ArmA: Armed Assault
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Publisher: 505 Games Genre(s): Simulation, Shooting Home Page: http://www.armedassault.com/
Too much of a good thingWhat Bohemia seems to have missed is that trying to emulate reality as closely as possible does not give the most immersive results. Simulating a first-person view is especially difficult, as 1:1 simulation isn't possible with any current technology, let alone the limited interface of a PC. Armed Assault takes a somewhat naive approach, where the developers have tried to reproduce exactly what they would see in real life on the computer monitor. Granted, Bohemia went the extra mile and included support for widescreen resolutions for slightly better peripheral vision simulation, and even for triple display setups with a true 12:3 field of vision. However, sometimes too much is shown on the screen: for example, seeing the soldier's own hands on the screen is a poor design choice, as they hardly ever react to the player's movements or interact with the world the way they should. Hand-eye coordination is one our most basic neurological functions, and putting two unresponsive hands on screen that interact with the world unnaturally feels completely out of place.
In ArmA, "realistic" is sometimes synonymous with "unintuitive". Let's take an example: on a scouting mission, you run face first into an enemy motorized squad that includes an APC and several soldiers. After barely surviving the initial encounter, you hide behind a wall with a portable anti-tank weapon in hand. Wary of the enemy soldiers sneaking up on you, you decide to switch to your rifle instead. Right when you press the button to switch weapons, the APC drives around the corner and stops only a few meters in front of you. What do you do? In ArmA, the answer is simple: movement and action animations can only be interrupted by your player character's death. Instead of ducking for cover or legging it, you can only watch as your APC turns its turret and fires, while your character juggles with his equipment. As if this freezing of controls during certain character animations wasn't bad enough, the equipment system has at least one very annoying bug: if you switch from pistol to another piece of equipment, such as a laser designator, and then to your rifle, your character compulsively draws and holsters his pistol before readying his rifle. Home on the rangePerhaps the defining feature of Armed Assault is how far you can see, reach out and touch. Modern ground warfare is fought at ranges between a few meters and several hundred, and ArmA tries to faithfully reproduce this. In real life, a rifleman with basic training can reliably hit a human-sized target at 150 m, using his weapon's iron sights. Most first person shooters concentrate on close range combat, and possible long-range engagements are fought using sniper rifles with magnifying scopes. In ArmA, the player gets a feel of the diversity and power of the plain old rifleman and his weapon. Your target in a firefight can be a speck few pixels tall or close enough to touch. Since it is so far from the norm of first person shooters, ArmA's long-range combat can be very frustrating at first. Even when spotted, enemies can be very hard to see, and while the player can fire a deadly shot at any range, so can the enemy.
You can't shoot where you can't see and so ArmA draws an impressive vista in front of the player. The viewing distance can be several kilometers from an elevated position, and the game draws terrain, vegetation, buildings and units faithfully to a distance of up to 10 km. By default, however, the view is set to just 1200 meters and for a good reason: a GPU can only draw and fill so many polygons and keep up with the action. To counter this, the scenery is drawn at less detail towards the limit of the set viewing distance. Objects such as trees and vehicles disappear at a certain distance, even though the terrain stays in sight. 
Jump in a Cobra gunship, and you wish you could crank view distance just a bit further, getting rid of that darn blue fog
This flexible view distance modelling is great for increasing performance while retaining good visual quality up close, but it can lead to some major problems when moving across open ground. A plain hill with no trees or undergrowth can be just that, or it can be a veritable grassy knoll full of enemy snipers - only you can't see any undergrowth, trees or snipers because of your limited view distance. If you choose to boost performance on a low-end system by limiting the draw range, you should bear this in mind. Turning view distance all the way up every now and then (at least in single player, where you can pause the game) might just save your skin. If you jump into one of the game's airplanes or helicopters, a long view distance is even more important. View distance is adjustable on the fly from the game's options menu, but doing so destroys the suspension of disbelief and can be very unhealthy in mid-air. Finally, despite its claims to be the ultimate combat simulator, ArmA forgoes some realistic features already seen in other first person shooters. Perhaps the most damning omission is the lack of adjustable sights in any weapon, a feature that I sorely missed when using both rifles and anti-tank weapons. This takes quite a bit of realism out of long-range engagements, and a lot of ground from underneath the "ultimate" claim.
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