Because one launch isn’t difficult enough, Arma devs Bohemia Interactive are going for one-and-a-half today. The big one is Argo [official site], their free multiplayer FPS spun off from Arma 3 [official site]. The half is an update for Arma 3 adding a new island to play on, the remake of Operation Flashpoint’s Malden which Bohemia made for Argo. All this is to celebrate the 16th birthday of Flashpoint (or Arma: Cold War Assault, as Bohemia later renamed it) today. Read the rest of this entry »
Arma creators Bohemia Interactive have announced that they’ll launch their free 5v5 tactical shooter spin-off Argo [official site] on June 22nd. They released a public prototype free in November 2016 under their ‘Bohemia Incubator’ label and have been tinkering and expanding it ever since. Argo’s an objective-driven game set on a remake of the original Operation Flashpoint’s island of Malden, and that new Malden is coming to Arma 3 on June 22nd too. Arma 3 will also borrow Argo’s cooperative mode, Combat Patrol. It’ll be a big day for serious simulated shooting. Read the rest of this entry »
Players will suffer sweats when they see these jets they are about to gets in the game of persistent threats. These new planes will appear in campaigns over the plains to cause some pains for territorial gains, and if one’s in your sight then just dogfight while taking flight with military might in Arma 3 [official site]. Your cover will be blown if you don’t go prone while one’s flown over you in the red zone. I’m writing as shown because everyone’s gone home and I’ve been left alone.
Read the rest of this entry »
Bohemia’s military sim Arma 3 [official site] is three years old but goodness me, it’s not slowing down. Bohemia have laid out their content plans for the next year, which include a free remake of Operation Flashpoint’s island of Malden, and paid DLC covering new jets, new gear, new missions, and so on, then creeping into early 2018 we’ll see more tanks rolling out. Busy year! A new video dev diary goes over the goods: Read the rest of this entry »
We’re talking away
I don’t know what
I’m to write I’ll write it anyway
Today’s another day to distract you
Gabbing away
Bohemia’s space sim looks pretty okay
Taaake Onnn Maaars
Take On Mars [official site]!
Ittt’s nooow ooouuut
Take On Mars!
I’llll beeee gonnne
With this sooong Read the rest of this entry »
Bohemia Interactive’s Mars ’em up, Take On Mars [official site], is launching out of Early Access and into full game status on 9 February. It has a new trailer to mark the occasion which you can watch after the jump. The trailer focuses on the story mission which was recently introduced and deals with a The Martian-esque plotline where one person survives a descent into Mars’s atmosphere but they’ve lost connection to Earth. Read the rest of this entry »
Arma developers Bohemia Interactive today launched Project Argo [official site], a 5v5 multiplayer tactical FPS built upon Arma 3, as a free public prototype. It’s one of the first games from their Bohemia Incubator label, also launched today, under which they’ll tinker with experiments and prototypes. Some of these Incubator games will be scrappy and some may never be finished, which is why Bohemia plan to make many of them free. Bohemia have also put Ylands, their Minecraftbut, into the Incubator. Ylands is not free but does have a free trial. Read the rest of this entry »
Arma 3 [official site] has jetted off on its summer hols with the launch of its Apex expansion today. Apex sends those surly soldiers to the sunny South Pacific to adventure on the tropical archipelago of Tanoa. Naturally, they’ve snuck a few fun toys into their luggage – one can hardly hit the beach without a thermal-masking uniform. A big update launched aside Apex too, with changes for all Arma 3.
Arma 3 will jet off on its summer hols to the sunny South Pacific on July 11th, developers Bohemia announced during E3 this week. The military sim’s Apex expansion [official site] introduces the archipelago of Tanoa with 100 km² of sun, sea, shanty towns, sugar cane fields, and submachine guns. Along with a new area, it adds new vehicles, men, weapons and whatnot. Observe the customary E3 moving pictures:
Maybe you think you’ll like shooting things, but you’re not sure what flavour of shooting. Are you the type who likes tense, simulated military manshoots you can play with dozens of friends in wide open areas, with missions you make yourself and vehicles you can pilot and drive? Good news! Arma 3 is free on Steam this weekend.
Or are you the type who likes slightly-silly, rapid paced, run-and-gunning against chums and zombies? Good news! Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 multiplayer is free on Steam this weekend.
One big milestone DayZ [official site] has headed for on its hike through the boglands of Early Access has been a new renderer [the bit of a game engine which turns numbers into pictures -‘Technical’ ed.]. Developers Bohemia Interactive have been working on a new DirectX 11 renderer which should bring far better performance to the open-world survival game, and maybe tart it up a little too. This has, of course, taken far longer than they’d planned (and said), but it is coming along. Check out this new video showing off the DX11 renderer and some dangerously heavy rain.
