The team becomes coherent, people truly cooperate and communicate, tactics and interesting solutions emerge.

The good news is that after several of those games, people tend to improve in many ways. Once we learned to cope with the challenge, we realized that defeat was always due to our own mistakes: botched reconnaissance, failed execution of the plan, or a complete disarray in team communication and role play. But we found that, what might sound as Combat Patrol's shortcoming, is in fact its most interesting feature. On many occasions, we failed miserably, and we still do sometimes. Even so, we actually ended up playing with most of the GUI elements turned off or toned down, and on a pretty high difficulty. From the very start, we attempted to design Combat Patrol in a way which would allow us to play on a high difficulty, but the challenge would still remain acceptable - even for the less experienced player among us. While many of us here are no die-hard milsim players, we appreciate a challenge that comes not only from the firefights, but also team coordination and tactics. In the latest iteration, which takes place on Altis, you can vote for the scenario's location, the amount of OPFOR scales according to number of players, there are custom-created roles designed for the PvE experience, we came up with a plausible scenario objective, and you can tweak the difficulty by changing the mission parameters. However, thanks to the joint effort of our Sandbox Designers (Miloslav Cinko, Radko Voda), QA ( Radek Pazdera), Josef ZemГЎnek as the Technical Designer, and the plentiful and passionate internal feedback we received, we've now reached a version polished enough for a public test. With all those different locations, the replayability skyrocketed as well, leading to some of our most intense or funny gameplay moments, many of which we remember to this day.ДЄdmittedly, the scenario was still rather crude, and especially the way that objectives were presented was considered too abstract by most of the players. Once Josef ZemГЎnek managed to bring the same gameplay to every village on every official map available in Arma 3, we spent significant time just 'browsing' the locations in various daytime and weather conditions. Thus, we came up with the idea of generating the scenario in every village based on a map's key points. However, we eventually became bored of playing in a single location. In the process, players also had to battle a few randomized infantry groups. The first location we used was the Altian town of Athira, and the goal was to pass through a chain of five randomly selected objectives, which the players had to find using only their map and compass. This prototype scenario helped us internally to introduce some of our new colleagues to 'classic' military sandbox gameplay - and the randomized nature of the scenario ensured replayability. In fact, the intention behind the very first prototype of Combat Patrol, which we called 'MOUT Training' ('Military Operations in Urban Terrain') back then, was to offer instant challenging combat with a little team of friends against Arma's AI, without making things too complex. Instead, it offers a quick and simple gateway to a more hardcore Arma experience. That said, compared to some of the more broad and complex community frameworks for randomized scenarios, Combat Patrol is much more straightforward. Each session is different thanks to the scenario's heavily randomized nature. In this OPREP, we'd like to highlight some of Combat Patrol's qualities in detail - and, most importantly, invite you to play it, provide feedback, and/or even modify the original concept to your liking.Д¬ombat Patrol offers quick cooperative gameplay by placing you and your squad mates together into an infantry team, and giving you the option to select the area that you want to play in. However, before that happens, we wanted to share it with you and see whether you like it as much as we do.

It's now evolved into what might become an official multiplayer scenario/mode in the game.

The development of this scenario started out as a pet project by our Senior Technical Designer Josef 'Jezuro' ZemГЎnek and myself more than two years ago. One of the latest Arma 3 Dev-Branch updates introduced a prototype of a cooperative scenario called COOP 12 Combat Patrol. OPSUM: Introducing an experimental cooperative scenario UNIT: Ivan Buchta, Combat Patrol co-author, Arma 3

Arma 3 patrol missions