The Rise and Fall of Operation Flashpoint

in 1997 a video game company named Bohemia Interactive was established in Prague the Czech Republic had historically never been a hotbed for video game development but Bohemia's founders Modocs Ponyo haunted espanol and Slava Mir Papa Shack were on a mission they were determined to create a first-person shooter that would capture the reality of war more accurately than any game before it an engrossing simulation that would depict what real battlefields were like and feature an unprecedented sense of scale and attention to detail after a challenging and prolonged development period Bohemia delivered on these ambitions in 2001 with operation flashpoint cold war crisis the game was both a triumph within the genre of tactical first-person shooters and one of the first major successes in the history of checkmate video games but it was also the beginning of two wars a war between Bohemia and its publisher which would attempt to capitalize on the game without its creators involvement and a war between Bohemia and itself as the studio struggled to balance its ambitions with its capabilities when the dust finally settled over a decade later operation flashpoint had been stripped of its appeal in future but Bohemia had survived and started a new series arma that picked up mechanically and spiritually work old war crisis left off unlike his predecessor ARMA received a more muted reaction from the industry when it debuted yet eventually grew into an empire within the military simulation genre in a world where abandoned video game franchises so rarely received spiritual successors that continued on their footsteps the story of operation flashpoint and ARMA is a shining exception a reminder that not all inactive series become lost forever this is the rise and fall of operation flashpoint [Music] [Music] [Music] welcome to this new demonstration my desire please sit back and enjoy the show in the mid-1980s brothers Marek and on today's spawn yell had the fortune of acquiring at Texas Instruments TI 99 for a computer a rarity in their home country during this time the computer engrossed the spaniels who became obsessed with programming their own video games to play on it this passion would soon turn into a small-time career when the brothers started releasing their software for Ataris home computers under the moniker suma seumas first few video games were simplistic fare consisting of blood a maze exploration game released in 1987 and invasion from aldo baron a space invaders clone released in 1992 however in 1995 came grab on real virtuality a futuristic hovercraft simulator set within procedurally generated 3d environments the result of the spawn yells having become interested in the military simulation genre Gravlin was well received but a commercial disaster reportedly only selling about 400 copies on its platform of release the ill-fated atari falcon looking to make up for grants financial failure the team made the switch to creating games for Windows computers and started development of a 3d clone of River raid called Rio Grande in 1996 however the project quickly proved done fulfilling compared to grab on which offered wide and open-ended exploration Rio Grande's design was too linear and constrained the Spaniel brothers understood that their passions wide elsewhere and decided to pivot and focus instead on making a spiritual successor to grav on one that would feature an emergent open-world with as few physical and mechanical boundaries as possible by 1997 this game had become a military shooter with a heavy emphasis on vehicles codenamed Poseidon recognizing the potential that the project held the duo recruited Slava Mir to polish AK one of the founders of video game retailer JR see check two then become a proper development company so that they could have the organizational infrastructure and assets necessary to fully realize their ambitions with it suma was put to rest and Bohemia Interactive was born as the Bohemia Interactive project Poseidon would change drastically over the course of its creation its story for example initially featured heavy science-fiction undertones involving American and Soviet soldiers convening on an island after an apocalyptic event to fight to the death with each new iteration this fantastical setting would be gradually revised and weeded out replaced instead with a grounded backdrop set in the near past however conflict between America and the Soviet Union's troops would remain a central focus the team developing it which would consist of 12 full-time members by the end of its production had almost all grown up behind the oppressive iron curtain of communism during their childhoods and wanted to make a game that addressed this in a realistic yet enjoyable fashion to them a game that allowed the team to take on the Soviet Union's military might was not just a narrative cliche but a form of digital catharsis for what they had experienced in their youth meanwhile Poseidon's campaign evolved from featuring fully dynamic missions that would be generated on the fly by the game's Army's interactions with each other two missions that featured more preset objectives and scripted sequences in a 2007 interview with Rock Paper Shotgun modoch would explain how the former iteration of poseidon had so few mechanics and systems that function properly with most enemies