Rock, Paper, Shotgun

12/06/2009 at 12:16 blerg says:

I had been holding off watching any Arma 2 footage until I saw these earlier, goddaamn amazing.

12/06/2009 at 12:18 StenL says:

Unfortunately, my short time with this game on the German version was very disappointing, mostly due to the immense number of bugs that I seemed to stumble upon all the time. I hope that they are fixed by the time the English version comes out, because at the moment, this seems like ArmA 1 all over again.

12/06/2009 at 12:21 Jim Rossignol says:

Enormo-spec, I think.

12/06/2009 at 12:23 Bongo says:

Schmung, I’ve heard that it actually works pretty well on a normal computer too. I know one guy with a nVidia 8600 and he says it can run it on medium without problems. The only crutch (as always in ArmA) is the viewdistance, which he can set to 1800 max with everything else on medium.

12/06/2009 at 12:24 luphisto says:

all i can think to say is “woah.. impressive”. though the smoke animation in the second movie was pretty lame from far away

12/06/2009 at 12:31 Tei says:

First video: You can do ridiculous awesome videos like this one with any game engine and a good machine ( HL2, Crysys… even Quake, theres a map for Nexuiz the size of earth, and another one with 14.000 mobs in a room… but I digresss…).

Second video: I *love* these explosions on the night. True elegant and fantastic explosions.

This shows ArmA2 will be awesome-realistic graphically.

12/06/2009 at 12:33 Dominic White says:

Oh yeah, and if you don’t like the AI being super-accurate, there are sliders that let you set both enemy and AI accuracy multipliers. Set it down near to the bottom, and you’ll get classic Hollywood accuracy, with bad guys missing the first dozen shots, giving you plenty of time to react.

12/06/2009 at 12:35 Bongo says:

Tei: Yeah, they’ve always modeled light very realistically. Old ArmA looks rather rubbish nowadays but some of the light effects are still very beautiful, like tracer rounds in the night.

12/06/2009 at 12:48 cullnean says:

BAN THIS SICK FILTH

military fetish murder sims!

joking of course, this looks great

12/06/2009 at 12:56 Howard says:

Well…visually impressive I suppose but…problem is that the Bohemia chaps seem to have lost the plot. The requirements V visual impressiveness of ARMA was silly. It took god’s own rig to get it to move and then, in the singleplayer at least, was an unplayable shambles. These shots jsut show that no one is going to be able to run this game at those details – not for years – and that is just damned silly.

Also can they PLEASE fix that AI voice thing? Not only does it sound ridiculous but it is so SLOW at putting sentences together that bythe time its done the event it was trying to announce is over and forgotten about.

All that said I really hope I am wrong and ARMA2 is finally a sequel to Op Flash unlike the first game.

12/06/2009 at 13:17 Dominic White says:

So, did nobody read my posts where I point out that I can get stuff looking like this videos on a pretty unimpressive PC? Look above, people.

12/06/2009 at 13:27 MrBejeebus says:

guys specs – 6gb ram, 3.0ghz core i7 overclock, quad sli gtx 295…

i want this game :o

will kill my computer tho

12/06/2009 at 13:31 Skalpadda says:

If you look at the second guy’s specs however:

Windows xp 32 bit
ATI Radeon 4870 512mb
4GB DDR2 RAM (2x 2GB sticks)
Intel Dual Core E8500 @ 3.7ghz
And a crap sound card :P

That’s not a system you’d have to give up an arm and a leg for :)

12/06/2009 at 13:39 VelvetFistIronGlove says:

they’ve always modeled light very realistically

Realistic? The lighting in the night video was shockingly unrealistic. Just look at the way the light plays on the ground and grass: it looks terrible!

Not that that’ll affect the game in any significant way though; I’m just nitpicking.

12/06/2009 at 13:46 Duncan says:

Eh? Seriously, those aren’t impressive at all.
As soon as Serious Sam 3 starts showing footage, it will blow that first vid with the planes away with the number of enemies. Also, the effects for the downed planes were rubbish – flickery and far too little variation between the different trails. When you see the plane model come down vertically near the player and just “dink” into the ground without crumpling or exploding it shows how basic that whole scene is.

That second vid… erm… nice sense of scale, I guess, if you like running round mostly empty environments while badly-rendered smoke sprites flicker and z-fight in the background. :-/ Audio was lovely for those distant explosions, but they really need to show a video from daytime and show the whole battlefield, with the “1000 AI” clearly running about, driving tanks, shooting etc. if they want to impress me with any sense of scale.

