Arma 2

Arma 2 from 2009 expanded the military simulator concept from Operation Flashpoint to even greater proportions. The vast fictional country of Chernarus, with tens of square kilometers of terrain, villages and towns, offered room for combined operations of infantry, armored vehicles and aircraft within a single mission. The game retained an uncompromising approach to realism — weapons, ballistics and unit behavior are governed by elaborate simulation rules, making it more of a virtual military training exercise than relaxing entertainment, requiring the player to account for range, projectile drop and visibility over long distances. Enemy artificial intelligence reacts to sounds and terrain cover, so even a single firefight can require careful planning of the advance.

The campaign takes the player through the conflict in Chernarus, but the game's true strength always lay in its mission editor and modifications, which allowed the creation of custom scenarios ranging from small skirmishes to large multiplayer operations for dozens of players coordinated by voice communication. The variety of available vehicles, from jeeps through armored personnel carriers to attack helicopters, gave players enormous freedom in their own approach to completing assigned objectives. It was from Arma 2 modifications that the survival mode phenomenon DayZ emerged, which later became independent and influenced the entire survival game genre built on resource scarcity and the threat posed by other players. Technically, the game was demanding on hardware at release and not always perfectly optimized, which nevertheless did not prevent it from becoming one of the most discussed titles of its time.

The legacy of Arma 2 lives on today both in the series' sequels and in the enormous community of modification creators, who managed to draw content from it far beyond the original intentions of its creators at Bohemia Interactive, ranging from civilian simulations to entirely new game genres.