struggling to fight correctly or pathfinder targets as a result the game was impossible to play test forcing the team to rein in their ambitions Bohemia learned the hard way that if it wanted to make an enjoyable open-ended game it needed to ensure that its physics artificial intelligence and many other dynamic elements worked properly in a linear environment first before introducing them to a nonlinear one these iterative changes to Poseidon's design would continue for the next several years over the course of which its name would change to operation flashpoint cold war crisis and Bohemia would spend a long time attempting to field a publisher to help release it while this and other growing pains resulted in cold war crisis as development being stretched out for far longer than anyone was expecting its long publisher free gestation had its benefits in a post mortem published on Gamasutra in 2001 the spa neo brothers were to recount how this extra time allowed them to greatly polish what their already had and incorporate many features into it that they previously hadn't planned on including and because they didn't have a publisher dictating what they could and couldn't do they were given almost complete creative freedom over its design from start to finish the team working on it became more burnt out as time went on but it's gameplay only became more mature eventually Bohemia managed to score publisher Codemasters a British company best known for its repertoire of racing games in the dizzy platforming series and saw cold war crisis released for the PC in June of 2001 after pouring its heart and soul to it for six years Bohemia was ecstatic to finally be able to share its first game the studio believed that it had created something truly special just as its founders believed they had done with gravan in 1995 except that this time around Bohemia would actually be recognized for having done so [Music] [Music] the year is 1985 in World War 3 is on the verge of breaking out the Malden islands have been invaded by a renegade Soviet army obliterating the American forces stationed on them threatening to escalate the situation into a global scale conflict out of options the remaining soldiers are forced to confront the Red Menace head-on in a series of elaborate and varied missions across the islands with the player taking control of four different individuals involved in the conflict as it progresses unlike other first-person shooters the characters controlled in cold war crisis aren't one-man militias capable of dominating anything and everything thrown their way a single stray bullet will badly injure or outright kill them immediately and the enemies they have to confront are numerous and highly aggressive as a result every encounter with an enemy is just as much about the slow and meticulous preparation that the player is forced to go through to successfully defeat them as it is about the moment that kill actually occurs however also unlike other first-person shooters each of the game's protagonist is usually accompanied by a squad of up to 11 AI controlled soldiers on the battlefield with the player able to issue specific commands to them at certain points during the campaign this combined with the many other mechanics available to the player including the ability to maneuver any ground or aerial vehicle they come across and switch to a third-person view point for a better situational awareness transforms each of the game's missions into highly dynamic environments in which innumerable scenarios can unfold in response to the player's actions in addition to its single-player campaign Fulda war crisis also included a robust online multiplayer suite and a mission editor the former allowed players to fight alongside or against each other in a range of conventional multiplayer modes such as capture the flag and deathmatch while the latter enabled players to construct all manner of scenarios for themselves and the world to enjoy and enjoy it they did operation flashpoint cold war crisis would be met with critical acclaim worldwide upon its release with pundits enamored of the game's mechanical depth the sheer size of its world and the amount of replayability both these aspects and its mission editor provided in a genre that was well oversaturated in 2001 cold war crisis felt like a genuine breath where most other militaristic shooters at the time depicted a highly exaggerated and hollywood-esque interpretation of warfare bohemia sopes was without peer in its commitment to realism this isn't to say that cold war crisis was without its detractors many took umbrage with its sheer amount of bugs which ranged from the artificial intelligence of the players analyzed acting oddly to mission scripting not working properly making it occasionally impossible to start or complete certain objectives and its demanding difficulty which could only be overcome by familiarizing oneself with its equally complex mechanics ensured that many first-person shooter fans stayed comfortably away from it however those who did go on to play operation flashpoint would find themselves strongly supported by Bohemia for many years to come with the studio helping encourage and grow the game's widespread modding community as well as providing new fixes and updates to the base game on a steady basis this would come to include two large-scale expansions - cold war crisis