Gaming Arma II Review

Most frustrating p.o.s. I ever played.

Bug ridden throughout. I couldn't even complete the training levels due to the amount of bugs. Needs another year of development to make it playable.

The controls are the worst thing ever, you would of think that they would have learned from their previous releases that they needed overhauling.

Also squad management needs to be overhauled to a decent gui like bf2.

Far too many buttons to do anything. By the time you press escape find the right button you are dead.

Wait for Operation Flashpoint 2.

 

It's got a lot of buttons because it's a milsim - not a first-person shooter, such as BF2.

Besides, you can do almost everything you need via the scrollwheel on your mouse.

 

Great review I enjoyed reading that, is this another good reason to wait and build in Sep when hopefully ATI will release some even more powerfull dirrect x 11 cards ?

 

For those new to the game and wanting to improve it, check the sites to see how involved the players and modders are with contributions.

Modding is the biggest part of the game even since OFP to ArmA 1, ArmA 2 continues the tradition.

http://www.armaholic.com/

http://forums.bistudio.com/

I'm currently working on my ArmA 1 mapping project and prepping it for porting to ArmA 2.

This winter shall be FUN

 

Downloading the demo now, seems great!

 

What's the DRM like on this game? Sometimes even the steam version installs the same DRM crap.

 

Just a quick update - BIS has just released a new patch

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=75075

 

I spent the whole of yesterday evening playing multiplayer with a friend of mine, this game is genius!

One of the highlights was setting up a custom mission where we raced buses around the airfield. The sandbox nature of the game has endless possibilities for creating some really immersive missions.

Looking at the system resources this game is running 75% full time on my quad core Q6600, so i guess there is a boost with quad over dual core. But otherwise it's running nicely at 1680x1050 on a 8800GT.

It's refreshing to play a true PC game that doesn't suffer from consolification.

 

Operation Flashpoint? ROFL, hilarious, this is a hardcore military sim, not a game masquerading as one, you should have researched what the game was before sounding like a douche. BF2 and OFP are not even in the same boat or trying to do the same thing as this game.

 

It uses Fade DRM like the original Operation Flashpoint. You can however install it as many times as you like on your machine...and sometimes you need to, its a trifle buggy, to say the least.

On the BIS forums there are two pretty hot topics raging across several posts. The first is the fact it won't run on many peoples 4850's (mine included) without bugs glithces, black cubes, stripes, you name it. The other is that fact that if you use the Nvidia driver for Vista, after 182.50, a big (not sure if its the game or in the driver) will always see your video card as 256mb VRAM which severely hampers the performance.

I was using the 186.18 after purchasing am Nvidia card having given up on the 4850/Arma 2 debacle and after looking through posts on the BIS forums searching for an answer to my 18fps on a GTX285 it seems that a cursory look at arma2.cfg in my documents revealed the 'local vram' setting was 256mb when it should be 1GB. I tried to manually adjust it and set it as read only to no avail and only several hour more reading came across the need to go back to 182.50 drivers.

Once I had deleted arma2.cfg and re-run the game, with the older drivers, I went back into the cfg file to see 'local vram' was now 1gb (except its a 10 digit number they are using).

Seems also to be an issue with 8GB of ram like the original Arma. Anyone experiencing issues or interested in purchasing the game should spend time reading through the forums and be very patient. However once I sorted my installation out, its been very enjoyable.

Patch 1.02 can be very reluctant to install too. From a fresh install the way I got it to install was to load the game without patches, play the campaign till it offered a save point and then come out. Then patch to 1.02. Otherwise it just comes up with errors at random point on installation of the patch (also lots of threads about this on the BIS forums). Believe it or not I had to install and reinstall the game 9 times before I came across the way to be able to patch it by accident and its not a co-incidence as it worked on a friends copy too with the same problem.

 

what bug is that? im running with 8gig ram and haven't noticed anything aside from a couple of times the game has crawled/paused for about 15s and then kept going fine

aside from that and a bug during the chopper training (pilot jumped out and started walking to the waypoint and i couldnt get in the chopper ) i've not had any issues at all, no crashes no obvious bugs, nothing

 

I also have 8GB ram but not had problems, like most bugs it only effects a percentage. There is a long thread about it on BIS forums.

 

Regarding performance I think it must be an operating system thing because I've found the frame rate, given the quality of the graphics and the scale of them, to be spectacularly high. I'd been expecting my PC to curl up and die trying to play ArmA2 but in my view it outperforms the original Armed Assault and does so while looking much better to boot. I've heard similar reports from other folks I've played the game with too.

