Simulation isn’t the defining aspect of Arma. It’s scale.

The enormity of the map is the foundation for the experiences that distinguish Bohemia Interactive’s flagship franchise. It’s what makes radios, topographical maps, binoculars, and compasses practical equipment in an FPS. It’s what allows for kilometer-long headshots and coordinated convoy raids. It’s what makes using your eyes to spot hints of enemies--muzzle flashes, tracers, gunsmoke--as valuable as being a crack shot.

The scale of Arma 3 dwarfs everything in the genre, including Arma 2. Altis, a keyhole portion of which is seen in these screenshots, is a Mediterranean island-nation assembled from ruins, airports, coastal villages, solar power plants, military outposts, salt flats, and tank-friendly scrubland. It’s a variegated backyard for you to play war in, but what’s more significant is that Arma’s landscape finally has the technology it deserves.

Fictional and adapted contemporary weapons, vehicles, and equipment make up Arma 3's armory.

Arma 3 represents an aesthetic overhaul of the series. Unbelievable dynamic lighting, a volumetric cloud system, genuine vehicle physics, 3D weapon optics, ragdoll, noticeably improved weapon audio, and other grainy, eye-level details await scrutiny inside Arma 3’s macro elegance. The best improvement is the merciful cutting of Arma 2’s rigid, Tin-Man-without-oil combat animations, which makes infantry combat more responsive in your hands.

A half-year in paid pre-release has given Arma 3 time to gestate, but the final build is far from being a comprehensive reinvention of the series, and some long-standing blemishes that arise from its nature as a gargantuan simulation linger. Even on high-end hardware, my framerate dips under the spectacle of some multiplayer missions. Friendly AI units, though marginally better-behaved, still depend on the player to be their brains, an issue that’s circumvented by playing Arma the way God intended it: cooperatively.

A tank percusses the ground after firing.
Operation cooperation
With voice-connected friends and a good user-created mission, Arma 3 is an unparalleled war story generator. On Operation Fault Line with a gang of Steam pals, I had to drive a clumsy, eight-wheeled transport called a HEMTT across the map. To protect this elephantine truck we had a IFV-6c Panther, an APC with a mounted grenade launcher and 12.7mm MG. Minutes after leaving base, our tanky bodyguard eats a land mine, ruining its left track. As we get out to survey the damage, rockets streak across the valley. Everyone’s okay, but the Panther is immobilized.

Dumping the APC is the only option. We clump into the fragile HEMTT, burning diesel to get off the exposed ridge. Green tracers track the truck, eventually pricking some of my tires. The wheels don’t deflate enough to go flat, but the suspension slumps to the left. For the rest of the mission I have to drive lopsided, constantly counter-steering just to keep the truck on the gravel road. But everyone works together to keep our war bus on track--my teammates give turn instructions, read the map, and scan the road for more mines.

When we’re free of immediate danger, we send someone back to base to retrieve an ATV so that we have a forward scouting element. At one point we position two machinegunners with nightvision scopes at the lip of a valley to provide cover as we drive the HEMTT down an exposed valley, then taxi them back to us on the ATV. The sequence of events, the chatter, the wounds and kills we rack up, all developed because we happened to run over a mine and our tires got shot up.

Arma's online community spans a spectrum of seriousness, inclusiveness, and ridiculousness.
Getting flexible
Arma’s capacity for stimulating camaraderie, atmosphere, and problem-solving, in other words, is fully intact. The feeling of ownership that arises over these moments between you and your squadmates sticks in your brain. Central to this fun is how malleable Arma continues to be for its community, which before launch day had published almost 1,500 missions to Steam Workshop. Assuming you have an internet connection, this well of content compensates for the absence of an official campaign at launch, which will integrate in three free monthly installments beginning in October.

On the ground, a new stance adjustments system is the best thing that’s ever happened to infantry combat in Arma. Holding the Ctrl key as a modifier while tapping W or S cycles between nine vertical stances, and you can also take a horizontal step in addition to using Q or E to lean. You feel articulate--making small body adjustments while behind cover initially feels like finger gymnastics, but the system makes more types of cover viable and more types of weapons viable in that cover. Coupled with the general smoothing of movement and the near elimination of Arma 2’s uninterruptible, sluggish animations, running and gunning should finally feel comfortable to average FPS players.

