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| [Feb 24, 2012, 9:54 pm ET] - Share - Viewing Comments |
A post on the Bohemia Interactive Studios Website by Arma 3 Project Lead Daniel Musil outlines plans to release an alpha version of the military shooter sequel after E3 (which will be in June). Here's a bit: Following E3, we plan to open up the game to our players. This process starts with the release of a playable build of Arma 3. We call it the 'Community Alpha'. It's intended to enable people who'd like to try the game early on in development help us to shape it up - and make Arma 3 the greatest release of the series. Ours is a large and complex game - being developed by a relatively small team - so we really appreciate your opinions, thoughts and feedback.
The Community Alpha will be quite limited in terms of the assets it includes, with the goal of providing enough content to experiment with the brand new bits of gameplay and technology. It also enables our passionate community to prepare their mods for the very latest version of the Real Virtuality engine. Then, later on in the year, we'd like to open up our game up even further with a more extensive beta program. The exact details, however, we intend to set out closer to their launch.
As you may have recently picked up on, we plan to delay the full Arma 3 release. With this additional time, we're focused upon creating a feature-rich, polished, and bug free experience. For us, it all comes down to delivering a quality product. We've achieved a great deal, but we don't want to rush things at the expense of what we finally deliver.
DirectX 10/11 has been implemented. PhysX is working - particularly, rag-doll animation looks really impressive! The UI is undergoing a redesign, with the focus upon improved usability. Indeed, ease of use, and particularly accessibility, has been an entire goal in itself. We've heard your feedback, and we want to make the game easier to learn for those new to the game, without sacrificing anything that makes our game unique. We have reworked our animations using completely new motion capture recordings. The result is the most realistic animations ever achieved in the series, as well as additional gameplay features.
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Re: Arma 3 Alpha Release Planned |
Feb 25, 2012, 01:14 |
Aero |
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Looking forward to seeing what they do. My biggest gripe with Arma/Arma2 was the overly complicated, sometimes utterly braindead, interface and controls.
It was a big step back from Flashpoint in that regard. Flashpoint had exactly the same issues, of course, but Arma/2 were a lot more complex and so it hurt a lot more. While I appreciate all the control you have over your soldier (fluid lean, rolling, all the various movement speeds), it got to be so that when playing it, I felt more like I was driving a mech than controlling a person.
A good example that annoyed me was the zoom/iron sights. Right-click once to enter a slightly zoomed mode (as with OFP) then hold down the right button to bring up the sights. Then, you gotta do all that in reverse to to get back to the standard view.
While that sounds okay in principle, and I admit that since combat happens at realistic ranges there does need to be some sort of zooming to deal with the four slightly darker-green pixels at the corner of your screen that shoots you between the eyes, it made everything feel so halting and disjointed. I imagine there are key mappings that might help (maybe separate zoom and iron sights buttons as in OFP), but it illustrates the principle.
Basically, I think they need to smooth that (and things like that) out either by cutting down on the number of controls, or finding a way to make it more automatic or context sensitive. It's a difficult problem, and I don't want to see it turned into COD, but I think I do want a little more simplicity. Despite its general clunkiness, I think this sort of thing was better in OFP.
Er, so yeah. They got their work cut out for themselves. More simply put, rather than adding more detail and complexity and features, I want them to refine what's already there, which is plenty.
Squad control was okay though. Team AI more capable of some autonomous behavior would go a long way (like just moving to safety instead of standing there in the open, keenly staring in entirely the wrong direction while getting shot at).
Oh, and sort out the "Oh no.--THREE--Is down.--Move to.--CAR--at--12--o'clock. Negative. Negative. Negative. Negative. Negative."
Long rant for yucks. |
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