Modders, rejoice! Arma 3 scenarios are now easier than ever to produce. The Eden editor has emerged from a long beta into general release, giving you the ability to edit in 3D and, you know, see what your tinkering does before you commit.

For purists, Eden preserves the top-down functionality of the old editor, and better still, it preserves the functionality of old scenarios: everything is backwards-compatible. One of the more amusing changes is the addition of Undo/Redo buttons, which really didn't exist before, just like the asset search and filtering functionality that has been included. If you want to get meta, the Eden editor itself can be modded with custom plugins.

The Eden update brings with it a new server browser embedded directly in the launcher, meaning no more main menu to get into a game and, more significantly, fewer limitations imposed by the engine itself. Filter options are more expansive as a result. It'll offer to automatically install missing mods as you join custom servers too.

Arma's authentic audio has been enriched thanks to new distance-based samples of guns being shot and objects exploding, supported by a multi-channel amplitude panner for when you really want to feel the PTSD setting in.

Finally, what might be my top understated patch note of all time: "Font Process information more quickly with a new, easier-to-read in-game font." It's all in the details.

The entire changelog can be found here.

On this week's mod Roundup, a more informative HUD arrives for Skyrim and wearable backpacks appear in Fallout 4. Meanwhile, The Witcher 3 gets a beautiful texture makeover, and Arma 3 becomes host to an alien virus in a mod that echos John Carpenter's classic horror film "The Thing."

Here are the most promising mods we've seen this week.

Wearable Backpack, for Fallout 4

Download link

If you're looking for an immersive way to improve your carry weight in Fallout 4 (without strapping on a hulking set of power armor), here's a nice little mod that adds a wearable backpack. Backpacks are always a highly requested mod in Bethesda RPGs: they makes you feel like a real traveler, a drifter, a vagabond. This one is no exception.

HD Reworked Project, for The Witcher 3

Download link

I think The Witcher 3 looked pretty nice, but the great thing about the modders of PC games is that they're always working hard to make games look even better. This mod improves—greatly I'd say—the textures of rocks and boulders, crates and sacks, and floors and tiles. Have a look at the video above: comparison shots begin at about 45 seconds in, and you can really see the difference.

The Thing, for Arma 3

Download link

This custom scenario for Arma 3 brings to life John Carpenter's landmark horror film The Thing (based on the sci-fi novella "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campell, Jr., which I recently read.) Set in 1982, you lead a team of Marines to investigate an outpost in Antarctica and deal with (shoot) the horrifying results of an alien virus. Note, it requires several other mods to be installed—you'll find a full list on this Steam Workshop page.

moreHUD, for Skyrim

Download link

You're romping through Skyrim and spot something: a book, a weapon, a piece of armor. What are its properties? To find out, you need to pick it up, then open your inventory and search for the item to find out. The moreHUD mod makes an item's properties available simply by looking at it. It'll tell you if you've already read the book you're looking at, how a weapon's damage will improve your attacks, and list an ingredient's effects. You can even see how much an item weighs, and how it'll contribute to your current carryweight. Nice!

This community-created, officially endorsed guide to defense is a useful primer for newcomers to Arma's hard-sim approach to modern military combat, but doubles as a good showcase of Arma 3's strengths. 

Arma 3's scale and realistic understanding of the effective range of modern weaponry creates deep battlefields. And I mean physical depth, measured from your position to the point where you have to start engaging the enemy. Scouting tactics are vital when the enemy is kilometres away. Arma fights happen on a scale most RTS games don't simulate.

It's an ambitious, impressive co-op game—one of the best—but it demands plenty of time and patience. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course, it just means that videos like these are particularly helpful. Here's another one on machine gun teams.

The most interesting and intimidating aspect of the Arma 3 ecosystem is its capacity to handle change. Developer Bohemia Interactive has updated Arma 3 so widely and aggressively—an all-powerful 'dungeon master' multiplayer mode called Zeus, a physics-based flight simulator mode, a go-kart racing mode—that the game we have now is very different from the game we saw at launch in 2013. Heck, that Arma 3 didn t even have a single-player campaign mode.

