Two years in the making. Where are we? What has it got me? How did we get to this point? I've been chewing on those three questions for a while, so I figured I'd actually write it down.
How we got here
Arma Wasteland started as a project of love. It was my favorite gamemode in Arma 3, and I spent at least three thousand hours playing on Code Four Gaming servers. That's where I met Tonic originally. Actually, scratch that, I think I met Tonic in Breaking Point. He was trolling me while streaming. But that's neither here nor there.
At the end of the day, we went on this journey to build Wasteland for the community because it was something I missed and something I enjoyed doing. And I know that bringing it back to life brought back a lot of fond memories for the community too. That's the only reason any of this was ever going to work. You can't fake that part.
What it's gotten me
I've done a lot of writing in the past about tactical communication. The ability to work as a team. Coordinating team effort under pressure. I keep coming back to it because I think it's one of the strongest things that makes playing Arma fun. Working on a team. Being cooperative. Being good teammates. Creating a fun and fair environment for everyone to play in.
That's the thing Wasteland is built around. Not just a survival mode with factions slapped on top. An environment where being a good teammate actually pays off. Where coordination matters more than gear. Where the squad that talks to each other wins fights they had no business winning. The communities that stick around for years are the ones that get this in their bones.
Where we are now
Honestly? Bohemia Interactive released a patch that was completely broken in nature, and they've been slow to push fixes. I don't understand, as a game development studio, how you wouldn't put out this patch and then QA test it before shipping. That's the part that gets me.
Player counts are way down right now because of how broken the engine is. That's not on us, and it's not really anything we can fix from our end. We're waiting on Bohemia to fix what they shipped. That's a frustrating place to sit when you've spent two years getting the game mode to the state it's in.
Two years in: a household name
But that's only half the story. At this point, two years in, Wasteland has become a household name in the Arma Reforger community. It's back to what it was when Sa-Matra first put out Wasteland on Arma 3. The same energy, the same dynamics, the same kind of fights breaking out in the same kinds of places.
I believe that with time and an iterative process, this becomes a powerhouse of the game mode. That's not a guess. That's me watching the same patterns play out that played out the first time around, only with better tools and a community that already knows the shape of it.
The next two years
So what's in the next two years of Wasteland while we wait for Arma 4? Potentially, you'll see several additional servers come up. We'll try different blends of the game mode. Some of what we've discussed: a smaller game mode with fewer people on a smaller map but more intense action, which is the thing we'd want to capture. Maybe persistency on top of that.
None of that ships until Bohemia gets the engine into a stable place. We have to wait for them to fix what we have before we expand on it. But hopefully in the next several months, between us and Bohemia, the game server is back to full capacity and we're back to building forward instead of patching backward. Once we're at full capacity, we can start exploring other options and other game modes to bring in more support for what we're building.
Our first game within a game
One thing I do want to point out: the outfit system was our first attempt at creating a game within a game. The idea was to build a competitive landscape on top of Wasteland where teams can compete against one another in a team deathmatch style, separate from the open-world chaos. We've talked some about creating a specific game mode that's dedicated to that. But for now I wanted to test the market first and see whether the player base would actually adopt it.
At this point, it hasn't really been picked up yet. That's the honest read. So I'm going to make some iterative changes to it to try and encourage teams to become more competitive against each other. I mean, they talk enough smack to each other. You think they'd wanna shoot each other?
If you've been part of this for any stretch of those two years, thanks. If you haven't, the door's open. Come find us on Discord.