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Back in 2001, a new game hit the market – “Operation Flashpoint”. It was a new concept in First-Person gaming. It was eerily similar to an earlier game – SpecOps. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say it was a new and improved version of DID’s “Wargasm”.
In short, you play the game as a soldier. However, your soldier can climb into vehicles and enter buildings. Now, prior to 2001, games just didn’t allow you to do this. If you’re a foot soldier, you’re a foot soldier all the way through the game. Yes I know, games like Battlefield and Call of Duty all can do that, but they were all made AFTER 2001, after Operation Flashpoint led the way.
Now somewhere along the way, the developers of Operation Flashpoint (ie the people who did the programming), Bohemia Interactive Studios (or BIS), had a falling out with the publisher, Codemasters. The result of this falling out was that Codemasters kept the title “Operation Flashpoint”, and thus BIS couldn’t use it anymore for any of their future games. So BIS changed the new versions to “Armed Assault” (in America it’s called “Combat Arms”). To the gamers, the name didn’t matter – what mattered was that BIS made new and improved version of the game we loved – Operation Flashpoint.
At this time, Armed Assault is already in its second incarnation – Armed Assault 2 (or ARMA2). In total, BIS produced 3 very successful games – Operation Flashpoint, the original, Armed Assault, and Armed Assault 2.
8 years later, Codemasters finally caught up with BIS, and released the SECOND Operation Flashpoint game. Affectionately referred to as “OFP2” for “Operation Flashpoint 2”, Dragon Rising is a totally different beast from BIS’s versions.
First and foremost, what comes to mind immediately was the awkwardness of issuing commands in OFPDR. When you are busy fighting, running, shooting etc, hitting the command key stops you dead in your tracks. Not only that, because the command radial uses the same WASD keys to select your commands, you often end up issuing the WRONG command to your squad. I have had it happen to me many times when I wanted to order them to FOLLOW ME and ended up telling them to MOVE somewhere else just because I was panicking and pressed W to go forward, and forgetting I was still in the command radial. All the time I’m in the command dial getting my fingers all knotted up, I’m standing still in the game world, being shot at.
In contrast, in ARMA2, even though they have introduced a new “quick command” key, the old key sequences still work. For veterans of the original game since, we’ve kind of memorised where each command goes, and we kind of instinctively hit the correct sequence without even needing to look at the screen. The new “Quick Command” feature is thus almost never used by me, but I can forsee that new players will find it useful. As an example, right now even as I’m typing, I can tell you that the command sequence to tell the whole squad to HALT is 1-6, and to go into stealth mode is 7-1. The command sequence to report status is 5-5, and to call for a medic, 5-4, and so on. Also, when the command option box is up on the screen, it does NOT interfere with you running, shooting, hiding or so on. You can issue a panicky “GET IN THE DAMN APC!!” (4-2-5) when you’re in the APC and watching your squad taking heavy fire, while still driving towards them without breaking the pace.
The next thing is something which I liked in OFPDR actually – the graphics engine seems more “optimised”, and framerates are at least 10 to 15 frames better than on ARMA2 for the same resolution. The movement is smoother, doing video capture didn’t “lag” the game much. In contrast, ARMA2 will sometimes slow down to a crawl during video capture. As an example, most times I see ARMA2 running at between 39 to 45 FPS on my PC. However with video capture turned on, it can drop to as low as 6 FPS! In OFPDR, the framerates were about 20 to 30 or so during video capture, and running at 50 to 60 FPS on normal plays.
The mission editor in ARMA2 is way more powerful than in OFPDR, but the scripting language (where most of the magic happens) is much easier in OFPDR than in ARMA2. As a comparison, I can make a simple “Attack that place and wipe out all enemies” in the OFPDR editor in under 20 minutes, complete with briefings and “objective complete” status flags. Compartively in ARMA2 I might need to spend a few hours getting the triggers, waypoints and other things all done for the same mission. The scripting language in ARMA2 is a little bit un-intuitive, unlike the one in OFPDR which uses LUA, which looks like a cross between C, Pascal, Basic, and Java. As long as you’ve done SOME programming in the past, doing event handling in OFPDR will be smooth sailing. Also, kudos to Codemaster for including the complete reference of commands, events and objects in the helpfile of the editor – no more hunting around on forums and such for some kind soul to gather all the neat info into a nice PDF reference.
The drawback of course, is that the mission editor isn’t as feature packed and powerful as ARMA’s. As a very simple example – you can’t give the player a different weapon from the default one in OFPDR editor. To do so, you need to fool around with other files (or ‘hacking the game’). In ARMA, you can easily just issue a command or 2 in the script to change the weapons – provided you know the exact objectIDs of course.
During normal play, it is easier to play OFPDR than ARMA2 even on the normal, easy mode. In OFPDR you have a compass strip on top which shows you position of ALL detected enemies, your waypoints, objectives and so on. In ARMA2, you have to use the compass, switch to map view etc to do the same. More realistic, but more troublesome for gameplay. Of course this makes ARMA harder to play too since most of the time you can’t see the enemies until you’ve been shot. In OFPDR, you get a nice feedback of whether you hit the enemy or killed him with a little white or red expanding crosshair. White means you hit something and did some damage but didn’t destroy/kill it, and red means it’s dead. So in ARMA, you may have missed the enemy, but you see him drop (he may just drop to a prone position) and should you move your sights away, he may shoot you back and kill you. in OFPDR you can tell for sure if it’s a hit or a kill.
Then we come to the availability of mods, maps, and missions from the respective communities. In many cases, the community actually overlaps – People who played the original Operation Flashpoint also play Armed Assault. As we all know, Armed Assault and its family has a HUGE library of mods, maps and missions made by players for other players. In this way the game doesn’t get deleted once you’ve completed it – other people will make more new missions or new campaigns for you to carry on playing. Comparatively though, OFPDR has very few missions and campaigns, and as far as I know, just 2 or 3 mods. No new models, no new army, no new aircraft, no new weapons etc. In ARMA, you can mod to your heart’s content. You can add Israeli forces, French forces, British SAS etc just by downloading the correct mods. In fact, in ARMA (the first one) someone actually re-did the whole Operation Flashpoint campaign into ARMA format – meaning the same missions, same objectives, but now with the new ARMA graphic engine and physics. I can’t wait to see if someone else would do the same in ARMA2.
So when we come right down to it, which is better? Well my answer is – I couldn’t choose 🙂 I bought both (quite obvious huh?), and I play both. However I tend to take OFPDR as a “casual romp in the battlefield” and ARMA2 for when I wanna really “get into” the game.
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