Rich and I had been playing a co-op mission slightly haphazardly and, after an explosive time at the airport and lots of headless chicken-ing around the map on quad bikes, our squad was all over the place. Here's another picture of it, to set the scene:
The tale of Arma III's AI going haywire is the tale of why I ended up staring at Richard McCormick's ass for so long. The in-built missions can suffer from glitches that force a restart, but much more often the problem is with AI squad members and enemies going full moron and screwing things up. What the promise of a campaign to come does is focus your attention on the paucity of Bohemia's own showcases for ArmA III and, much more importantly, how they sometimes fall apart.
My perspective is simply do a campaign or don't – but don't launch without one and then boast about the fact it's coming in three 'free' episodes as if this is some kind of revolutionary business model. To acknowledge that the campaign is fruitless would also indicate you're an ArmA player already. You could argue that a campaign is largely irrelevant to a toybox and you'd have a point – the Arma II campaign was fascinatingly over-ambitious, but ultimately entertained a diminishing audience. ArmA II came out in March 2009 which means, while admitting Bohemia's attention has been split, ArmA III has had around four years of development, give or take an expansion pack. This detail about the campaign doesn't sit well with me. And quite another is the handful of training missions, co-op scenarios, and challenges, with the promise of a campaign to follow. So the elements, the building bricks of ArmA III are one thing. As with the previous entries developers Bohemia have built a grand toybox, but done precious little with it themselves – a feeling that may be down, in large part, to a long period of alpha and beta testing of largely the same content. The editor and scripting system which constitute the major part of the game, and give you access to all the AI tanks and soldiers, all the helicopters, drones, and near-future battle gadgets, is a sort of shonky masterwork of instant modding, and will be the forge in which brilliant ideas are, um, forged. Or, more likely still: it is what others will make of it for you. The most important, and perhaps the only, important thing about ArmA III is that it is what you make of it. It took up so much of my screen for such a long time that I came to see it as not just a digital derriere, but an emblem of ArmA III. That is a rear view of former PC Gamer writer Richard McCormick, and a few days ago I spent at least an hour with this in my face while guiding us around the extensive coast of Altis in an assault boat.
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