Arma 3 June 2012

“We are a Studio of big ambitions and like to produce games that other Publishers would look at as impossible” Ivan reveals to me over lunch with a demeanour that is down to earth, realistic yet passionate about the game he is helping to produce.

Bohemia Studio’s Arma division, operates out of the beautiful city of Brno, in the south of the Czech Republic and acts like a Behemoth from the outside, hitting heavy with Arma II, a military sim so steeped in operational realism that you would think the studio had 100 staff working tirelessly on the project. But when you actually arrive at the Studio itself, you instead find 25 or so artists, designers and coders that are dedicated to making Arma III the most breath taking version of the franchise yet and my early findings with the Gamescom presentation and the day I spent with this group have concluded that these guys are for real.

One of the first things you notice about the studio is their dedication to righting wrongs and creating a more immersive experience than before. Ivan is a humble man explaining that he understands where Arma II’s faults lie and that he now has the canvas to include some more features that were missing from the first two games. They have also listened to the community too. After all, this is a game that has a dedicated following and rather than being able to throw Arma titles out and hope that a small portion of the millions that purchase it will like it like the large Publishers can afford, Ivan knows that being a small studio means that Arma III will live or die by the sword and as such needs to make this as perfect as possible in order to keep the fan base happy and secure future funding.

The island of Limnos plays a prime importance for this theatre of war. Originally discussed as a potential add on, Ivan and his team felt that the scale of the island and the terrain it offers was too big to play down and deserved the recognition of being the basis for Arma III. Ivan has a great passion for war history as well as having a great knowledge of weaponry, strategy and tactics. Limnos offers a huge expanse of land that covers every type of terrain from towns and villages, shrubbery, trees, woods, roads and believe it or not desert, something that surprised me when I got a guided tour in one of the aircraft that will be available in the game. It’s huge, different, refreshing and imparts real life wartime history within its space which provides Arma III with a perfect sandbox playground in which your battles can be played out.

The availability of so much satellite imagery nowadays has enabled Bohemia Interactive Studios to map the island perfectly, getting an idea and feel for where certain towns are, where bases remain and are able to include all of the remnants of the Greek, Turkish war within it’s realm. Only then could a scouting team be sent out to the island itself to start photographing and videoing the important areas of interest to produce an accurate representation of Limnos and all that it has to offer. Upon seeing comparison screen shots of real life photography compared to how the villages were being designed shows a real attention detail on getting things right and accurately representing the island as best as they can within budget.

Meeting the design team and artists enabled me to see the next level of art and design in game which included buildings that degrade and damage over time. These buildings will remain that way in game, as well as including interiors that you will be able to enter, something that was somewhat missing, for the most part, from Arma II and will provide a deeper tactical experience come Arma III’s release. A lot of attention has gone into the terrain detail too. Grass moves independently, shrubs are expertly detailed and during part of the presentation the tree design was explained to me in what can only be described as a scientific breakthrough and something that other producers may want to pay close attention to for their future military titles that play out on expansive maps. Each tree within the game uses a tool to bring life into every single tree in the game. Branch structures, leaf patterns grow independently and take on their own forms within the game which results in something that looked absolutely spectacular. The result is that no tree looks the same as the next and therefore loses that feeling that artists have just replicated a generic design to flesh out the terrain. It is stunning, looks very cool, fresh and you have to applaud the coding team for writing a tool that can produce this kind of result.

So there you have it. The Arma team have created a world that lives, breathes and differentiates itself enough to make you feel as though you want to explore every inch of the island and from what i’ve been told, there are members of the community that love doing that exact thing in order to really understand what Bohemia Intertactive Studios have created with this game.

We all know that a pretty looking game doesn’t make the game great. The main essence of immersion, and to some extent fun, comes from the gameplay and Arma III seems to be hitting every nail on the head as they keep the core mechanics from Arma II but take away the things that didn’t work as well as replace them with features that make the game a lot more fluid. Ivan has informed me that the squad command wheel is giving way to a more selfish experience, playing as one soldier in a battle that will come to life around you. There will be elements of squad command again but nowhere near as heavy as what was used in Arma II, something that was complained about and something that has been looked into. Ivan has also kept his cards close to his chest in terms of storyline and is a part of the game that I cannot go into.

A.I. Improvements are also vast and a lot of time has gone into refining the A.I. Experience so that you will not see a lot of the mistakes that happened in Arma II making their way into III. As funny as it may have been watching a rabbit riding on a quad into battle these sorts of things are not going to happen here. I was shown squads in small fire fights away from your position adopt their own strategies and positions that were compliant with strategies that would be adopted in real life. Soldiers covering each other and moving in proper formations as well as taking up attacking and defensive positions depending on what was happening in the fire fight or how they were progressing through a village. One mission that was shown allowed for my soldier to place some proximity mines on a crossroads in a village and watch the carnage as we scouted from a hill above. As soon as the first mine was set off, the rest of the enemy team adopted cover and defensive positions looking for a way out of their problem.