“You can imagine the editor as a military-themed Mario Maker on PC,” says one Bohemian in a video showing off the new editor coming to Arma 3 [official site] later this month. It certainly looks a lot friendlier than Arma editors of yore. Sure, folks have already managed to turn Arma into everything from a zombie apocalypses to a job simulator, but more approachable tools mean even more people making stuff. I am always in favour of more people making things. The more readme files the merrier, I always say. Missions and mods too, I suppose. Here, have a look at the new editor:
Cast your mind back to the hazy summer of 2012, when the world first went wild for DayZ [official site]. ITV sent Ross Kemp in to interview DayZ’s most notorious player-killing gangs, an entire edition of The Observer’s New Review supplement reported on arts and culture in Chernarus (with a fascinating piece on puppet theatre!), and MasterChef’s Invention Test round gave contestants scavenged ingredients – trail mix, tinned sardines, a can of Mountain Green, etc. My, how the survive ’em up took off!
So you may have a DayZ forums account, in which case you should know that they were hacked recently and you should do that whole password-changing dance.
Historically, the go-to feature for adding a splash of scary to games has been zombies. Hordes of ’em, coz the undead are terrifying, yeah? So what do you do when your game began life as a zombified mod for another game, like DayZ [official site] to the open-world military sim Arma II? You introduce predatory animals to the relative safety of the world’s expansive plains. In DayZ, that’s the plan and this here work-in-progress video is proof:
RPS Feature Can a rookie play with Arma veterans?
There was a shot. It was not the sound guns make in Call of Duty or Battlefield. It was more of a sugar stick snapping or stretched bones cracking. Sparks was still running, his back occasionally illuminated by passing bullets. Careful, considered commands still coming over comms. I, however, was not moving. My vision blurred, and I fell. A crack later, and I was no longer in first person – cast into spectator mode by death.
This is how my first mission with Folk ARPS, the Rock, Paper, Shotgun joint Arma 3 outfit, came to an end.
Here is how it began.
RPS Feature A day with Arma 3's roleplaying mod
Altis Life is a roleplaying mod for Arma 3 [official site], featuring police, ambulance crews and outlaws. We sent Brendan deep into one of the UK servers to see what the populace is up to.
Hank receives a message. ‘Raise your altitude or be shot down’. Before either of us have time to consider it, we can hear the telltale crack of gunfire beneath us. Hank lifts the helicopter higher and higher until the gunshots ebb away. We are flying high over the orange streetlights of Kavala now, over the main street of the town, the bank, the fishmongers, the pub. I turn to Hank. Was that the police shooting at us?
“Yeah,” he says, hand on the stick, “that was small arms fire.”
Bohemia don’t always seem the most organised with how they update their games, whether it’s DayZ or Take On Mars, but they have been much better over the past few years with Arma 3 [official site]. I like especially their regular posts about their internal development roadmap, and there’s now a post and new footage outlining updates and expansions to come in 2016.
RPS Feature Matt Damon simulator.
At first glance, Take On Mars [official site] seems like the closest thing we have to a tie-in game for The Martian. You could almost call it Mark Watney Simulator 2015, especially now that manned missions are in the game and let you do things like build Martian bases, grow crops, and drive rugged rovers over the desolate Martian surface. Hell, there’s even a mission where you literally have nothing to do inside your base except grow potatoes. It’s just a fecal-matter montage away from being the first act of The Martian.
But I am no Mark Watney. And the Red Planet is a much harsher, weirder place in Bohemia Interactive’s vision than in Ridley Scott’s. Mark Watney is nearly killed by flying debris during a Martian sandstorm. In Take On Mars, no storm is as terrifying and unpredictable as the physics engine.
In what can only be described as a Mars-a-thon week, we’ve witnessed not only the release of Ridley Scott’s book-to-film interpretation of The Martian, but also the news that science boffins have discovered evidence of water up there on the Red Planet. On the ball as ever, Arma makers Bohemia Interactive have now added to the Mars Madness by releasing a Power Update to their Early Access-residing space exploration and survival sim Take On Mars [official site].
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every weekday of the year, perhaps for all time.
DayZ [official site] takes the pernickety simulation of Arma and applies it to a grim survivalist tale. One in which the already dreach weather and desolate towns of Chernarus have become infested with zombies and in which the survivors are driven to do terrible things in order to keep on living – or to entertain themselves. It is also, just as importantly, often boring.
