So you're for sure playing? then I sure aint! jk =P I still dunno, I'm just worried there's not going to be enough CQ maps =( open field maps make me sad cause I am sniper fodder.
Medic/ engineer/ pilot / ABRAMS/ everything.... Yes I am!,if you want to be a sniper ,this is the game...forests long grass great for a sniper.check the youtube videos. It's chaos: there's a gunfight taking place in the middle distance, over by the tree line. A handful of screaming villagers are fleeing in your direction, running for their lives. You dash forward, your vision blurring slightly as your body rocks back and forth under the weight of your kit. You pass a goat, standing alone and confused. The rattle of gunfire is all around you - and you suddenly notice a very particular sound, sharper and closer than the others. Someone is firing at you. Scanning the horizon, you spot the guy. And then a bullet compacts into your skull with a wet 'thwack'! Your first encounter with ArmA 2 can be somewhat disturbing. In its strongest moments, at the times when the sheer mass of detail really conspires to suck you in, you'll feel about as close to a real-life war as you could ever want to be. The excellent graphics are a major contributing factor to this immersion, but it's down to other things, too: it's the sheer number of things that can be going on at once. It's the fact that death comes swiftly, that you could be killed at any moment. It's the use of the Doppler Effect, the scientific name for the way sound is distorted by movement - like when a car drives past you in the street. Or like when someone is firing a 7.62mm Full Metal Jacket round at your head. Advertisement In other words, it's the sheer scope of the game that grabs you - both in terms of the size of the in-game playing area (a whopping 225 square km) and in terms of the level of detail. Even if you leave aside the 136 scale-modelled vehicles and the 81 weapon variants, there are other, even weirder statistics that Bohemia Interactive Studios are touting. For example, the game's fictional location, Chenarus, has a total of 1883 unique road signs scattered across its land mass. Each of these signs is accurate and unique. Following them will lead you directly to wherever you want to go... provided that you can read Russian. Okay, so many people who play this game won't be able to do that - but it's the combined effect of touches like these that make the world feel like a real place. And that makes it more scary when someone is trying to shoot you in the brain. Let's back up a bit. All this number-crunching may sound a bit intense to those of you unfamiliar with the previous ArmA, or with its landmark predecessor, Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis. In a nutshell, Bohemia is the studio responsible for pioneering the post-millennial war sim. The original OpFlash helped to inspire a whole generation of titles with its emphasis on swift, realistic combat and a sandbox-style game world that let you do as you please. If a mission asked you to infiltrate a hostile base to retrieve some important documents, it would let you go in all stealthy-as-a-mouse - but it would also let you raid an enemy depot, steal a tank and then blow up everything in sight. It was that kind of game. And it rocked. ArmA 2 also lets you check out people's asses...The Operation Flashpoint name now belongs to Codemasters, but the ArmA series is more a less a continuation of the work the team started back in 2001. The first ArmA was a moderate success, but Bohemia felt that it could have done better - which is where this game comes in. You may or may not care about extreme realism. It may not excite you to learn that you can experience a HALO parachute drop in full real-time; but even if it doesn't, you should be aware of this game. ArmA 2 has the potential to be the most definitive military game since... well, forever. If you have even vague memories of picking up twigs and pretending they were guns, you should keep an eye on this one. The only problem with previewing a title like this is that the whole project is simply gargantuan. We visited Bohemia Interactive Studio's headquarters in Prague a few weeks ago, and even though we spent a good couple of hours with the game, it feels like we barely made a dent on all it has to offer. Still, we'll do our best to describe the flavour of what we played. Bohemia started us off right at the deep end by letting us jump into a full-blown multiplayer war. ArmA Warfare is a game mode that mixes RTS elements into the FPS pot, resulting in an insanely large military gangbang. Players join one of two sides and square off across the map (all 225km of it), but instead of each side comprising of a handful of individuals, each user is essentially in charge of a small squad. You'll have a small, steadily-increasing budget which you can use to buy new kit or troops when you're at one of your bases. You might want to just buy yourself a sniper rifle, or perhaps you'll purchase a jeep with a mounted machine gun. You could drive this yourself, or you could order one of your men to drive while you man the boomstick. It's totally up to you, but bigger decisions affecting your side can only be made by one player, who acts as your general. This guy can decide to spend his budget on building structures like factories or other facilities which in turn open up spending options for you. Imagine Command & Conquer from a ground level view, and with some other guy calling the shots. Now, in theory the idea is that you form a well-organised plan and set out to realise it. In practise, we and the other journos leapt into the nearest vehicles and shot off in search of trouble - which we all too easily found. A quick glance at our map showed that hostile forces were attempting to capture a nearby town, so we set off to test our mettle. As soon as we showed