How a Military Simulator paved the way for the current gaming landscape.
The series that influenced a generation of PC Gaming enthusiasts, and how it started a domino effect into the highest and lowest of the modern gaming industry.
When you think about the most influential videogames of the past couple decades, there may be an impulse to name your favourite indie or the highest-selling blockbusters — Yet I want to shine a spotlight on a relatively small Czech team who ended up opening the floodgates for a lot of what we consider staples of the industry, for better or for worse.
In 2001, a team of 12 employees released their dream sandbox military simulator: Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis (Now released under the name ARMA: Cold War Assualt). The title featured a comprehensive mission editor, allowing players to create their own operations to play with their group.
The developer Bohemia Interactive found it crucial to promote the idea of player creation, something that was true for most of the golden era of early PC gaming. This continued into their 2009 follow-up title Arma 2.
The game that convinced me and my friends at the time to start our PC gaming journey. The promise of infinite possibilities, hardcore mil-sim tactical gameplay, and cutting-edge visuals that brought our humble desktops to a crawl.
Come the summer of 2012, a dedicated Arma fan Dean “Rocket” Hall, freshly inspired by his time enlisted in the New Zealand Army used his passion for survival training to create a mod for Arma 2 known as DayZ.
Reading the name of that mod will make a lot of people wince in pain, with the memories of a buggy, messy sandbox filled with hours of troubleshooting — For this was the introduction of the Arma series into the mainstream.
Later becoming a standalone title published and developed by Bohemia Interactive themselves, DayZ influenced a wave of survival multiplayer games to hit the market.
Rust, ARK: Survival Evolved, 7 Days to Die, and H1Z1 are a few names that crawled their way out of the rubble that was the Survival craze, an entire genre of games that were produced from this new-found love for surviving against other players in a harsh sandbox environment.
For every single one of these games that remains relevant today, there are a hundred others that are relegated to the prison of having a single-digit player count on Steam, falling out of the slither of relevance that they once had. This new craze of surviving and crafting opened up a whole world of so-called “Shovelware” being released onto Steam.
Yet surprisingly, this is far from the biggest influence that the Arma series would have. Bohemia Interactive continued open support for their Mod community, and it kept blossoming until eventually releasing what I consider the biggest stepping stone between the early 2010s gaming landscape and the one we play in today.
The popularity of the DayZ mod led to multiple offshoots (or “mods-of-mods”). Epoch, Overwatch, and Origins may be familiar to those of you who played this era of Arma, each bringing custom maps, missions, AI and weapons to the Zombie apocalypse.
Yet in 2013, I spent a countless number of hours playing a new heart-pumping mod, dubbed “DayZ: Battle Royale” after the Japanese movie with the same name. This mod forced the server full of players to battle it out and try to be the last man standing, resulting in some of the greatest memories I have of this era of gaming.
The mod creator, Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene, released a follow-up mod for Bohemia’s next title, Arma 3. The mod was aptly named PlayerUnknown’s Battle Royale. Bringing all of the Arma 2 mod’s gameplay into the new title.
Greene was later brought on by the developers of H1Z1 (a DayZ competitor) to produce the Battle Royale mode for their game, after this a South Korean gaming developer reached out to him to create his own title based off of the concept. This title became PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (now known as PUBG.)
PUBG had an insane amount of growth and became one of the highest-played games of all time on Steam, along with Console and mobile ports releasing later down the line. This is the first time we also saw bigger developers try to get in on a brand new genre being defined with names such as Call of Duty, with Black Ops 4 having its own BR mode inspired by PUBG.
There’s yet another player here, with Epic Games releasing their BR mode for their 2017 co-op shooter Fortnite. Later causing PUBG to attempt to sue over the plagiarism of technology, since PUBG was created in Epic’s own Unreal Engine.
Fortnite had some big advantages to PUBG in the market, PUBG may have been the biggest game in the world at the time, but Fortnite would soon take that throne. Being one of the first truly massive Free-to-Play titles, also released on console while PUBG was stuck to PC early access gave it a massive boost.
Where few developers dared to follow DayZ’s or PUBG’s trends. The success and endless cash flow of Fortnite forced a lot of big-name developers to follow their business model — being Free-to-Play, featuring a “Battle Pass” and a rotating cosmetic store with expensive items bought with real-world cash. It truly had a giant impact on the industry, and one that will be talked about for decades.
Yet it all flows back to the military simulation games by Bohemia Interactive, if it wasn’t for their support of their mod creators, allowing near-open use of their engine, spotlighting creations and encouraging growth from their community, the games you play today may not be the same.
There’s something that can be said for developers that allow their community to push their games further. With News such as Capcom issuing Copywrite strikes against players publishing videos using mods in their games, and Take-Two taking down Grand Theft Auto mods that are over 15 years old, I give all my power to the developers who openly embrace the weird and wacky world of their modders, for only in these environments does true creativity shine through.
Two of the biggest genres of the last decade stemmed from Bohemia’s community, and with their promise of keeping the mod tools and keeping their games creator-friendly for the foreseeable future, who knows what life people will squeeze from their future titles?
