Calling all quartermasters
The Armory
The interactive encyclopedia and sandbox mode for all content in the game is back in ARMA 2.
Some of you may have already played around in the Armory in ARMA 1, which was properly introduced in the North American release and consecutive patches for all territories. For those who are not familiar with the concept: the Armory allows you to select any vehicle, weapon and creature in the game and do a number of cool things with those items.
Not feeling very active, but want to see the item in action? Check out a dynamic Scene starring the item you selected. Want to inspect an item up close? Fire up the Viewer and rotate, pan and zoom to your heart’s content. In the end though, there’s nothing more fun than to just play around with the item and it goes without saying that this is possible too. Select an item and Try it out for yourself.
In tryout mode you are presented with two types of dynamic challenges. Primary challenges are little scenarios like a firing range or attacking a location, which you can accept, decline or disable altogether. Secondary challenges can occur at any time and are fully optional to complete. You may be asked to quickly get away from your current position or to land your aircraft within a limited time frame. You are the one to decide whether or not it’s even possible to complete said challenge. Maybe it’s conflicting with your primary goal, but easier to achieve. The choice is yours. All challenges earn you points, which in turn will unlock more and more items within the Armory.
The Armory makes testing community content pretty much plug-and-play. With the add-on inserted into the game, the Armory will process it automatically.
What’s very important to point out: when we say ‘content’, we are not limiting you to using official items. Any community add-on will be processed by the Armory and this gives players a chance to very easily try them out. That’s not all: community content will also be used throughout the Armory, for instance as opponents for challenges or as actors during cutscenes. Last but not least, it is possible to configure the author of an item in its config and it will be shown in the item’s statistics / description screen. This should be a nice way to credit the superbly talented modders in our community.
In short the Armory’s goals are: have fun, learn about different types of content, explore community content and hone your skills. The overall gameplay experience is more arcade than the rest of the game, but we feel it’s a nice game mode if you feel like you need a little break from the main game.
So what’s new?
We’ve worked on many new features for the Armory and improved existing content as well. All in all the experience should be more fun than ever.
Any world
The old Armory was one mission on one world: Rahmadi. We felt that was too limiting and not in tune with the procedural nature of the mode. So now the Armory can be started on pretty much any world and yes, that includes community worlds. Basically the Armory is no longer a mission in the traditional sense, but rather something created on-the-fly by a lot of scripts. Many challenges will work ‘out-of-the-box’, while some more advanced ones require some config work.
As an example the Checkpoint Race will not require any information, since it’s able to analyze the world’s road network and then build the challenge from there. The Fitness Track on the other hand requires a world modder to define obstacles and objects. We’re going to do our best to provide details on how to configure worlds for that purpose.
New challenges
This one was pretty easy to guess: we added new challenges and improved upon old challenges.
Steal the Item is a play on a certain massively popular singleplayer scenario many fans will remember. Here you are asked to steal an item from an enemy position and deliver it. Good luck convincing that hunting rifle bearing farmer to give up his tractor!
In Assassination you are handed a few vague target characteristics and with those you need to take out the correct target. Some targets are moving around alone and in a vehicle, others may be in command of a squad.
The Kill House is a mock-up CQB range in which both enemy and friendly targets will pop-up to test your reaction speed.
Ever wondered what it’s like to be hunted like a wild boar? The Hunted challenge provides unique insight from an animal’s point of view. A ranger is on his way, but poachers are closing in on your tracks.
Other challenges include rapidly stopping your vehicle, performing an inside loop, moving a ship on land and reaching a target position quickly.
Unlocking
In the previous version unlocking was not as straightforward as it could have been. This time there is no points counter per item, but one global figure. All challenge points add up and that single figure determines what will be unlocked. We’re also making unlocking more forgiving, so you will not have to play for six billion hours to unlock everything, although you are very welcome to do so!
Not up to unlocking all items through challenges? You can also finish the single player scenarios and / or campaign to receive a massive points boost.
Have a lot of fun exploring all that content!