arma has kind of hilarious copy protection that I don’t know if people have gotten around and yeah the appeal is playing with a decent group. the campaigns have never been anything special and public servers are either PvP nightmares or huge premade missions like domination or insurgency where you kind of get a sense of the scale of the game but it’s hard to feel like you’re really doing anything interesting or impactful to the trajectory of the mission. this is why the RP servers are the most popular public arma servers lol. the game is at its best when you’re in a tight knit group doing handcrafted missions, theres literally nothing else like it
starting in arma 2 i basically started to run missions i built by hand with custom scripts to dynamically change the weather and spawn civilians, etc, combined with an in-game mission editor mod (they started natively supporting this in arma 3 with the zeus modules) and that was kind of what cemented it as one of the best multiplayer co-op games ive ever played. i would play alongside my friends but also build the mission around them, so it basically turned the game into military themed D&D. many of the positive memories my friends have of arma are of encounters and battles i built for them to play through, which is kind of nice
one of the best campaigns we ever did was based around NATO occupation of the (fictional) island nation of Sahrani, where my friends started out dealing with bandits in the hills harassing the local populace and turned into this elaborate plan to defect from the imperialist NATO forces by crossing the DMZ. no shit, without my intervention, these guys cooked up this plan to steal the local news network’s van and don vests that said “PRESS” on them and have one of the players who was stationed on the border absolutely eviscerate the civilian convoy they were with a part of with a machinegun. they somehow managed to pull this off without anybody realizing and sparked a fucking humanitarian crisis that led to russian intervention and the communist guerillas up north pushing NATO off the island and liberating their country. people still mention this (and another incident where one of them assassinated a politician from the cargo bay of a mi-24 superhind with an anti-materiel rifle) every time we talk about arma as one of the most memorable things they’ve ever done in a game
our jagged alliance style mercenaries in the desert thing ended with them trying to make a deal because they had been playing both sides against each other and uncovered evidence that the CIA was up to some shit out in the oil fields, which made them marked men. the PMC guys who were doing security for the CIA agent who had the money told us to send the leader (me) in unarmed so i had one of my guys set up a sniper position with a clear line of sight to the courtyard in the village they told us to meet at and then had the rest of the team approach from the back of the village on foot. it turned into this huge CQC clusterfuck where they tried to double cross us and we had to go house by house clearing out the contractors and avoiding the civilians, and we chased the CIA agent across the desert on foot for like a mile before an enemy helicopter caught up with us to pick him up. the dude in our squad with a PKM hit the dirt and blasted the fucking rotors and sent the guy and his escape chopper crashing down into the desert
we also did a really memorable vietnam campaign which was a double-edged sword because oh boy do historical conflicts give people an excuse to be a huge fucking racist (the red orchestra 2 expansion rising storm is one of the worst offenders here) and so many arma players are really eager to commit war crimes for fun. we started with like, 8 people and ended up with maybe 3-4 by the end because i had to tell half of them they werent welcome anymore after killing civilians, using slurs, executing unarmed prisoners, just real fucked up shit because they were “getting into character” or whatever. arma’s a really intense game! it’s kind of fascinating how people lose their minds when they play it for an extended period of time, i guess
anyway the vietnam one was great because I was an asshole who would spawn vietcong guys in the jungle and have them take potshots at the squad before making them disappear, i was constantly adjusting and directing enemy activity to make the players feel like they could get attacked at any time. i would set mines and booby traps and place spider holes in logical spots around the perimeter of enemy encampments or villages. this led to a particularly memorable encounter where the team was sneaking through the jungle at night, making their way through tall grass, and only realized with horror at the end that they had just traversed the outer defensive line of a north vietnamese army camp when someone saw a guy sticking his rifle out of a hole behind them. it was really fucking cool and i have no idea how they pulled it off but i hear about that one a lot, too
the game was so unpredictable that even when i set stuff up i’d be totally shocked when shit got out of control, especially as i layered on more dynamic AI scripts and spawns and stuff. it got to the point where i’d set up encounters and the AI would just go out of their way to call reinforcements and flank and set up ambushes without me having to worry about it. this led to a mission in vietnam where my friends were trying to eliminate mobile AA guns that the vietnamese had moved into a nearby canyon and after completing their mission watched as their helicopter got fucking shot down by some random AA team that had been called in by the AI earlier. so they called for another extraction and had to march 3km through dense jungle infested by the enemy who was now actively looking for them in the hopes that they could find a safe LZ. there was this great moment where the team was laying down on the jungle floor and an entire column of hardened NVA regulars literally just walked past them unaware they were there. eventually my guys got cornered in a box canyon with an entire platoon of guys bearing down on them…only for their helicopter to take a hail of machinegun fire to the cockpit when it had landed to pick them up. they fought their way out and ended up having to traverse like 7km of jungle as it was getting dark. it had some of the best firefights ive ever seen in a videogame, just stopping and starting every time flare rounds the radio operator had to call for from the artillery at the firebase every minute or so. and then they got home, exhausted and wounded and having to scavenge for weapons and ammo off of bodies to find that the reason there were AA guns in the canyon in the first place was because the AI had planned an offensive and was currently besieging their base. so they spent all night in-game fighting off vietnamese soldiers who were fighting their way up the hill to the firebase at the top until the siege finally broke at dawn. the game was running at like 15fps because there were fucking bodies everywhere and burning wrecks of vehicles and shit. we spent about 6 actual hours playing through this. everybody was exhausted but it left a huge impact on the people who played it and i’ve always been proud of that
everything else in arma just feels so sterile and boring in comparison to these wild fucking missions where literally anything could happen and you felt like the stuff you were doing actually mattered. there were actual choices and consequences based on what they chose to do and what they fucked up, there was an overall war they felt like they could tangibly understand if they were winning or losing. i understood my players’ skill levels without putting them in situations where they were overwhelmed or didnt have the support they needed to pull off something huge and crazy and the problem with a lot of pre-made missions is you either never get the feeling of being part of an enormous battle or its you and 3 other guys fighting an entire battalion of soviet tanks and getting obliterated in 15 minutes. all the people from my old arma crew have stories that they will never forget that they couldnt have gotten from any other game
sometimes i think about getting a gaming PC and going back to it, getting the old crew together, and doing the shit we used to do. but arma was a lot of work. i would toil for hours to set up the missions and the scripts and test it and then having to DM the entire thing for 4-8 hours at a time when i was working 60-80 hours a week at my actual job on top of that. it was always people requesting new scenarios (shout out to the racist kid in high school who wanted me to make him a rhodesian bush war scenario!!) or new additions or having ideas for shit to do. it was always more of my time, more downloading mods, more setup, more server costs. its always bothered me that nobody ever understood the amount of effort i put into making what was literally the kind of unique videogame experience you just couldnt get anywhere else or said “thanks, i appreciate this” while i was putting the time in but hey what can you do
