Community Blog Post: Numero Uno
Welcome to the first (and hopefully not last!) of regular community blog posts, these will serve as a means of looking at all areas of the community, the people in the community and the works that the community is doing with regards addons and mod making, mission making and things like that. In these community blog posts we'll also look at other community sites out there, as well as chatting to a number of people who have directly or indirectly affected the lives of people within the community.
This first community blog post is ideally meant to start a "this is what we want to do, thoughts?" mentality happening, it's your community so we need your feedback to see what you want from the community, how can the community blog best represent you? How are you the community member feeling? What do you like about the current situation? What don't you like? In this first blog post there's a summary of the rise of the community as seen through the eyes of someone who was there during all the heady and exciting days, and weeks and months and years. Also included with this first community blog post is an interview with one of the addon/mod making revolutionaries Kegetys.
The clues lead to the not so secret identity of the community blog's first interviewee
Community huh? What’s all that about then?
Where does this gaming community aspect come in to play? How do we join? Why would we?
For many games, we buy them; we play them; we complete them and stop playing them, or simply get bored and move on to another game. For the majority of people who’re reading this, Operation Flashpoint when it was released was different, we played it, we talked about it on IRC and web forums, we played some more, then slowly but surely we started to see more and more things that we could download and add to the game to expand its life: missions, campaigns, then after a while various addons, eventually huge, complete mods that completely changed every aspect of the game.
For me that’s only one aspect of the community around BIS’ games. Whilst there’s no doubting how significantly the “moddability” of Flashpoint helped keep peoples’ attention I think a large part was also due to BIS’ design philosophy, that of creating an open, sandbox wargame which allowed us to relive all those fantast battles that we’d had as kids in our sandboxes with our Action Men™ or GI Joes™ and such. Sure, some games were prettier, some games had nicer sound, some games had a bit more spit and polish, but at the end of the day what attracted myself and I’m sure a lot of you out there was the heart and character of the game, it was a game made with feeling and sincerity, not often seen in 2001, not often seen today.
So that was then, Flashpoint in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 was a hell of a ride, along came Armed Assault/ ArmA: Combat Operations depending on your geographical location, or ArmA as we affectionately call it, some got it in 2006, some got it in 2007, to some it was the masterpiece follow up to Flashpoint that all those years of waiting were for, to others it was, well it was a bit of an anti-climax.
The name might change, the face might change, but in its heart the philosophy remains the same
Now as we’re coming towards the end of 2007 I believe the game is reaching the mature, polished, patched state that allows the game to be seen and played as the true embodiment of what BIS hoped it to be, most of the hoped for addon tools have been released and the talented, dedicated addon/mod makers are beavering away to bring us a plethora of delightful new content, and at BIS headquarters the final touches are being put on the 1.09 patch, to those of you who aren’t aware this patch will be released as beta 1.09, once that beta status has progressed successfully it will then be released as final ArmA patch 1.11 or 1.12 (perhaps with a couple of small additional tweaks/fixes if required). The patch includes a number of tweaks/fixes, some improve performance significantly, for example the reworked grass clutter of
Just some of the many work in progress addons and mods that have been released or that we should be see released soon
To all the addon/mod/mission/campaign makers out there, if you have something you're working on that you'd like to see covered in the blog please send me an e-mail, be warned though that a "quid pro quo" system is in effect, I'm happy to cover what you're working on, but I may insist on interviewing you in return!
It’s goodnight from me, and goodnight from me
So this was the first of my community blog posts, in fact this was my first ever blog post period, so if you feel like guinea pigs there’s a reason for that! Future blog posts will see interviews with various famous and not so famous people, a look at various addons/mods/missions/campaigns with special focussed looks on the stuff you tell me you want me to look at. Obviously as this is a community blog and not “My boring-ass life, the uncomfortably candid diary of Paul R. Statham” it really needs some little prompting and poking by you guys to help shape future contents of the blog, what do you want to see? What do you not want to see? If you have any suggestions, questions, feedback please send me an e-mail, please note that as I get insane amounts of spam if you don’t put “community blog” in the subject there’s a good chance the Email will be filed with all the penis expanding, fake paypal Emails that I get daily.