****DISCLAIMER TO ADMINS*****
Well I took the time to write this long ass reply to the other topic here, only to see it got closed. Well I dont know where else to post this I didnt want to post this in the
TG ArmA forums as its relating PR to
ArmA coming from the perspective of a PR player, so most of the comparisons are based on the readers experiences with PR.
I think its a worthwhile discussion topic and dont know where else you would put this. I think its not offtopic cause its talking about both communities and the good and bad of both. I just wanted to be informative about my experiences with both games and to open some discussion (from both groups of players).
If you feel the need to close the thread then go ahead I just didnt want want to have written this large reply for no reason whatsoever. I hope someone finds it useful anyways :P
****DISCLAIMER TO ADMINS*****
Well until recently I would have said stay away from
ArmA as it just didnt have enough positive things on public servers to warrant trying it, but with the new VON (voice over net) being added to
ArmA I think both games are going to be great and the gameplay of each will compliment each other.
Ill give you in a nutshell of what I think the perks of both games are. Obviously you guys play PR so I wont go too much into detail on that, Ill focus more on what I think is good and bad about
ArmA:
Project Reality Good:
- well established community, most players are there to use teamwork or at least open to it
- established game modes / gameplay, which focuses on teamwork to achieve objectives
- developed with teamwork in mind and constantly updated with new ideas and ways to incorporate teamwork.
- excellent
BF2 squad system, VOIP is paramount
- excellent
BF2 commander system, augmented with new PR features
Project Reality Bad:
- map size limited to
BF2 restrictions, things like draw distances on objects etc can be a pain
- lots of things cannot be changed, such as player limit, squad size, VOIP structure, etc.
- has the problem of
BF2, where everyone is in a rush to get somewhere, players often not thinking of a plan and just moving blindly forward
-
BF2 engine has other limits like the whole kit system (not being able to select custom loadouts and pick up individual mags etc in the game world)
- Player Movement in
Bf2 has always been a big negative for me. Going prone so quickly, the player moving at light speeds, hit detection on moving players, etc.
- Vehicles (jeeps especially) have cartoon like qualities, able to do ludicrous things that IRL would get you killed. Vehicle physics are fairly rudimentary (but for being released 2 years ago they were prety decent).
ArmA Good:
- The new VON (Voice Over Net)! Amazing! It currently is only working in the new 1.11 beta patch. First time ever in a LARGESCALE online game world players can communicate via localized voice, so you can hear enemies speak, and the direction a players head faces is the direction the voice will be projected. Also many other VON channels such as side, group, vehicle etc make it useful (Now for the love of god why didnt they include a LEADERSHIP channel?!?!?!? DOH! Thats something
BF2 even did..)
- Massive game world, really allows for true military tactics, and things like transport helicopters, APCs, Tanks, etc can finally have space to strech their legs. It really shows the tiny closet-like space that we have been fighting on in virtually all other games over the years (including PR).
- Great realistic player movement speeds and player freedom. You can SPRINT, RUN, WALK, SLOW WALK, you can lean left and right, rotate your head freely of your gun to quickly check left and right, float your gun around the screen so your not always moving your screen around, there is so much more options of movement in
ArmA than most games. This also does make setting up the controls much more difficult.
- Little Details. Ive never seen a game contain as many little details before. Stuff like: Insects flying around where you lay, grass that is flattened when you go prone on it, fully rendered and realistic star constellations when you look at the night sky(!), seagulls that fly above (and you can become one when your dead), ocean waves/tides that react realistically to the moon cycle. Many other little details like this make the game much more immersive and fun to just run around.
- Vehicle Physics are much more convincing than
BF2 physics. Although there are times when vehicles will do some funky things, overall the vehicles are much more interesting. You can blow out tires, shoot out windshields, make fuel trucks cause HUGE explosions, damage specific parts of tanks, disabling turrets and tracks, disable vehicles not just blow them up. The best thing is vehicles dont only have a hitpoints system for the entire vehicles like in
BF2, but they have hitpoints for all the subcomponents too. Driving a car feels much more like real life than driving a car in
BF2. If you hit a telephone pole at 50mph, your car wont simply explode or bounce back like in PR/
BF2. Your car will come to a complete stop and the engine will be destroyed, but the car will remain in perfect condition. However, you as the driver will be killed instantly, and your face will be all bloody, cause you hit a freakin telephone pole at 50mph :P
ArmA Bad:
- The Vanilla
ArmA Gameplay / Game Modes. No one tells you this, but vanilla
arma is actually just a shell of a game. It does not actually contain ANY compelling gameplay. It ships solely as an engine, with ZERO interesting multiplayer missions. The singleplayer IMO was buggy, dull and totally uninspired. So then why even bother with the game? Well the developers of
ArmA basically relied completely on their modding community to make their game playable online. Which is probably why so few people play online. However, their modding community is VERY talented and have been hard at work developing missions like evolution, sahrani life, domination and beserk. However, there is still very little variety in missions and the biggest problem is lack of detailed, TEAMWORK ORIENTATED missions, leaving a big open hole which should be the bread and butter of this game. PR has this hole filled, and that IMO is the biggest difference in the 2 games,
ArmA is still searching for that good game mode/ mission where teamwork really does make a difference, whereas PR has already found what works for it and has expanded on it greatly.
