Arma 2: Combined Ops (ARMA 2 Base game now free!) (Zombie Mod!)

[Mrbloodworth]

Anyone playing this? Was thinking of picking it up, the features are rather deep.

http://www.arma2.com/game-features/arma-2-operation-arrowhead-features_en.html

[Mrbloodworth]

Well.

ARMA 2 is now free to play.

Arma 2 Free Launch Trailer

http://www.arma2.com/free

The free version of the game does not include the campaign mode, HD graphics or support for user-made addons and mods. It does, however, include the full range of over 300 weapons, units and vehicles; the 50+ player multiplayer mode; support for play on dedicated servers from either the free or retail version; and the single/multiplayer mission editor. There are no microtransactions and no hidden costs in the game -- it's completely free, effectively making it the world's most generous demo.

Hot on the heals of this, is the ARMA 3 announcement:  http://www.arma3.com/

E3 2011 - ARMA 3 (In-game footage, etc.)









Dude, Subs and SCUBA now, all in a giant sandboxy world. Amazing.

[Malakili]

Might be worth dinking around with for the low low price of zero.  I tried the demo at some point and I thought it wasn't ok but it didn't  draw me in.

[Stormwaltz]

Ah, depth of field - what developers add when they decide faux-cinematic visual effects are more important than allowing the player to look where they want.

If you give me a game with a horizon, you must allow me to look at the horizon without getting eyestrain. Particularly if, in your game, there may be a sniper out in the blur waiting to blow my head off.

[Mrbloodworth]

Thats what scopes are for. The land map of this title is 2.4 x the 400sqkm of the previous one. That DOF is comparable to BF3 from what I have seen.

[apocrypha]

Depth of Field sucks in games since it mimics what cameras do, not what our eyes do. It makes screenshots look great but it makes gameplay shittier. It's anti-immersive and needs to fuck off.

[TripleDES]

You can disable DoF in Arma2.

Depth of Field sucks in games since it mimics what cameras do, not what our eyes do. It makes screenshots look great but it makes gameplay shittier. It's anti-immersive and needs to fuck off.

Our eyes do the same as a camera does. The only difference is that the reaaaaaaaaaaally short focal length of our eyes creates a pretty huge depth of field (the area that's perceived sharply). Hold your a finger up close to your face and look at it. You'll notice that anything further away is blurred.

[Stormwaltz]

I'm glad to hear you can turn it off.

Our eyes do the same as a camera does. The only difference is that the reaaaaaaaaaaally short focal length of our eyes creates a pretty huge depth of field (the area that's perceived sharply). Hold your a finger up close to your face and look at it. You'll notice that anything further away is blurred.

But DoF in a game imposes the designer/artist's decisions about where the player's eyes should be. It's the developer dictating to the player, "You shouldn't look at anything on the screen but what I choose for you to look at." I tend to look to the horizons and enjoy long-range landscape panoramas. When I first encountered DoF in City of Heroes, it drove me fucking insane until I looked up how to turn it off - I was looking into the distance and getting eyestrain from everything being artificially blurred.

[Azazel]

Dude, it's a pretty screenshot. Don't read too much into it.

[tgr]

Our eyes do the same as a camera does. The only difference is that the reaaaaaaaaaaally short focal length of our eyes creates a pretty huge depth of field (the area that's perceived sharply). Hold your a finger up close to your face and look at it. You'll notice that anything further away is blurred.

Be that as it may, it's still automatic and you can't really look at the OOF parts of your FOV. I've got it in sniper: ghost warrior, and it's pissing me off whenever it messes up what to focus on, or you're lying still and looking around on your monitor. It's still a feature which needs to die a quick death.

Having said that: ArmA3? SQUEE!

[Azazel]

Is ARMA2 any good? I thought it got savaged? Or was that ARMA1, or Op Flashpoint 2? I never followed those games closely, so which ones are good and bad always confuses me...