On the opposite end of your gun, though, AI remains a shortcoming. Arma 3’s enemies share plenty of their ancestors’ DNA, which means that they oscillate between being eagle-eyed snipers at one moment and static, dumb, 3D silhouettes evocative of a light gun arcade game another. Their greatest flaw is that they lack personality, which mostly resigns them to being targets rather than soldiers.

3D weapon optics contribute a lot to Arma 3's infantry combat. Holographic, high-magnification, thermal, and other types of optics can be attached to almost every rifle along with other rail items like grenade launchers and flashlights.

A few sparks of intelligence did impress me--after we killed the rest of his squadmates, I watched a rifleman flee for the first time in Arma, setting up a tense shot where I had a narrow few seconds to snipe him in the back before he disappeared behind trees. This is the sort of human behavior I’d love to see more of, stuff like blind-firing, limping, throwing smoke grenades for cover, claiming abandoned vehicles, or looting bodies for supplies--anything that would lessen the predictability.

Friendly AI is even worse, unfortunately, because they’re typically your responsibility. It’s absurd that my squad’s medic won’t patch me up when I’m bleeding right next to him unless I order him to. Pathfinding isn’t reliable, either: I spent five minutes repeating the “Move to…” and “Get in vehicle” commands, trying to convince a freed hostage and my squadmate to cross the map so we could finish the mission. They wouldn’t budge. The crux of the issue is Arma’s mile-long command menu, which scatters dozens of commands across all 10 numerical keys. Like the enemy AI, though, there are glimpses of authentic behavior. I felt like a proud parent when my AI fireteam, unprompted, broke formation and spread themselves behind cover during a raid on a cluttered factory.

A night base raid. Arma 3's single-player missions are most enjoyable when you're not assigned the commander role.
Breaking formation
Bohemia’s graphical improvements are substantial enough to make Arma 3 one of the most visually impressive games on any platform. Altis (and its little-brother island Stratis) are rendered with incredible clarity, illuminated by lighting that produces pink sunsets, blinding solar glare, and golden afternoons. I love the way the earth feels textured as you jog and crawl through it--gravel, sand, and grass all emit different sounds under your boots.

I’m mostly happy with the graphical performance I’ve been getting on the three configurations I’ve been playing Arma 3 on. The caveat being that my framerate varies based on where I am on the map, the number of objects and enemies, and if I’m playing online. On a Core-i7 X990 at 3.47 GHz and two AMD Radeon 5970s on Very High settings, I’ve gotten 17-25 FPS on one single-player mission and 40-50 on another. Multiplayer is where I found the least-consistent performance. On a Core-i7 870 and GTX 780, I can get 55 FPS in a tight, six-player scenario on Very High, but 20 in a large-format mission like Wasteland.

Tinkering with Arma 3’s 25 configurable video settings allowed me to improve these numbers a little, but even dialing down the quality to standard or low on my rigs barely helped while playing large multiplayer missions. The scripting or complexity of some scenarios simply seems to bottleneck performance regardless of your settings. Some specific actions also consistently produced framerate dips for me, like turning 180 degrees with high draw distance, driving at high speed into a city, or right-clicking into gun optics for the first time in an area.

Despite Arma 3's size visual and audial details like back-blasts and muzzle flashes feel handcrafted.

If the downside of Arma’s fidelity is its inconsistent graphical performance, its upside is that it reliably produces stories. Even its modular inventory system has produced little rituals for me in co-op, where I have everyone vocally recite the gear they’re carrying to make sure we’ve got enough versatility. Sometimes, like some sort of weird mom commander, I inspect their backpacks to see that they’re storing enough C4 and medkits. In these moments, you realize that the majority of Arma’s realism doesn’t exist for the sake of realism.

I’m annoyed that it’s still much more of a burden to command teammates than it should be, on par with chaperoning a second-grade field trip. It’s bothersome that enemy AI oscillates between being smart and dull. I wish 40- and 50-player missions chugged less. And it’s mildly disappointing that Bohemia delayed the release of the game’s campaign, presumably in order to get Arma 3 out ahead of Battlefield 4. For most of us, the self-authored war that awaits in co-op is worth tolerating all of this.

