About

Gameplay overview

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

  • build and develop FOBs in strategic locations
  • stock up on supplies, captured vehicles, and gear
  • raise money, because to wage war you need three things: money, money, and a little bit of money on top of that
  • gather local population support to ensure you are not going into battle alone
  • balance resistance activity against threats from the enemy
  • complete missions for the resistance

Project goals

  • create the 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 detail and immersiveness of short, one-off 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 the 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 nearby and such an event has not happened 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 their sight, and the system can control the pacing and intensity of the gameplay.

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

The gameplay should maximize action and intensity over realism when it comes to force sizes, response times, and general firefight 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 that is hidden in obscure directories, and so on.

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

Most game mode features should be optional and act as add-ons to the core mechanics, so that scenarios can be ported to third-party terrains and community factions can be added with a minimal 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, with which I have spent hundreds of hours in Arma 3.