Arma Reforger First-Look Preview: An Early But Promising Return for a Milsim Great

ign.com:

Arma Reforger is a work in progress. That point was hammered home over and over again at a recent preview event hosted by developer Bohemia Interactive. It's been almost a decade since the release of Arma 3, and while a formal sequel is still on the horizon, the company is first offering a smaller, scaled-down version of their traditional warfighting precision. The goal, says Bohemia, is for Reforger to be a "bridge" towards Arma 4; using the platform as a testbed to gauge community feedback throughout the rest of the development cycle. That makes a lot of sense considering how Reforger, and the future Arma 4, are both headed to consoles for the first time in the series’ history. The studio now needs to answer questions it never had to ask before. Can a gamepad mesh with the complex logistics of a military simulator? Does the console audience even have an appetite for Arma's many quirks? You can understand why Bohemia wanted to dip their toes in first before taking a dive.

Arma Reforger is, in some ways, a reimagining of the first game of the series -- 2001's Operation Flashpoint. A fictional Eastern European island from that game, Everon, has been fully remastered in Bohemia's new Enfusion engine, and players are cast as either Americans or Soviets in the keening, late-’80s apogee of the Cold War. I was granted access to a pre-release build, which gave me a tutorial and a few multiplayer servers that were otherwise abandoned by any other actual human players, and it was immediately clear that Bohemia's graphical retrofitting paid off. Pastures bloomed with dewy grass, trees lined the horizon on the impressive draw distance, glassy water lapped against the shores. Bohemia mentioned that development for Reforger has been