Late last week we learned that Arma 3 won’t initially release with any campaign content (something that should make it an interesting challenge to review, for one thing). Instead, Arma 3 will launch with 12 single-player showcases, nine multiplayer scenarios, eight firing drills, and its mission editor, while campaign episodes will parachute in shortly after release. This should allow the military sim to emerge from beta sooner at the cost of staggering its content.

I got in touch with Joris-Jan van't Land (Project Lead) and Jay Crowe (Creative Director) to learn more about about this decision as well as what we should expect from the content of the campaign.

PC Gamer: Help me make sure I’ve got this right: Arma 3 will launch with zero campaign episodes, but you’ll begin releasing them one per month for the three months following release. Is that accurate?

Jay Crowe: Spot on, sir. Well, perhaps with the additional note that, of course, they're free.

Joris van't Land: We see the launch of the game as a solid starting point. We've focused on creating single-player showcases and challenges, multiplayer modes and, of course, the highly anticipated, Altis terrain, together with the editor and its range of units, vehicles, modules, etc.

Crowe: Exactly, we hope that Arma 3's release content provides a big variety of gameplay out of the box. We want to show players what the game is all about—what opportunities it offers—built on a solid platform, which we can gradually extend with free additions like the campaign episodes.

van't Land: But, honestly, we will admit that this is not our originally planned release strategy. It is one borne from the problems the project faced over the past years, the insightful experiences of releasing public Alpha and Beta versions, and wanting to deliver a quality campaign.

Can you give us an overview of the campaign’s story and the player’s role?

Crowe: The player is a regular soldier, a Corporal who's part of a NATO peacekeeping mission in the Mediterranean. Originally deployed in the wake of the total economic collapse of the Republic of Altis—a nation something like the size of Malta—a situation that flared up into a bloody civil war. It's been a couple of years of uneasy peace following a cease-fire. This US-led force is now in the process of a staged drawdown, tasked to decommission the bases and coordinate the scrapping of military equipment and vehicles that they can't afford to ship back home.



This withdrawal takes place in the context of decades of recession in the west and a rise in power and ambition of nations under the banner of CSAT, the Canton-Protocol Strategic Alliance Treaty. Stratis—the island where the player's unit is based—is a key strategic position between east and west. But, with the US more concerned about its interests and influence in the Pacific and traditional European powers looking inwards at their flatlining economies and mass unemployment, it's become something of an unaffordable operation.

The vacuum left by withdrawing NATO forces is being rapidly filled by CSAT, creating the conditions for, one might say, a flashpoint. The campaign follows the player from this point and examines his role across three distinct episodes: Survive, Adapt, Win.

How are the campaign episodes connected?

Crowe: Together, they form three parts of a single overarching story. Our “Episodes” are actually something like sets of interconnected missions—each a mini-campaign—related to the others in terms of the progression of a single timeline and in the gradual introduction of responsibility to the player.
"We ask the designers to think about what 'winning' actually means."
van't Land: The episodic design is not new. It's not something that we implemented after deciding on these release plans. Though, admittedly, we originally intended to release them together.

Crowe: When we came to redesign the campaign, the game—the sandbox platform—was in a considerable state of flux. The episodic nature of our revised approach was partly geared towards managing that, and partly on trying to investigate some distinct themes.

van't Land: Arma 3 is now built on a singular vision—combined arms military with an infantry core—but it’s still a very broad topic, so the themes help to focus that a bit more.

Crowe: While each episode looks at a different theme, there's a consistent thread between them all—yes, in terms of narrative—but, perhaps more importantly, in terms of gameplay. If you look at the Showcases, for example, they generally give the player an objective, a tool or a set of tools, and offer some freedom in terms of how to go about achieving that goal. In the process, one aspect of the game is "showcased." They work because they're simple enough for us to test, but open enough to allow players to enjoy completing them without being led by the hand. Our campaign episodes are similar, but—rather than focusing on a single “thing,” like “tanks” or “scuba”—they develop a single theme over the course of a few missions, deploying a range of meaningful and appropriate features that, hopefully, serve to create a consistent, enjoyable experience.



Will the result of certain events affect how the campaign plays out or ends in Arma 3? What are some examples?

van't Land: Branching and player agency over the plot is not what we're after with the Arma 3 campaign. We went back to a simpler approach that is focused on fun, and one we can test properly.

