Gameinator: Good day! Let's get to know each other!

Bohemia Interactive: Hello readers, my name is Ivan Buchta, and I am the chief designer of ARMA 2. I with my colleagues are working on ARMA 2 already for more than two years. ARMA 2 - is indeed an important project for us for many reasons. Our goal is to make a really good military simulator, that we ourselves would want to play it. So we put all our ideas in this game.

Gameinator: War will always stay as a war, indeed. Changes only the only changes are the participants, the timeline ... What kind of the plot awaits players in Armed Assault 2?

Bohemia Interactive: the plotline of the game tells a story about 4 USMC Special Force soldiers, who will go through a variety of combat situations during the non-linear plot of the game, while doing missions in Chernarus. Our heroes suddenly realize that their actions affects the fate of an entire country. Depending on the behavior and decisions of the players, the campaign can be completed as an victory or even defeat.


Gameinator: In Armed Assault 2 are we going to see familiar places from the past titles, or are awaiting for a new global map?

Bohemia Interactive: The game will take place in a totally new location, or in other words, you'll observe on your monitor a whole new country reproduces completelly in 3d, that is the fictional country of Chernarus - In addition a small island along the coastline, where partial plotlines will develop.

Gameinator: Regard the military conflict: which faction will we be serving this time?, whether the provision of allied forces(to me it sounds like he's talking about the russians or (USSR)), Can I take part in the composition of the allied forces?


Bohemia Interactive: Players will mainly manage the marines, specifically the appointment of a special recon squad. During the campaign, the player will receive support from other soldiers/marines involved in the mission. Later events may be connected to the local army and the guerrillas, but only if the player will be able to persuade them to cooperate.


Gameinator: Which role the player assumes?, whether the old system of rank promotion and unit control will be back? And regarding the management of the supplies, what can we expect?

Bohemia Interactive: Fundamentals of the gameplay is very reminiscent that of Armed Assault. You - are a soldier, and one way or another, you receive and obey the orders. The principles of the gameplay(control) are the same, however we have improved and developed new GUI system. Also we have added an additional level of command. Previously, players could manage only the soldiers, now in ARMA 2 in certain situations, you will be able to command large groups of military forces and fight in a much larger scale combat.
In general commanding troops will differ depending of the rank, that are sergeants and captains.

Gameinator: Will you play the campaign provided in the form of dynamic events that depend on the player performance or will the campaign be static, as in scripted, once player starts doing different jobs?

Bohemia Interactive: To preserve the opportunity to tell the story of the game, we have built a line in the campaign, but the player is always given a freedom to choose how he wants to perform the mission.
For the plot of the game, there are moments when the decision of the player determines how the situation will continue to evolve. In the story there are several endings, and the actions of the player, starting within the first mission, starts already to influence the determination of the story ending.


Bohemia Interactive: The player will have a support and the chance to win, but as a the whole concept, it differs from campaigns of Armed Assault. ARMA 2 gameplay is more dynamic, so we have decided to do so: to give every mission 'player' a range of toys and send them in a personal voyage, to give everyone the opportunity «to play a game». When the situation allows, the player will get the access to various support options: a transport helicopter, artillery or aerial support. Later, when the player will fight for the mastery of the map, a pilot using all his resources and support may give you a crucial chance of victory. For example: you may be a tank platoon, but you can send it to patrol around the base or support troops advance in battle.


Gameinator: Is it possible to pass the campaign in the cooperative mode?

Bohemia Interactive: Yes, it will be possible, the campaign is planned in a such way, that allows four players to take the roles of Team Razor.

Gameinator: Suppose that at the moment under the players command there's an universal detachment (spy, sniper, engineer, cover, attack plane, etc). May I switch between them at given time, so to speak?

Bohemia Interactive: Yes, it is possible. the design of the game allows it, regardless of the scenario. We call this feature a TeamSwitch - it allows the player to switch to any of his team members, and fully, without restrictions to control them. Among the characters of the player there's available a variety of interesting roles in the campaign: Cooper - the commander of the team, it is important to talk with local (he speaks russian), Ice-cold (ice) Sykes - a skillful sniper, Robo Rodriguez - a Machine gunner and O'Hara -- is ready to give a medical treatment.

