One of the, if not the, last series that actually makes new hardware purchases justified. Im still using my 4 year old PC for the console ports...
As for dumbing it down: The community will scream when this happens too much. And so will I. The controls right now are nice, very easy for the complexity it offers and intuitive if you know OFP. Nothing has become more complex than it was in OFP, that isnt justified. I dont know how anyone would even think that.
There are still bugs that I hate, like the player automatically dropping a M136 or in some cases NLAW just because its one-use. This takes too much time and gives the enemy enough time to see where you are and kill you, since you cant move during this animation. You simply cant abort this animation or make it faster. Same with similar situations like when you bandage someone, etc. There should be at least a panic button.
Also the AI is still cheating. Trees/bushes/grasses plus AI is just horrible. You simply cant see them without thermal, because they can often see through those trees and bushes, though it has improved each patch. And I hope pathfinding will be improved again, but I know how hard that is on such huge maps. Still, they have improved quite a bit with the patches - even with the last one. Very nice to see that they are still working on a 3 year old game.
And also, while I condemn DLC on other games, I loved what they did with it in ArmA 2. I hope they release DLC on a regular basis this time. There are lots of possibilities. However, they shouldnt replace expansions with it. OA was awesome.
Above all else it should become more realistic. The armor-system of tanks needs improvement, aka being more complex and not allow explosions of the tank so easily, weapons need to be more realistic, as in being able to adjust the zeroing where its possible in real life too, mods, and even a lock and load function would be nice incl. possible jams and misfires. All buildings need to be accessible again, like in OFP, the destruction system of the buildings could use improvements, even though its quite good already, and the netcode needs a huge improvement. I am positive they will improve it because they improved ArmA 2 so much, I would have never thought it. Not even OFP nor ArmA 1 were ever improved on such a broad scale and in so many ways. However, they overdid it in some cases. Like optimizing the graphics because so many people whined about performance instead of buying a new computer. That actually made the graphics uglier. Maybe a 64 bit version will help with that problem.
Off to another game of warfare.
I have given up on waiting for BIS to come back to their senses and do a real ArmA 2 successor.