Crowe: The gameplay itself provides some opportunities for players to approach their objectives with a degree of autonomy. An example would be one mission where you have the choice to go to a weapons cache. It's an optional objective but, if you do go there, you'll be able to scavenge weapons to use in the following mission that best fits your style of play. However, if you mess up, that mission becomes more difficult.

van't Land: So there is some persistency between scenarios and episodes, but it's fairly limited and not the focal point of the experience. Big “cinematic” choices aren't really something we want to confront the player with too much—at least to begin with.

Crowe: The decisions the player does have are fairly organic. Pick the right way to complete the objective. Do so with as few casualties as possible. Unlike in Arma 2's “Harvest Red” campaign, where one had to—somehow or another—babysit your comrades, in the A3 campaign everyone can die on a mission. Sometimes, it'll be your fault for being a crappy leader; other times, it's because that helicopter you shot down crash-landed in the middle of your unit. C'est l'Arma.
"Sometimes, it'll be your fault for being a crappy leader; other times, it's because that helicopter you shot down crash-landed in the middle of your unit. C'est l'Arma."
What feedback did players give you about the Arma 2 campaigns?

van't Land: As with a lot of feedback regarding the Arma games, it was quite ... mixed. Some people really enjoyed playing them. Some were frustrated with the initial release versions not working and having showstopper bugs. Others waited for patches and re-played them in a much better state. Myself, I remember several of the missions fondly and it being very different to other games I was playing—in a good way. My favorite campaign would still be the Resistance expansion.

Crowe: I think “mixed” is a fair description. There were a lot of great things in the campaign, which—one way or another—players couldn't always access. The very nature of the design made it a bit of a nightmare for QA to test, and—unsurprisingly—that meant, where'd you'd have one person having a solid play-through, you'd have another—like me—aborting two or three hours of progress—or, indeed, restarting the entire campaign—because it needed to be patched up. There's also something to be said about the general framing of the campaign. In A2 you were playing as a fairly elite recon leader. I think some people missed the feeling of being more down to earth, something like “a nobody”—just one cog in the war machine—that eventually comes to play a bigger and bigger role.

van't Land: We went for too much complexity and cinematic approaches that we could not execute well enough. Ambition has always been something that drives our games—it's important to creatively challenge yourself, but it also can mean we take on too much. Something that was also true of the original concept for the Arma 3 campaign. Plus, the use of higher-than-squad command in the Arma 2 campaign has always been a bone of contention. The Warfare mode, base building and such elements in single-player—a lot can be said about that ...



Crowe: Indeed, but, I'm afraid much of it is negative! When we set that kind of experience against our goal of trying to convince players to give Arma a chance and discover the beauty of the game, well, I think it's asking too much from one campaign. Joris is spot on about the need to be ambitious and challenging, what we've tried to do is find a good balance between stability and innovation. When we look at the awesome experiences you can have—that people have been having—during the Alpha and Beta, it only hardens our resolve to deliver something more worthy of A3's potential.

What sort of tactical situations do you want to put players in? What experiences do you want them to have in the campaign?

van't Land: Very many different ones—that's sort of the point of the three stages. My personal favorite situation is being a grunt in an infantry squad, taking part in a combined arms assault. Another great experience is roaming the massive terrain and finding opportunities as an underdog—locating weapon caches, setting up ambushes, avoiding conflict when that's more appropriate. But there is a lot of subjectivity at play there—others enjoy being in command or being a lone operator. Or driving a tank, flying a helicopter, etc. We returned in some way to our approach with Cold War Crisis and Resistance, where many types of gameplay are offered, but none are dominating. So if you dislike a certain type of gameplay you're not stuck with it through most of the campaign.

Crowe: Let's take the most awkwardly named episode. I mean—"Survive," "Adapt"—those themes immediately conjure up some sense of the experience, but "Win," well, perhaps appears more two-dimensional. Smells a bit like tiger blood or something. So, here, we ask the designers to think about what "winning" actually means. There are the obvious things like, being part of a dominant force or striking serious blows against your enemy, but one might also consider things like the price of victory, winning at what cost, winning against the odds, despite friendly fire, etc. We want our game mechanics and features to be meaningful and, to do that, we want to put players in specific situations and challenge them to think about how to complete their objectives.