up we were able to get a good idea of where the opposing forces were by simply following the sound of gunfire. Unfortunately, we were perhaps a bit too relaxed about wandering into the warzone - and we got gunned down before we really managed to get anywhere. After this happened our old Operation Flashpoint training kicked in, and we went about things a bit more carefully. Once we respawned, we armed ourselves with a sniper rifle and summoned a humvee, which we filled with three standard squaddies. This time we stopped the vehicle just outside of the settlement. The four of us crawled into town on our bellies, then we sent our troopers in one direction while we covered another approach with the sniper rifles. This proved far more effective than our first, blundering assault. Bohemia says that its improved "micro AI" lets NPCs make decisions based around their immediate surroundings - the idea being that soldiers respond to their environment, rather than to just "the bigger picture" of all the things your CPU is handling. Well, they certainly did a good job here - taking out a couple of hostiles with ease. Then as we crept around the town from a different angle, we spotted a Russian vehicle trying to get away from our boys. We sniped the driver with a single round through the rear-view mirror. Awesome stuff. Advertisement When tactics like this actually work, you feel really proud of yourself and your AI troopers. A full-blown game of ArmA Warfare could go on for hours, and we could easily see this becoming a massive time sponge once you get comfortable with the way everything works. We imagine that it'll take a while to learn the best way to approach battles on this scale, but it seems fairly easy to change things like spawn points and the like. The greater challenge will probably come from coordinating with other players in an effective way - so let's hope that the user base is a bit more civil than the usual Xbox Live crew. The actual in-game controls are fairly close to what was used in Bohemia's previous games: you have movement mapped to the WASD keys, with separate keys to set your stance, while most actions are governed by the mouse wheel, which is used to cycle through menus that vary depending on what you're doing. On foot it will let you change weapons, but near a vehicle it will climb aboard or stow away equipment. Ordering troops about is a bit trickier as it involves using the function keys to select soldiers, and the numerical keys to pick instructions from a series of menus. At first this may seem horrendously complicated, but you'll soon learn the commands you need to use the most often - and the right mouse button can be used to shortcut many basic actions: you can click on the ground to send your guys to a specific spot, or click on a vehicle to make them climb aboard. As with so many things, practice makes perfect. Nobody messes with Cousin Itt.It's important to note that this massively complicated multiplayer carnage is just one slice of what ArmA 2 has to offer. At the other end of the scale from this huge complexity, Bohemia is also including a sort of playable encyclopaedia of all the game's units. Here you'll be able to inspect the models close up before taking them out for a spin. All of the game's land, sea and aircraft will be available for a test drive, and as you roam about the map you'll be offered spontaneous challenges to try. You might have to blow up a certain number of targets, notch up a high speed in a usually-sluggish tank, or simply get as far away from your starting point as you can within a set time limit. These mini-games aren't limited to vehicles either: there will be challenges for every weapon and soldier class too - you can even play as the in-game wildlife, if you like. Hopping around Chenarus as a bunny rabbit was far more enjoyable than we're comfortable to admit; we can't wait for the 'make 200 offspring in 30 seconds' challenge. Of course, the major ingredient of ArmA 2 that we've not yet covered is the main campaign itself. We didn't get to play this in Prague, but it looks to be shaping up neatly. Bohemia seems to be giving more attention to the story this time around, with a plot that follows the exploits of a five-man unit as the USA, Russia and two groups of rebels battle over the future of poor Chenarus. We're sure that many gamers would be content if the developer just shipped ArmA 2 as a pure military sim, but no-one's going to complain about a fully-fleshed out story. The cut-scenes we were shown looked suitably dramatic, but we're more interested in how the RPG-style elements will play out. We already know that the game will have multiple endings that stem from how and where you fight, but we've now learned that you'll be able to do things like talking to civilians to learn about enemy activity in your local area. Naturally, you'll only be able to do this if you've not pissed everyone off by killing innocent bystanders (and if you're using the one member of your squad who speaks Russian). It all sounds quite ambitious to us, but we've got high hopes that the guys at Bohemia are really going to deliver the goods. We get the impression that the developers are trying to make this game everything that ArmA wasn't, and then some. At the moment the studio is keeping fairly shtum about plans for a console version, but it's hinted that it's planning something. Given that Codemasters is bringing its own Operation Flashpoint 2 to PS3 and 360 next year, that could make for some interesting competition. Either way, what is already clear is that ArmA 2 is going to offer masses of things to do. Given that a lot of people are still playing and modding the original OpFlash, this game has the potential to inspire a whole new generation of bedroom generals, and that can only be a good thing. Arma2 is due out for PC Q1 2009, with console versions TBD.