Arma s community has also grown, with amazingly talented modders bringing new weapons and maps and endless hours of scripted missions to the game. Now that Arma has sold two million units, Bohemia has sketched out its plans for the next year s worth of updates leading up to the new landmass, Tanoa.

Nexus

ETA: November 2015

The first and least sexy update is titled Nexus. Nexus is laying the groundwork for later updates by overhauling Arma s core systems. First, Bohemia is rewriting how stamina and fatigue work. Until now, jogging and walking have always reduced soldier effectiveness in different ways. Having a heavy pack and walking up a hill is enough to make it hard to aim and impossible to sprint. After Nexus, players will be able to enjoy infinite jogging, basically: stamina only comes into play when players are in a flat-out sprint.

While this will make traversing Arma s giant battlegrounds on foot a little less restrictive, the change hasn t been received warmly by some parts of the community. Fortunately, as Shack Tactical founder Andrew Gluck wrote on Twitter, the old system can always come back with mods.

Nexus will also change how personal protective gear works and add new community support for players looking for reliable groups to join. The multiplayer mode End Game will change, setting the stage for more game types in a similar vein.

Eden

ETA: Early 2016

Eden will bring Arma modders to the promised land with a new 3D scenario editor. No longer will modders squint down at an overhead map trying to guesstimate and place objects by trial and error. The 3D view window based off of Zeus-mode technology lets modders place and rotate objects in real space. A bunch of improvements to the Arma 3 editor will hopefully make the entire process much more seamless.

Players have been begging for some of the changes in Eden for over a decade: an undo button, new MP game finding, control mapping, and weapon switching. Bohemia is also promising some new shading and lighting tech to make water and fire graphics pop.

Apex

ETA: Mid-2016

Nexus and Eden are laying the groundwork for the really big deal: Apex. The new south Pacific landmass, Tanoa, will launch as paid content, along with a co-op campaign, new weapons, and new vehicles. The main menu will be redesigned. New vehicle classes like vertical take-off and landing jets and Light Strike Vehicles (basically: open-air dune buggies full of men with guns) will bring new ways to attack any mission.

Bohemia says it's continuing the features are free, content is premium doctrine that we saw in previous expansions like Helicopters and Marksmen. I m a big fan of that system, as I ve written here before, but in this case I don t think it quite applies. 

Making new gun physics a free update—while making sexy new guns only for paying customers—works because two players can play together with different guns. The developer earns money without breaking up the player base. In Apex, however, the landmass of Tanoa itself will be only for customers who pay for the Apex expansion, and there s no way for paid and non-paid players to play together on that island. Despite the policy, Tanoa is the first paid update that will break up the Arma player population. I wouldn't expect an entire landmass to be free, but that worries me.

Assuming the player population keeps growing and new content keeps flowing, though, Arma 3 should get much more user-friendly and much more versatile. With the freedom to mod anything and everything still in place, even unpopular changes should still be part of a more welcoming, exciting version of the best military sandbox around.

Arma 3's 3D editing tools are now available in beta form, and I hope at least one of you will be using them to recreate MGSV: Ground Zeroes' Camp Omega. Of course, Bohemia's military sim has had scenario editing tools for a while now, but they've suffered from one fewer dimension than many of us are used to in our daily lives. In addition to that extra D, the 'Eden' tools will supposedly be easier to use.

If you've made scenarios with the 2D editor before now, rest assured that Eden will be backwards compatible as well. I keep using the future tense during this article—because Bohema says the new editor "will be made available to all Arma 3 players for free as part of a future platform update"—but it's actually available right now! Er, if you fancy putting up with "an experimental and largely untested version of Arma 3". Simply right-click on Arma 3 in your Steam Library, and opt-in to development builds on the properties tab, and Eden will be all yours.

Bohemia revealed the tools on a livestream a couple of days ago. Here's a YouTube recording of that:

The accompanying blog post goes into some detail about the editor. I'll quote a chunk of it below.

"Users will now be able to directly create or edit entities, such as characters, vehicles, buildings and other objects, within the 3D game environment. They can also set mission objectives, define waypoints, control time of day and weather, and make use of all other functionality previously available in the classic 2D editor."