- The Player Base. Players in
ArmA are typically the lone wolf type, and its missions are geared towards spec ops and snipers, which DOES NOT conduct well with teamwork orientated gameplay. If your idea of teamwork is flying a cobra and blowing **** up while a spec ops guy runs in and blows other things up, then a typical
arma round may be right up your alley. But if you prefer a more infantry based teamwork where players use suppresive fire, fire and movement, flanking, formations, APC fire support, armor columns, etc. You will be gravely disappointed. That kind of stuff happens in PR, I have yet to see it happen in
ArmA EXCEPT in well organised private groups such as Shack Tactical. The fact is, the PR community has come to know and love these style of gameplay, but the
ArmA community is still struggling to find its feet and its still sadly all about the lone wolves at this point IMO. Until a mission/mod starts focusing purely on a teamwork orientated design and gameplay, I dont believe
ArmA will ever evolve past the basic notions of teamwork it currently has. Step on a public PR server right now and you will see squads moving together, fighting together, communicating together. Step on a typical public
ArmA server right now and you will RARELY see any of this. Although with the new patch VON will help tremendously with this, there are hardly any players playing the new patch regularly which really hurts.
- Player numbers. Right now,
Arma has less players than Project Reality nightly. That says alot considering PR is a niche mod on an aging platform.
ArmA NEEDS more players in order to survive, and it needs players who can fill leadership roles, get player excited about the game and get people into organized online play. If this doesnt happen
ArmA will never have the same level of organized play on PUBLIC servers like PR has.
- The Little Details. For all their love of little realistic details, they did not do alot of things that most games consider mandatory. For example, all weapons use the same reload animation, which does not fit all that well. All weapons (yes, including sniper rifles) have TRACERS! For EVERY single round. Theres other little details like this that make you go "huh?" and really takes away from the immersion.
- Sounds. Vanilla
ArmA sounds are some of the worst sounds I have ever heard in a shooter released past the year 2000. Now the sound engine is amazing, capable of some awesome things like occlusion, echoes, etc. But the sounds that ship with vanilla
arma are complete garbage. Especially weapon sounds, they sound NOTHING like their real life counterparts. Yes there are bullet snaps, but they are much worse than PR and dont give you any indication of where the rounds are coming from. You'd think they would have put more time into making the weapon sounds more interesting, but it seems almost tacked on at the last minute. Yes there are sound mods you can get, but lets face it most people buying this game are not going to heavily tweak it, and are going to base it on the default product. PR has awesome sounds,
ArmA sounds suck, its that plain. Get FDF and there will still be problems but overall much better audio experience. Except that I can guarantee you that alot of your squad mates your playing with WILL NOT be hearing the same things as you because they dont have FDF, and that means you are not really hearing the same things, very bad when your trying to work together.
- DESYNC: cant really blame
ArmA because its such a huge world with tons of things going on and tons of networkable objects to keep track of, but servers desync players ALOT. This is something
BF2 does not have a problem with, if you ever start to desync you will see "Connection Problems" in the middle of the screen and you cant move. In Armed Assault, you will get connection problems but you wont realize. Everyone else in the world will stop moving but you can still run around. So you could be running right into an enemy ambush but you wont have a clue. Desync is a huge problem in
ArmA that massively takes away immersion. For example, youll see a hovering helicopter crash into the ocean, and in the next instant the helicopter will magically zap back into the hovering position, like it never happened. Or youll be driving with a friend, and suddenly your friend will drive off the road over a cliff. You will scream at your friend and he will think your crazy, and then suddenly youll zap back onto the road like nothing happened. That kind of stuff is immersion killers and it happens way too often in
ArmA. Its not so bad is your just driving, but in the middle of a fire fight it can be extremely confusing and frustrating. I dont see this getting fixed any time soon either.
- Animations:
arma has excellent animations but the system is also flawed. Sometimes it feels clunky and fake, and the engine always has to run through your animation, even when getting shot at. So if an AT guy is slinging his rifle and taking out his AT, even if you shoot him in the face the whole animation has to play before he actually goes down. So you could put 30 or so bullets into the guy, and he will still play this long drawn out animation before he goes down. Not a gameplay killer but certainly buggy.
- Laggy/warping players, especially at long range. In
BF2, players are seen to be moving smoothly from one spot to another. Although this has the bad effect of hit detection (cause you actually have to aim infront or behind the player) its no where near as bad as long range players in
Arma. they will warp around at long range, sometimes warping in 5 meter intervals or more. This makes long range targetting nearly impossible, and is a major problem I doubt will be fixed.
- Servers running different versions. Currently there is a HUGE divide in the player populations/servers right now because there is a new beta patch (which runs amazing) but because its a 'beta' many servers arent running it. The new patch has working VON and fixes major bugs, while the old patch still has many bugs. Just think if
BF2 was ONLY NOW getting a patch that enabled VOIP. I dont think PR would have ever grown to the size it is now without VOIP. In fact I think the solid VOIP in
BF2 is one of the main reasons for the success of PR. Without VOIP, I think PR would have never made it past its infancy. Thats why Im strongly looking forward to seeing the
ArmA community grow with the inclusion (finally) of its amazing VON. Finally, players can begin organizing themselves in the servers, without the added need of going into teamspeak each time they enter a new server. I hope this will help give the
ArmA community the incentive to start using teamwork oritentated missions and tactics.
Theres many other points for both games Id like to bring up, maybe Ill add to this post when I think of more stuff.
Overall I think both games are awesome, and they both have their good and bad points. I know I will personally be playing both for some time. It depends how much time I have to play and what kind of game play Im up for at that given time. I dont think the games are competing with each other as they are different enough to co-exist healthily together.
I think it will be a crucial barrier to overcome in order for ArmA to become a more open community and to encourage more use of teamwork and military tactics.
|TG-6th|Skud