Bohemia has more campaign information on the Arma 3 blog. Arma 3 is currently available for purchase through Steam Early Access.

I’m inside of a wall, inside of a fire station. I see a fellow survivor—only not really, because I’m inside of a wall. Mashing V repeatedly, I slowly slide down to the ground floor of the four-story tower. As my feet touch the floor, I sprint back into the traversable interior of the fire station and begin the hunt. I step outside and immediately spot N3m3sis. Zeroing in on his head, I pull the trigger and he drops to the ground.

DayZ players everywhere anxiously await the impending launch of the DayZ Standalone’s alpha. People aren’t content with the dated graphics, the endless list of bugs, and the general state of the DayZ mod. DayZ Arma 3 is here to change that. The Zoombies team has ported the DayZ mod straight into Arma 3. You’ll be seeing the exact same models, zombies, and weapons rendered in the full glory of the Arma 3 engine. Let me be the first to say that it looks absolutely amazing.

Can something so beautiful really be the backdrop for a zombie game?

On my rig, DayZ Arma 3 runs much better than the standard DayZ mod—a credit to Bohemia’s Arma 3 optimization. Even if many of the textures are just upscaled, the difference in lighting and detail is terrific. Even the guns look amazing. In the DayZ mod, the Lee Enfield is abhorred by experienced players everywhere for being an aural flare gun. Shooting it alerts every zombie within an almost ridiculously large radius. In DayZ Arma 3, that same gun transforms into a beautiful amalgamation of wood and metal. It's not functionally different, but it looks amazing. Throw in Arma 3's improved physics and all the weapons feel as powerful as they look.

I hope he has knee pads.

The ragdoll physics of Arma 3 are hilariously applied to the zombies. One minute they’re alive and well, zigzagging across Chernarus for a chance to take a swipe at you. The next, they're somersaulting backwards into the pavement. Seeing a zombie faceplant is inherently satisfying and makes killing zombies so much more fun.

Although the zombie animations are still awkward because of their tendency to random stop, player animations have seen some subtle improvements. There's a distinct sense of weight that accompanies each stance—running, walking, or sprinting. I noticed each and every step that I took which is important in a game where being seen or heard is tantamount to being dead. Although many of the animations look nearly identical to their Arma 2 versions, additions like prone sprinting and a better walk animation go a long way towards making the game look tighter.

The Arma 3 inventory: I would be happy even if he didn't have two guns.

There’s one thing that makes DayZ Arma 3 infinitely better than the original DayZ mod—inventory. Arma 2’s inventory system was never to meant to support a loot-driven game like DayZ. Zoombies has fully integrated Arma 3’s glorious, low-input inventory system with multiple inventory spaces (backpack and vest) as well as near instant interaction. Picking up an item isn’t nearly as hard as it used to be.

If you have ever had any interest at all in DayZ, go try this right now. DayZ TV has a great guide on how to get DayZ Arma 3 installed. Braver readers can visit the official site and figure it all out themselves. The bugs may not be fixed, but the games looks, feels, and plays so much better.

Dean Hall during his Everest ascent. Image via @rocket2guns.

We learned during E3 that Dean “Rocket” Hall wants to make a game about mountaineering. The DayZ creator, who climbed Mount Everest in May, tells me it’s a concept he’s wanted to pursue for years, and one he somehow found time to iterate on while ascending Earth’s hat.

In this conversation with Hall, I ask what he imagines his mountaineering game will be like and get him to consider the future of DayZ will look like without his direct involvement.

PCG: Tell me about your idea for a mountaineering game. The concept didn’t originate while you were on Everest, right?

Dean Hall: No, I was actually at university. Since university. There’s a game called Everest, a really shitty game, that I played a long time ago, and I was like, “God damn, why don’t they just make this properly?” When I played that game I was like… I’ve always wanted to make this Everest game, so… I look at the Kerbal guys and I look at the Prison Architect guys and I’m like, “I want to make a game like that. A different game.”

"It’s not an action game. It’s more of a strategy game, because that’s really where a lot of the challenges with climbing happen—the logistics and that kind of stuff."

Something people don’t expect?