operation flashpoint resistance an expansion that follows an expected to repel invading Soviet forces from the island of no gova and red hammer an expansion that places the player in the role of a Soviet soldier during the events of the base game red hammer was notable for having been developed externally by Codemasters rather than Bohemia itself it was the first time the publisher had been directly involved in the franchise's development and while its work was not as beloved by the community as resistance the expansion was still enjoyed by many moreover the fact that codemasters was given the opportunity to make red hammer in the first place spoke to the strong rapport it had with Bohemia something that isn't present in all developer/publisher relationships unfortunately the next time codemasters would get so heavily involved in operation flashpoints development it would usher the end of this bond [Music] after Cold War crisis was released Bohemia began working on multiple projects commencing development on an Xbox port of the game titled operation flashpoint elite an official sequel codenamed game - and various other ventures all at once initially the team wanted to move away from flashpoints military trappings and make an open-world role-playing game set in the Wild West Bohemia was highly enthusiastic about it going so far as to scout locations in the United States to find visual inspiration for its world in 2002 however the project ultimately failed to find solid footing leading Bohemia to scrap it and settle on making game 2 in his stead while it's normal for any video game developer to desire outdoing itself with a sequel Bohemia had especially lofty ambitions with game 2 not only would it overhaul and deepen all of the first game's physics and mechanics but it would also take place in three extremely large destructible environments and have some of the more intricate and detailed graphics ever burned to disk simultaneously overwhelmed by how difficult game 2 would be to develop but two incensed by the promise that held two back away from it Bohemia would spend the next several years struggling to realize it hundreds of intensely detailed assets were crafted to fill its world from glistening eyeballs to army equipment created by 3d scanning their real-life equivalents yet the underlying systems designed to give purpose to these objects never came together if Bohemia still had no other company publishing its games as was the case for much of cold war crisis as development than it might have very well continue down this path into oblivion but the studio was now under the thumb of codemasters which had agreed to publish Bohemia snek several flashpoint titles and it wasn't very happy about game two's lack of progress nor was it pleased with the difficulties the studio was having with operation flashpoint elite what was originally believed to be a short nine month poor job had ballooned into a four-year affair - in no small part to the studios and experience working with the Xbox's limited hardware and when it would finally release in October of 2005 it would be disparaged by critics for looking and feeling noticeably dated as well as overshadowed by the Xbox 360 which would launch the following month eventually Bohemia became concerned that Codemasters had reached the limits of its patience and was planning on developing a sequel to operation flashpoint without the studio's involvement upset by this Bohemia would part ways with Codemasters shortly afterwards the two companies were now free of one another but as a result of various agreements that had been made while they were together Codemasters ended up with the rice - operation flash points name in the process Bohemia still retained all of the technology assets characters and so forth that had previously been developed for this series but it no longer had the power to release new games in it [Music] Bohemia was in dire straits the costly nature of elite and game two's development had sapped it of much of its money and its acrimonious break up with code masters left it unable to profit from the one name people knew the studio for desperate to regain its footing the studio would come into a bit of cash after discovering the existence of dar wars ambush a flashpoint mod developed by BBN technologies and Total Immersion software dar wars had come to be used as a training program by the United States military for its troops bohemia capitalized on his shoes and established a division within itself called Bohemia Interactive simulations in order to provide armed forces with their own homegrown military training software this allowed Bohemia's prime studio to remain afloat a little longer and figure out what game it would release next not wanting to repeat the follies of game twos developments the studio decided to reuse assets and code from the original and elite editions of cold war crisis to create a quick new iteration of its design this new iteration known as ARMA armed assault in Europe and later as ARMA combat operations in North America would roll out to storefronts starting in November of 2006 and proved to be not quite as popular as its progenitor well there it is from the horse's mouth stationed on this beautiful island our troops ensure a safe environment for your holidays thank you very much soldier for the a-a-and Network this is Marian quant from the kingdom of South Sioux Ronnie the game's main campaign which sees America defend the island nation of surrani from a coup orchestrated by communist insurgents would be praised by pundits for retaining cold war crisis as high level of realism in both its mechanics and depiction of warfare and all of the multiplayer and level editing features that helped extend the latter titles life well beyond the joys of its single-player were still present and accounted for yet its controls and graphics would be knocked for feeling too dated and its excessive amount of bugs a product of its rushed development would prove to be a nearly universal point of contention Bohemia James had always lacked a certain level of slickness and polished scene in other more mainstream shooters but ARMA felt a little too undercooked for comfort something that Bohemia itself openly acknowledged later on nonetheless Barma would go on to attract a solid following keeping Bohemia out of the red and paving the way for future additions and improvements to it such as the 2007 expansion ARMA Queen's Gambit which depicts various conflicts that occur in surrani after the bass games story it helped that for all of Armas issues there were still very few games on the market that attempted to simulate life in the military as accurately as it guaranteeing external support from players who desperately wanted experiences of this sort unfortunately ARMA was about to receive direct competition and from a franchise that Bohemia had been dreading it would be forced to face [Music] [Music] determined to build up armor into a series that would match operation flashpoints reputation Bohemia would begin work on a sequel to armed assault shortly after its release as with the first game in the series Bohemia kept its ambitions in check during the development of what would become ARMA 2 this time we're using many of the high quality assets that had already been created for game 2 to construct its world and focusing its efforts exclusively on the PC instead of home consoles despite being drawn to the increasingly popular xbox360 early in its creation ARMA 2 seemed like it was going to be Bohemia SMO stammered Keable and straightforward production yet until code masters revealed in 2007 that it was making a new operation flashpoint game in-house titled operation flashpoint dragon rising and that it would be coming to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in addition to the PC the announcement left Bohemia reeling not only did it now have direct competition from an opposing studio but said studio had no qualms about insinuating a connection between their product and cold war crisis that didn't exist with Codemasters repeatedly failing to credit Bohemia is role in the franchise's creation while promoting dragon rising tensions between the two would eventually reach a fever pitch in early 2009 when Bohemia issued a fiery press release in Wichita sized its former publisher for attaching operation flash points legacy to what it viewed as a completely unrelated game in Bohemia sighs ARMA 2 not dragon rising was the only true flashpoint sequel and code masters indirect insistence to the contrary was part of a deliberate strategy to try and snuff it out knowing that their livelihood was at stake Bohemia would push itself to include comprehensive new features and improvements to make ARMA 2 a more appealing experience resulting in it like the to military Sims prior being somewhat buggier than its developers would have liked when the game launched in June of 2009 [Music] enemy man fall to our but even with us rough edges however ARMA 2 proved more than satisfying for fans of the genre offering a much needed evolution of what Bohemia had offered with the first arma in particular the game's single-player campaign which follows a group of US Marines tasked with putting down a communist rebellion within the post-soviet state of Charis would be commended by reviewers for featuring a more compelling and morally complex scenario than would have been offered in the past as well as more interesting interactions between the game's non playable characters many of the same complaints that had been directed at Bohemia's prior titles were still present the game's scripting was spotty and for all it did to immerse players in its world it made little effort to be more accessible to newcomers ARMA 2 remained an unforgiving lis obtuse experience but for those willing to brave it's abrasive exterior it provided the strongest iteration yet of Bohemia scrapped dragon rising on the other hand wouldn't be held in quite as high regard when it arrived in October later that year Codemasters self-made take on the franchise largely mirrored Armas ambitiousness with its campaign which takes place on the island of Spira after being taken over by Chinese revolutionaries featuring much of the same sense of scale and mechanical deepness as the latter albeit with some differences for example issuing commands to one squad is now done via an onscreen command radial similar to that of the Rainbow six games instead of typing various key sequences many also felt dragon rising to be a notably easier experience thanks to the inclusion of features such as a strip compass displayed on lower difficulty levels that shows all current enemies and objectives as well as the player's crosshair indicating whether they're shot successfully killed its target or merely wounded it and for gamers on a budget it didn't hurt that the system requirements to run dragon rising optimally on PC were a fair few notches lower than those of ARMA 2 however dragon rising was also noted for suffering from many of the same technical issues as ARMA while simultaneously lacking a decent chunk of the latter's level of detail and customizability this ranged from larger systemic features such as the environments in its single-player campaign being populated by much fewer characters at any given moment to smaller inconveniences such as the player being unable to switch to a third person viewpoint whenever they please meanwhile its mission editor which was only available on the PC version of the game didn't resonate as strongly with audiences as its competing series counterparts with many finding the editors limitations to be much more severe than those of ARMA 2 this lack of enthusiasm would also carry over to Dragon risings modding scene which while far from non-existent trailed behind the level of support ARMA had enjoyed it's notable that some of these issues could have potentially been addressed and remedied in future updates and patches but Codemasters unlike Bohemia wouldn't stick around to support their product for long after its release where Bohemia tailored the development of its titles to the constraints of the PC codemasters had tailored in risings development to the constraints of the two home consoles it appeared on the result of this disparity was a good game that felt at home on sony and microsoft systems much more so than operation flashpoint elite did on the original xbox years prior but ultimately came in second place to ARMA on the PC regardless both games would go on to so decently across all of their respective platforms ensuring that Codemasters and Bohemia would remain at each other's heels a little longer this would manifest bizarrely in June of the following year when Bohemia on the eve of releasing the ARMA 2 expansion pack operation arrowhead would receive a cease and desist letter from codemasters claiming that the expansions title sounded too close to operation flashpoint while Bohemia would laugh this off and proceeded to release operation arrowhead as is codemasters was far from ready to give in to his rivals two months after the expansions release the company announced that it would be making another operation flashpoint game titled operation flashpoint Red River except this time around it would be offering a much different experience than what it offered with dragon rising in the ground obviously dragon rising we took some time out to take a look and you know see what kind of creature we created and how we could make that better for us it's about focusing on the core experience which is a tactical first-person shooter that's set a much more realistic and authentic environment than a lot of our competitors it's not about being a military simulation it's about fun it's about gameplay and it's about keeping the player engaged and entertained rather than trying to provide an open-ended military simulation Red Rivers development teams settled on making a straightforward and scripted tactical shooter in which the player would command a closely knit squad in Central Asia Surrey stalwarts like the map editor and even competitive multiplayer were done away with and in their place were fancy new aesthetic elements such as a video camera style filter over the screen that would become dirty and glitch out whenever the player received damage in a presentation given to the video game press in mid-2010 the game's creative director Shaun Lenten described wanting to provide a personalized vision of conflict drawing comparisons between the game and films such as The Hurt Locker jarhead Red River would appeal to players who had hit a glass ceiling mechanically and emotionally with popular first-person shooters like Call of Duty and yearned for a more hardcore experience while many of these unorthodox decisions but mused series faithful during Red Rivers creation it was understandable as to why its developers were eager to pursue them where Bohemia had spent over a decade perfecting the art of the military sim on the PC the team at Codemasters currently assigned to operation flashpoint had only spent a few years doing so and remained committed to keeping the series on the technologically constrained PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 taking operation flashpoint in a new simpler direction one that was more accommodating to these consoles technical limitations would allow them to create a much more polished game and avoid directly competing with the inevitable ARMA 3 unfortunately even when judged on its own merits Codemasters third stab at the series would fall short of its ambitions upon its release in April of 2011 reloading most critics agree that its single-player campaign in which the player confronts Islamic extremists and the Chinese People's Liberation Army in modern-day Tajikistan offer to satisfying cooperative experience for those with three other friends on hand albeit one that was much more linear than anything prior in the series those who didn't however were in store for a much more grueling experience due to the poor artificial intelligence of the players allies and enemies as well as the many other bugs it contained and its portrayal of modern-day forces while not without merit was hamstrung by the shallowness of his writing Red River was far from an absolute disaster but it was neither a great military sim like his forebears nor a good tactical experience that could compete with the best that Ghost Recon or SOCOM had to offer it was just another decent first-person shooter in a video game generation that already had far too many not long afterwards Codemasters would release the futuristic first-person shooter body count to a similarly dispirited reaction sensing that its efforts to capture the interest of the Call of Duty crowd were going unheeded the company would announce in April of the following year that it would be putting future operation flashpoint and body count entries on hold so that they could focus exclusively on developing racing games going forward in a 2011 blog post on Bohemia's official website Maddox Faneuil would state that while there would be no winners to this war he felt that their team had managed to retain the hearts and minds of its community and that this mattered a great deal to them Codemasters efforts with operation flashpoint hadn't been immensely inferior to what Bohemia had offered with ARMA during the brief period they fought but Bohemia still trounced its former publisher where it mattered most [Music] [Music] [Music] in the years following the war's end Bohemia has significantly diversified its offerings games like white lands an open-ended sandbox game with a cartoony art style and take on Mars a simulation game set on the red planet have given the studio a much more varied image than it had in the past when it dealt exclusively an ultra realistic warfare but Bohemia is commitment to the latter never stopped while Codemasters was making its last stand with Red River in mid-2011 Bohemia was busy appealing to its base re-releasing operation flashpoint cold war crisis as ARMA cold war assault and announcing ARMA 3 within a few months of each other the latter game had originally begun development in 2010 as a highly futuristic spin-off of the franchise in which the player would fight aliens but the more the team tinkered with its design the more gradually morphed into a more conventional experience not that anyone was complaining fans were happy to see Bohemia still committed to staying true to the series roots especially now that the studio was no longer under the stress of having to compete with code masters ironically however a year before ARMA 3 would grey storefronts ARMA 2 would be unexpectedly thrust into the limelight by a mod featuring supernatural elements called Daisy the brainchild of Dean Hall a former Air Force officer in the Royal New Zealand Air Force Daisy reimagines ARMA 2 is a multiplayer only survival game in which players must brave them a cop version of chair nurus overrun with zombies the mod would become a smash hit following its May 2012 release leading numerous players many of whom had never played any of Bohemia's products before to download ARMA 2 for the sole purpose of being able to try it Bohemia had long enjoyed a loyal and dedicated fanbase one that had followed its work intently through thick and thin but halls creation would provide the studio with a level of mainstream recognition that it had never previously known even though many of the mods players never went on to try the base game it was derived from the latter's relationship to Daisy ensured that both of their names would equally penetrate the public consciousness if an influencer or media personality wanted to recommend Daisy to their audience they couldn't do so without also mentioning the words ARMA 2 Bohemia would recruit Hall shortly after to work on a standalone iteration of Daisy the alpha version of which would launch in December of the following year on PC meanwhile ARMA 3 would launch in September of 2013 this time taking place on the AEGON islands of Alta sand Stratos ARMA 3 would receive a solid critical reception earning praise for once again continuing to uphold its predecessors commitment to realism and complexity but also disappointment for its comparative lack of single-player content however the latter would be more than made up for by its comprehensive post release content which provided players with uncountable new toys and scenarios to amuse themselves with [Music] operation flashpoint endured a tumultuous existence its creators struggled time and time again to properly harness its potential its publishers took the franchise's brand to use for their own devices and its fans waited for years for new entries to satisfy their cravings but while its name would ultimately be cast by the wayside its spirit survived and continues to live on with the people best equipped to make use of it [Music] our documentaries are crowdfunded and made possible by the generous supporters 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Channel: GVMERS

Views: 1,179,941

Keywords: Operation Flashpoint, Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis, ArmA: Cold War Assault, ArmA, ArmA 2, ArmA 3, ArmA 4, Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising, Operation Flashpoint: Red River, Armed Assault, Combat Operations, Red Hammer, Resistance, Game 2, VBS, VBS2, VBS3, Bohemia, Bohemia Interactive, Codemasters, DayZ

Id: dz3xxUueCP8

Length: 35min 42sec (2142 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 22 2019