ArmA II Comments by Alec Meer

First

I pre-ordered this a while ago. The original ArmA with mods is great.

I've been a staunch supporter of ArmA despite its initial crappiness. Fan made missions carried the first game for a long time until BI patched it to the game it was supposed to be. In fact the sheer amount of additional content they added was very impressive.

Current money is on this game being a little more realistic than OPF2. But whatever that means for you, the competition between products is probably a very good thing.

Will probably pick this up sometime in the summer but not straight away. Not sure my rig will be able to handle it. So far theres nothing its been unable to play but things like Crysis Warhead need to be put on Medium-Low and ArmA 2 looks to be another powerhouse game.

So ArmA 1 is worth getting back into? They best have patched it to buggery.

@Coastal, more or less. It hasn't fundamentally changed. The missions are now all playable -before you were more likely to encounter bugs than not. MP is were it is at, though. More than most games you need to tweak the settings in the options to get it to run and play how you prefer. Myself, I reduce the "float" zone to zero, so that the crosshair is always in the centre of the screen (you'd be amazed at the number of people who complain about the float and completely miss this option).

Still a bit rough though. Don't bother with the addon -they've patched in 90% of the content anyway.

Please can this be released for 360 so I'm not stuck with just Codebastards' increasingly inferior-sounding knock off. Yours, hardened OFP fan.

I am pretty sure there's a 360 version in development, metalangel.

It sounds promising, but I'll wait for reviews. And I hope the AI doesn't have X-ray vision this time around - something which, I think, was never fixed in ArmA.

@UncleLou

Believe it or not that AI vision wasn't all that unreasonable. The problem was that they had incredible, absurd hearing. Not much of a distinction, I guess. I too hope it's fixed though.

i seriously can't wait

Well well, looking forward to this one!
Can't wait.

Indeed hope bugs wont spoil the first wave of buyers, like the first Arma.
And pleased to read they've done work on sounds; original arma sounds was bit lame, had to use Addons for great sounds, like CMS



Mongoose

Never got a chance to play the original, but safe to say I've pre-ordered this.

Looks amazing!

They worked really hard on this game, its been in development since the first flashpoint game, and way before Arma1. I think they'll deliver with this one. Shame console folks won't see it for a while, but judging from operation flashpoint: elite it should be a decent port.

Wish I had a decent PC. :-/

@metalangel

"Please can this be released for 360 so I'm not stuck with just Codebastards' increasingly inferior-sounding knock off. Yours, hardened OFP fan."

Are you serious?
You want it released on 360, accuse codeys of developing a knock off then call yourself a "Hardened OFP fan"???

thats 3 ways to contradict yourself in one sentence well done!!

360 version won't have the editor I'm guessing sadly...OFP2 looks more appealing to me as I don't trust BI to release a playable game (OFP/ARMA were the same, I stopped playing OFP until patch 1.85 when it actually became a playable game and Arma still isn't that playable).

Truth is as much as we love "Mili-sims" BI have their hearts in the right places but sadly not the skill (harsh but true).
Codemasters are bigger budget and have a much much better game engine to work with when compared to the engines Arma/arma2 run on.

Any "Hardened OFP fans" that have been on the game since release would know BI can't program :P



**Edit 2**

Heres a bet!! I bet you the hands don't move on the steering wheel in Arma2 as they didn't in OFP/ARMA!

;)

No way I'm ordering this until I see the reaction of the reviewers and, more importantly, joe Q public who will encounter all the initial bugs should they (most likely) be present.

No way I'm ordering this until I see the reaction of the reviewers and, more importantly, joe Q public who will encounter all the initial bugs should they (most likely) be present

Couldn't agree more. The burden is definitely on them to deliver, this time around, before I'll part with any cash.

@ Zeddfragg

Calling it a 'knock off' isn't far off, Codemasters never developed the first flashpoint, they have no experience with these types of games and to boot this is their first fps game they're developing internally. They're using the name for marketing more than anything else, nothing wrong with that though.

However your wrong about the editor, the 360 version of Arma2 has been confirmed by the BI themselves that it will include a mission editor. The console versions of Ofp2 has been confirmed to not have a mission editor, funny that, right?

Bigger budget does not equate to skill either, sadly. I'm mean using a racing engine for a milsim, sounds like a plan to me! The engine was adapted from the one in grid btw.
Also how do you know its a better engine? Because I swear I haven't seen it in action, you know with Codies not showing the game off yet and all.

