About

Gameplay overview

The primary mechanic of FF is capturing points of interests and taking control over territories in an open world environment. A successful takeover will require from you:

  • building and developing FOBs in strategic locations
  • stocking up on supplies, captured vehicles and gear
  • raising money, because to wage war you need three things: money, money and a little bit of money on top of that
  • gathering local population support to ensure you are not going into the battle alone
  • balancing resistance activity against threat from the enemy
  • completing missions for the resistance

Project goals

  • create an ultimate go-to single player experience in Arma Reforger
  • fill the Arma Reforger niche of persistent campaign game modes known from Arma 3
  • showcase feasibility of Arma Reforger for such projects
  • mix the attention to details and immersiveness of short, one-off style narrative scenarios with the scale and replayability of open world persistent campaigns
  • deliver a production-quality bug free experience
  • maintain a well-written codebase to support the project development over several years
    • …and hopefully serve as a foundation to spearhead development of a sequel or similar projects in Arma 4

Design philosophy

While the campaign remains player-driven, the player should not feel as if they are single-handedly saving the world. Ambient and friendly AIs should create a feeling of a living, breathing environment, of which the player is only a part of.

Gameplay should be emergent and feel like a Game Master session, but without a Game Master. The player can launch a session with an intent to do one thing, but end up doing ten other things, because the events unfolded spontaneously.

No hard simulation of the world state and events. Like in a Game Master session, an event should happen because a player is near and such event didn’t happen for some time, not because of some hidden autonomous background mechanic. When done right, the player doesn’t know that this patrol has just been spawned out of his sight, and the system can control the pacing and intensity of the gameplay.

Magical and game-y solutions and mechanics should be minimalized as possible, but not to the point the gameplay becomes tedious. If the player calls a fire mission, they have to figure out and provide the coords over the radio, not magically click on the map - but it’s something that provides an advantage and is not performed constantly.

The gameplay should maximize action and intensity over being realistic when it comes to force sizes, response times and general firefights intensity.

The player is not a modder. They should be able to set up, configure, launch and use the mod without having to dabble in profile files, JSON configs, reset save data hidden in obscure directories and so on.

Arma has always been about mixing, matching and adjusting the gameplay to one’s liking. Provide an overkill amount of user-selectable dificulty and balance settings, because every group or player has different skill level and expectations.

Most gamemode features should be optional and act as addons to the root mechanics, so that the scenarios can be ported to third party terrains and community factions can be added with a minimalistic setup.

If a feature requires extra configuration in the world or the faction being used, and this configuration is missing, that feature should be gracefully skipped without breaking the game.

Attributions

The project is inspired by earlier game modes developed by the fantastic Arma series community, such as Antistasi, KP Liberation, Old Man and Overthrow, in which I have spent hundreds of hours playing Arma 3.