Thirith on 21/3/2019 at 17:50
I don't think I shrugged it off: I said "great potential" and "when it worked it was great". At the same time, though, it depended on scripting that broke easily and often, which is just damn frustrating in a game of this type, added to which I didn't think all too highly of the High Command missions towards the end. I'm not great at strategy but I succeeded with ease and without fully understanding what I was doing, which didn't exactly convince me that the systems were working particularly well.
@Jason, we'll probably have another session on 30 March, starting at 3pm UK time. We're using a bunch of mods, but it's all explained in the first post of the Arma thread.
Jason Moyer on 21/3/2019 at 18:02
I don't think any of the main campaigns in BiS stuff were realistic, some of the expansions may have been but I can't remember all of them. Cold War Crisis has the best story, the best flow, and my favorite maps plus it's set in a historical period that's recent enough that I can relate to it. I don't really buy the "US troops pulling out and remnants caught off guard and fighting guerilla warfare" angle but that's been in every main BiS campaign. Resistance (which was an expansion) was pretty great as a story and if memory serves it was a pretty plausible Cold War scenario. I enjoyed the main campaign of ArmA I (and I think the ArmA I engine is the best of the series in terms of balancing looks and performance and features, which makes me a bit biased towards it) although I think it was maybe the least plausible from a mission perspective; lots and lots of one man/one squad vs an entire army missions, although those may have been isolated to the "choose your own adventure" side missions. The Queen's Gambit expansion campaigns were fun, although in QB itself I remember all of the named characters basically died in the first few missions so the "persistent squad" angle of it didn't really work for me. The SpecOps oriented campaign it shipped with was great although another "overwhelming odds" situation. ArmA II was ok when it worked, although there's something LOLtastic about the largest part of the campaign being a "go do a bunch of stuff in whatever order with no time limits" mission because that's obviously how the military works. Also, it was hilarious that the climax of the final campaign mission involved a bridge, and they hadn't solved the "AI can't cross bridges" thing (is this fixed in 3?) so you had team mates running all over the place trying to get to the objective while the enemy AI is glitching out and it was unintentionally funny. Oh, and Warfare missions in a singleplayer campaign can fuck off. The expansions as I recall were a good time, with the Czech one probably being the most believable, although the most memorable to me was that Post-Apoc thing they did.
My favorite thing, and what I'm always tempted to perma-install and replay, is the combination of Arma I + Queen's Gambit + Cold War ReArmed.
Malleus on 21/3/2019 at 18:52
Well I liked the high command stuff in the A2 campaign. Btw, my experiences are from when I replayed it years after release, when most problems were patched and the scripting worked most of the time. IIRC it was a mess when it came out (isn't their every game though :) ).
Thirith on 21/3/2019 at 19:25
Regardless of anything else, Chernarus is still my favourite Arma environment.
Tony_Tarantula on 23/3/2019 at 20:31
Question for anyone else:
Does it kinda feel like we're in the middle of a major Japanese resurgence in the industry? Seems they've been hitting it out of the park lately. We've had Kingdom Hearts 3 make a splash, CAPCOM is back in a huge way between RE2 and DMC 5, Sekiro is being received very well, and we had a bevy of well received Japanese releases in 2018 like Monster Hunter World. Meanwhile a fair bit of what American AAA studios have been putting out has been utter shit with fiascos like Fallout 76, Anthem, and Battlefield 5. A lot of the "great" reviewed ones are mediocre "run to all the map markers" type open world games. You have a few exceptions like RDR 2 but Rockstar always has been very different from their competitors.
Clarification is that I'm just talking about major studio games. There's still a lot of smaller US studios like Insomniac that put out quality products and Indies are made by players who are individually too small to shape the market.
N'Al on 24/3/2019 at 20:18
Just completed Human Revolution. Pretty damn exceptional, all in all.
froghawk on 25/3/2019 at 04:14
And botched ending sequence
N'Al on 25/3/2019 at 05:09
Quote Posted by icemann
Besides the boss battles.
Played the Director's Cut, didn't bother me.
Jason Moyer on 25/3/2019 at 06:10
The boss battles even in the original cut were fine if you brought a stun gun along. I mean, I guess they were still terrible, but they took about 20 seconds.
I think the total lack of believability of the world and characters was a bigger crime than anything else in that game.
N'Al on 25/3/2019 at 06:38
It was exceptional, it was.