 

[Stormwaltz]

ARMA2 is more or less a declassified version of Virtual Battlespace (VBS), a professional infantry combat simulator. It's as hardcore and realistic as you feasibly get on the civilian market, and punishingly unforgiving of typical FPS IMMA SUPAHERO behavior. Use tactics and cover or you will die very quickly.

If that excites you, try it. If it sounds frustrating and neckbeardy, avoid it.

[apocrypha]

You can disable DoF in Arma2.

That's good, I approve!

Our eyes do the same as a camera does. The only difference is that the reaaaaaaaaaaally short focal length of our eyes creates a pretty huge depth of field (the area that's perceived sharply). Hold your a finger up close to your face and look at it. You'll notice that anything further away is blurred.

Sigh.

OK, when I said "our eyes" I meant "our entire biological and psychological visual system". Yes, our eyes have depth of field, it's an inherent feature of lenses, of which our eyes contain one each. However, DoF in our eyes is, as with a lens, affected by the aperture. The greater the aperture (which is a reciprocal function of opening diameter and lens focal length) the lower the DoF. The aperture in our eyes is our iris, the diameter of which varies rapidly and constantly in response to a number of factors. Plus our eyes focus at different distances extremely quickly and efficiently, dependent on many factors including age and focal distance. On top of that we actually only have good visual acuity over a small fraction of our retina. The centre has tightly packed rods which give us colour vision and the cell density in that area gives us good resolving power. The rest of the retina contains more cones which are more efficient at light gathering but don't differentiate between different colours. There is also an area near the centre (the fovea centralis) where the optic nerve joins which has little or no vision (the blindspot). Our visual processing systems in our brains are highly adept at constructing composite images from the sensory inputs from our eyes, which are varied and imperfect. If you want to know more about the specifics and the degree to which we construct complete images then look up gestalt psychology for starters.

SO. At the kind of distances being depicted in a video game of modern warfare, such as the one being discussed in this thread, we don't usually perceive the kind of depth of field effects that those screenshots posted in this thread show.

Happy?

You lot are so stupidly fucking pedantic most of the times I wonder how you get through life without being regularly punched in the face by people who are just trying to have a conversation.

[tgr]

Is ARMA2 any good? I thought it got savaged? Or was that ARMA1, or Op Flashpoint 2? I never followed those games closely, so which ones are good and bad always confuses me...

I would say it depends. ArmA2 is pretty unforgiving, has lean, has the ability to look away from where you're travelling etc etc etc, whereas what I remember of OpFlash2 (the little I played it before I quit in disgust) was that it didn't have lean, it didn't have the ability to look in a different direction from where you were travelling, and your squadmates kept respawning on each savepoint.

ArmA2 should be more or less bug-free at this point though.

Quick edit: this was pretty much a few of the main selling points (for me at least) when OpFlash1 was released, and OpFlash2 would probably have been received a bit better if it hadn't been a "successor" to OpFlash1 and NOT have these things. I'm not so sure about whether or not to call OpFlash2 a sandbox, as I didn't spend much time on it, I ragequit it after 2 missions because it was so disappointing compared to what it was based on.

[Quinton]

Hmm.  The A2F version is not actually available yet, but Steam has free demos of the full game.

[Mrbloodworth]

Its also a huge sandbox.

[Azazel]

Yeah, I had a look also. Maybe I'll just wait till ARMA3 comes out. and gets patched up. and then goes on sale. hrm. Looks like Rangers in ARMA3 as well. Nice to be able to play something besides USMC.

[Kail]

Its also a huge sandbox.

Sandbox how?  The trailers made it look like a fairly realistic millitary game, and they're generally pretty picky about where you drive your tank.  Do you mean, like, the mission areas are big, or that it's really an open world game?

[tgr]

Sandbox how?  The trailers made it look like a fairly realistic millitary game, and they're generally pretty picky about where you drive your tank.  Do you mean, like, the mission areas are big, or that it's really an open world game?

