As promised, Arma 3 developer Bohemia Interactive live-streamed an extensive hour-long gameplay reveal of its forthcoming Zeus DLC over the weekend, but don't worry if you missed it, as the entire thing is now available to view at your leisure via Youtube.
Improvisation is the ultimate key to success in Arma 3 Zeus. Inspired by popular tabletop games such as 'Dungeons & Dragons', a limited number of players can assume the role of Game Master, and influence the multiplayer experience of those with boots on the ground. Watching the battlefield from a bird's-eye view, wielding an intuitive real-time editor, Zeus can create, manipulate or expand mission content to generate new stories and a flow of challenges. The result is incredibly dynamic, unscripted combat gameplay - and multiplayer sessions which are filled with unexpected, challenging, and creative events.
The Zeus multiplayer concept works across all familiar multiplayer game types, such as Team Deathmatch and Sector Control, where players can either work with or go up against Zeus. The most distinctive game type in Arma 3 Zeus, however, is ‘Zeus Game Master’. Here, Game Masters are entirely free to create objectives, spawn units, and steer players across Arma 3’s massive Altis and Stratis terrains.
The Zeus DLC is due launch as a free content update for Arma 3 in early Q2 2014.
Been playing a lot of this on Dev Build; It's been pretty good so far. I was a little sceptical at first (Don't want any arcade gimmicks in a military simulator), but its managed to plug some of A3's biggest holes. Making missions is a real pain, requires a lot of skill and time... and usually merits only one or two playthroughs with your mates before it becomes boring. This is a more accessible, 3D enabled and simplified editor.
It dumbs down a lot of the complex aspects of mission making (such as creating tasks that rely on very specific triggers/things to happen) to simple premade tasks that can be manually set to "succeeded"or "failed" by the Game Master, something that is really simple for a human to do, but can be obscenely complex to explain to a computer program.
Nothing is scripted, each playthrough is different and the missions have a much more challenging atmosphere about them as you know there is intelligent design behind every task and unit placement.
I'm not sure how well this mode will work online; there is a lot of room for trolls to stuff it up for everyone. All of my experience with this game type has been with a group of mates, where we randomly pick the next Zeus and rotate it through with each mission. Makes for some awesome game nights.
Posted 03:23am 18/2/14
It dumbs down a lot of the complex aspects of mission making (such as creating tasks that rely on very specific triggers/things to happen) to simple premade tasks that can be manually set to "succeeded"or "failed" by the Game Master, something that is really simple for a human to do, but can be obscenely complex to explain to a computer program.
Nothing is scripted, each playthrough is different and the missions have a much more challenging atmosphere about them as you know there is intelligent design behind every task and unit placement.
I'm not sure how well this mode will work online; there is a lot of room for trolls to stuff it up for everyone. All of my experience with this game type has been with a group of mates, where we randomly pick the next Zeus and rotate it through with each mission. Makes for some awesome game nights.