I'm not sure about the issue of bugs, but then I haven't played much of the single player campaign. I hear that's a bit buggy, but playing homebrewed missions with a team I have seen two crashes, one of which I caused with something I did in the mission build and the other one I chalk up to alt-tabbing when it was loading. I wouldn't be surprised if the bugs in the campaign are of the first type, i.e. mission build gone wonky, rather than the game itself. Frankly I've found the game to be rock solid in the reliability stakes.

I'm willing to concede though that the lack of crashes, good performance and apparent lack of bugs could be due to sheer dumb luck, I enjoyed a similarly hassle free time playing Empire: Total War too while everybody else was gnashing their teeth at lock-ups and crash-to-desktops.

By the way, regarding the legendary unforgiving nature of Arma you can build missions to have a more Gears of War style health model (i.e. you get shot and go to ground bleeding and screaming, but can be revived if helped promptly). There are things called Modules in the mission builder, and you need to use two of them, First Aid Simulation and Battlefield Clearance. Place both of these on the map (anywhere is fine) and use the synchronisation button to connect them both to the group leader of the group you wish to have these medical benefits. I use this if I am building a particularly heroic co-op mission (you can't beat the epicness of picking up and carrying a friend out of the line of fire while shooting one handed, given the ruthlessness of the game those moments of heroics are so much more awesome).

 

Haven't seen any problems there myself, are you sure you didn't do something to trigger FADE?

Didn't have problems with the controls either.

Also squad management needs to be overhauled to a decent gui like bf2.

PEBCAK

OFP2 has nothing to do with Bohemia Interactive or OFP1.

All in all, i don't think this is a game for you. Go back to Battlefield.

 

Cant put my finger on this, tried the demo and just didn't like it.

It ran very smooth, but just didn't like the game play for some reason.

 

@Keir I can understand how a person might not gel with the gameplay right away, Arma is a very different animal to a lot of games. It compares to regular FPS games in the same way that something like Flight Sim X compares to HAWX, that is to say you're effectively doing the exact same thing, even using many of the same controls, but there's just something different about it. There's not to say, "OMG your opinion is WRONGZORZ!" but I think if you give it time it might grow on you. It's not for everybody though.

Something I am looking forward to though is having a front seat when a British army based clan (which I play for alongside some serving and former soldiers) goes up against our opposite number in the US (a clan based around USMC doctrine containing several current and former Marines). Unlike most clan games that are a test of who can get the most headshots this is shaping up to be a test of doctrines, will British fire control and discipline triumph over the heavier firepower and the deadly designated marksmen of the Corps?

 

I'd love to watch that on QuadV or something

 

Is it just me or does the guy in the front page picture look like he's doing a force choke?

 

even though I am a big fan of the series, and was involved in the modding community with OFP, Arma was a let down for me and Arma 2 having played the demo is kind of the same. I mean, I'm judging it the wrong standards really, but despite everyone shouting at bogie who says the controls are crap and the GUI is crap saying "its a milsim! serious business!" it is sold as a game. The controls and GUI are pretty much exactly the same as they were in Operation Flashpoint, and they were bad then. This is several years later. I mean, it's not asking for a lot to make the cars driveable, whereas here you actually need to hold the left / right arrow button down while it turns the wheel.

I think if they had left the graphics the same as operation flashpoint, but made the game smoother, it would be much better for it. Imagine if you had the same ease of movement around your environment as call of duty games. See an obstacle, climb over it, not just simply teleport you forward with a stepping over animation (you can step through buildings as well, noice). It's great for all the realism in the world, but we don't have a realistic input device, we have a mouse, and a keyboard. It's up to the devs to try and cross that boundary and they haven't really revisited it at all from the original game where even then it was one of the big weakpoints.

Then again, operation flashpoint was a great game. And Arma an Arma II are improvements upon that, they've not made anything worse as such. Just in my completely honest opinion, have overlooked how the end user interacts with the game or milsim if you want to call it that, which does let the game down. I too will be waiting to see what operation flashpoint 2 is like. Also really agree that as Arma and Operation Flashpoints, bugs are aplenty, but the game really is not the campaign but the builder. Consider that VBS2 doesn't come with a campaign at all, that is clearly the direction this is aimed at.

 

Hey guys head over to our server .:iGi:. ARMA 2 Public, we run the domination missions which imho are the best. For those in the know we will be running the ACE mod when it arrives, which made the first ARMA amazing. Also we are recruiting mature experianced players to join our ranks. Most of the team are ex mil or serving so come over to the site and say hello: http://www.imgoingin.co.uk