Arma 3 Will Not be Getting a Single Player Campaign at Launch

It was recently announced that Arma 3 will not be getting a campaign at launch.

Evan Lahti of PC Gamer got in touch with Joris-Jan van’t Land (Project Lead) and Jay Crowe (Creative Director). This is the short and snappy version of what was said.

Evan first asked:

Arma 3 will launch with zero campaign episodes, but you’ll begin releasing them one per month for the three months following release. Is that accurate?

Jay Crowe replied with:

 …of course, they’re free.

Followed by:

…we can gradually extend with free additions like the campaign episodes.

 Joris-Jan van’t Land said:

But, honestly, we will admit that this is not our originally planned release strategy. It is one borne from the problems the project faced over the past years, the insightful experiences of releasing public Alpha and Beta versions, and wanting to deliver a quality campaign.

So what is it about?

Crowe:

The player is a regular soldier, a Corporal who’s part of a NATO peacekeeping mission in the Mediterranean. Originally deployed in the wake of the total economic collapse of the Republic of Altis—a nation something like the size of Malta—a situation that flared up into a bloody civil war. It’s been a couple of years of uneasy peace following a cease-fire. This US-led force is now in the process of a staged drawdown, tasked to decommission the bases and coordinate the scrapping of military equipment and vehicles that they can’t afford to ship back home.

This withdrawal takes place in the context of decades of recession in the west and a rise in power and ambition of nations under the banner of CSAT, the Canton-Protocol Strategic Alliance Treaty. Stratis—the island where the player’s unit is based—is a key strategic position between east and west. But, with the US more concerned about its interests and influence in the Pacific and traditional European powers looking inwards at their flatlining economies and mass unemployment, it’s become something of an unaffordable operation.

The vacuum left by withdrawing NATO forces is being rapidly filled by CSAT, creating the conditions for, one might say, a flashpoint. The campaign follows the player from this point and examines his role across three distinct episodes: Survive, Adapt, Win.

Talking about the experiences you will get in the game, Crowe said:

Let’s take the most awkwardly named episode. I mean—”Survive,” “Adapt”—those themes immediately conjure up some sense of the experience, but “Win,” well, perhaps appears more two-dimensional. Smells a bit like tiger blood or something. So, here, we ask the designers to think about what “winning” actually means. There are the obvious things like, being part of a dominant force or striking serious blows against your enemy, but one might also consider things like the price of victory, winning at what cost, winning against the odds, despite friendly fire, etc. We want our game mechanics and features to be meaningful and, to do that, we want to put players in specific situations and challenge them to think about how to complete their objectives.

Further information about the campaign can be found here.

You can head over to PC Gamer and find the full interview there.