The near-mythical release of ARMA 4 is set for next year, but Bohemia Interactive’s biggest project may not stick the landing among console players.
After going through a belle époque in the wake of the 1.0 release in late 2023, current-gen ARMA Reforger has plunged the console playerbase’s trust into the abyss following the 1.6 update.
What Bohemia envisioned as an update to improve stability for heavily-modded servers and a major overhaul to core game modes has turned into a nightmare marked by crashes, long freezes, and resentment.
The ARMA Reforger Half-Fix
Bohemia Interactive has been trying to fight back, with patch 1.6.0.108 deployed to the stable branch of the game. The efforts, although valiant, have not been enough.
The ‘Stability and Performance’ section of the changelog features fixes to a number of crashes, including endemic ones with pathfinding and mipmap generation, but a peek into the ‘Known Issues’ page shows critical issues remain.
Under both Xbox and PlayStation 5 entries, you will find ‘occasional freezes’. In Reforger, this has manifested itself as the game randomly hanging for 5 to 30 seconds at a time.
Freezes are a bad time in any game, but when you are shooting, driving, or flying as often as you are in ARMA Reforger, this becomes a quick ticket to a meet-and-greet with St. Peter.
Feedback on patch 1.6.0.108 has been mixed so far. The general consensus is that overall stability has markedly improved on consoles, with some players stating crashes are down to at most one per hour of gameplay. Far from perfect, but this has allowed some Xbox and PlayStation 5 soldiers back into the fight.
From Console Trailblazer to Trouble Child
The console crisis in ARMA Reforger threatens to undo some of the revolutionary accomplishments by Bohemia Interactive.
Until the early access release of ARMA Reforger for Xbox Series X|S, modern consoles had been constantly sidelined from any form of ‘serious’ gaming. With few exceptions, like Hell Let Loose (2021), the concept of multiplayer console shooters became synonymous with casual games like Overwatch or the nth iteration of Call of Duty.
The excuses given by big studios for not pursuing more complex games on consoles were typically that the console audience would not want it, console performance was not good enough, or that controllers didn’t lend themselves well to the number of inputs required.
Bohemia promptly ignored all of that, throwing players into the deep end with a game that was every bit as complex as previous ARMA entries. After an awkward, bare-bones launch, ARMA Reforger would eventually surpass ARMA 3 in popularity and open the door for other slow-paced tactical shooters like Ready or Not to dominate console shooters.
This legacy is now at risk as the console performance crisis enters its third month. The fact that such severe performance problems exclusive to consoles are plaguing a game over two years after its 1.0 release has forced many veteran players to put down ARMA Reforger.
The clock is ticking for Bohemia to squash these issues before the console community it worked so hard to build sinks into the cold Atlantic waters around Everon before ARMA 4.
