Archief - [ARMA1] Armed Assault : The ultimate combat simulation

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btw er staat een artikel over arma in de pc gameplay

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+ punten

- spannende, gevarieerde missies
- Intensieve sfeer op het slagveld

- punten

- Slechte besturing van de voertuigen
- Nog werk aan de AI

Bij elke beta versie laat maakt Arma grote vooruitgang en met deze versie heb ik bijna evenveel plezier beleeft da met OFP zelf
Als ze de behandeling van de voertuigen, AI en het savesysteem verbeteren zou Armed assault wel eens mijn favo strategy shooter kunnen worden.
OFP fans zullen Armed assault zeker bejubelen, nieuwkomers zullen teleurgesteld zijn. (vink ni erg )


Verwachting : uitstekend.

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Though it doesn’t have such a huge fan base in our country(Hungary), like in the other countries of Europe or in America, the spectacular success of Operation Flashpoint is unarguable. A game, which even 6 years after its publishing lives and blooms still, and additionally the – incidentally incredible Bohemia Interactive – doesn’t really support the game. Who remembers those games which was published along with the OFP? Additionally, the game created a genre. True, it is classifiable as tactical shooter, however the czeh developers were the first one to create a game in which the player could get in all vehicles, and could go anywhere he/she wanted on a 25 cubic kilometers island.

As I mentioned, they didn’t have to take care of supporting, because the engine was so „open”, that fans have been expanding OFP up to nowadays. Thus the Bohemia guys had time to deal with their simulator(VBS). Which is good for us, players, because they learned a lot from military stuff, and were able to implement them in their following game, Armed Assault. Why is this it’s name, and not Operation Flashpoint 2? Well, it has techinal and political reasons.

Armed Assault is nor tecnically a sequel, since it’s a game using OFP’s revamped engine, and not a totally new engine. Though this doesn’t mean that the develpoers took a small step, but instead they don’t want to call something a sequel, which in ther opinion isn’t one. The other reason is political: the name „Operation Flashpoint” is the Codemasters property, and since they got across each other, the name couldn’t stay.

When we were at GC, at the IDEA Games’s stand – where Armed Assault was presented – they gave us a press DVD, which contained the Armed Assault’s press version. We tried this at home, and this preview shows the result of the testing. First of all, I tell you that I’m a big fan of OFP, so I’m a little biased regarding Armed Assault. Although I will emphasise the cons, it is important to say, that I played an early preview version. Which means they are still developing the game at full throttle, and I hope that they will fix a lot of the things which caused me bad experience. They will surely not fix everything, as some of the bugs were in OFP already, and if they didn’t fix those first, it can mean that they are the engine’s speciality.

For example the AI’s road-holding is one of these. We could already experience in OFP, that when the graphical engine was strained (because it had to draw too many detailed object) then the AI-driven vehicles were zig-zagging on the road, and could be Y-turing for long seconds in crossings. The Armed Assault inherited this thing. Here I would note that the test PC isn’t a fresh one, but nor it is a weak one: P4 2.4 Ghz, 1 GB RAM, GeForce 6600 GT. And on this PC, the graphics could never - not even with lower settings – be drawn normally. This means that the game was either jerky or the object weren’t drawn on normal quality. You can see on the pictures, that the models are rough and the textures are slubbered. If I waited a little there – my HD was working non-stop – then more detailed models and textures were drawn.

I think they will fix this. And in fact, this is the worst I can tell about ArmA. Because incidentally, the game is pretty nice. The soldiers have such high quality models, which we expect form any new games. The land is pretty detailed too, and nowadays the grass is also a basic expectation. And to those, who criticise the graphics despite that, I say that I’ve seen nicer games too, but we have very small, limited area in those, which isn’t a grat deal to make good-looking. But in ArmA we have a whole island. We can go where we want, we can complete tasks as we want. The price for this great freedom is that the graphics is a little weaker than in some top games, which we will forget a year later, but we will play ArmA even six years later.

I was able to try some missions and the campaign. The missions aren’t really different from OFP’s. The weapon selecting became different, and the signs on the map progressed. A nice new feature can be discovered in the campaign. We are able to select a secondary mission before the major mission. The secondary mission has effects on the major mission, and if it’s done, the enemy might have less tanks, or we might get artillery support, etc. We can skip these tasks if we want, but there won’t be any bonuses then. An extra curiosity for these tasks is that we can only select one task before each mission, but it has alternatives. So it’s up to us to decide whether if we want to receive more troops, or we want to delay the enemy reinforcements.

I can’t tell you many innovations about AI, since it’s performing well in OFP as well, except when it went too close to it’s enemies. Now it feels that the closeness isn’t a problem for the AI. Although it’s hard to judge since the graphics strained the test PC so much that basically everyone acted a little dumber. Despite that, it was good to see that urban fight greatly progressed. The AI-driven mates were decently moving and they shot down foes pretty cleverly.
It shows up on the engine, that it has been used for military purpuses before. And this is good for us, players.

For other games, it’s a habit to mention the weapons, units and vehicles that can be found in the game. There’s not much point in that here, since all OFP addons/mods will be possible to import, and the number of these is almost infinite. Let’s add this: this is only a promise yet, because I wasn’t able to import any addons into this preview version yet(translator’s note: addons must be converted with some tool first). It can be seen immediately that there has been a jump in the time too: from 1985 we reached nowadays. This shows on the uniforms and weapons too. The soldier’s anims modernized too, now we feel the Black Hawk Down type movies closer to ourselves than the WW2 movies.

As a veteran mission editor, I looked at the mission editor of course, which maximum changed in its look. But inside, everything remains the same, which isn’t a problem, since everything could be archieved with it. There’s a document on the web, which contains almost double more scripts than the number of scripts in OFP (already existing + new scripts). We should be happy for that, because in OFP there were some things that were really difficult to archieve. This shows us in advance, that we won’t be bored even years after the publishing, because more game modes, weapons, missions and campaigns will be waiting for us, while the czeh guys work on the real sequel.

To sum up, Armed Assault is everything what the prime OFP fans have been waiting for a long time. If we pimp our PC a little, then we won’t be disappointed. We receive a well expandable, long-term activity providing, real military simulator, tactical FPS, which has more detailed graphics, and it’s waiting for us with modern feeling instead of cold war. It’s a worthy challenger at every aspects for all of it’s opponents, which were born following OFP. And I bet that we will be still playing Armed Assault when no one will remember it’s opponent’s name.

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