12/06/2009 at 14:01 jackflash says:

Looks pretty exciting. Shame the soldier in the in the second clip didn’t have a jeep or somesuch as he seems to be constantly missing all the action! I bet he wishes he went and got the jeep.

@EyeMessiah – a lot of these vids are of Arma2 players just setting up massive AI battles in the editor and then running around watching stuff, but not really participating. It’s more of a showcase of what the game world does when you just leave it to do its thing. So not surprising that the player isn’t engaging much.

While the early release in germany looks to have its share of bugs, Arma 2 really does look straight up incredible. I never could get into the original Arma, because it (the demo, at least) was really sluggish and clunky on my computer. But this looks so much more polished. It’s a definite purchase.

12/06/2009 at 14:05 Jim Rossignol says:

“As soon as Serious Sam 3 starts showing footage, it will blow that first vid with the planes away with the number of enemies.”

Right. Arma2 and Serious Sam 3, that’s a useful comparison.

12/06/2009 at 14:08 Dominic White says:

Yeah, the amazing thing here is not ‘Here’s a game with 1000 characters running around’ which isn’t much of a technical feat, but rather ‘Here’s a hardcore military sim – in five minutes with the editor, you can have 1000 intelligent units interacting with each other in a gigantic firefight’.

It’s all unscripted too. You just plop the units down, tell them to go somewhere, and they’ll engage enemies intelligently. They’ll flank, they’ll search for cover, they’ll retreat if they think they can’t handle it, they’ll even avoid the combat area entirely and sneak off into the forests if they think it’ll give them an advantage.

12/06/2009 at 14:18 Muzman says:

Yeah the 1500 one is very nice.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KK6Fo3Y0AU

Just seeing the headbob and other viewpoint stuff makes me want to get this

12/06/2009 at 14:24 unique_identifier says:

recently in pc releases: dolls house v3 and giant sack of toy soldiers v2.

12/06/2009 at 14:39 Duncan says:

““As soon as Serious Sam 3 starts showing footage, it will blow that first vid with the planes away with the number of enemies.”

Right. Arma2 and Serious Sam 3, that’s a useful comparison.”

Well, it is if you post a video that only really seems to be impressive given the sheer number of units being shown.

I was expecting to see more obviously intelligent behaviour to be honest – but all I noticed in that first vid a bunch of planes all flying at each other and some exploding with very ropy effects and crashes.
I’d be far more impressed to see a handful of jets flying autonomously and dogfighting in an exciting and intelligent-looking manner.

Hence my comparison with Serious Sam. Showing 2 large groups of jets flying towards each other like some kind of Medieval Total War battle charge just doesn’t scream “hardcore military sim with intelligent AI” to me.
Maybe it’s just the way these guys have setup these little sandbox worlds by plopping 2 groups of AI in and saying “go fight them”, but in the context of someone saying “hey, look at this video, isn’t this game great?!”, I’d have to say… erm… didn’t look very impressive to me.

“Yeah, the amazing thing here is not ‘Here’s a game with 1000 characters running around’ which isn’t much of a technical feat, but rather ‘Here’s a hardcore military sim – in five minutes with the editor, you can have 1000 intelligent units interacting with each other in a gigantic firefight’.

It’s all unscripted too. You just plop the units down, tell them to go somewhere, and they’ll engage enemies intelligently. They’ll flank, they’ll search for cover, they’ll retreat if they think they can’t handle it, they’ll even avoid the combat area entirely and sneak off into the forests if they think it’ll give them an advantage.”

See – if that’s the case then sure, that’s amazing! :-)
Unfortunately, I didn’t see any of that in the videos there. the “1500″ units one is a bit better as you can see more AI soldiers standing as the player is running about near the start, so you get more of a sense of a large battle – but then it’s just the same “explosions in the dark with ropy looking smoke effects”.

I’d be much more impressed with a daytime vid of the land battle and seeing all these units everyone claims there are, all doing intelligent things.

12/06/2009 at 14:41 Dominic White says:

Oh, one of the coolest features of the editor – the Ambient Combat and Secondary Operations scripts, both of which can be added to any mission – singleplayer, co-op or competitive – if you so wish.

Ambient Combat procedurally generates a war around you, according to whatever variables you feed in. Density of enemies, unit types fielded, which side has the advantage, etc. Unscripted, random and really exciting.

