Armed assault!

[Rodion Romanovich]

The sequel to OFP! MP demo finally released: http://www.armedassault.com/downloads.html

I'm downloading it now...

Is there anyone who has the Czech or German version yet? If so, what did you think of it? Too bad the English version isn't released yet...

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

Gah no English?

Looks great though, with surprisingly low "recommended specs".

[The_Mark]

The demo even runs on my comp. With the mean FPS of 8, but still. It's quite good, gotta love the more sophisticated infantry controls and the new AI, which is a killer. Probably the most outstanding aspect over OFP is the much, much, much neater CQB, which is mostly what the demo coop is about.

I don't quite fancy the menus, though.

[x-dANGEr]

HEHE! Get ready, OFP-ers are coming!

(I HOPE I get a decent ping .. ) ((And FPS))

[Husar]

Played the demo a bit before I left to my parents last week, yes it's out for that long.
Well, cannot really say how it is yet, was a bit unusual again since I didn't play OFP for some time.
Whenever I see it in a store, I want to buy it, but I think I should save my money for other things first.

Ok, maybe my first impression from the demo, well I died a lot and the AI surprised me a bit from a distance, didn't really seem to react when I was close.
The Depth of Field seemed weird to me, I set post processing to low because on high almost the whole screen was blurry and that irritated me quite a lot, felt like I needed glasses.
I also tried some of the included vehicles, a HMMWV machinegun which was about as accurate as a sniper rifle I think(it was mounted, but the seemingly deadly accuracy surprised me a bit), a truck that couldn't make a turn and stqay on the street(the turn axis was also in the middle of the truck and not at the rear wheels, which also felt weird).

Also the demo is MP only but I opened my own game and played vs AI, didn't try real MP yet. Not too happy with it so far but I want to try the demo again, just can't right now, no good gaming computer here.
I think chances are 40/40 that I will either get it as a budget title or wait for "Game2"(the last 20 are that I will get it soon for the full price).

[The_Mark]

HEHE! Get ready, OFP-ers are coming!

True OFPers aren't coming. They have been here all along, waiting in their modded trenches. Now, we will just... assume control, of the fresh recruits, which comes quite naturally when playing coop with a squad of rookies going rambo.

[x-dANGEr]

True OFPers aren't coming. They have been here all along, waiting in their modded trenches. Now, we will just... assume control, of the fresh recruits, which comes quite naturally when playing coop with a squad of rookies going rambo.

What he said! YEAH!

[Rodion Romanovich]

Yeah the graphics seem kinda weird (judging from screenshots and trailers). I think I'll install it tommorrow (took an awful lot of time to dl ).

[Kekvit Irae]

What a coincidence... I just completed the Red Hammer campaign an hour ago and was toying with the single player missions of OFP.

[Rodion Romanovich]

First impressions of the mp demo:

Graphics: Excellent graphics! Surprisingly well done, compared to what I first thought. Some of the lighting is a bit weird, as in many modern games, but it can be turned off. Enemies blend into the background quite well, which is good for gameplay. There are much more houses and stuff than in OFP when you get into villages, but the nature battlefields are just as great as in OFP, if not better. The addition of high grass makes it quite interesting, and sometimes I was unable to lie down prone and fire in cover because I would be blinded by the high grass, which made it a more difficult task to pick appropriate positions to fire from.

AI: AI seems about equal to that of OFP, but with the aiming being more difficult than in OFP, the AI characters in the end turn out more dangerous than they did in OFP, even if their behavior seems comparable. I noticed a few improvements of AI though, with quite complex large scale flanking manouvres, and infantry was escorting an armored vehicle as it tried to reach our position on a hill in coop mode.

Game mechanics: It's much more difficult to fire assault rifles in semi-auto mode than before, which is good - in OFP I was eventually able to learn to kill up to 10 enemies with one magazine in less than 20 seconds - here it can take up to 10 seconds to kill an enemy that is over 200 meters away, even if he's lying on the ground. Because of the more difficult semi-auto aiming, I was forced to switch between semi-auto and burst depending on range, terrain and the movement speed of the enemy. The engine overall seems great - it has all the great features of the OFP engine as well as many improvements, but there are some balance issues - hopefully to be fixed in patches.

The biggest change I noticed when it comes to tactics was that it's impossible to take out enemies from a distance of 200-500 meters - here any firefight with enemies further than 200 meters away seem to end up with firing random shots until - usually - the AI hits you first after firing 5-25 shots. This forces you to move in closer to the enemy, with some team members staying put and providing covering fire as you advance, and then engage the enemy from a closer distance.

Networking: here's the biggest minus. While I ran the demo, it tried constant port scans and other suspicious stuff that forces turning off of the firewall, if you want to play. It shouldn't be necessary to run port scans for a network game to work...

[Kekvit Irae]

10 seconds to kill an enemy at 200 meters? It didnt take me that long to zero in and group three shots on a 300 meter target in basic training!
Semi-automatic mode should be accurate (to a point). And even if you are using cold iron sights, it should still be easy enough to hit a 200 meter stationary target (if you are skilled in using cold iron sights).

[FesterShinetop]

Networking: here's the biggest minus. While I ran the demo, it tried constant port scans and other suspicious stuff that forces turning off of the firewall, if you want to play. It shouldn't be necessary to run port scans for a network game to work...

This happened to me too, very annoying.

But for the rest it is a great demo and it runs quite well on my aging machine. I do think there is a memory leak though... performance worsened after playing a while... did anybody notice that as well?