This sort of realism in the game has been Arma’s bread and butter and again is at the forefront of Arma III. The story itself is set a few years down the road. Ivan and myself has a lengthy discussion on the future of warfare and how it translates into Arma III. Ivan explains that a lot can happen in weapons and vehicle technology over a period of a few years and is something that the Arma team has been keen to understand as they develop the new wave of weapons that are being prototyped today. One thing was for sure is that the worlds armies are keen to move away from the spray and pray weaponry that has served them so well for nearly a century and concentrate on one shot, one kill technology that will provide more power, more accuracy and save on ammunition. One such manufacturer is a Hungarian gunsmith that is working on a few weapons that Bohemia has licencing to use in the game. One shot, one kill technology that looks, sounds and acts the part. The Arma team’s sound crew took the time to visit the manufacturer to get the ballistics and firing sounds recorded as well as getting some hands on time with the weaponry to get a feel of what needed to be included in game and the results were very positive.

Other things like vehicles have also been looked at and how they may translate into the game given the time frame of the story. Although this sort of tech is pretty secret, the Arma III team have designed some vehicles, that will be available to use in game around information about the basis of new vehicles that are being developed from military experts in that field. The results are pretty impressive as I witnessed first hand a design that the team have come up with. I won’t go too much into it now but if what is seen in game is near to what may be available in the near future I would be shitting a brick if I was a dictator that wanted to get on the wrong side of one of the military powers at present.

Even physics seem a lot more realistic than in Arma II. During one presentation a lot of owness was put on how weight distributes a lot more realistically now. Moving an armoured personnel carrier, for example, into a tank will hardly move the tank whereas the reverse creates a carnage and damage that you would imagine possible in that situation. This does not only apply to land but also to water and a hell of a lot of work has gone into supplying a water physics model that works incredibly well above water as much as it does underwater. I would have to say that the movement and weight distribution here is as close to the Hydrophobia game you could get without completely marketing a game based primarily on its water physics engine, it’s that good. The attention to detail underwater too has not gone unnoticed. Swimming around underwater you will also see fish swimming around that are native to the waters that they inhabit in real life and the level of detail being applied to these fish also cements to the dedication that the team have made to getting things right.

After all, Ivan states that “Small things can sometimes be as important as the larger things as these are the bits that breath the life into a game and make it more immersive” He is not wrong there but don’t think that this sort of attention to detail is detrimental to the overall development of the game as it is not. Arma II was a beast of a game but with faults and the team this time are using everything that was good with II and adding a shit load more into III. Even a small little demonstration of an armoured vehicle towing a car, showing independent weight distribution through every part of the rope and the two vehicles looked impressive. To move a vehicle as realistically as that takes some talent and foresight and one thing that I noticed over the course of the day was how much creativity and love is breathing in one building.

Ivan, Daniel and myself also had a good chat about creativity, the stifling of the creative experience being tied to a Publisher as compared to working a small studio on a tight budget and one thing that was apparent also was that although there was a hierarchy, there was also freedom of creativity and the right to voice your opinions, no matter how small it may be.

Ivan and Daniel are both humble enough to know that a small thing at the time could become a huge thing over time and if someone from the team feels that something should be included or excluded their should be a case listen to it. Ivan has declared that “certain parts of the game have come from ideas from other team members in the studio that didn’t feel as though he would not be listened too and spoke up about it. Sometimes it could turn into an argument but there was always a result where everyone was happy.” This sort of attitude, in any situation, provides for a healthy personal relationship and to see this implemented into a business environment is refreshing. From car interiors, seeing the hands at a steering wheel and turning it as you’re driving, to combat fatigues drawn and designed in the right patterns and colour to individual magazine change animations for each weapon comes from a member of this team.

One thing is for sure about my visit to the studio and the people I met that day. They are hell bent on creating one of the most immersive and genre defining experiences in the military sim space. An area that they have really called their own since Arma II and an area they look set to dominate if Arma III keeps on going the way it is.

A parting question for Ivan was what the future holds for Arma as a franchise. His answer? “Well, my mind is totally dedicated to Arma III at the moment but I am always thinking about a future storyline. They say that the next world war will see the near destruction of mankind and that the fourth will be fought with sticks and stones. Perhaps there is something in that”

Arma III is due for release on PC in 2012.