Secondary Ops plays off Ambient Combat. With it activated, every now and then you’ll get a radio call from HQ, offering secondary objectives which you can accept or refuse at your discretion. You might be called to assassinate an enemy commander, take out an anti-air vehicle, defend an allied camp, rescue a downed chopper crew and such.

Those two can make even a simple ‘travel from here to there, kill this dude’ mission into a randomly generated mini-campaign.

12/06/2009 at 15:36 Dominic White says:

I’d say that the majority of missions are close infantry combat between smallish squads. These are just mass AI test videos to show just how much it can handle.

12/06/2009 at 15:50 Voidman says:

The first vid even though impressive and valid as a demo of the engine is unlikely to happen in a game if it’s as realistic as they claim it is. Still it looks ok not a huge leap from ARMA but as long as they make it a wholesome game with most aspects of modern warfare simulated it will be great (the first one lacked that sadly hence the ongoing enhancing modding effort). One thing that strikes in the second vid is that they made it futuristic even with some stupendous way to zoom, no binoculars, no looking glass it must be cyberoptics. Regardless the crucial feature in this game is the AI scripting – I hope it’s not as clunky as in the first one.

12/06/2009 at 15:56 Hoernchen says:

Should be called BA2 – Bugged Assault 2.

12/06/2009 at 15:57 Walsh says:

One thing that strikes in the second vid is that they made it futuristic even with some stupendous way to zoom, no binoculars, no looking glass it must be cyberoptics.

You are going to quibble about a zoom effect that practically every game uses when you aim to offset the fact your virtual eyes can’t focus?

12/06/2009 at 16:05 Duncan says:

@Walsh – not really, if the AI and scale is as good as you guys say it is then I’d love to see it! There must be something to this game to get Gillen et al. excited about it – I just want to be able to see it!

One of the people making these vids needs to upload a video of a massive ground battle *IN DAYLIGHT* and maybe use a debug camera or something to zoom around the battlefield to show you the mass scale and complex interactions you guys are claiming. A night video showing a few dozen units nearby and a bunch of explosions at close-, mid- and far-range really doesn’t get across to me any sense of mass scale involving *hundreds* of troops and vehicles.

The guy doing the airplane vid seemed to know what he was doing more – at least you could *see* what was happening!

12/06/2009 at 16:07 Dominic White says:

Jesus christ, people – these videos are just AI mass-stress tests thrown together in the editor in minutes, not official promotional videos to show off just how capable and smart it can be.

If you want a better look at how the AI behaves, just make the player spawn as a civillian helicopter pilot in the air between the two forces. They should generally avoid shooting you, and you can see them at play on both sides.

12/06/2009 at 16:11 The Hammer says:

I was actually more impressed by the second video. I’d love to play through limitless scenarios full of that kind of military chaos. It felt like a real war, with the tanks rolling through the grass and the planes and helicopters flying overhead.

12/06/2009 at 16:18 Duncan says:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOQOLgyj8ko&feature=related

This is better – showing how many tanks, rifleman, choppers, jets etc. there are in the editor helps get a better sense of scale for when he drops in to the game, but again… nighttime :-(

12/06/2009 at 16:36 Mad Doc MacRae says:

Watching the second vid made me think there could be a game somewhere in there as a war photographer type who films the fighting and stuff. I’m not sure what part to make game-y, but if done right it could be one of the mods that sometimes shows up around these parts…

12/06/2009 at 16:47 Dominic White says:

The death in the video is actually rather exceptional. All the singleplayer campaign missions have you as part of a larger squad, and with a more complex health system. It’s unlikely that you’ll be killed outright by enemy fire – you get knocked down and stay wounded until someone can carry you to safety and heal you.

You can also switch to control any member of your squad, so if one man goes down, it’s not a big deal.

Also, the game has nothing even close to 1000-man battles unless you put together something as insanely huge in the editor. A couple of hundred at most, really.

So don’t try and judge the actual gameplay based on these videos. They only exist to prove that you can have 1000+ guys running around and fighting simultaneously without your PC exploding into a horrible ball of firey doom.

12/06/2009 at 17:03 Weylund says:

I’m a tester for Combat Mission: Shock Force and I end up talking to a lot of vets – most of the guys on their testing team are active military or veterans. You folks need to talk to some guys who’ve actually been shot at.