I think it's stretching the definition a bit, but I believe that technically you can setup the whole island and just run around doing whatever you like.

That is if you're talking about ArmA2, I've no idea how OpFlash2 is in that regard.

[Azazel]

Set it up with enemies and such? Then run around sniping them from the bushes and running away?

[Mrbloodworth]

I mean that the entire country is available to play in ( 400sqkm ) , complete with citizens, towns, factions, destructible environments, base building ETC... Coletrial damage will shift populations view on you, the world lve and breathes with movement, advancements, and migrations. You can also make your own missions. This is not a session based game like others where you load up a map, there is only one map, depending on DLC and version of course. However you can, if you want, limit missions area scope, but its not required.

There are NO classes, what you can and can't do is completely up to the gear you load out and or the vehicles you jump into, every vehicle is drivable, from tankers to bicycles. There are over 300+ Items, Weapons and vehicles all recreated from real world measurements.

Feel free to get 120 of your friends together and do this: http://youtu.be/DecIhVlaPMk Or this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oN6kOig7WW4&feature=related

You can have AI on or off, you can have a squad of 4 friends AI on, and roll into town and claim you run barter town.

Arma 2 "Battlefield" [HD] [/url]


Make sure to go to boot camp, alo some of the AI is dumb at time, the demos are a bit buggy too. If you let it, the video settings can bring any machine to it knees by shear scope. Launching the ArmA 2 full client with all updates is a brilliant move for them.

[Nija]

Set it up with enemies and such? Then run around sniping them from the bushes and running away?

Exactly that. The world is enormous and thenvehicles are fun enough to sometimes spawn an empty world just to fly around in.

[Mrbloodworth]

ArmA 2 warfare tutorial

Goes over some basics, building, guns, command, RTS elements ETC....

[Comstar]

The single player campaign was bugged to hell and uncompletable when I played it - I ended up using cheat codes after several levels never completed themselves correctly. If it's free, that's about what it would be worth.

[tgr]

The single player campaign was bugged to hell and uncompletable when I played it - I ended up using cheat codes after several levels never completed themselves correctly. If it's free, that's about what it would be worth.

That's why I said "ArmA2 should be more or less bug-free at this point though.". This is something they always go through, with releasing it buggy as all hell, and fixing it over the next 6 months. Not exactly the best scenario, but I'll live with it if it means getting a better game in the end.

[HaemishM]

For those interested, Arma2 free version is now available.

[Mrbloodworth]

Awe sweet, if you own the full version, you can play with free players too.

ARMA 2 full edition and ARMA 2 Free edition are fully MP compatible (base game w/o mods)

[Azazel]

Hm, I reckon I'll start downloading as soon as I get home. Last day of the month before my downloads reset themselves for the month, as well...
 

[Azazel]

Sign in using your account to activate Arma 2 Free! No credit card or sensitive personal data required to play!

They then give me the choice of signing in using Facebook, Windows Live ID, Steam, Google/Gmail or some other thing called OpenID.

http://free.arma2.com/activation/

 

[tgr]

Didn't want those users anyways.

[Azazel]

The Steam one looked like it might have been ok.. it sent me to a Steam page which told me it wouldn't share anything with Bohemia except for my Arma play stats. I'll let one of you guys do it first, though... 

[Mrbloodworth]

Why would it be any different than any other steam login?

I own the title, using steam, I don't see an issue.

[Azazel]

Because I usually only have one Steam login. Which is associated with Steam. "Log in via steam to claim your Bohemia game" is a bit ...different. But it's the other stuff they offer that give me pause. Maybe I should use my fake facebook account?

[Mrbloodworth]

I guess I don't see what the issue is. Then again, I am not sure why its not on steam in the free section. Maybe that is to come.

[Mrbloodworth]

Arma 3 & Underpants

Game has an amazing amount of features.