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It just got an Aussie release date

Look like it's been out for a while in the US and Europe? Anyone tried it?

I played the demo on Steam. It's ArmA V 0.8 if you're interested now. The AI is waaaaay better this time around but it's still pretty hilarious. It looks very good and runs quite well which is a huge improvement over ArmA, but improving on ArmA is pretty fucking easy to be honest.

The biggest hitch for me is that OFP's shitty 2001 interface is still around and completely unchanged. Now you also get to experience the masochistic joy of commanding numerous squads from the stupid thing.

The animations are *better* but the dudes still look and feel pretty blocky.

I've heard that the full game actually runs better than the demo for some reason.

Modules seem like a pretty nice thing. Auto spawning AI patrols, easy artillery (Not in the demo), automatic civilian populations, high command, etc.

Editor wise, each "side" now includes multiple factions within it - Something that should've been done a long time ago.

As mentioned it doesn't seem to run any worse and honestly I'd say it actually runs better than ArmA.

And the controls I always bitch ArmA out over feel as though they've been adjusted.

The demo is broken crap, its even worse then the 1.0 release of the full version was.

As for the full version with 1.02, no it does not suck, it is awesome, and it is not a totally broke game though multiplayer will simply not work about 30% of the time. So far in four days of playing I have had exactly one crash, it locked up loading a multiplayer match. I do get graphical bugs, basically you’ll look in some direction, and then these black lines appear all over, usually they persist for a few seconds and then I turn away and they go away. Occasionally the problems persist longer but they always do go away. Usually don’t happen when I’m fighting people so its no big deal. The gameplay itself seems to work fine.

The terrain is really really good in general. The only other game I’ve seen which can compare is Crysis, and neither Crysis or Crysis Warhead have anything to match the two largest towns in Arma 2 nor the map size in general, though Crysis did have some big maps.

The biggest thing I’d complain about is actually button lag, but I think some of that is deliberate to try to be more realistic. Also you can’t fly anything worth a damn without a joystick, in OFP and Arma 1 you could at least decently fly a chopper with a keyboard and mouse. However I don’t really care on this part.

The game however is very highly demanding, and apparently it actually works worse on the latest cards then one ones from 1-2 years ago. It’s the first game I’ve encountered which really does support and fully utilized a quad core too, unlike all the other games which claim they do but don’t, or else use two of the cores for almost nothing. Arma 2 actually balances out its use of all four.

The interface isn’t great but fuck it, it doesn’t that that long to start memorizing the major commands.

In the end though, I wouldn't feel any great need to RUSH out and get the game unless you have no other games you are now playing in which case, hell yes rush out. The first two patches fixed a whole lot, and it sounds like a third patch may soon be on the way. You might want to just wait for that.

I hate looking at little things in a game and just going "but yeah X feature is cool" because that kind of flies in the face of my distrusting stance of a recently released title. But I also noticed in development and while playing just how good the terrain design was. The topography and placement of towns, forests, is all extremely logical and absurdly well placed. Their are no obvious storyline terrain concessions like that shitty island from ArmA 1 or in many other games.

I can't wait for the modders to kick out a WW2 mod for ArmA or better yet, bring back FDF mod.

Hmmm, I'll wait till it goes budget. Maybe with whatever expansions they release for it.

I've become stingy as hell with games. There's no reason to pay full price, I just don't have the time to immediately play new releases anymore. Shelling out for Empire:Total War on release was just moronic. I haven't played it all since bloody March. I keep trying to find time to, but it's so much easier to just boot up Mount and Blade or Crusader (finished No Remorse again the other day - onot no Regret now - fuck I forgot how much harder No Regret is) than it is to invest the time in a Total War empire building game, especially on week nights after a long day at work.

CaptHawkeye wrote:Their are no obvious storyline terrain concessions like that shitty island from ArmA 1 or in many other games.

Sahrani was just all kinds of terrible between the vegetation bug, the lack of Eastern European landscape, the boring ass semi-tropical desert in the South, and half of the North being an inaccessible mountain range that falls off into ocean. Ugh.