Hall: Yeah, something people don’t expect. Something quite indie and fun and maybe do it in Unity or something like that, or maybe not. I don’t know. There’s still a lot of stuff to figure out with it. But yeah, that was something I was very interested in.

Do you have a sense of what kind of experience you want the player to have? Is it a single-player game? Is it a co-op game?

Hall: I’m best noted for multiplayer, and I love cooperative and stuff like that. But I’ve also been really interested in other… I was talking about this with Patrice , from Assassin’s Creed, last night. And so… What I want to do is, I think this kind of game needs a single-player element. So I look at something like Dungeon Siege, which is great, where you can actually do stuff with your friends in multiplayer, even though you’re mainly playing a single-player game. That was the kind of idea. A lot of the experience would be single-player, but players can maybe invite their friends to come in and help them. It’s not an action game. It’s more of a strategy game, because that’s really where a lot of the challenges with climbing happen—the logistics and that kind of stuff. So I was looking at that. Then I thought it would be great to have online-only mountains, like Everest would be a classic one, where if you want to climb that, you have to compete with a bunch of other people for space and logistics and all that stuff.

I’m trying to see what that would look like. Do you see it as a first-person game, a third-person game…?

Hall: No, I don’t. I see it as more of an isometric type of… Being able to go into first-person is good. But I definitely see it as, you have your avatar and you control him, but you’re basically guiding some little AIs and stuff around, and your friends can come in and help you. Maybe you can challenge your friends to see who gets to the top first.

Do you see it as a simulation game?

Hall: No. A good model I would choose would be Kerbal Space Program. I love Kerbal Space. I talk about it all the time. I probably talk about it more than DayZ at this point. I saw what those guys were doing and I was like, “I want to do a project like that.” Also, I thought it would be interesting to do a non-shooter game. I’ve been involved with that for a long time now. I really wanted to look at that.

Right, I remember hearing you tell someone from Riot last night that you don’t particularly like shooters.

Hall: Yeah. I’m not good at them. I’m not good at Counter-Strike. It’s just not me. Arma obviously, as you know, provides this whole other dimension, which means I can do it, but… I’m really interested in the strategy stuff. If you look at the games that I play, there’s a lot of elements of that in there. I like the mountaineering idea because I don’t think anyone’s done anything quite like that before. It’s a nice mix of the things I’m interested in.

Dean Hall atop Everest. Image via @rocket2guns.

Obviously climbing Everest takes more than an hour or a couple of hours. Do you think that you’d create save points? Would it be a multi-day campaign? Would there be accelerated time?

Hall: I think the idea is to have different mountains providing different challenges. The idea was to try and perfect a quick experience on a smaller mountain, but I think definitely scaling comes into effect. The idea is to try to compress the experience down a little bit and take the approach that Kerbal did. Kerbal went in one direction, but very slowly, leaning quite a lot on the base of what the community feedback was. I want to follow that model —come up with this design, try it out on something quite simple, and see if maybe it’ll steer in the direction of being more of a simulation or not. Maybe it’ll steer more in the direction of being a more, dare I say it, arcade type of experience that’s in a much shorter time frame. I still think it’s going to have quite strong elements of strategy and survival in it. It’s kind of like DayZ, but a level up. Not in an apocalypse scenario. It’s survival, but it’s survival strategy.

"I love Kerbal Space. I saw what those guys were doing and I was like, ‘I want to do a project like that.’"

Has Marek , for example, given you free rein to just pursue that idea?

Hall: Well, I’m not… I’m only signed with Bohemia for DayZ, so I’d need to come up with something else. I haven’t even thought about who to do it with yet. I’m not sure how to work in the Real Virtuality engine. My ultimate aim is, I want to create my own studio that I can run under my own ethos. I love working with Marek, so I think I’ll always have a close relationship with them, but I think, to make this game, I’d want to find people to do it with who… There’s been a few people I’ve met here who’ve said, “Wow, I’ve always wanted to do this mountaineering game.” I’m trying to assemble people who really want to do that.

I know it’s hard to predict, but how long do you see yourself working on DayZ?

Hall: I think right now, realistically, the next 12 months. Particularly if a console port came in—or ports, if there were changes to certain consoles. I’d say I’m probably being realistic there, to deal with that.

What do you consider the biggest remaining challenges on getting the standalone version of DayZ done and releasing it in a playable state?

