I played a bit more of the Arma 2 demo. The server had turned down the AI so the jeep gunner couldn't kill us from a kilometer away without really trying. But while it made the game less challenging, it made for a better story.
I joined late. The was probably good for me as I probably would have joined the chopper crew otherwise. There was normally no chopper on this map, but people were learning the editor (or maybe just cheat codes) to give us one, and it was flying around, drawing a lot of fire by the time I entered the game. It took maybe two minutes for it to draw too much fire and crash.
That left me (a medic) and one other player (a sniper) alive on our team. I made rejoining the sniper, holed up in a shed overlooking the town, my priority. There was a lot of open terrain with a few scattered low walls, trees, and bushes between me and the sniper, but I caught a break. For no apparent reason, the AI thought it was more fun to stand around the crashed helicopter and pump extra rounds into it than resume their patrol. (AI bug?)
Our dead comrades became disembodied voices, black crows in the game, and told us when the enemy had finally gotten bored and were coming for us. The first wave was infantry. I watched some coming from a long way off, across the field I has just crossed. The sniper killed a couple coming up from town. The jeep tried to roll up on us from town, but I abandoned my watch to join the sniper in filling the occupants full of lead the instant they appeared. I'd been killed by that mounted machine gun too often.
There was more tension as the sniper ran down into town to secure the jeep and drive it back up. Too bad it had no ammo left from shooting the heli. :P We abandoned the shed and ran into town. The sniper found some elevation and called out the enemy IFV. It sucked, but I had to run back out to the shed under enemy fire to pick the anti-armor gun off a dead friendly that had been the sniper's previous backup. Fumbling with the inventory interface, which I had never used before, and having to do it twice because it didn't automatically grab ammo for the gun was an exercise in fear.
But I managed to make it back to the edge of town furthest from the enemy infantry without getting shot. Callooh! Callay! I loaded the weapon and looked for the IFV. According to the sniper, it had seen me and was heading toward the edge of town. I peeked around the corner of the house and almost got my head shot off. The IFV kept firing on my corner of the house, and in ArmA 2, high caliber rounds go right through walls. But the IFV's continuous fire gave me an opportunity. As it kept shooting, I booked it around the house the long way and managed to shoot it in the side faster than the turret could turn to murder me. It was scary.
The rest of the game was also scary. My sniper buddy got shot and it was just me and the ghosts. It all bleeds together: jumping fences, playing cat and mouse around houses, stealing weapons and ammo from enemy corpses, shooting guys in the streets and running up from the fields, and getting targets highlighted by the friendly black crows over their heads. In the end I probably killed a dozen bad guys.
Of course that probably only felt so exciting because my guts were freaking out as though we were on Normal difficulty when we were only on Recruit.
For good or ill, there won't be any more ArmA 2 stories for a while. The retail version came out only a day or two after the demo, so the Penny Arcade folks have upgraded. I'll probably buy it eventually, if there are still people playing after the price comes down. That's one of the strengths and weaknesses of multiplayer games. If enough people I know are buying it and having fun with it, the desire to be a part of the experience while it's new and fresh can get me to shell out more money than I otherwise would. But if the community has dried up, I won't buy it no matter how well made it is.
In many ways, AI hasn't come very far at all. It seems like the only choices in ArmA 2 are idiots who can't shoot straight or robots with perfect aim who see through anything. They try to flank you, given the chance, but for the most part AI seems like it can now do procedurally what Half-Life 1 did with waypoints and scripts over ten years ago. We haven't come very far in the last decade.
This is why I always laugh when people talk about how we're reaching the maximum computing power we'll ever need for games. They're always thinking about graphics looking "real" in perfectly posed screen shots. During actual gameplay there are always clipping and animation glitches that break the illusion. The original Red Faction let you deform the terrain. The new one lets you knock down buildings. We're still probably a console generation or two away from one that lets you believably do both. And that's just physics.
AI that can act and creatively navigate complex environments with interactive physics will probably take more computing power to run and more effort to design and implement than we'll see applied to gaming in my lifetime.
"Prove me wrong, kids! Prove me wrong!" ;)
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