to the mission due to you contracting Syphilis.

Indeed, the fact that I kept getting killed during a cutscene where I was meant to get on some Strykers earlier in the game (i.e. I had no control) was what made me delete the original ArmA in disgust.

Vympel wrote:Indeed, the fact that I kept getting killed during a cutscene where I was meant to get on some Strykers earlier in the game (i.e. I had no control) was what made me delete the original ArmA in disgust.

You've got to be kidding...ArmA actually did that?

It did a lot more than that, i'm sorry to say.

Mr Bean wrote:

Commander 598 wrote:

Sure that's realistic in war that an arty shell or 500lb bomb drops into your foxhole sometimes, but in a game, having that happen is just plain annoying, especially when you get killed in the intro to a mission while you still don't have control of your character.

I don't even know what to say to this seeing as how "shit happens" is practically one of it's selling points. I'm not even sure how you would go about implementing it without granting the player near total immunity to everything except bullets or making everything except grenades not explode.

There yah go Commander598 I restored the part of the quote you stripped out that makes weemadando's example a demonstration of poor design not a selling point.

"Hey guys lets make it so you can randomly lose the mission when loading it!"
A basic frigging tenant is do not cause the player to lose the game when he is not playing it. For fuck sake they might as well have a 20% chance every time you load a mission that you automatically lose it before even playing it. Maybe a little message could come up explaining you died on the way to the mission due to you contracting Syphilis.

Well of course making a mission like that is a special kind of dumb, it should really go without saying. The other 75% of that paragraph felt like some only partially related rant about random shit happening to the player in a stupidly massive sandbox battlefield being a bad idea. Now if we actually want to talk about something frustrating that isn't just a side effect of shitty map/mission/level making, there's the AI's target priority putting the player ahead of everything else, thus leading to half an army trying to kill you while you're prone behind cover instead of the guy next to you standing in the open.

Not like I played the campaign and experienced this incident anyway. For all the skill BIS has in making pretty landscapes and things to blow up in them/them up, their skills in the story department are terrible, and having actually bothered to play through a decent amount of OFP and OFPR's campaign, I can safely say that the dialogue is cringe inducing.

First of all, I need to get of my chest that I'm an ENORMOUS BI fan-whore. Have been since '99, back when OFP was still being set in Australia (apparently). Hell, it's one of the reasons that I'm in the game (or at least my e-mail sig from the time, accredited to me - yes, you can blame the whole "historical quotes on death screens" on my e-mail to the devs in 1999). Now, onto addressing some ridiculous strawmen.

Commander 598 wrote:

Are you kidding? Of course it will still be scripted as shit, it's what they do.

What I mean is that you won't have to wait X months for someone in the community to get around to doing it, at the very least.

And my point is that I'm still going to have to script every arty shot, unless they completely re-write the engagement AI. The scripting for arty has been there forever, but the script to have the AI use it correctly is what's always having to be added.

Vista compatability.

Works fine in Vista32 with 2gb of RAM.

Not my point. It's an acknowledge fucking problem that for some reason a 4gb Vista64 box is 100% incompatible with ArmA on fullscreen. BI has said that they aren't going to try and fix it in ArmA, so let's hope they do in ArmA2. After all, if it comes down to "dual boot your system" vs "don't play ArmA2" I know which one I'll be doing.

Actually fixing the 1 gunner per vehicle bug, rather than just dodgying it up with an irreplaceable AI.

I don't even know what you're talking about, there were multiple turrets on several vehicles in ArmA...?

Yes there were, but there was still only EVER 1 player fillable slot. It's a legacy bug in their code - they acknowledged it with OFP and only just worked around it in ArmA to my knowledge by making one an AI only position. Feel free to prove me wrong on this one though as I haven't been in large enough multiplayer events to fully test it all.

Actually taking some effort to make a game that's fun, not just frustrating. And you shouldn't have to pare realism back too much to do that, just make missions where there isn't as much risk of an "hand-of-god" kill event for the player. Sure that's realistic in war that an arty shell or 500lb bomb drops into your foxhole sometimes, but in a game, having that happen is just plain annoying,

I don't even know what to say to this seeing as how "shit happens" is practically one of it's selling points. I'm not even sure how you would go about implementing it without granting the player near total immunity to everything except bullets or making everything except grenades not explode.

[/quote]

If I die in a mission, that's all well and good. Shit happens, that's war. Etc etc etc. If I die in a cutscene and consequently can't even play the fucking game? That's bad programming.