Any 'hardened OFP fan' would know that Arma2 and BI improved a shit ton from the first game, and that theres a lot to look forward to.

I'm not slagging off Ofp2 (in fact I'm very excited for it), but give credit where its due, Codemasters had little involvement with flashpoint and BI learned quite a bit from Arma1.

It's Chernarus, not Chenarus.

"Truth is as much as we love "Mili-sims" BI have their hearts in the right places but sadly not the skill (harsh but true). "

Yeah absolutely, last time I played Arma 1 some missions would not finish after completing all the objectives, and there was an unplayable graphical glitch whenever more than 2 gigs of ram was used (both probably patched since I haven't checked).

BI need to seriously up their technical ability. They've gotten away with carelessness in the past with an enthusiastic modding community, but for people who do not want to get involved with that and just want to, you know, play the vanilla game, its not good enough.

We shall see.

I hope they fix the weird mouse lag etc, if arma 1 felt as responsive when you were moving around and aiming as call of duty or something it would have been unreal

I hope they fix the weird mouse lag etc, if arma 1 felt as responsive when you were moving around and aiming as call of duty or something it would have been unreal

You can reduce the inertia thingy to 0 so the game feels a lot more responsive, if that's what you mean. The "real" mouselag in ArmA seems to depend entirely on the framerate.

Agreed though, all in all it is a very clunky affair. I, too, hope for a game that combines at least some of the complexities, AI, level size etc. of games like ArmA and OpF with smoother, simpler controls. Maybe OfP 2 is that game.

edit:

Just remembered something else: if you turn the mouse very quickly, your character only turns around a tiny bit. To turn around fully, you can't move the mouse too quickly. Maybe that's what you mean?

Trust me I tried all the potential solutions going round, none of them really worked. I think it was a more general input lag than mouselag, and it seemed as disconnected from the framerate as that sort of thing can be... I just hope it's fixed for Arma 2, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

"Truth is as much as we love "Mili-sims" BI have their hearts in the right places but sadly not the skill (harsh but true)." I'm quite sure they know something about what they do. They are selling simulators to several countries.

@Skurm, I'm glad someone said that. It has to be one of the more silly things I've read here.

Bring it on!!

Upon reading this hands-on, I'm very tempted to pre-order the game. It's been a while since I've been as excited about a game as this one.

Just one caveat: I bought the first ArmA (at budget price, thank god) and as much as I tried, I just couldn't get into it. Most missions left me very confused about my objective, bearings and enemy positions, and often I died without knowing who just shot me. Given that, I wonder, would it be stupid to pre-order ArmA II?

karstux: Depends on whether you want to play SP or MP. I didn't really like single player. But multiplayer is great.

As someone who played the original OFP demo constantly for days and bought every OFP expansion on release day and obsessed over every patch I was insanely excited about ArmA, when I heard the release was staggered and Germany would get it months before the 505's release I ordered a German copy and waded in... to a buggy mess of a game that took a very long time to come good. But I persisted, buying a 505 version and Queens Gambit the expansion. The only reason I don't play it now is cause the game doesn't work on Vista 64 with ATI cards :(

I've got ArmA II on preorder, I'm hoping it's the game ArmA hinted at being but after so many releases that needed a patch or ten before living up to their promise I'll probably have more patience than most with it, however I wonder how long Bohemia can go on releasing unfinished software before people stop buying their games. I think there's a lot riding on ArmA II, I hope Bohemia realise that.

@ El_MUERkO

BIS knows they screwed up with Arma1, they didn't even want to make that game, they did to build up funds for this game and they knew it turned out crap. Arma2 was in development since ofp1, it was the so called 'Game2' (originally meant to be the sequel to flashpoint before the split with Codies) that BIS talked about in the past. From the previews that have been going around from the latest build, the game is said to be in a solid state with few bugs. It hopefully won't launch in the same state that Arma1 was, which was a disaster. I've been waiting for this game for a long time, and imo they'll deliver this time.

If you want a detailed preview of the latest build, there was a hands-on straight from some of the community members: http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=5694

Great to hear that it's more stable than ArmA1 - bit more excited about this now! :]

From the in-game movie, still looks to have the same awkward human models & animation and unrefined engine of OFP.
Not that that stopped it being a great game in the end... just somewhat tarnished by the lack of polish.