Why *would* you expect to see the guy that kills you? If he killed you, he got the drop on you, and unless he did it with a knife, he probably killed you (or far more likely, incapacitated you) faster than your senses could tell you about him. Any game that has any tendency towards realism is going to need a ton of scripting/balancing before it ensures a “fun” experience every time – even after years of testing CM:SF is still sometimes too brute-hard to play with beer and pretzels. In short: ArmA 2 probably isn’t going to be honey candy and giggles all the time. I wouldn’t get it if you’re expecting a super-human sees-all-his-enemies COD experience.

I was surprised that the guy in the second video lasted as long as he did, running through all those pools of light (and who in holy hell runs up next to a vehicle which is clearly burning?). I was disappointed with the AI in the second vid – it showed practically no sense of cohesion. It was just a bunch of bots running around shooting at each other. Is there a way to set up a command hierarchy in the editor?

And yes, the guy should have been riding in a track or other vehicle, if he was advancing at all – there’s no excuse for running infantry across hundreds of meters of open ground in the middle of an armor battle.

12/06/2009 at 17:32 Steelfist says:

That wasn’t a campaign level, I believe he just set up a massive pitched battle and then ran around in the middle of it all to film the results.

In real missions you have a role to play, and will actually fight.

12/06/2009 at 17:47 Über Nerd says:

The second video sums my Arma/Op experience. Run around watch something going on with no idea about what actually is going on and get killed without even noticing someone is on to you.

12/06/2009 at 17:49 Voidman says:

@Walsh
Not “but all games use it” argument again! Please. A mediocre feature remains mediocre and the fact that other games use it does not make it any less mediocre – you follow? Anyway I don’t care about any other game and the fact that it uses a similar effect is beside the point. Plus to address your “offsetting focus theory” there is nothing to offset since the whole scenery on the screen is as a rule in focus and scales according to the perspective and distance so I disagree with your metaphor (the only simulation of “virtual eyes” will be the ironsigths probably with the depth of vision blur) in fact you playing still use your eyes to look at the monitor so you apply focus anyway (losing some of the peripheral detail). Yes, the resolution and POV are limited compared to “life feed” resolution and scope of perception but this doesn’t justify this in-game optical ability. The way that zoom is executed here does not feel realistic in what aspires to be a realistic simulation. But let’s not dwell on academic detail I don’t have to use zoom to keep things hard core right ;) plus it’s a minor detail. AI dynamics is my major quibble…

12/06/2009 at 18:08 Weylund says:

@Dominic: I’m not sure that not knowing about ArmA amounts to having gotten “the wrong end of the stick”. RPS tells us there’s a great gameplay video. Jump in, watch it, read the the comments, write one.

You’ll note that MOST of my comment was responding to people who wondered about the authenticity of the player’s experience. I didn’t say “OMG the AI suxors so much” (and I wouldn’t, as I have built AI for a living for the past eight years or so, it approaches ass-hard to do what’s shown in the video), I said I was disappointed with the lack of cohesion and asked if there was a way to establish a hierarchy in the editor. Thank you for answering my question.

My comment regarding the vehicle was not a knock against the game but, again, a response to comments.

I didn’t mention a thing about whether this looked like a “real engagement”. Clearly it did not, and I had no expectations in that regard, although if you plop down 1000 random men in CM:SF they’ll at least act and fight as platoons and companies as opposed to driving around alone and getting themselves blown up, but that’s more to do with the way they have command structures set up than any inherently superior AI.

Overall the video was impressive, and I’d been planning on buying the game. No need to defend it from me and my stick.

12/06/2009 at 18:24 cliffski says:

Oh man, I just watched some more vids then pre-ordered this. Do you think the tax man will accept this as a business expense for ‘explosions research?’ :D

12/06/2009 at 18:34 Marcin says:

@The Fanciest of Pants

Correction: running and crawling for 6 minutes, then dying without seeing any enemies.

Reminds me of my WW2OL (very brief) trial as well.

12/06/2009 at 18:52 A Button says:

That second video is very nearly terrifying.

I am not a military man.

12/06/2009 at 19:00 Lightbulb says:

““As soon as Serious Sam 3 starts showing footage, it will blow that first vid with the planes away with the number of enemies.”

Right. Arma2 and Serious Sam 3, that’s a useful comparison.”

Well actually I think it is.