"[...] The more advanced scenario creators, on the other hand, can continue to make use of the extensive library of custom scripts. Plus their previously created scenarios made in the original 2D editor will be backwards-compatible. In addition, modders can extend the editor's functionality via custom plugins."

Bohemia says the Eden editor will be "seamlessly" integrated into the Arma 3 Steam Worskhop, which is nice. (Thanks, Blue's News.)

A couple of weeks ago we spent time with Space Beast Terror Fright, the alien-blasting FPS with the giant guns and tiny corridors. Clomping around inside Space Beast Terror Fright s narrow hallways is claustrophobic—thanks, in part, to a narrower-than-usual field of view. PC gamers routinely push, cajole, beg, and mod custom FOV controls into games whenever possible, and some argue that a wide FOV is critical for all PC games.

I don t agree. The field of view, just like any other design element, is a tool developers use to create an experience. Let s stop thinking of FOV as a line-item in an options-menu must-have list. The FOV controls what we see in a game, and we should give developers the freedom to use that power.

None of this is to excuse sloppy PC ports of console games, however. In those cases, the standard 60-degree FOV is better suited to being viewed on a giant TV from across a room—up close, it s a nauseating mess. To be clear, all games should be physically comfortable to play.

According to Space Beast Terror Fright developer Johannes Norneby, the game s FOV is 90 degrees, and he has no plans to include a custom slider. A 90-degree FOV was pretty standard in the days of Quake and Doom, but a lot of modern FPSes let players adjust their FOV up to 100 or 120 degrees. For players in Space Beast Terror Fright, their 90-degree window is cluttered and likely to be filled by an alien maw at any moment. The FOV helps give the game its feeling of menace and claustrophobia, but it also has a relationship to other game mechanics.

When you get scared in Space Beast Terror Fright, the FOV increases to maximally around 150 degrees in extreme cases, Norneby said. This change pulsates with the sound of a heartbeat, so the closer you get to aliens without taking action, the more freaked out a marine becomes. I suspect that what you experience as a narrow FOV is caused by both the helmet and visor design in conjunction with the cone of the flashlight, which slowly decreases over time with draining battery. This creates a sort of vignette effect in the image, where the edges are darker.

Combining these dynamic FOV changes with a custom FOV slider could lead to view angles of greater than 180 degrees, which would cause all kinds of chaos in the game s internal calculations. Norneby has no plans to add an FOV slider, though there is a way to tone down the pulsations if it s causing motion sickness. This is a perfect example of a developer using the FOV to simulate fear, adrenaline, claustrophobia, and anxiety in a character. Demanding a slider would take those tools away from Norneby to make the game he wants to make.

We ve written plenty about Arma 3 in this column, but one thing we ve never mentioned is its use of sight and blindness as a tool. In Arma, infantry combat comes with no heads-up displays or enemy markers or any of the other conveniences players in other FPSes use to find targets. Sharp vision and keen powers of observation are a skill—maybe even a superpower.

When vision is as crucial as it is in Arma, taking away sight becomes even more meaningful. Vanilla Arma 3 doesn t offer a FOV slider, so first person soldiers aren t able to expand their peripheral vision. For drivers of armored cars or helicopter pilots, the physical contours of their vehicles block important visual information. Experienced pilots have to develop an instinct for the size of their vehicles and rely on squadmates to communicate information they can t see for themselves.

Elite: Dangerous pulls a similar trick to make different ships feel different to players: a zippy fighter like an Eagle has a glass dome spanning almost 180 degrees of visibility. A clunker transport like the Adder sports a narrow windshield, like driving a minivan with warp engines. Using the freelook button or wearing a headset like the TrackIR or Oculus Rift lets pilots look around more, but what transport pilots can see is mostly bulkhead and decking. Low-tier transports are also slower and less agile than fighters. Flying a basic transport in Elite: Dangerous feels vulnerable in part because dogfighting is discouraged by the pilot s viewport. What you can see and what you can t becomes a part of the game.

