Yes, you read that right. While most companies with shooters on the market promptly drop support for the older game once the newer one in the series is released, Bohemia Interactive continues to support the older Arma II, in spite of the release of Arma III last year. But then again, they’re not like most other companies, are they? And neither is Arma like most other shooters.

Update 1.63 for Operation Arrowhead generally exists to move the matchmaking of the game from Gamespy’s servers to Steam. Remember, Gamespy recently shut down its servers for online play, and while that caused a lot of well liked online games to go dark, a lot of developers pledged to come up with alternate solutions to keep the online communities on their Gamespy dependent games alive.

Because this update moves matchmaking to Steam, it must also be downloaded through Steam. If you have a retail copy of the game (and therefore one that can’t receive Steam updates) you can simply activate its key on Steam, and download the game from there (and then proceed to update it there).

Bohemia has also announced an alternate solution for their other games affected by the Gamespy shutdown, which may be accessed here.

Gotta say, Bohemia’s commitment to its older games and its community is absolutely admirable here.

Bohemia Interactive’s turn based strategy tactical spin off for their critically acclaimed Arma series of authentic military simulators is now out on a variety of platforms and formats- this includes Windows, Mac OS, Linux, iOS, and Android.

Arma Tactics is a turn based strategy game, in which players takes control of a four-member Special Forces team; the gameplay is completely free form, favoring no one strategy over the other like games in the genre often do, instead giving the player the choice to decide how to play (and consequently, of determining how the battle will turn out).

With unlockable weapons and progression perks, coupled with a highly liquid play style, Arma Tactics should have a lot of replay value. PC formats (that is, Windows, Mac OS, and Linux) get an additional campaign as well.

Are you going to get Arma Tactics? What platform are you planning on picking it up for?

Bohemia Interactive, the studio behind the popular PC exclusive military sim series, just seems to attract trouble. After the entire debacle of their developers being jailed, they now find themselves in the midst of another (rather smaller) controversy- their website has been hacked. The studio will be resetting all passwords in response.

“We have unfortunately discovered that an illegal attempt has been made to access certain of our online websites, leading to the download of a database containing usernames, email addresses and encrypted passwords,” Bohemia said in a statement on their website.

“Please note due to the encryption of the passwords it is very unlikely that anything nefarious can be done with this information.

“We would like to reassure everyone that no other information such as credit card details is stored by us and thus was not at any risk from this illegal breach.”

So it sounds like there was no lasting damage, but still, it sucks that it happened in the first place.

Source: Bohemia Interactive