CaptHawkeye wrote: But I also noticed in development and while playing just how good the terrain design was. The topography and placement of towns, forests, is all extremely logical and absurdly well placed. Their are no obvious storyline terrain concessions like that shitty island from ArmA 1 or in many other games.

Well keep in mind, most of the terrain is direct copied from a real area of Bohemia, so it’d better be logical. The coastline is actually a river in real life; they just removed the far bank and made it open water.

I downloaded it overnight from Steam and booted it up for about a 10 minute tool around this morning to see how it works/looks. I bought it because ArmA1 was completely broken for me (which they've fixed in ArmA2) and I'm a complete BI whore. I rarely play their campaigns anymore, but just create sandbox scenarios in the editor to muck around with.

First impressions:
-They did what they promised to do and fixed the bug where you couldn't play ArmA fullscreen on a Vista 64 system w/4gb of RAM. So now I can play fullscreen. Which certainly helps me in being more favourable towards it.

-It looks NICE. And it was running quite well when I was flying about in an Osprey to check out terrain and pop-ins etc.

-Factions in the editor. Thank fuck for that, I just hope that hte mod community uses them properly.

-It didn't crash straight away.

Some hopes:
-I won't bitch about the squad controls too much because I've played so much OFP and enough ArmA that it's second nature, however if they have implemented a better way of creating and managing "sub-squads"/"teams" I'd be really happy.

-A real 2nd gunner position please. PLEAAAASE? Don't tell me that in your 10 years that you've been working on OFP, ArmA and ArmA2 you still haven't figured out how to fix that bug in your engines.

What do you mean a real second gunner position? You can man three different gun positions on an M1A2 TUSK, though illogically the basic M1A1 does not have the loaders machine gun, and you man the door guns on either side of a chopper. Good enough for me.

I mean the ongoing problem with their engines (though this one has actually dropped in another AI or two to fill the slots) where there was only one "gunner" position per vehicle that the PC could use.

It seems that might have been mostly resolved according to what Skimmer is saying, but there is still the [minor] issue of not being able to tell the editor that you want to spawn in gunner position #2, instead it's still just "driver and gunner".


*edit*

I've only had one showstopper bug (CTD for no repeatable reason that I can determine), but the texture loading is fairly intrusive. The intro on the deck of the USS Khe Sanh, for the 30 seconds or so, was a total slideshow as new textures kept loading and then there was a great comedy moment when the CO who had been delivering the speech sped through his 30 secs of backed-up animation in about 5.

Somehow they seem to have made the voices more obtrusive and obviously stilted. Good work.

I'm still only on the first mission of the campaign (sandboxing in the editor too much - and finishing FO3), but I'm liking that you are getting a lot of choices on how to run things. I just hope that it doesn't devolve into a management-fest like some of their other campaigns have. A Force Recon team of 5 guys would be manageable to lead - don't give me too much else.

I just checked, the AI certainly will use all three machine guns on the TUSK (and god is it cool when twenty TUSKs are doing so at once across a wide open field), I am however not sure if the loader manning his M240 actually stops the turret gunner from firing more then one shot from the 120mm cannon. You can only spawn as commander/gunner/driver, but once in game you can switch to the loaders position.

Checked the BMP-3 too, and the AI will use the main turret as well as both hull machine guns too. As a player you can’t spawn in the hull guns, but you can switch into either one in game.

Never had any problem with Khe Sanh myself, standing on the deck isn’t demanding at all though I seem to have a fairly optimal rig for this game, new but not the very latest hardware, which seems to get all the problems ironically.

If you don’t like leading more then a squad, you may go mad base building and tank refueling in warfare mode.

One gunnery problem I do see, I don’t think it’s a bug, just a bad game design choice to limit ATGM rates of fire, is that the BMP-3 and T-72/90 all have the gun launched anti tank missile treated as a completely separate weapon, not a kind of ammo to load. That means you can fire a main gun round and then instantly switch to the ATGM and fire that too and they then reload independently.