I hope we can push back against the knee-jerk instinct to insist that every first-person game come with an FOV slider. We should come around to the idea that FOV—just like lighting, particles, and textures—is a graphical tool developers use to build a sense of place. Blacklisting or writing off fixed FOV games without regard for context deprives us of valuable, immersive experiences.

Military sims like Arma need a lot of space for their features to breathe, which places a lot of importance on the design and layout of any new terrain. Following up on the reveal of Tanoa at the PC Gaming Show, Bohemia has pulled back a few more of the information-obscuring branches on its "green hell"for Arma 3, due with the game's first expansion in the first half of 2016.

One takeaway from the video is Bohemia's status update on the development progress of Tanoa. Creative director Jay Crowe says that the "basic layout, basic shape, structure of the terrain is in place" and that Bohemia has moved on to populating the map itself. New tech for Tanoa is being worked on, too—the lighting config, a new ocean shader—and it sounds like some of this will be integrated retroactively into existing Arma 3 terrain.

Bohemia also, for the first time I think, explicitly mentions Fiji as a prominent part of its source material for the creation of Tanoa. Bohemia sent two of its environment designers to Fiji to gather photo references of structures, vegetation, and other materials, not to recreate Fiji, but to capture its atmosphere as a foundation for what will become Tanoa. Bohemia also mentions that they've tried to do a Pacific map for some time. "We actually considered the Pacific setting for several, unfortunately, cancelled projects in the past," says Joris-Jan van 't Land.

Finally, Bohemia teases a new 3D scenario editor coming either with or after the release of the new expansion.

The FPS genre has produced amazing stories, as proven by successes like Portal, BioShock, or Metro 2033. It s much more common, though, to see a pastiche of Rambo and Saving Private Ryan smeared over the top of more interesting mechanical stuff, like interesting movement, encouraging great teams, and a thriving competitive community. As Tyler dug into last week in his plan for a better Call of Duty, good storytelling is rarer than it should be, especially considering the resources behind major FPS franchises.

Still, I m nothing if not optimistic. While reviewing the winning mods in Arma 3 s Make Arma Not War contest, I came across Deliverance and found a case study in great storytelling from an unlikely source. Plot, characters, voice acting, and cinematography in amateur mods are routinely atrocious. But Deliverance pulls it off, and it was rewarded with a third place win in the single-player category. How does Deliverance get it right?

Step 1: Take risks

Deliverance tells the story of a race war, a subject that Call of Duty wouldn t touch from a mile away with an unmanned drone. War breaks out after an Apartheid-like law is put in place on Altis, segregating the island s black population to the poor, undeveloped northeastern landmass.

There s a lot of ways this could go wrong. It s scary territory for a writer. But in making the attempt, Deliverance shows players interesting, nuanced minority characters by the dozen. The Wisecracking Black Sergeant from every war movie ever has no place here.

"Making players care about small, intimate conflicts would change the entire tenor of Call of Duty."

Part one of Deliverance follows a white member of the official Altis Army. He and his squad a well-armed, well-trained, and supported by heavy weapons and air support. As the group ventures north into segregated territory, there s a real sense of isolation as the comforts of the racist south get farther away.

In part two, the story follows a young black mechanic who has spent his early life suffering at the hands of the white government. After being attacked in the middle of the night by white frat boys in a flashy hatchback, he flees his home and joins the insurgent black army. Though the insurgents have greater numbers, they re armed only with ancient cast-offs and their own anger.

Step 2: Give the player space

Deliverance gives players room to make their own decisions. Even though most of the set pieces are the same as Call of Duty in form, in practice they let you do what you want to do. During one mission, I needed to cross a valley and a road to link up with my squad. I could head straight across the center, crawling to avoid detection. Or, I could curve around the west side and kill a guard. All told, I had a square mile to do anything I wanted. (I ended up off-roading it to the rendezvous.)

Giving me the space to solve problems made me invested in their solutions. Once I became engaged in the plot, feeling connected to the characters around me was easy. I enjoyed the cutscenes in Deliverance, even though the animation was pretty rough. I think back to all of the times I rolled my eyes through a Battlefield cutscene because I didn t care that Grumpy Redneck Sniper was mad at Sarcastic Nerd Corporal. I wasn t interested because we were all sitting in a theme park ride together, and I couldn t escape the feeling that it would go on whether I was there or not.

