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Comment by dmoy | Hacker News Reader

> which tasked the company with working on updates for "America's Army," the 2002 first-person shooter

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Ahhh so they're the ones who made that game less realistic and more modern shooter-y. Which I have no doubt is exactly what they were asked to do, because the original AA game was slow and a lot of people hated it compared to ut or cs1.6

Shame though, it was the only game that kinda had that level of realism, with "rifle from prone while waiting can hit you at 400+ yards, but if you're running around you struggle making hits under 100 yards" that encouraged very methodical play with teamwork and spotting.

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I still remember sitting through a legitimate field medic first aid course before unlocking the medic class. That game was something else!

It was finances by the army as a recruitment tool and to save on training costs, that's why

If you want realistic they should have put IEDs and PTSS in it.

The Netherlands now has to spend 5% of GDP on the military which is doable- recruiting fools is the hard part in a country with free university and a functioning welfare system.

IIRC the sniper course in AA had IED disposal (via anti material rifle) in it as one of the major components for passing.

But yea it was very much a rah-rah-go-Army game, nothing about the aftermath.

Glad to know I was a fool for ever joining the military...

I remember sitting in the prison...

I felt so cool after passing Sniper School, then you could pick that role in matches.

The training course to sneak past behind enemy lines for the SF role was the hardest, lol.

> Shame though, it was the only game that kinda had that level of realism, with "rifle from prone while waiting can hit you at 400+ yards, but if you're running around you struggle making hits under 100 yards" that encouraged very methodical play with teamwork and spotting.

The original Ghost Recon came out the year before, and the Delta Force series was already well underway. I recall enduring the interminable mandatory training of America's Army, just to discover that it was a flashier, gamey-er version of games I was already playing.

In fairness, I think you can definitely see AA's impact on the design of e.g. Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter on the PC, but hilariously (and true to form) when ArmA came out in 2006, its clear they took not one cue about how to build a playable game.

Fair, I guess I never played Ghost Recon

I do remember winning a lot of AA games without ever even taking out my rifle, and just using binoculars and telling all my teammates (who were lying in bushes for minutes not moving) where people were moving.

Wasn’t ArmA the successor to Operation Flashpoint?

Yes. Operation Flashpoint was made by Bohemia Interactive and published by Codemasters, with BI owning the code but Codemasters owning the trademark. When the companies went their separate ways (iirc there was some drama, but can't remember about what), BI had to rename the next installment of the game series.

Operation Flashpoint having also been spun off into “VBS” (Virtual Battlespace Systems) a military combat simulator whose first client/user was incedentally the USMC. So AA’s was probably arguably the first mainstream (from the heavy promotion and the fact it was free, something out of the ordinary for an “AAA Game” at the time) “realistic shooter”, but certainly not the first.

OF was great, i'd spend hours in the editor just making custom scenarios.

Doesn't the ARMA series at least support that level of realism?

Could snipe people at 2km+ in arma 2.

Which is also (arguably not easily) doable IRL. The most realistic part of it surely being the pacing and “tactical” aspects of it.

At those distances there's a lot more involved in shots than just bullet drop/gravity, which AFAIK is all that ARMA models.

AA3 was my first shooter, and it was slowed down a lot compared to AA2 (then AA4 sped things back up) and I haven't been able to find anything quite like it since. Some of those maps were incredible

That team also did a helicopter flight simulator at the Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville (IIRC the devs were at Redstone Arsenal?) that I saw once and was surprisingly in depth. Required 2 players, one of whom would be the gunner and the other would be the pilot, complete with stick, collective, and pedals. A far different experience than helicopters in video games at the time

I loved how slow that game was, my favourite map was the bridge one, before they added the ridge so you could circumvent the bridge as a chokepoint.

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