There's a huge emphasis on weapon and optics simulation within Arma 3. Ten minutes later, we learned that the lone bullet had come from a now-dead sniper, but that we would be staying at our position to eat in case we didn’t have the time to later. Without hesitation, everyone dismounted and formed a perimeter around the vehicle. Here, soldiers listened to their commander give a detailed plan for their mission, their rules of engagement for the day and how to remain safe around the vehicles that they would be using that afternoon.Īn hour later, I was in the back of an armoured personnel carrier when a lone bullet dinged against the vehicle. With a different unit, I experienced a side of conflict that no movie or game has ever exhibited.Īfter a thorough press briefing, I found myself sitting inside of a virtual recreation of a briefing room for the 5 Rifles Regiment. Robinson’s experiences in war, which mirrored what I had seen when playing with him, is not the only unique part of combat that Arma 3 showcases. You’re shooting the bad guys while yelling “fuck you” at them.” “There’s a lot of cussing, a lot of yelling, and a lot of indirect insults.

Everyone knows what they’re doing and wants to follow the book, but you never know if there’s a bad guy around the corner,” said S. ‍ “In real combat, there’s a sort of organised chaos. Everyone took a smoke break, reloaded their weapons and started to move towards their objective like nothing had just happened.Īrma 3 allows players to go on missions at night which adds another layer of realism and confusion to the already chaotic combat.Īlthough there’s no shortage of movies and documentaries about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, something that they almost always fail to capture is the strangeness of combat that I experienced within Arma 3. The soldiers didn’t know if they had killed their targets or not, but it didn’t matter to them. The enemy stopped shooting at the soldiers, so the soldiers too stopped shooting. They treated their wounded, smoked virtual cigarettes and shot hundreds of rounds into the hills. They moved from rock to rock, covering one another as they moved and dragging anyone who got wounded to the back of their firing line.

They unloaded magazine after magazine into the hills where the enemy had originally fired from, all while shouting obscenities to anyone within earshot. As a rocket whizzed over our heads, I ducked into cover, but the soldiers immediately returned fire. Minutes after our mission started, the soldiers I was with were ambushed. The first time I went along with one of Arma’s units, I felt like I was in The Hurt Locker. Arma 3's helicopters are one of the things that make the game so realistic and something that few other games have.

Arma 3 world war 1