Hall: I think the zombies. Because it’s a zombie game, a lot of people have an expectation that they need to be very good. I’ve seen that on Reddit and forums and posts last night. We’ve got a bit of work to do there. I think that’s really about it now. We’re at a point where we can push play any day now. We just want to make sure that when we push play, we’re not screwing things over. The model in my heart that I’m choosing is how the Introversion guys did Prison Architect. We’re not going to follow their pricing structure, because they tried to—and I don’t know if they succeeded—price people out of the alpha. They said, “We know that hardcore fans will buy the game. We don’t want people to buy the game now who won’t like it.” But when I first played it I was like, “Wow. It’s pretty bare. There’s not much there.” But I knew there was the husk of an awesome game there.

I don’t know if you’ve played the recent build, like alpha 10. It’s so much freaking fun there. It was a lot of fun. So that’s what I think we want to do. We want to release this very bare-bones alpha. We’ll try to discourage people from buying it. The less people buy it, the better for the alpha. We’ll have a really good core group of people who want to be part of the development, who want to be part of it from the start. I don’t think it’s going to take long, like weeks and months, before we start to see some progress. More people will come in. The energy gets better. Then we get towards a beta and I think from there it will be smooth.



One of the other things you were talking about last night was this notion of trying to make the player’s body and the environment more of an enemy or a threat. Can you talk about how you’re implementing that?

Hall: Yeah. You played Space Station 13, right? Basically I looked at Space Station 13 and I said, “I want that, I want that, I want that.” You notice that there’s no UI and you get little text indicators, just like Space Station 13. I’m meeting the Space Station 13 guy at Rezzed, so I’m going to kidnap him or something. Lock him in my suitcase and take him back. The idea is the immersion, to try and put the player in there. Not give the player so many obvious cues. To make them really be thinking about how their body is. You run along without shoes for a while, your feet hurt, your feet are getting sore. After a while of doing that even longer, you get a stress fracture and you end up limping around everywhere. So the idea is really to make items quite important. Even though you might be abandoned, you might have no shoes. You need shoes. There’s your story… You could go out and shoot someone or whatever, but you might damage items and all that. I think there are so many new items coming in. With a level of, I guess… There’s a lot of complexity, but I’m hoping the complexity is fairly intuitive. It’s stuff people understand. You run a lot, your shoes are going to degrade. That kind of stuff. There will be more encouragement to interact. It’s not necessarily positive interaction. A lot of it might be neutral or even negative, but at least we’re pushing people to interact.

Thanks, Dean.

Read part one of our Dean Hall E3 interview here.

In a special interview during E3, DayZ creator and lead designer Dean Hall sat down and answered questions submitted and voted on by the r/DayZ community. Reddit user DrBigMoney compiled the questions and sent them around to media outlets, and VG24/7 managed to get Hall on camera to answer.

Since r/DayZ is one of the most active segments of the DayZ community, the questions all concern hotly anticipated and wished-for features as the wildly successful Arma 2 mod transitions to becoming a standalone game.



One of the earliest questions tested Hall’s devotion to the survival-horror theme: will suicide be allowed?

“Suicide will be an option, most likely in the form of right-click on a weapon and then click ‘suicide,’” Hall said. “Obviously there’s some controversial elements to that, but we really felt that it’s a major part of the apocalypse. If you read a book like The Road you can see that it’s very important there. And I think if it’s alright for a literary work then it’s something that we need to seriously consider.”

Hall also discussed players building bases: “What I really want to do is an instance-style, like Skyrim, walk up to a grate in the ground, go into a cavern, and then from there Red Faction-style digging out the cavern. It might not be possible for technical reasons with multiplayer.”

Some of the other features Hall discussed were:

Clothing and equipment degradation: being injured will damage clothing, and walking will damage shoes. Walking without shoes will cause injury.
Random public game events: the team doesn’t want to manufacture anything in the game, so what happens in the game will be caused entirely by players.
Barricades: barricades will be included, but they aren’t implemented yet.
Safe zones: zombies will not respawn once they’ve been cleared from an area, but wandering zombies will reinfest a zone if it isn’t secured.
Players who jump from server to server will be warned and then stopped.