Step 3: Say something real about war

The central theme of Deliverance (besides the obvious: racism is bad) is the way war makes good people do bad things. Both protagonists have moments where desperation and tribalism lead them do regrettable things without pause. There are accidents and death that aren t caused by anyone being The Bad Guys. Deliverance shows that bad things happen when you give young men war paint and guns and set them loose.

As I mentioned, last week Tyler spent some time in this space thinking about how to save Call of Duty. I submit that Deliverance and stories like it hold the key to solving that game s image problem. Making players care about small, intimate conflicts would change the entire tenor of that series. Not having the burden of a globe-spanning, epic storyline makes a big difference. People die just as dead in Deliverance as they do in Call of Duty, but without the background noise of Mega America nuking Super China—or whatever—the characters can be real people telling a story about their lives. No normal human can carry that much exposition without an enhanced exo-suit, which is why it s so easy to get lost in it. When I get lost, I stop caring.

Deliverance is one example of how freedom and risk-taking can create stories in FPSes that can t be told in film or books. Maybe, just maybe, a huge yearly war game will take those cues to heart and use their considerable talent and monstrous budget to explore something amazing. I m nothing if not optimistic.

Deliverance took third place in the Make Arma Not War contest, single-player mod category. You can get it on Steam.

You can t dissociate Arma from its terrain. Players joke about Arma and DayZ being walking simulators, but the reason they make that crack at all is because of how well most of Arma s stock and player-made maps hold up as authentic-feeling spaces despite the fact that they re often hundreds of square kilometers big.

At our PC Gaming Show today Bohemia officially revealed their next terrain for Arma 3, Tanoa, a South Pacific setting coming in Arma 3 s first expansion in the first half of 2016. Bohemia describes Tanoa as a South Pacific archipelago with a land mass of over 100km², and home to lush tropical vegetation, unique landmarks, a rich history, and imposing man-made feats of modern engineering. It ll be bundled with new vehicles, weapons, gear, attachments, and more with Arma 3 s first expansion, which will be distributed as Arma 3 DLC, meaning it won't be standalone.

This is the first time Arma has, outside of user-created mods, been set in the South Pacific. And although we can see a small variety of terrain types in the trailer, I m most curious about how Tanoa s dense jungles will influence firefights. Bohemia will almost certainly need to add new equipment (and perhaps vehicles) to help players manage the limited visibility in these areas, but this could be the first time that players (and AI) have large brush-covered areas to effectively hide in. Secondary to that, I m excited about the idea of island-hopping on rafts between missions.

You can watch the full interview with Bohemia below, and see even more screenshots further down:

The first ever PC Gaming Show happened Tuesday night at E3! With host Sean 'Day9' Plott at the helm, we looked at a great variety of games, big and small. You can watch the archived steam on our Twitch channel, and the whole thing is broken up by segment on our YouTube channel—you can watch it all above.

The highlights

• Tripwire announces Rising Storm 2: Vietnam
• Creative Assembly teases Total War: Warhammer
• Phil Spencer says Microsoft "lost our way with PC gaming"
• Gears of War Ultimate Edition is coming to PC
• Dean Hall says, "I stayed on DayZ for longer than I intended"
• Dean Hall's Ion has organ simulation, Diablo-like camera
• Frontier announces Planet Coaster with trailer
• Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns trailer shows guild halls
• Pillars of Eternity's first expansion is The White March
• Tanoa is Arma 3's new jungle terrain - first video and screens
• Watch the full Dirty Bomb E3 trailer, and get a free mercenary
• DayZ single-player mode and server hosting planned
• The Monk from Diablo 3 is coming to Heroes of the Storm
• StarCraft 2 Whispers of Oblivion prologue missions revealed
• No Man's Sky will release on PC at the same time as PS4

The trailers

No Man's Sky

Dirty Bomb

Arma 3

Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

American Truck Simulator

Planet Coaster

Total War: Warhammer

Rising Storm 2: Vietnam

StarCraft 2

Heroes of the Storm

SOMA