I'm kind of annoyed by the Tank damage model. It's still based a lot on health bars for components like treads and the main gun. From what i've heard the Tanks in V1 of the game could be killed by machine guns. No shell v. armour penetration logic. Seemingly no reactive armour or striking angle coming into play.

Then again, modern armoured warfare isn't as chance based as World War 2 was where a shell COULD penetrate...or it could not. These days it's so shot = ded.

Somehow they seem to have made the voices more obtrusive and obviously stilted. Good work.

ALL! PROCEED TO!!!!! NORTH!!!!! AND !!!!!!!! WEST !!!!!!!!

It's been so long since I played OFP I almost forgot.

You can still kill a tank with a machine gun, but small weapons do have a rating vs. armor that makes them drastically less effective. I don’t much care if 8,000 rounds of 7.62mm can kill a tank, its not a serious problem in game. Striking angles are not accounted for as far as I’m aware, but the tanks do have different armor level on different areas, with the tracks and gun barrel being more easily damaged then other parts. You also sometimes are given a chance to bail out of a destroyed tank before it explodes. The secondary explosion mechanics are nice, keeps people from using burning wrecks as cover.

Vympel wrote:ALL! PROCEED TO!!!!! NORTH!!!!! AND !!!!!!!! WEST !!!!!!!!

It's been so long since I played OFP I almost forgot.

It's almost part of the charm to hear 'enemy MAN 200 meters... oh no THREE is DOWN! enemy YOU AYE VEE nine O'CLOCK!!! two hundred meters' all the time.

I just had an awesome example of their voice work.

First main mission and you (if you chase a side-plot) find a torture victim, a rape victim and then a mass grave. As I'm radioing in these events I get these continual calls in between each of my statements and the reply from HQ:

"2! RETURN TO! FORMATION!"

Talk about killing hte moment. Then again, your character is a hellza-playa, he saves the rape victim, but leaves the 3 others hostages tied up in the room to be executed later. Top bloke.

Something else I fucking love - reloading on the move. No longer do I have to be static in order to go through the reload drills. Which is handy for when you are in a balls-out firefight and get a dead-mans click. You can hit reload and step back into cover at the same time.

I’m annoyed at the way you always must stand up to take out or put away a rocket or missile launcher, I damn well should be able to do that from a crouch, and laying down at least in the case of the smaller rocket launchers. Its not like they don’t let you crouch or lay down with the entire thing still strapped on your back..

What I hate is the fact that the heli AI is still way too hesitant in delivering troops. I constantly watch as my insertion or evac choppers get blasted to hell and back as they do a loooong sloooow orbit of the LZ before slooowly coming in to hover about 30m above it and then slooooooowly coming in for landing and then everyone get's on or off one at a time.

BAS (IIRC) has an addon to OFP which did fast-rope mechanics (chopper drops ropes, guys slide down ropes in rapid succession and if the chopper is moving then they get damaged). THIS WAS FIVE YEARS AND TWO FUCKING ENGINES AGO. WHY HAVE YOU NOT INTEGRATED IT?

When I pilot a chopper, that thing slams into the ground hard enough that it's takes damage half the time, and the power stays on so as soon as the last guy looks like going I'm already on the way to being airborne. But no, the AI still acts like it's a learner pilot trying to do a precision landing at an airshow.

Why is it that when I command a squad I tell them not to disembark the chopper, but to eject when the time is right. It means that everyone bails at once and you get a much lower time of the ground for the chopper and thus less chance of you getting FUCKING MURDERED.

But no. Instead I face constantly failed missions because some fucker with a RPG/SA-7/ZSU/PKM/AK/pea-shooter has ample time to kill the gunners, pilot, engines and everything else on teh fucker while it attempts to land.

All I'm hoping for (after patching) is ACE2, and that hopefully it can be used for single-player; I already love the ACE concept.

EDIT: Also pleased to hear that the full version is better than the demo; hopefully my horrible framerate (Benchmark test claimed an average 5 fps on anything above "very low" graphics) won't be so bad.