“One of the things we’re doing is really going back to basics,” Hall said. “The overarching theme of this is we’re going to tidy up what is in the alpha at the moment and actually allow people to give us feedback.”

The DayZ standalone version is currently in development. We recently covered news of diseases in the world of DayZ and explored some footage of the new game.

One of our most hotly anticipated games of this year, Arma 3, will be showing off in a big way this weekend with a livestreaming event straight from Prague. Though the newest version of everyone’s favorite military sim franchise is still in alpha, the beta build of the game will be on full display on Saturday, June 1, and again next Saturday, June 8.
Gearing up for E3, Bohemia Interactive will stream two sessions through the Arma 3 channel on Twitch. The first session will feature mission designer Thomas Ryan giving a basic tutorial in scenario editing. The second stream will show a playthrough of the new Combined Arms missions that will also be released in the beta update.

Both streams should last around an hour and begin at 17:00 UTC (or 12:00 EDT). Check out the world time server for a further breakdown of time zones. During the stream, you’ll be able to ask the team questions via the Twitch chat interface or Arma 3’s Twitter account.

If you’re a green recruit to this Arma business, check out Craig’s hands-on account or Arma veteran Evan’s rundown on how super-duper serious Arma is (hint: really serious).

Hoorah! Dean "Rocket" Hall's bandit-riddled, zombie-fleeing mod DayZ has been threatening to take on a life of its own the past few months, and that threat no longer lies dormant—Rocket revealed in an interview that some lucky fans are already playing the DayZ Standalone version.

Speaking to Gamasutra, Rocket spilled the beans on the first batch of testers: players who have been rewarded for their loyalty to the brutal ArmA 2 mod the past couple of years.

"So what we're doing at the moment is, we gave free keys as a gift to the forum moderators, the Reddit moderators, people who helped out with DayZ development, and stuff like that," Rocket explains. "I guess there's about 30-100 people involved with that."

"From here, once we've finished our server/client architecture—because we're moving it an MMO model—we're reviewing the situation of that in June, and then we do an alpha, just like Minecraft."

There's only one server in DayZ Standalone at the moment, but content updates are being delivered constantly. Like Minecraft, DayZ Standalone plans to charge a small amount to players during the public alpha, with the price increasing steadily as it nears completion. During alpha, Rocket plans to allow players access to either the latest stable build, or the experimental build on the developers' desktops.

Though the first proposed release date "sailed on by" while Rocket and friends worked to implement the MMO model, it's looking like DayZ standalone is still on target for a June alpha release.

Arma 3's alpha is just over a week old, but a few promising add-ons are already taking advantage of Bohemia's out-the-gate moddability. An inevitable carryover from the hardcore Arma 2 community is ACRE, or Advanced Combat Radio Environment, a mod-turned-mainstay for the majority of players for its realistic voice-comm behavior influenced by range, direction, terrain, and facing. It's as certain to appear in Arma 3 as scores of DayZ knockoffs, and this video shows off an already working early prototype in multiplayer.

Jump forward to around the 1:10 mark for some examples of ACRE's range-limiting and directional capabilities for voice chat. Arma veterans like Dslyecxi swear by it. "Terrain can influence it," he told us in an interview last year. "If you're in a forest it'll cause it to show shorter ranges. If you're moving away, their radio is having more trouble reaching you, they'll actually hear you distort and break up and eventually you'll lose them entirely."

For me, the added mechanics ACRE provides serves as yet another reason to fully jump into the Arma series' golden moments of teamwork and communication. I'd also like to see similar options for realistic comms in other military multiplayer shooters. Having the game environment affect how well a team trades messages would give a nice boost in immersion, not to mention tactics—the distance drop-off for voice could deliver impromptu ambushes and revealing eavesdrops.

Evan's gone full-tilt on covering Arma 3's alpha, and you can find plenty of info on the game through his videos and hands-on preview.

As we've outlined in interviews, hands-on impressions, video footage, and other reporting this week, Bohemia Interactive's Arma 3 is an extremely serious, hardcore military simulation that should only be experienced by current or former United States Marines who have received twelve or more medals. We can't be more explicit about this: Arma 3 is a hyper-authentic, high-fidelity simulation intended for hardened men of danger, and no amount of paintball skills or similar talents can prepare you for its harrowing depiction of war.