Boba and Rooster have got themselves a server so I'd like to do both them and all of you uncivilised heathens a favour by making a thread about this amazing milsim
Mil... what?
Milsim. It's a military simulator rather than a game; however, it's not as inaccessible as you might be led to believe. Obviously twitch shooting will get you into a very deep hole very fast, but with a little practice it's not too hard to come out on the winning side of a firefight. Bohemia Interactive actually designed ArmA II (and its predecessor, ArmA) around the VBS 2 and VBS engines respectively, which are used by the US and Australian armies as training aids. The ArmA series is actually more of a sequel to OFP than Dragon Rising is, since the latter is most definitely a game.
I don't trust you. It sounds hard and boring.
I won't lie; if you can't go for five minutes without getting your action fix, you should definitely stay the fuck away from ArmA II. Both yourself and the community will be better for it. That said, it does get pretty intense - we're talking scores of players on a massive open-world map, with shit blowing up everywhere - and sometimes you'll even find yourself relieved not to have been contacted for the last half hour.
In terms of difficulty, it has a fairly steep learning curve, but it doesn't take too long to master. The hardest thing to get the hang of is probably the clunky controls; there are more key bindings than I wish to even think about, but for the most part you'll only be using the same main ones you'd expect in your average FPS. There is a small tutorial built into the single-player campaign, but if that fails to help you, there are also community-made training missions and online servers designed to help new players.
Alright, but what about multiplayer? Campaigns are for faggots. Pros like me need to hit the online scene.
Co-op campaigns, co-op missions, team-based deathmatch, team-based objective... the list goes on. There's an endless variety thanks to both the built-in scenario editor and the massive modding community, who constantly churn out addons and tweaks. On top of that, BIS releases patches fairly regularly; the last added a wealth of new units and features, a whole new campaign, and fixed a lot of niggling bugs.
How far you go really depends on your own preferences. You may want to just hit up a Domination mode and go blow shit up, or maybe go on a long (sometimes upwards of five hours) co-op with your mates.
Show me.
Ok.
Here's a pretty sloppy video I threw up on Youtube to show a large-scale armoured skirmish at night - lots of pretty lights and explosions:
Fan-made promo for ACE 2's PLA addon
More videos from the same guy, mostly cinematic - yeah, there's potential there too
A lot of currently serving/ex-service brosefs play this religiously, and are only too happy to share their wealth of knowledge:
I could post videos, screens and after-action reports all day, but in the end, I doubt it'd help much. There's just so much to experience that it would be impossible to include it all in one thread, although certainly at a later date I'll try and do just that. In the meantime, give it some thought; ArmA 2 caters to any serious gamer, from the creepy snipers like me to demoman lovers to aspiring pilots. Land, sea, and air; infantry, artillery, armour, transport, and support; fighters, bombers, attack helicopters and transports, and drones; light armour, heavy armour, air defence, transport... the list goes on. There are even zombie mods, WWII mods, and God knows what else in the works.
For those interested, I'll look into running some short missions which will give you guys a chance to get up to speed on things. I'll be glad to help you out with some of the basics of infantry life, too.
Originally Posted by Aerowyn
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