domain:open.substack.com
TitaniumButterfly
29m ago
Here you go. Timestamped!
self_made_human
śāśvataṃ jīva athavā yudhyamāno mṛtyuṃ āpnuhi
55m ago
Arma Reforger.
I am somewhat embarrassed to admit I have over 3700 hours in its predecessor, Arma 3. That is almost half a year of my life, and it wasn't all just leaving the game on idle. About 500 in Reforger.
For the unfamiliar, the Arma franchise is what happens when you take Battlefield and force adherence to a semblance of realism. Combined arms on the company scale, presented in either first or third person. Guns are lethal, you're not a super soldier, finding yourself facing a main battle tank in an open field, without effective AT only really ends one way. The maps can be enormous, and they must be, to accommodate the full spectrum of modern firepower.
Your role, in the grand scheme, is usually one of profound insignificance. You are a grunt. You might be a grunt with the keys to a fifty ton armored fighting vehicle, a helicopter, or a supersonic jet, but your fundamental state is that of a small, fragile component in a much larger machine.
To actually achieve anything, you must look to teamwork. You must find people willing to be the other cogs in the larger machine. You will find yourself reading the USMC's small unit tactics manual and applying it to great effect in a video game. In the limit, you could run a West Point course (and this happens, since a variant of Arma is marketed as a genuine military simulation for actual soldiers).
There's no one way to play Arma. You can play it single-player, either in its curated campaign, a wider sandbox, custom missions that push the bar for what the engine allows. You might play multiplayer, where experiences range from hardcore one-life ops with a hundred other human players vs AI, or even other humans, to people RPing a semi-functional society. Remember, DayZ and PUBG both began as Arma mods.
The reason why I have an ungodly number of hours in Arma 3 is a feature/game mode called Zeus.
This mode elevates one player to the status of a god, or more accurately, a Dungeon Master. From a top down, real time strategy perspective, the Zeus controls every facet of the unfolding scenario. They spawn enemies, call in air strikes, change the weather, and narrate the conflict, all in service of providing a compelling experience for the dozens of human players who have entrusted them with their Saturday evening. As a child, I arranged green plastic army men in my backyard. As an adult, I marshaled platoons of real people from across the globe. Among them, a cohort of astonishingly racist yet disarmingly hilarious British alcoholics, who, in a display of baffling camaraderie, adopted a young doctor from India into their virtual unit. I am scheduled to have a drink with some of these individuals in the physical world later this week. The kinds of bonds you can make in the game are sometimes ridiculous.
But Arma 3 is an artifact of a bygone era. It was never a paragon of technical elegance, and time has only magnified its flaws. The player controller is famously obtuse, the performance is inconsistent, and it lacks a constellation of quality of life features we now consider standard. It is, in a word, clunky.
Arma Reforger? It's very much a transitional product. Bohemia Interactive wanted to overhaul the entire game engine, and decided to launch a glorified paid demo to keep players busy till Arma 4 came out. Then, to the surprise of both the devs and cynical older fans like me, said demo blew up, and is now a genuinely good game which approaches greatness when modded.
The critical distinction is this: Arma Reforger is a superior shooter. The fundamental act of moving, aiming, and firing is vastly improved. You are no longer wrestling with an awkward digital puppet that seems determined to glitch through the terrain at the most inopportune moments. Clipping your car into a small rock will no longer reliably send you to space. The graphics, while not at the absolute cutting edge, are entirely serviceable and a significant leap forward. The friction between player intent and in game action has been dramatically reduced.
Alas, this reduction in friction has come at the cost of systemic depth. The simulation is not as comprehensive. The new equivalent of the Zeus mode is a pale, half baked imitation of its predecessor. The artificial intelligence of non player characters is unimpressive, and this is a damning statement when one recalls that the old AI was hardly a legion of tactical geniuses. Yet the core of the Arma experience persists, and a new dimension has been unlocked: the player versus player combat is orders of magnitude better. I now find myself genuinely enjoying large scale PvP, an activity I had long dismissed as a chaotic and laggy sideshow in Arma 3. The smoother, more responsive core mechanics make all the difference. Add to this monumental, DLC quality modifications like RHS, which transports the default Cold War setting to the present day, and you have a robust platform for tactical conflict. Getting a few friends together to engage in a firefight with other human beings is now a clean, enjoyable, and rewarding loop.
In a nutshell, Call of Duty and Battlefield use pretty pictures and the illusion of real world weaponry to sell the fantasy of being a supersoldier. Arma will have you feeling like a real and all-too-vulnerable soldier in the fire of modern conflict.
I have very high hopes for Arma 4 now. While I genuinely enjoy PvP at times, I yearn for the experience of herding human cats through my own campaigns. If done right, everyone has a great time you can't really replicate anywhere else, and you end up with drinking buddies for life.
I used to feel the same. I don't anymore, but I used to.
Amen. I never did it in the hope of being liked. I did it because I wasn't doing anything else with my time so why not pitch in. I stopped doing it because I reached the conclusion that doing nothing and losing nothing was preferable to helping people and ending up worse off, plus getting lined up to be volunteered to have the process repeat.
The last time I did a good deed worth talking about post resolution was when me and my gf at the time found a pair of debilitatingly intoxicated students in the park around midnight so I called a taxi and gave the driver £20 to take them home. They, a boy and a girl, were half naked and had just crawled out of a large water-filled ditch together. God knows what they'd been doing but it was clearly not working out and it was time to call it a night. When the taxi arrived the girl complained that she didn't want to share the taxi with the boy so I let her know that she could either deal with it or resume searching for her shoes. She wisely decided she'd deal with it.
In that instance I was pretty confident that I wouldn't become jaded from repeatedly encountering the same situation.
More options
Context Copy link