Theres no way in the real world that that many jets would meet like that. Its pure fantasy and cool explosions – sounds more Serious Sam than Serious Sim to me….

12/06/2009 at 19:12 Dominic White says:

For those wondering, the ArmA2 campaign is actually more reasonable in difficulty than OFP, and way easier than ArmA1. The game never really puts you into any ridiculously hard situations, and if you find yourself getting shot to bits, there’s a whole page full of difficulty-related toggles and sliders. It won’t make it any less realistic on the easiest setting, but you’ll get perks like highlights on identified enemy targets and other such conveniences.

There’s also seperate sliders for enemy and allied accuracy multipliers, so you can set it to anything from ‘once they see you, you’re already dead’ to ‘Star Wars stormtrooper’ levels.

12/06/2009 at 19:39 Okami says:

The second video was awesome. Running around at night time, deeling totally lost and confused, stuff exploding everywhere, you never see a single enemy and then you’re suddenly dead, killed by a bullet you never saw coming. I guess this is how war is for most soldiers most of the time.

12/06/2009 at 19:45 Amirul B Ruslan says:

Was anybody reminded of Battlestar Galactica in the first video with the mass dogfights?

12/06/2009 at 20:07 sklaav says:

nice, this MMO will be amazing.

12/06/2009 at 20:30 Hoernchen says:

The Scripts sometimes dont’t even get triggered at all….

12/06/2009 at 21:16 qq says:

Damn, I really wanted this game to be good, but after trying the German version it feels like it has more Bugs than Starship Troopers. I hope they patch the thing.

12/06/2009 at 21:59 Snuffy (the Evil) says:

I remember watching these videos earlier. They certainly convinced me to buy the game.

We know the second guy’s specs already, and they’re not too bad. If I’m not mistaken, the guy in the first video has a ridiculous computer. Something like 6 gigs of DDR3 RAM, two GTX295′s in Quad-SLI and an overclocked Core i7 processor.

Gentlemen, that is the computer that will trap you in a dark alley and RAPE YOU TO DEATH.

12/06/2009 at 22:57 MrBejeebus says:

i just watched the 2nd vid again, and realised how terrible the sky is in it…especially when all the terrain is quite light for a midnight setting.

12/06/2009 at 23:41 EyeMessiah says:

@Jack

Always get the jeep. No matter the cost!

13/06/2009 at 03:13 jackflash says:

@Guhndahb -

Yes, for the ten millionth time. It was a player throwing a couple hundred jets into the map with the editor and then hitting “GO.” It was not an actual mission.

13/06/2009 at 03:31 Digit says:

My whole issue with Aram 1 and 2, is that they are capable of pretty awesome things, but they don’t do them in game. It has a lot of simulation, and not much gameplay. I’ve not played Arma2 but I have a friend who is making a mod for the series, and is always talking to me about it so I feel like I’ve played it. ;) I bought Arma 1 and was really disappointed, I don’t think I will get Arma 2 as I just feel that it’s too much of a hyper-sim, and the gameplay there isn’t fun (for me).

13/06/2009 at 06:22 KP says:

Digit: I’d like to say you’re approaching it the wrong way. It doesn’t have a lot of “game” out of the box. BUT it has the tools to make just about any kind of game you want. With a good group of people and some time with the editor it’s riotous fun. Arma is to Battlefield 2 as Garry’s Mod is to Half Life 2.

13/06/2009 at 07:48 Serondal says:

Wow is all I Have to say at these videos.

13/06/2009 at 11:01 El_MUERkO says:

or not….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjTei0BiUP4

13/06/2009 at 12:46 El_MUERkO says:

okey dokey, encoding now

13/06/2009 at 13:06 panik says:

the lightning effect was quite cartoony…i kept expecting a soldier to be hit by it and his skeleton to flash

13/06/2009 at 16:59 Slippery Jim says:

Totally unscripted, just happened to this guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN1Y-SpcI1s&hd=1

13/06/2009 at 18:47 Turin Turambar says:

Slippery Jim, cool video. But i think the video’s author is wong. The AI didn’t suicide, the black smoke trail is a clue that the plane was already damaged.

14/06/2009 at 03:08 El_MUERkO says:

apologies for the delay, had to go to a wedding :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7jCGvlkXW4

14/06/2009 at 05:03 Weylund says:

@Dominic: those mini-campaign missions you describe… I’m buying ASAP. Lovely.

14/06/2009 at 23:56 DennisK4 says: