It's interesting to see some of the recommendations they make, but I simply cannot believe them.

For example, players really want to 'come to terms with the psychological aftermath of war'? I doubt it.

I have felt physically sick from playing ArmA 2, modded with SLX gore, before. From about 600 meters away I shot an enemy soldier with a .50 cal sniper rifle. I missed center mass due to improper windage, and I watched in my scope as his arm was torn off his body with a misty spray of blood. He fell face down, squirming, as another soldier ran over and started desperately trying to drag him into cover, while the rest of the group ran to hard cover and started blindly scanning for me (there's your smart AI, if that's what you want). I coolly adjusted my windage and hit the second man square in the chest, where I saw a dark hole appear before he fell backwards in a heap with a splurt of red. I lined up to knock out his injured comrade, realized that I was being hit by a wave of nausea, and quit out of the game. Some of my friends I play ArmA with IRL have felt similarly playing with the same setup, so it's not just that I'm a 'baby.'

I don't play with SLX's gore component turned on anymore, because it isn't fun. I'm not desensitized to stuff like that, video game or not. On the other hand, I can play other shooters and explode enemy soldiers into cartoonish chunks all day without the slightest psychological effect.

Action shooters like Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare aren't 'realistic' because very few people actually want a 'realistic' shooter game. What most want is 'authenticity': carefully detailed M4 models, the latest weapons, some semblance of bullet drop, those sorts of graphics and mechanics. Modern games provide those in spades, at varying levels of detail, fitting the needs of players ranging from the Battlefielders to ArmA fools like myself. I've made 'realistic' scenarios for ArmA 2, but I've never sent them off for potential inclusion on the SimHQ server, because few people indeed enjoy many of the gameplay outcomes of that type of mission design -- such as sitting in a HMMWV for 25 minutes, riding around with no enemy contact, only to die instantly and pointlessly to a buried IED. Alternately, ride around for 30 minutes, make enemy contact. Dismount and exchange fire with an enemy 900+ meters away using a 5.56mm rifle with a maximum effective range of maybe 400-500m. You have a red dot sight (or maybe irons, if you are unlucky) and no magic zoom. After a 30+ minute firefight where you have no idea if you have accomplished anything other than shooting at specks, CAS arrives and drops a bomb on them.

We had one real mission on the server (Magnum can attest to this one) where our APC convoy moved out of its base, and about five minutes into the field, a Hind that had approached us nap-of-the-earth appeared out of nowhere and slaughtered us with a full rocket/guns salvo. I retuned that mission and nerfed the Hind, because that wasn't much fun.

If that's the type of game/single player campaign you really want and enjoy, I wouldn't expect anyone to make it -- better get friendly with the ArmA 2/VBS2 mission making interface.

Wall of text, but I hope it adds some complexity to this type of thinking.

Haha. I'll only buy it if we can burn down the white house again when playing as British/Canadians .

Cheers,

Fafnir_6