Gameinator: Often in tactical games players are allowed to make inexusable mistakes, when developers are forcing the player to micromanage their mates,which very often end up not doing something right. As in the «Armed Assault 2» what is the case of your teammates Artificial Intelligence?, are they going to carrying out an order and choose the most convenient way to do it?

Bohemia Interactive: Artificial Intelligence inARMA 2 is a progress of 10 years of research and development, and it should cope well with different situations and circumstances. This system is called Micro-AI which was specially developed for ARMA 2. It includes: a clear movement of units, depending of the action sites, use of cover fire and cover on certain position, which makes controlled teammates really dangerous. You can send them into battle or fight side by side, they are exellent at supporting you, that is.

Gameinator: Tell us about the innovations in military technologies implented into Armed Assault 2, and, of course, what can we expect to see from the weapon side?

ohemia Interactive: ARMA 2 will have the largest variety of weapons and vehicles than our past titles have had. We offer a variety of modern U.S. Marine Corps, as well as Russian weapons and vehicles, and additionally older models for the guerillas and partisans. Weapons are presented in different variations, like additional attachments (optics, collimator view module launch grenade) launchers may use different kind of warheads.

meinator: WHAt about the game architecture, what game engine is used for this? What new visual technologies are awaiting us, will the DirectX 10 be used and supported?

Bohemia Interactive: ARMA 2 uses Real Virtuality 3, the latest version of the In-house engine - It is the only engine capable of supporting such large areas, numbers of stand-alone units, while providing significant distance visibility. The engine supports DX9 shaders, and a third, which inprinciple is enough to provide all modern graphical effects, color and post-processing effects, HDR-lighting, advanced shading, and shader material objects, and more.

Gameinator: What are the system requirements?

Bohemia Interactive: I'm afraid we can not accurately determine them, but ARMA 2 will, of course, (also?) require multi-core processors.

Gameinator: Sometimes with top-of-the line required games are often not optimized to lower standards. What is the case with ARMA2 ?


Bohemia Interactive: We make every effort. We try to make a game that will run and work well on a medium power and a look great at high configurations. Since the game contains a huge number of graphical material, and calculated physics - we must pay attention on optimization.

Gameinator: What multiplayer game modes will there be?


Bohemia Interactive: We are seriously focused and we want to make them similar to Warfare mode, it works perfectly for our games, but we also have incorporated more popular multiplayer modes (deathmatch, team deathmatch, Capture the flag). mission editor will allow players to quickly and easily make custom modifications.
And of course we must not forget that in Armed Assault 2 players will be able to join 'my friends' to play an entire campaign in co-operative multiplayer. Fans for several years begged us for it, now it's possible!

Gameinator: Do you plan to release Collectors edition of Armed Assault 2?

Bohemia Interactive: Collection edition is a publisher's business, we can not influence their decisions.

Gameinator: Thank you very much for the interview and answers! GAMERU.NET looks forward to your game, and wish you an even greater army of fans and big sales!

Bohemia Interactive: Thank you very much for the interesting questions, I hope that the readers of Gameinator will be happy to play in Arma 2, when it comes out. And especially I hope that they will, as our fans before, create interesting addons and modifications, it always leads us to a delight.

Maruk has released two unedited sound samples on the BI Forums. They reveal improved interior and exterior sounds for the UH-1Y Venom in game.

Maruk, again. Thank you for your feedback to my previous post about ArmA II UH-1Y Venom in-game screenshots .

As you are already familiar with visual style and quality of Arma 2, I want to give you preview of another important aspect of the game, sound, that will probably be not getting that much attention from various popular gaming media sources (which I am confident will be providing a lot of coverage in coming months about Arma 2).

I admit that sound was not very strong asset in first Arma (and in fact, the sound system used in Real Virtuality 2 engine didn't change much from OFP, except moving from DirectSound3D to OpenAL) but we are aiming to change it dramatically this time. Sound improvements wasn't too obvious from our GC live demos (partly because of the loud environment on the show and partly because the sound part of the game is not really complete yet).

Two audio samples attached, as usually, these are genuine in-game sound recordings - my word for it . (Note that this sound fidelity is result of real-time combination of 44 different audio samples just for the engine/rotor take off and landing sequence of UH1, using our brand new flexible and powerful sound system implemented in Arma 2)