[Rodion Romanovich]

10 seconds to kill an enemy at 200 meters? It didnt take me that long to zero in and group three shots on a 300 meter target in basic training!
Semi-automatic mode should be accurate (to a point). And even if you are using cold iron sights, it should still be easy enough to hit a 200 meter stationary target (if you are skilled in using cold iron sights).

Yes, that's about how the game feels. 200 meters standing target = easy kill, 250-300 meters prone, crawling target = 3 shots is usually a kill. Moving targets were however near impossible to hit, compared to OFP. Perhaps the shooting will become easier after a while when I get used to calculating where to aim relative to the enemy depending on distance etc, or if I lower the video settings to get a better fps ...

[TB666]

Well the demo was overall good.
The graphics are very nice and yes there does indeed seem to be a memory leak somewhere and also the engine needs to be better optimised but they can do that with patches.
The blood effects are very nice, even better then in OFP.
Sounds is nice and feel that weapon handling feels nice as well.
However the AI is dumb as a freaking brickwall.
If you are far away it is decent but once you get close they seem to lose it.
For example, me and other player jumped into the HMV, he was the driver and I handled the MG. He drove into the town and the other guy jumped out in the middle of the town center leaving me there. There were alot of hostiles there so I thought I was toast but the AI didn't react so I calmly opened fire. I killed maybe 5 hostiles before the AI finally started to fire back. Since I was abit of a sitting duck I decided to get out of the vehicle and I did.
However then I got hit in the head and that was it for me and I became a bird. Then however as a bird I noticed how dumb the AI is.
At first I was hoovering over my corpse to look at the blood when 3 hostiles came running up to my corpse, formed a neat close little circle around my corpse and opened fire !!!
And they did it until they ran out of ammo. WTF !!!
Shocked at what I saw, I moved on and saw more stupidity. 5-6 hostiles in a nice bunched up blob, almost on top of each other, just stood there. You wouldn't even have to waste half a clip to get rid of those.
And more, 7 hostiles stood in a neat line in the middle of the street and didn't react to anything .

Figured that this must have been a fluke, I joined another game and saw the same passive/stupid behavior.
Luckily there was players/players otherwhise this demo would have been awful.
Together with the crashing which happens abit too often I say this game needs some more patches.

[Rodion Romanovich]

My second impressions are a bit worse than my first impressions, I must now admit. It's quite buggy and in order to get decent FPS I had to turn off all graphics effects. The upside is that FPS is close to being decent at highest graphics settings, so they should be able to optimize so you can run it with decent settings. AI is also starting to disappoint me, sometimes not being as good as the AI in OFP. However there were some nice hours of exploring all the features until the flaws started becoming apparent. I hope an sp demo will come out, hopefully less buggy than the mp demo, so I can see if the sp is any good.

[Templar Knight]

I ordered the German version from amazon.de and converted it to English with a patch from the official forums. I haven't had any major problems after 1.2.

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

An English demo is out.

This game is ridiculously difficult. Even though I got my first kill before my first death. I've never played a game where you could hit somebody from so far away without a scope or anything.

[Samurai Waki]

Hurray! Now, I'll sit back for five years and watch the mods flow.

Actually... I better get my kicks in now... only a month away and I'll be semi-permanently detached from my computer chair

[Somebody Else]

Installed it.
Started up a game on my own. Got shot in the head trying to work out how to bring the scope up (I really should try reading instructions sometimes).
So anyway, I transferred to a new body (as one does in this game). Found out how to scope up, now... is it US army policy not to use a scope, in favour of some aimpoint malarkey? Anyhoo, at this point, I decided that aiming for one blur of pixels amongst a bunch of others at 300 metres was a bit silly with no magnification, and that I had other things to do. I'll wait until the game's updated a bit, before I try and bully my poor laptop into running it.

[Mailman653]

An English demo is out.

This game is ridiculously difficult. Even though I got my first kill before my first death. I've never played a game where you could hit somebody from so far away without a scope or anything.

I find this easier than Red Orchestra the targets are stationary long enough to get a shot in unlike RO where everyone is moving all over the place. But the ARMA demo I found to be quite fun though it seems modding isint something the ordinary gamer can get into with this game unless they have some major software (Photoshop)

[Rodion Romanovich]

Interesting, but at least I'm sure it'll be easy to create own missions. I just read a review stating that ArmA will have a level editor similar to that from OFP.

I also heard news that it'll be almost 2 months until the English ArmA will be out, which means most major bugs found in the demo and the Czech, German and Polish versions will hopefully be fixed by then. The question is how good AI will be after all the fixes. The post above also got me wondering - do you in the full version single player get transferred to another body when you die, or is that exclusive to mp?

[pdoan8]

I also heard news that it'll be almost 2 months until the English ArmA will be out, which means most major bugs found in the demo and the Czech, German and Polish versions will hopefully be fixed by then.

I hope so.

I'm not so hype about any new game now, but I do hope that ArmA will live up to its expectation (to be a great game as OFP was). I will DL the demo tonight when I'm home.

[TB666]

Well I have tried the UK version of this game and it is alot better then the demo.
It is much more stable(haven't had a single crash yet) and better optimised as well.
The AI has gotten improved as well however there is still problems with it that makes it either blind as a bat or stupid as a brick(take your pick).
Also if you end up in a car driven by the AI prepare to get carsick because those guys drive all over the place and love to run over people(allies and civilians).
But hopefully they will fix this with patches.
But still a good game