There’s a school of thought among some Flashpoint fans that Bohemia’s real reason for Armed Assault is to deliver the updated engine to the players. Certainly Flashpoint is one of the most modded games ever, and ArmA’s editor and scripts enable a degree of quality way beyond that found in the bundled single-player missions. For example, there’s a script in there that tells AI units to drag injured people out of the line of fire, and it never pops up in the prepackaged tasks.

If it’s the case that we should be reviewing the tools rather than the game then there’s definitely a whole lot more to be said. At their most basic you’re able to plunk down a few soldiers, tanks and helicopters with a few guiding waypoints and tell them to kill one another, and the resulting firefight will be short and spectacular. Spend some time with it, work out the coding and triggers, and you’ll be setting up the sort of mass parachute drops and land battles that we’ve not seen since WWII.

Even the already revamped multiplayer (it now allows up to 100 players and enables them to join a battle that’s already begun, unlike Flashpoint) can be tweaked. CTI, the mod that completely opens up the entire island as an online battlefield, is in development. Perhaps they’re right: the most important element of Flashpoint was the fact that it gained a massive, obsessive fanbase who took it on themselves to make what they could of the game.

But what does that mean for the gamers who pick it off the shelf because they like the box? Will they care that there’s a massive amount of accurately modeled vehicles, or simply be annoyed that the pathfinding of the AI drivers causes them to swerve off roads and crash into each other? Is the 400km enough to offset broken save-games and missing triggers? We know these are problems that Bohemia Interactive or their fanbase will eventually solve, just as they have with Flashpoint, but the majority of gamers, unaware of this fanbase, would rather pay for a fully-working game.