thought all this info would sway the masses.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLNnb7OAD5Y&feature=related
lol its due out any day now isn't it? Now... I am wondering about a few things with this game... Unless you get a ton of people for a map this size, you going to need AI... when I played OPF for the short time that I did, we tended to just do a few of us against a large AI force as we didn't have enough players to field both teams. So I am wondering about that... is it true there is a 5 player limit if your doing coop PvAI? Also, one of the things that interests me (always has in the BF games, but I just can't be bothered to try and compete with the million others that want to fly) is being a helecopter pilot in a transport role... blackhawk type role where your more of a transport then combat... (think galaxy pilot for those PS players out there) Is that viable? I think you can have the AI do that role, so does it make sense to have a player doing it over the AI? Or is the AI version just for the campaign mode maybe? I'd like to fly something in more of a combat role too, but I have found I am not very good at that in the BF2 games I seem to get blown out of the sky really fast... Also snipers keep in mind that grass is not rendered at long distances, so while it may look like your in the grass and hidden to you, someone 100 meters away will just see some guy laying down in the open (that is what I have read when looking into sniping anyways)
Kyoji and I will form our own group as snipers that have gone crazy after being shunned from the main division. We will wander the map in search of targets, but have trouble grasping which are friends and which are foe sometimes taking out entire squads before realizing that they are wearing the same uniforms as we are Meanwhile we will be updating you on our progress of taking out the enemy squads in your comms channel! Jeb: Kyoji, take out that guy in front, I have the one on the right... " Dash: Were taking sniper fire, everyone down... Dash: Anyone see them? STATUS REPORT! Spectre: We have 2 injured, calling for medvac... Kyoji: Alpha squad, enemy squad located in your sector, we have opened fire on them. Dash: This is Alpha Squad, stop shooting, it's us. Spectre: Another injured member. Kyoji: Don't worry Alpha, we have 3 of them down, and the rest are pinned! We will protect ya! Dash: Is that Foxtrot Squad? STOP SHOOTING. Dash: I think it's Foxtrot shooting at us... ERock: Didn't you disband them? Dash: <SIGH> Yes... No_Smoking: FFS I am gonna kill those motherF****RS Jeb: Kyoji, get that one in the front talking on the radio.. he might be calling for help. Spectre: Dash has been hit... EVERYONE FALL BACK! Jeb: Alpha Squad, what's your ETA, we can't keep these guys locked down forever! Wait, they are falling back... Alpha? Are you there? Kyoji: All clear, they have fallen back towards the town... You can thank your friendly neighbourhood Foxtrot snipers for that! Foxtrot out!
hahahahaha i am having a lot of fun playing the single player right now ... i am 100% getting this game now
Hmm married life will probably dictate that i make a decision between this and Flashpoint. So I guess which one I play will probably have more to do with who is playing them and Xen's stance on each. Regardless, I just want to be an idiot with c4.
Yeah I was just messing around in a lan game.. wow. maps are HUGE. it spawned me with a sniper rifle.. and holy crap. I was pretty much able to take out a whole group of maybe 6 npcs before the last guy spotted me and pegged my leg. the rest of the game he kept whining about his leg =/ Still no clue how to call a medic or use first aid.. What I experienced in this game probably is nothing like multiplayer, but it looks like there will be a lot of effort to defend spots. Does anyone know what the max player count is on servers?
For those of you on the fence lets put it to ya this way ... if you want to feel like you are apart of a massive battle in a war without being there then this game is for you Spec was talking about 100 on a server with 3 AI per human so 300 that is nuts
100 players? that's pretty awesome. Yeah I think if we can at least 10 XoO going on this, 50 bucks would be worth it. I just have to convince my wife now XD I do have a paypal account that I've been hiding some cash for a rainy day.. . looks like a storms a'comin! lol